As a realtor you must be versed in different areas to grow your business. These include following up with clients, scheduling meetings, bookkeeping, and marketing. From the list, marketing/advertising is an area that can play a substantial role in increasing your clientele. In this post we take a quick look at advertisements for real estate agents. Knowing about the pros and cons of using print and digital advertisements will help make informed decisions in growing your business.
Mediums
Printed advertisements can be classified as something physical that people can see and touch. These include newspapers, magazines, brochures, banners, flags, bus shelter ads and bench ads.
Forms of digital ads are consumed through electronic devices. These devices include personal computers, laptops, mobile phones and tablets. For this reason, it is important to consider how ads are shown depending on the device size. Digital ads also include social media.
Costs
If you plan on advertising using print media, the cost varies depending on many factors. For example, in using ads with the Toronto Transit Commission TTC, a poster with dimensions 11’ x 5’ can cost between $300 to $800. An ad with a larger size can cost between $900 to $5000. Also much like real estate properties, the prices of these ads will vary depending on their posted location. You will be paying for high traffic areas where many people will be able to see your ad. More about TTC ad costs can be seen here.
With digital marketing you can drive your costs down. Unlike traditional ads, you do not use a physical space for your ads. Due to the internet and its ease of accessibility you can easily create “your own virtual space”. Purchasing a domain name for your website can cost around $10 a year. While a web hosting service like BlueHost can cost you as little as $4/month. Another form of advertising your business online is through social media. Creating a landing page and a social media account for your business is fairly simple. However the real work is making your online presence stand out from all your competitors.
You can certainly look further into gaining how you can do this by yourself or you can use companies that specialize in this area. LeadHornet is one of these companies that specializes in helping real estate agents get traction for their business. If you are a small business, you use digital marketing agency for small businesses.
Return on investment (ROI)
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. This popular quote can be directly applied to advertising for real estate agents. To see if what you are doing works, you need hard numbers to support your actions. With traditional advertisement, the simplest way to check is by directly asking customers how they have heard of you. Other ways to check if your leads were directed to you through your printed advertisements is by creating a landing page with the high probability that clients will only know about it through your prints. Another example would be to monitor how many leads you have received during the time your prints were published. Data from these can give you a rough idea about your ROI. This article provides more information on how you can track your printed marketing efforts.
With digital advertisements you can easily get metrics for your landing page or social media account. Data tracking is built-in within the web. A tool that can be used to check your digital ROI is Google Analytics. It can give you a real-time report on the traffic flow of your site, the visitors’ location, their actions, and many more! With all this data you can get precise feedback on what is working and what is not. However learning all these tools will have a learning curve. LeadHornet has a committed team that can work with you in marketing and lead generation for your real estate business. The company is big on transparency, providing you realtime reports about your online ads.
Targeting
Print media can be much more effective for businesses in targeting specific demographics. For example, as a realtor you can place an advertisement within the real estate classified ads of the local paper. However this is limited in creating a customer awareness of your business at a local level.
In contrast, with a digital presence you can build a greater reach to your targeted demographics. With that being said many technology tools can be implemented in creating an effective online campaign with a target audience in mind. These tools include Google Ads and applying SEO best practices. However, technology is always evolving meaning you must always be learning and with different emerging technologies. Hence businesses tend to outsource this task to companies that specialize in this. If you plan for the long term and want to build your service based on it, you can check out SEO Services. They do most of the service you require for SEO.
Neuroscience of ads
Apart from their obvious physical differences between printed and digital ads, the human mind also processes them differently. According to studies, printed ads created better review time for small businesses and longer memory retention compared to its digital counterpart. Although print beats digital in this section, its high price point makes it a challenge for small businesses to run a marketing campaign with a high ROI.
Conclusion
In conclusion, deciding between print or digital in your advertising campaign depends on your situation. They both have their pros and cons, but as a small business, going digital is very cost-effective. Above all, going this route can also gain great insight into your audience with data analytics. Certainly they are not exclusive of one another. They can be used in combination together, both complementing the other in increasing awareness for your brand. That is our breakdown for advertisements for real estate agents!
