Four Ways to Improve Visibility For Your Listing
As a real estate investor, you’re inevitably going to wind up selling the properties in which you’re invested in order to realize a profit. We don’t want to make too much of it, because we believe real estate investment is a series of plans and goals regarding each investment with actually buying and selling being just two steps among many, but ultimately the final goal is to sell. This means, if you’ve followed your plan so far and have set reasonable goals, that it’s now time to give your listing the exposure necessary to attract potential buyers and thus increase the chance of selling the property at your asking price. To achieve your goal, you need to generate more leads and in order to generate leads you need traffic, which means you need to utilize all available methods. With the dual availability of both online and offline marketing methods, it’s easier than ever to gain that visibility, but where do you start and how do you do it without spending a fortune?
Use the Internet to Your Advantage
The smart investor makes use of the tools available to him or her, and in a digitally connected age the most conspicuous tool in this regard is the Internet. By far, one of the easiest ways to get started is to create a professional, attractive website for your listing AND for your firm. Social media is great, but keep in mind you need a good “hub” (your website) in order to pull traffic from the heavily populated areas of the web like social media (the “spokes”). On your own website, you have full control of the content and allow prospective buyers to see you in a way they can relate to, as opposed to just finding your listing on an aggregate site or classifieds, and it’s a great way to obtain brand loyalty. Remember to feature the address or property name in the domain to drive people to the website from your marketing collateral and help promote it more actively online. This doesn’t mean you should neglect classifieds and real estate sites, either; the key is to attain a high level of saturation and exposure, and the more outlets featuring your listing the better. Finally, social media – while not the sort of place buyers go to purchase real estate – is nonetheless a way to reach interested buyers based on their interests (more on that in a minute), and to again give buyers a view of your firm to which they can positively relate. True visibility online means as many gateways to find you as possible, and all of these things matter in the grand scheme of getting sales.
Email Lists
E-mail is within the aforementioned realm of web-based tools, but deserves its own mention because despite the advent of so many new technologies, email remains one of the most effective for communicating with a large audience of prospects. The key is to send highly relevant content that is useful to your prospects, using a high quality HTML-based template that looks as professional as possible. A good example is MailChimp, which not only facilitates the construction of email newsletters and the maintenance of email lists but also allows you to create custom sign-up pages within your own website. Organize your lists according to location if possible, and target different content to different segments so the content is relevant to each one. If you have a separate email for brokers, tenants, warm prospects, and others on your list, the response will be stronger.
Paid Advertising
Again, yet another web-based tool deserves special attention. Paid advertising online is more targeted – and generally more effective – for commercial real estate than it has ever been thanks to online networks that provide powerful tools. While not often used for residential properties, it’s nonetheless quite effective when targeting prospective homebuyers (since they’re often very open in their searches as to what their intent is) for a broader purpose, such as building up your email list, or for attracting homebuyers, wholesalers, realtors, or other investors to your blog or website. Cost per Click (CPC) advertising allows you to choose exactly who sees your ads, and only pay if they click them. This gives stricter budget control and better overall targeting for what you’re paying for. Specifically, consider advertising with Google AdWords, Facebook, and Twitter. These ad networks have shown they can be powerful and effective tools.
Physical Signage
The Internet may have changed this industry, but offline tactics are still very much in style, just as effective, and can be powerful tools in your kit. Signage, in particular, remains an important way to grow visibility geographically. In other words, if we’re to compare it to PPC advertising, with signage you can at least be nearly 100% positive that most of the people who see the impression are local to the area in which you’re selling. Web-based advertisements can sometimes waste impressions (particularly on social media) due to mislabeled locations, which is less of an issue with Google-based ads, but regardless, the potential for wasted impressions is by far lower with physical, location-specific signage. Combine it with your online efforts by including your custom website URL or social media contact information, and you’ve got a powerful combination. Keep in mind that not everyone is ready to pick up the phone when they see a sign, so give them a lower commitment level at which to engage with your brand and they are more likely to do so. A website URL does just that.
Smart marketing, for any objective, is about getting in front of people where they spend their time with a message that resonates, and real estate is no different. Online tools like social media, paid advertising platforms, email marketing, or launching your own property website is easier to do now than ever before. Use these tools wisely and you’ll not only gain better visibility with your target audience, but you’ll generate the traffic and leads you need to really boost your sales as well. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for real-time updates and listings, and don’t forget to check back with us each week for more blogs on real estate investment!
– Get It Right Solutions LLC