Starting an estate agency can certainly seem like a challenging endeavour in the early stages, particularly when you’re planning the entire process from scratch. Of course, marketing will be a top priority in every case, as every startup needs to advertise and promote brand awareness to gain clients and sales. As an estate agent trying to make a name for yourself, you’ve got plenty of work to do. Between establishing a reputation, gaining experience, obtaining a business location, and handling the finances, you’ve got your hands full enough before you even start thinking about the marketing efforts involved.
Whilst you may be leaning towards outsourcing the marketing to an agency, you may actually achieve better results by pouring those funds directly into ad campaigns that you manage yourself. Learning how to do that isn’t necessarily easy, but it’s something that most estate agents can learn the gist of within the first week to a month of studying and taking courses. Plus, the following guide will cover all of the steps you’ll need to cover along the road to success.
1. Travel & Network
Online marketing should definitely be a part of your game plan, but offline networking is where you can really build some quick momentum by connecting with agents, investors, buyers, sellers, and businesses that can help you get your first few deals done.
Getting out there and making yourself known always helps. But while doing this locally is easy enough, when your agency is nationwide you’ll want to visit the areas that you operate in to network. The easiest way to do this is to check out the website mondaytofriday (https://www.mondaytofriday.com/) and find a comfortable room to let at your destination. Whether you are marketing your company in Edinburgh, Manchester, London, or anywhere in between, you can find a room to rent in a convenient location for the duration of the week. Mondaytofriday makes it super easy to get in touch with a landlord and sign a short agreement, leaving you with one less thing to worry about.
2. Build a Strong Social Media Presence
Becoming known locally is a lot easier when you extend your efforts to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and so on. You can join groups and follow pages related to real estate and network with estate agents in your area.
If you’re going to be running an agency, chances are you’ll need some help, so networking with other estate agents in the area could help you find some of your first associates. Once the agency is running smoothly, you can pay a social media manager to update all your accounts and manage status updates as part of your ongoing marketing campaign.
3. Launch Online Ad Campaigns
You might think that Facebook Advertising, YouTube Advertising, and Google AdWords are methods that should be reserved for experienced ad specialists, but it’s actually possible to become highly proficient in using all of these platforms simply by reading popular marketing blogs and watching instructional YouTube videos.
The key is to start slow and steady until you get the hang of it and start to see which demographics and methods are working. Once you find an audience targeting profile that seems to be converting well, then you can scale up the ad budget.
4. Invest in Quality Design
Building a reputable estate agency can be tough when you don’t have a big portfolio to show. Thus, as a new startup you’ll have to rely on the appeal of your branding, site design, and personal presentation. While the other steps mentioned in this guide can be handled independently by most estate agents or agency owners, this final step is where you should really allocate most of your budget.
Paying a competent designer to build your website will pay off, as will investing in custom graphics like logos and photography shoots. High quality photography, web development, and graphic design are skills that can take months if not years to master, and those are the visual aspects that you want to have projecting perfect professionalism.
5. Develop, Publish, and Distribute Great Content
Last but most certainly not least, to continue your mission of spreading brand awareness for your agency, you should be putting useful and engaging content online regularly. Your web content is essentially the face of your agency online, as the words and media you release will be what people are basing their opinions on.
As the owner or manager of an estate agency, you may not want to be writing full-time, but it would be wise to contribute an occasional blog post to the company blog and outsource the rest of the mission-critical writing to experienced writers. On the other hand, if you’re a skilled writer, you might as well showcase that skill by guest authoring by authoritative blogs for goo brand exposure.
Combining All of the Above for Optimal Results
Although implementing even just one of the tips above will make a notable difference in your start-up’s growth strategy, utilising all of them in combination is almost guaranteed to get your agency lots of attention very quickly.
Author: Estate Agent Networking UK
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