How to promote your estate agency

 

Your estate or letting agency should be a busy place. With a buoyant market, rental properties hang around for on the lettings market for a matter of hours in some areas of the country and for properties being sold, there are still many buyers searching for their perfect place.

Your marketing message needs to be consistent across the range of promotional and advertising tools that you use. Hence, you use the same logo, stick to a colour palette, font and so on.  With a letting or an estate agency, they key to success is visibility with recognition.

What does ‘visibility with recognition’ mean?

This phrase means that when someone looks at your logo etc. that they know who you are and what you do. One of the most common logos that people will recognise are estate agent boards and so on.

Thus, as you learn how to promote your estate agency, here are five key ideas for your business:

#1 Estate agency boards

This is an obvious and clear step to take for your estate agency as this is how most buyers will identify a property they are interested in. An estate agent board outside of a property needs to give key information – who is selling the property and the contact details for buyers to use.

Many estate agents invest in what are known as ‘slips’; these are additional pieces of information printed on rectangular pieces of plastic that can be fixed onto the sign. They are often pre-printed such as ‘sold’, ‘let agreed’ or ‘no callers’ etc.

Designing these boards so that they are instantly recognisable is important so choose your colours carefully.

#2 Geographical targeting

Buyers may come from all over the country but your sellers are based in your area thus, you need to be hot on geographical targeting.

Many estate agents choose to base themselves in a certain area, with natural boundaries such as counties also forming the boundary for their business. Over time, an established estate agency will often expand into adjacent, neighbouring areas and so on.

Thus, targeted marketing in your area is a strong option and one would be to take out adverts in local newspapers. Many agencies already do this, listing their properties for sale or rent on a weekly basis. Many prospective buyers will use local papers as the means of gathering information for both properties and agencies. Sellers will also look at these pages too, to help them settle on a price and so on.

#3 Social media

Social media platforms are a good avenue for raising awareness of your business, as well as letting people know of new properties that have come to the market, price reductions and so on.

Like all businesses, however, to get the best from social media, you need a strategy. Likewise, you should be telling prospective customers, both buyers and sellers that you can be found on certain social media sites by including this information on flyers, postcards, business cards and so on.

#4 Flyers

Letting people know you exist and reminding them of this on a regular basis is the simplistic approach to any marketing and promotional campaign.

At some point, you will need to step this up and encourage anyone who may be thinking of selling, letting, buying or renting to explore this possibility further – and to do so with your agency!

Leaflets or postcard through doors, known as direct mailing campaigns, can be simple to set up and run. You can push leaflets through doors yourself, or you can buy into a package with a local company who include your flyers in local free newspapers or if you desire, you can opt to have it mailed directly to properties in a postcode area.

This can reap huge rewards, providing you have a convincing marketing message but it does come at a cost, including not only delivery charges but the costs of leaflets & flyer printing, although these can be competitive.

#5 Website

No letting or estate agency can survive without a responsive website. It needs to be maintained well, as well as plenty of material and content being added on a regular basis. This should include not just properties for sale or rent, but information in the shape of blogs and so on.

Being able to download the specifics of a property is important, something that can be easily done by including a PDF document for buyers to download or print off. Don’t forget to ensure your logo is included in any documents!

In learning how to promote your estate agency effectively, you need to be confident that you are giving out the right message to potential customers, both buyers and sellers. How do you market your agency?