In today’s market, you need a multi-channel marketing plan

Credit: VHT Studios

Your clients are now your ex-clients, because their house sat on the market for many months. Setbacks happen, but your clients were expecting something that you didn’t deliver.

It is no longer acceptable to just put a listing on the MLS (and a few websites), set up a single-page website for the property and distribute sell sheets at open houses and agent gatherings.  In the old days, clients counted on their Realtor to market their house to other Realtors. Now, sellers take a more active role and monitor how well or how poorly their property is advertised and marketed, especially online.

Clients demand their home is marketed as well as or better than their neighbors’ listings, using a multi-channel marketing plan that takes advantage of the many tools at your disposal.

A Multi-Channel Strategy

Your marketing strategy should begin with a story, selling the “why” as much as the “what.” Start by defining that “one thing” about the listing that you can build the marketing story around. Is it a home with four bedrooms and a big basement for a growing family? Or is it a great starter home with an awesome backyard?

Photographs help illustrate the story and are valuable in attracting search engine traffic. If someone searches for homes with big backyards, it benefits you and your seller to have photographs of the big backyard of your listing online. It will help your listing rank higher, and potential buyers will get what they searched for.

While it might be convenient to have the MLS distribute your listing content, don’t count on them to handle your photographs. They compress, reformat and generally degrade the quality of images. That might be OK for other agents, but not for consumers or your sellers.

Today’s affordable marketing tools, such as virtual staging, can make an empty home look lived in by filling it with furniture, which can help potential buyers envision what a barren room could look like when furnished. Also, photographic enhancements can turn a grey sky to blue, and brown grass to green. There’s simply no excuse for bad visuals to accompany a listing.

Multi-channel marketing is not online only – offline tools are still necessary. By integrating stunning photography, vibrant color and effective narrative, you can create colorful brochures, great sell sheets, engaging postcards and appealing ads.

Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing

Next, leverage your content as much as possible. You can start by taking advantage of the content you’ve created on social networks.

• Announce your new listing on Twitter and include a link to photography
• Add your new listing to your Facebook profile and encourage your friends to share it
• Update your status on LinkedIn
• Add photographs of your listing on Pinterest
• With every home, be sure to include a link to your firm’s website with detailed listing information

Publishing a couple of tweets and a few Facebook posts is not enough. Allow time every day to consistently update your social networks by building a narrative about the listing. Remember: Social media is social, so make an effort to engage your clients by friending them on Facebook, following them on Twitter and connecting with them on LinkedIn.

Beyond social media, two pillars of content marketing – blogging and email marketing – can build systematic interest in your property.

Writing Your Posts and Emails

When creating the narrative about your listing, these are some of the most important issues to keep in mind:

• Tell your listing’s story in a straightforward, conversational fashion.
• Good grammar and spelling are important.
• Highlight something new in each post.
• Use 10 or 15 keywords that will make it easier for buyers to find the property on Google.

Add a blog feature to your website to help you to develop the story of your property by highlighting specific rooms and particular features. Email updates through an email marketing system to deliver these stories to your contacts so that your news arrives in their inboxes.

Real estate marketing has changed, as have your clients’ expectations. By gaining an increasing comfort level with new marketing technologies and techniques, your multi-channel marketing strategy can evolve – which will help you close deals, not lose them.

Credit: VHT Studios

Brian Balduf is CEO of VHT Studios, the nation’s leading provider of exceptional real estate photography and marketing services, delivering to real estate agents their most powerful selling tool – high-quality photography – as well as innovative and reliable solutions for sharing and distributing multimedia content when and wherever real estate professionals need it. Learn more at https://www.vhtstudios.com/