Once you have established an estate agency, you must then face the fact that competition is fierce and you need to make sure that you raise yourself above the pack and get noticed. You need to advertise your product and ensure that your potential customers know who you are and what you can offer them; in short, you need to market your estate agency. Here’s our top 10 suggestions on how to market your online estate agency.
We’re living in the age of the internet and it is all-pervasive; basically, websites are what drive most businesses, and the internet is where everybody gets most of their information from. You need to have a strong internet presence, you need to have a good estate agency website, and it needs to stand out from the other estate agency websites. Easy-to-navigate, engaging, striking visuals with lots of photos, maybe a few 3-D tours of the properties, informative about the surrounding area and local amenities… make your site somewhere people want to visit and, more importantly, somewhere they want to stay. And make sure your online estate agency website is mobile-friendly.
In today’s modern world, ‘word of mouth’ still exists but it’s evolved and become part of the internet revolution; social media is everything nowadays and this is how you can spread the word about your business and what you have to offer. You can set up a Facebook account, join Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and a whole host of other social media platforms where you can post pictures of your properties, images of the surrounding area, news updates about new developments, or just attract interest with little competitions and so forth. Having a presence in social media is a must in order to market your estate agency.
There are many aspects to this but it is imperative to be the estate agency that landlords want to give their property to; the more properties you have on your estate agency website, the more people will visit you, and the more successful you’ll be. As mentioned before, build a killer online estate agency website, but then make sure you have SEO optimization to push your estate agency website to the top of Google ratings, employ comprehensive cold calling techniques, start blogging about your services, put adverts or teasers out in social media, make little videos about your estate agency services and distribute them via email newsletters, start referral schemes whereby a landlord will get a percentage of a sale for referrals, advertise through other mediums, go to networking events and shake some hands and personally ‘sell’ your online estate agency business, maybe even collaborate with other related businesses and help each other out. There are many ways to attract more landlords to your online estate agency website, and you must use as many as possible in order to be successful when you market your estate agency.
We’re living in the visual age, and we’re also living at a time when everybody is just so damn busy; so, kill two birds with one stone and make everybody’s life much easier while at the same time making your estate agency more successful. Create stunning visual 3-D tours of your properties, showcasing them for your potential buyers, saving them the time to actually visit them, at the same time saving you the time of actually physically taking them to the property. If they like the property, you can then take the time to actually take them there. It’s a good thing to offer to potential landlords too, a great tool to use when you market your estate agency.
Just get the name of your online estate agency website out there, get it circulating, get people talking about it, become a presence in the communities where your properties are based (making sure that any future landlords come to you first) and also where you would like to be based, areas where you have no properties but would like to acquire some. The thing to remember when you market your estate agency is to make your estate agency website conspicuous.
Newsletters are a great way of reaching as many people as possible and letting them know about your online estate agency and any new properties on offer, or even just general news titbits to keep them informed about the general state of the property market. You can buy leads or create them yourself, either way you can create brand awareness, and maintain it, by constant newsletters. They don’t have to be long, and you can make them as fun or as serious as you want.
Again, we’re living in the digital age and most people get their information from the internet. Good bloggers are worth their weight in gold, and they actually make good money doing what they do from advertising, since they have a lot of influence; use them. Seek out the ones with lots of followers and strike a deal for them to promote your estate agency website or just ask them to review it, or just be creative and come up with another offer.
This is the latest in location-based pages and it is not as confusing as it might seem at first, it’s easy and quick to set up, and it allows users to find your online estate agency website much easier. It’s a must.
This is a good way to bring buyers and sellers together and also promote your estate agency website. You can make them entertaining and interactive with Q&A’s or slide shows, or just informative with different speakers or a panel of agents and some good discussion points about the state of the property market, or whatever else you may wish to do. A few drinks, some sandwiches, handshakes and business cards being exchanged, and just a fun day out.
This is a no-brainer and it should go without saying but we’re saying it anyway. Let everybody know all about your online estate agency. Otherwise, how will anybody know?
Like what you hear? Contact us to find out more about how we can help your estate agency attract more sellers and landlords.