Mistakes in Estate Agency Marketing No.21
Mistake No 21: "Trying too hard to measure it"
Common business thinking suggests that if you can’t measure it, then you shouldn’t be doing it. I disagree. There is more art to science in some elements of estate agency - communication being one of them. For example, you can’t measure the value of a phone to your business, but you know you need one!
You can probably rely on your business intuition more than you expect. When it comes to writing content for your marketing initiatives, simply ask yourself, “Is this a good idea or not?” How can producing relevant, interesting, meaningful, timely and well-written material not be valuable to your agency, especially in view of how easy it is to generate deep engagement?
The key to measuring whether your marketing communication piece is worthwhile is to ask yourself the following: “If I were handing this to the reader personally, would they:
- thank me for it?
- learn something from it / be entertained by it?
- talk about it?
- keep it?
- look forward to receiving the next one?”
If the answer to any of these is “no” then you might need to reassess your content.
So often, I find estate agency marketing material falls short in that it focuses on “getting” rather than “attracting” and herein lies the problem. Do you really think that simply telling people what you do is actually that interesting? Is advertising pictures of properties enough to distinguish you from your competitors? And is your dark blue company livery genuinely more persuasive than your competitor’s light green colour scheme?
If you are simply relying on brand awareness and not communicating your agency’s style or personality, then why should people regard you with anything other than indifference – if they even notice you at all?
Indifference is a major business killer, especially in an environment where the public believes that estate agents are more or less the same as each other. Yes, you have to stick your head above the parapet with the risk that not everyone will like what you have to say.
That’s fine - you don't expect everyone to instruct you anyway. The important thing is that people should at least have some opinion of who you are and how you are, so that they have something to go on when making an informed decision about which agent might be best for them.
This usually takes the form of a drip, drip, drip feed of your advice, opinion and comment over a period of time. You'll find this delivers long, medium and short term results as well - you just don't know which until it arrives, and even then, you won't always be able to attribute it to a specific campaign, mailer, blog etc. Having said that, you can measure Facebook/Linkedin Likes, re-Tweets, virality, and clicks.
But you won’t get any of these without first securing engagement. If you can systematically deliver on quality of content, with interesting and engaging material, then quantity will follow. It's called reputation management. Your reputation is everything - it's just down to you to manage it.
As long as you have something interesting, informative or entertaining to say, then it's easier than ever to be proactive in promoting your reputation, thanks to social media, email campaigns, blogs and low cost digital print flyers and newsletters. And the great thing is that your target audience is well-defined, local and easily reached.
As ever, if you need a hand with relevant, meaningful and well-written content that makes you look good, then please do let me know HERE. I've helped hundreds of agents deliver effective marketing messages and campaigns and I'd love to do the same for you.
Key point:
Event though it may be difficult to measure the response, don't let this dissuade you from being proactive in managing your local reputation.
