Estate Agent Marketing Ideas
In this article we explore some common and some not so common estate agent marketing ideas. Can you use any of these to win more business?
Most Estate Agents seem to all do the same when it comes to marketing their estate agency practice.
If estate agent A advertises in a local paper, estate agent B also advertises there.
If estate agent A then sees estate agent B leaflet dropping in a certain part of the town where the nicest houses are located, it is highly likely that estate agent A will do a leaflet drop in the same street one week later.
This happens in all service sectors, where one provider sees someone advertising or marketing in one way so moves in to do exactly the same thing.
The real opportunities arise when someone thinks outside of the box.
However, to do this, you first need to understand the different types of marketing and why some forms of marketing for estate agents are so much better than others.
Attraction versus Interruption Marketing.
You will attract your ideal clients if you are able to appear in front of them at the precise moment in time that they are looking to engage your services.
Attraction marketing does just this for you.
Interruption marketing puts you in front of the majority of people who are not looking to use your services, either now or any time in the near future.
For interruption marketing, we are talking about newspapers, television, radio and every social media platform that you can name.
Whilst we are not saying that these cannot work, what we are saying is that it will cost you more money to get in front of more people for worse results than if you use attraction marketing.
Think about your own search journey. If you are looking for someone to help you with something. Let’s say that you need a new accountant; do you head to facebook hoping that someone will pop up in front of you offering their services, or do you head to Google and actively seek out an accountant?
If you need a pet sitter to look after your dog while you are away, do you head to the newspaper to find one, or do you just hop onto your favourite search engine and type in “Pet Sitter” followed by your home town or village name.
It is the same for all of us. And the key difference that we highlight above, which is what makes attraction marketing so very powerful, is that you, or your potential client, when heading to Google, has ‘buyer intent’ behind their search.
Buyer intent is the crucial difference between attraction marketing and interruption marketing.
No one ever heads to facebook or Instagram with buyer intent. They head their to kill a few moments of their day, not to buy estate agency services.
Now that you know this, let’s look at the four key methods of attraction marketing that you should be using as an estate agent.
- A website that grows, is informative for local search, and is not built on a 1970’s estate agent website design platform.
- Google Ads. The fastest way to win more business quickly (and consistently, month after month, year after year).
- Email marketing. Keeping in touch with your clients and prospects forever is a sure fire way to be the first person they call the next time they are looking to sell their property.
- Referrals. From solicitors, mortgage brokers and anyone else in your locality who works with your ideal clients.
Your Estate Agency Website
Your website needs to look good and work quickly.
If a prospect is looking for an estate agent, they need to believe that they have the best resources available to them to help them to sell their property.
The first place a prospect is going to head to decide if you are the right fit for them is, just like all of us, your website.
If you have one of the dreadful templated sites from one of those companies purporting to ‘specialise in estate agent website design’, but which looks like one of the first websites ever to have been built, you will lose them at step 1.
This is why your website is first in our list of marketing arteries. It all starts from here.
Google Ads
The good news is that once you have a good website, it is very easy to send all of the local traffic of people looking for your services to it.
Remember we discussed how people start their search for any service provider? They head to Google, type in estate agent followed by their town, village or city name, then they are presented with these search results:
If you do the same for your location now, which of your competitors are showing at the top or bottom of the first search page results (look for the word Ad)?
Shouldn’t you be there too?
If you are there, do you take your visitors to a page that offers them high quality items of value that they can download, which then automatically adds them to your email list below, so that you can follow up with them until they ask you to represent them?
If not, your marketing spend is not working anywhere near hard enough and you should look to fix this as soon as possible.
If you are being smart enough to use Google Ads, but not offering anything for your visitor to do except to call you, you are wasting at least half of your marketing budget and need to fix that, fast.
Email Marketing For Estate Agents
We have just explained that email marketing is vital for new prospects, but in many ways it is even more important for existing clients.
There is no easier sale than selling your services to someone who has used you in the past.
However, what often happens is this:
- A client uses you to sell their house and luckily you find their next one.
- They have a lovely experience, but then never hear from you again once completion has taken place.
- Seven years later, they come to move again. However, for the last seven years, they have had one email each month from another local estate agent who has talked about the local trends, hotspots and flagged up amazing properties, so they call them and not you.
- You have lost the easiest sale posssible.
Email marketing is absolutely vital for estate agents. Are you using it?
Referrals
You no doubt already know the power of referrals. You may well send leads to solicitors in exchange for a referral fee or not, but how many referrals do you receive into your business each month?
Most estate agents do not track these numbers, but they are vital.
When it comes to referrals, here is the three step plan you should follow to grow your referrals:
- Measure all referrals in and out of your estate agency. You need to know who your best referral partners are (not think, but know based on the numbers).
- Once you know, reward your best referrers. Enusure they are happy and ask if there is any way you can help them further.
- Once that system is in place, go and find more referral partners just like them.
These are the four main Estate Agent Marketing tactics, and if you do them well, you can be as busy and as profitable as you like.
Here are some other estate agent marketing ideas, if you are still thirsty for more.
Be Different And Don’t Fear Upsetting Other Estate Agents
Gerald Ratner built the most successful jewellery business in the UK by breaking with tradition and doing things completely differently. Whereas all other jewellery stores hid their prices from their shop windows and the whole jewellery purchasing process was shrouded in mystery, Ratner put the prices on jewellery and also put up huge posters with promotions on which had never been done before in the jewellery sector.
His competitors sneered at him and even told him to stop bringing down the prestige of the jewellery sector.
Ratner ignored them, not caring what they thought but only what worked for his business. His bank balance soon showed that he was right (before he made the infamous comments about some of his products at an Institute Of Directors event).
So when it comes to marketing your estate agency, you absolutely must try new and different marketing methods than your competitors. If you keep doing what you have always done and what your competitors always do, you will now attract diminishing results.
Be Seen As The Expert
The next step is simple, in theory. If you want to be the number 1 estate agent in your town or city, you absolutely must be seen as the property expert. This means that you must do the following:
- Be regularly quoted in the local media talking about property prices, what’s hot and what’s not.
- Have the most informative website about your local property sector.
- Be connected and well respected by everyone else in the local property market.
- Have an email marketing list to die for.
Most estate agents complete a sale or a purchase and then fail to communicate with their client ever again. This is complete madness. The easiest clients to sell to are your past clients. The second easiest clients to sell your estate agency services to are friends and family of your past clients. Unless and until you keep in touch with each of these groups of clients on a regular basis you will never have as many clients as you want or need.
RightMove, Prime Location and Zoopla all send regular emails to their lists. That tells you something, does it not?
Other hidden benefits of keeping in touch with your clients through a weekly email newsletter:
- You will spur people to sell who were not necessarily otherwise going to do so. They will see prices rising or falling and it will spur them into action. They will see their dream house on the market and suddenly you have a new house to sell as they want to buy their dream house. You miss this chance without an email newsletter.
- You will generate new buy to let investors. You can suggest properties as a hot ‘buy to let investment’ and even write blogs and host webinars about how landlords can get their first property in the buy to let market. Without a weekly email you have absolutely no chance of creating new buy to let investors.
- You will be seen as the most knowledgable expert in your home town. Isn’t that what we set out to do?
Summary – Estate Agent Marketing
The content on this page gives you a blueprint for growing your estate agency. There is little else that you need – will you take action?
Download our Estate Agency Marketing Guide below to discover more.
Estate Agency Marketing Guide – Click here to download now:>>