Have you really got the time to invest in marketing? What about social media for estate agents, tweeting, sharing, posting, uploading… sometimes it can feel like it is over taking our lives. In most cases what makes us think twice usually regarding our marketing decisions is cost, how much money it will cost us to outsource vs how much will it cost us in time to do it ourselves and between them both, which gives us the best ROI.
Good marketing, especially if we are looking to release our own original content, will take time, no magical wand will make it appear in front of us without some effort!
Marketing can take many forms and be used for many reasons.
Marketing is a lot more than just social media or updating our website, let us not forget that marketing also includes those early morning business breakfast networking events, branded company cars, business cards, for sale signs, local newspaper adverts, Google Adwords and so much more.
Reasons for us to be marketing include the likes of video tours to showcase our property listings, improving the ranking of our web pages on Google or to increase our personal business profile in the local community.
Before you get underway:
You need to first decide why exactly you are marketing and this will help you to achieve better results and you should also recognise that nearly any audience that you are looking to attract will be online in some way or another. It is not difficult to get in front of a target audience these days, especially thanks to social media, as there are many dedicated pages and groups full of active online people with specific interests.
Why are you marketing?
Think about it this way. You own a market stall and you are selling amazing pasties. You need to make a living so you want to sell enough pasties daily to keep the sharks from the door, but you also are thinking about expansion of your business and want to get above the normal flow of people passing by simply purchasing to cure their hunger. You know your pasties are great and want more people to taste what you serve so instead of concentrating on attracting the passers by who will be inclined to purchase from you anyway, you expand your reach to those who do not know about you. This is where your local target audience comes in to play:
If you have already built yourself a small audience which are most likely to be local then why not reach out via them? What about sharing content, or even pasties, with these people that they will find of benefit to them and benefit to them to share? If you want a marketing drive then what about something on the lines of “here’s your pasties and now here is a free one for you to simply share with someone you know” – “here is £500 if you refer a new client to us and they either purchase or sell a property and here are some ideas on how to succeed ie posting on your Facebook timeline or sharing Tweets on your experience of dealing with us.”
For most estate agencies your target audience is your local audience so when it comes to marketing online why not save yourself time and waste efforts by making sure that what you share is put out in front of the people that can make a difference to your business. Local communities are everywhere online and the more local content you share then the more likely that local audiences will engage with it thus increasing your local brand awareness.
It is important in today’s marketing world to engage with your local target audiences and reach out to their networks… In my mind that is what building target audiences organically is all about, reaching the networks of the networks that follow you…
Author: Andy Soloman
