Marketing isn’t just for traditional marketers anymore. Businesses now use their own marketing strategies to stand out from the competition and attract prospective customers, while remaining cost-efficient at the same time.
This is no different for estate agencies looking to distinguish themselves in the market and be attractive to prospective buyers or tenants. Marketing in the property business are divided into two; branding and immediate sales.
Branding may refer to building recognition, goodwill and visibility about your business (usually long term), while immediate sales is selling right away and aims towards achieving goals in the short term.
Branding
- For estate agencies hoping to create awareness about their business, branding helps to make this easy. It serves as a preliminary activity that makes way for sales. Branding puts your business in front of potential customers ahead of your main sales campaign so that by the time you start selling, your customers are already familiar with your brand.
- When branding, it is necessary to understand your target audience and use the language style and visual imagery that appeal most to them. It is also important to know how these aspects of your brand appeals to their needs and should be consistent over time.
- In other words, you should give your brand a personality.
- A brand personality humanizes your business and makes it more acceptable to people as opposed to a ‘faceless corporation’ which some people describe businesses. The mistake made by letting and estate agencies is trying to attract everyone to the brand. Not everybody will identify with your brand personality. Like people, there are some personalities you will like and others you won’t.
- Estate agencies should profile the kind of audience their property business attracts and focus tailor-made branding campaigns around this group. This will save money and make it a lot easier to make profitable sales when you are selling.
- Some of the most effective media for branding campaigns in the property industry are digital channels: search engines, property listing sites, social media and print.
Digital Channels
- A recent survey from National Association of Realtors showed that 92% of buyers use the internet to hunt for available houses. Thus, developing branding campaigns for online sites is more common.
- Agencies can place the company ads and information about their business on selected sites to build awareness and visibility. SEO practices for search engine marketing, Google AdWords and Display Ads on sites like Zoopla are useful methods.
- Facebook ad campaigns targeted among specific groups have also reportedly been successful in generating impressions that lead to traffic on estate agency websites. Other social media channels such as Instagram and Pinterest represent good opportunities to promote your company’s brand.
- Email marketing campaigns are popular methods of reaching across to your target audience. It is known to generate a high response rate among customers when executed.
- A major advantage of digital channels is its efficiency in taking control and measuring the performance of your campaign allowing you make changes when necessary.
- Contrary to what many people think about print media these days, it still is a useful way to reach out to house hunters, especially among the more traditional customers. Newspapers, magazines and classified are somewhat still popular and the fact that many people are backing out makes it a less crowded option to advertise as opposed to the already crowded digital space.
Immediate Sales
After laying the foundation with a successful branding campaign, your sales team should follow this up with an effective sales campaign. Sales is a continuous process, so while branding campaigns may occur in periodic cycles (depending on your budget), your business should be ready to close a sale anytime.
Selling should be the livewire of your agency’s business strategy, and is a lot more important as a goal.
As a result, your sales campaigns should have a strong communicative agenda, with compelling language and a definitive call-to-action that should convince your customer to complete an action.
While a branding campaign makes your brand more amenable to your customer, a sales campaign aims to close the deal with an action, usually to generate leads, register a prospective buyer or complete an immediate sale.
As an agency, you should be able to create listing ads that can jump right off the page and appeal to a prospective buyer. This is where great copywriting and picturesque photography come in. Use powerful keywords that appeal to buyer emotions; so while your sales message focuses on selling facts, it should also tell a story that compels purchase.
Just like branding campaigns, the same media channels also represent good opportunities to conclude a sales process.
Digital Channels
- Traffic from external sites like Zoopla, Facebook, Google Search etc coming into your website should be converted to complete an action by ensuring website optimisation to reflect the content that attracted prospective buyers in the first place. This includes having clear and concise information, ease of navigation and a strong call to action. Your website should also have analytics that enable you to track leads and conversions to assist in improving your online campaign outcome.
Telephone
- Like the print media, this may seem out of place in today’s marketing practice. Yet, the telephone is actually one of the cheapest ways to close a sales deal. Furthermore, it enables direct communication with a prospective buyer and gets all the information you may need to know about your customers
Prospecting
- Prospecting for customers is building up a reliable database and preparing a sure-fire way to target your recipients with your offerings so that they respond. Agencies may collect data from organised contact lists and networking fairs the traditional way. Still, you can import data from reliable sources and used to boost immediate sales campaigns.
Whatever your preferred strategy, the idea is to target a relevant group of people, in your target area and present them with an irresistible offering. I would suggest a combination of both branding and immediate sales strategies across geographical areas of your business, because a well-integrated campaign strategy yields positive outcomes.
Article Source: The House Shop
