If you run a real estate agency, you will understand how important marketing is to growing your customer base and your brand. But it’s not an easy task! Real estate marketing campaigns can be extensive and need a whole team of experts. That’s why you might be looking for help from a real estate marketing agency. But how do you know which one to choose? We’re here today to help you to decide.
Why you need a Real Estate Marketing Agency
There is so much involved in marketing a real estate company from direct mail to developing an extensive digital marketing presence. It will take a whole host of web designers, content writers and social media marketers to pull it off! So no doubt, you will feel a little overwhelmed. A real estate marketing agency will take on the responsibility of part or whole marketing campaigns. This means that you will have stronger campaigns that will convert into real customers. It frees up your time so that you can concentrate on doing what you best – selling property!
A real estate marketing agencies could help you with:
- Print based marketing and direct mail
- Social Media management and social media advertising
- PR and reputation management
- Content Marketing including blogging
- Search Engine Optimization (making sure that you get found on Google)
- Pay Per Click (e.g. Google Ads)
Do you feel that you need help with any of these? We are going to explore how to choose the right real estate marketing agency for your brand.
1. Choose a Real Estate Specialist
The first and most important point is to choose an agency with proven experience in real estate marketing. It’s easy to think that a marketing consultant is just a marketing consultant, but that’s not the case. Marketing experts and consultants usually specialize in marketing a specialist area because they know the audience and they know how to get those customers to convert. So for example, some agencies specialize in marketing for fashion, pets or travel. You want to choose one of the best real estate marketing companies, because they will understand your audience and know what marketing methods work in your industry.
2. Reputation and Previous Success
Next, look at the reputation of your potential new real estate marketing agency. A good place to start is one of the review sites such as Trust Pilot. You can read previous comments from their past customers. Remember to consider if they are genuine reviews – whether positive or negative you can usually tell because genuine customers will mention specific examples.
Next, ask for a portfolio of work and hope to find examples of marketing success from other real estate clients in the past. Good and experienced marketing companies will back up their portfolio with stats. You want to look at things like conversion rates (how many people convert into customers), ROI (return on Investment) and if it’s an online campaign you are looking for you can even ask for organic traffic increases and social media click through rates.
3. Their Specialist Areas
The next important thing to establish is what kind of campaign you are looking for. Is it a print based or digital campaign? If you are looking for a big digital campaign, it’s no good approaching a company who work predominantly in print (and vice versa). If you are looking for video campaigns such as YouTube or even radio and TV ads then you need to focus on this as a specialism of course. The key is that the agency you hire should be experts in the kind of campaign that you want to run.
4. Knowledge and Expertise
Ask questions about the type of campaign that you want to run and you can usually tell if they are ‘winging it’ when they don’t give substantial answers or back them up with evidence. For example, if you are hiring a digital agency then you can ask questions to test out their experience. If they don’t know what SEO stands for, or how to schedule content on Facebook, then look the other way!
5. Qualifications
You might also like to check out their accreditations. For example, do the staff have university degrees or practical qualifications? If you are spending a hefty sum then this would be expected. For example, if you were looking for an agency to do a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign on Google then you would expect them to be an accredited Google partner. This is something that you can verify.
6. Are they Insured?
This sounds like an obvious one when you think about it, but not many people remember to check that the agency you hire are insured. This is particularly going to be important on the rare occasion that something goes wrong, but it also says something about the company too. It shows that they are professional and have every eventuality covered – this is the kind of real estate marketing agency that you want to be working with.
7. Location
The next thing that you will need to decide is whether you want someone local or not. If you want an office to physically go into for face to face meetings then geography will come into play. Decide on a location and how far you are willing to travel from that location, then circle it on the map. That’s your search area. But, if you are happy to work remotely as many people these days do, then location won’t be problem.
Do consider the different time zones if for example you are in the USA and your marketing company is UK based. You will have to work out the best time to connect. But people these days work together across states and even continents without any problem. This opens up your options massively!
8. Finance Options
The last thing on our list to consider is something that very few people are aware of. Did you know that you can actually get marketing campaigns on finance? Supercharged offers have finance options to help your business to grow. This can drastically help with cash flow and allow your business to the next level.
If we can assist with any of your real estate marketing needs, please contact us. We would be happy to help!
