Due to the competitive nature of online property advertising especially when considering the number of agents that currently market their properties on portals, it's very important to ensure that you get your marketing right first time, or ensure that you correct it as soon as you see any mistakes. Any online advertising, but especially the use of property portals, offer a brand advertising & lead generation platform that can be a very effective way of marketing your properties to a 21st century online audience, however, they can quickly become a very expensive and useless form of marketing if you don't advertise your properties properly in the first place. Lead numbers can be seriously affected, even by the smallest of mistakes, so let's look at a few things below that you should think about when uploading your properties.
1: Appealing Images
First impressions count for everything and that's certainly the case when marketing your properties online, due to the thousands of hits that the most popular property portals receive each day. Would you honestly click on a property that had a bathroom as the main image, or something that looks like the walls are falling down, or a dark exterior image of the property that's been taken on a rainy day? It's not about falsifying the property to a potential buyer, so I definitely would not recommend the use of an image tool, but it's about being smart, and portraying that property in the best light so when it's presented, it looks like a house that you would want to live in. It's worth noting too, that your sellers do look on portals as well, and will appreciate you putting some time into how you promote their house and what it looks like online. A house, with decent images, will almost certainly attract a better quality and higher number of enquires than that of a property with bad images, even if the properties are the same or very similar.
2: Interesting & Factual Property Description
Like the above, the property description is just as important when marketing your properties online, and it will affect the number of leads and the quality of the leads you receive in the same way. As an agent, you must think about that house, as firstly, it being your own property, and secondly as in the eyes of the buyer. You need to ask the seller to tell you about their house, and the information they give you shouldn't just cover how many bedrooms, bathrooms and reception rooms the house has, but it should be more interesting such as, what makes their house stand out, what is interesting about their house, why should people buy their house, and why are they selling their house. You should never be afraid to ask these questions, as the more information you find out, the more descriptive the text will be. Take that information, and then to make it that little bit more interesting & factual, think about it from the eyes of the potential buyer, and consider what sort of questions they might ask, i.e. what are the necessary requirements to buy the house, what are the community fees, what's the area like, is it a terraced garden or a lawn garden, how close are the local amenities. Again, it's not about falsifying the information to fill the gap, it's about providing a factual and honest description that's going to portray the house in the best light, and market it as the dream property that the client has been looking for.
3: Match your website
As we've already discussed property portals are not only highly useful for lead generation, but they also give you a fabulous brand awareness platform and bearing that in mind, if, what you promote on the portal, is not what you promote on your own website then it can seriously affect your credibility as an agent, and as a trustworthy individual. Almost all the portals, will have your company logo next to your property so it's easy to search for your website online, and so it can easily confuse people, if you are marketing a property online as a bungalow when in fact on your website, it's being marketed as a townhouse. You are already starting off on the wrong foot and rather than ask the question and clarify with you, people will automatically look for a company where the process is going to be simple and they feel like the company takes an interest in its own image. If you, as the agent, can't market properties correctly, then how can you expect them, to trust you and take you seriously in the overall sales process?
4: Agent Information
People like knowing who they are dealing with, and marketing on Property Portals gives you the perfect opportunity to also showcase your own property agency, and what you can offer to a client. The property itself should always be the focus, but at the bottom of each property description you should include some background information about you and your experience as an agency. As we all know most agents will provide a similar service, so always try to make it slightly different & as interesting as you can. If you have a certain process for dealing with enquiries, or you offer a rental service / after sales service, then these are all important benefits that can potentially help your client, so they should be notified. It's always best to be honest, so don't offer something that you can't deliver on, as it will always come back to haunt you.
5: The Property Portals themselves
Most of the major property portals will keep their database well informed by sending out regular weekly emails with hot properties of the week, or those that fit a theme. In most cases they won't ask the agents to send over properties, and though it's not guaranteed they will try to accommodate the various agents that work with them, so that no one agent is preferred over another. What is guaranteed, is that if you don't have superior quality listings, then none of your properties will ever be featured, and you could miss out on a fabulous way of extra promotion. Another point to notice is that most of the property portals offer to sort search results by a most popular option, and though there are many factors which make a property popular, the quality of the listing also plays a key role.
A short Summary
When uploading properties online, you do have the choice of uploading manually or via a feed, but however you choose to do it, the above is still the same. Just take a moment to think about quality, consider the pointers above, and though online property advertising is never guaranteed, the higher your listing quality, the more chance you have of succeeding.
How Can Property Portal Marketing Help?
PPM has been designed exclusively for estate agents, and we offer a full 360 marketing service, with the objective being to increase the quality and quantity of your sales leads, whilst giving advice on property portals, property advertising and marketing of your properties online. We can manage all your property advertising to ensure that quality remains at a high, giving you the best chance of success, and ensuring the maximum return for your marketing budget.
Contact us today for further information.
