Home sellers often ask about our marketing plan. Of course, they want to know what we’re going to do to get their home sold. What we’ve discovered is that there is a lot of misinformation about what constitutes good real estate marketing today, so we often spend time educating consumers.
Our number one goal in marketing is to generate leads. We want as many prospective buyers as possible to contact the office so that we have an opportunity to expose them to our inventory of homes for sale. To this end much of our marketing includes pictures and descriptions of homes for sale; that’s what causes buyers to contact any real estate office.
But we also market for prospective sellers . . . and this is beneficial to our listed sellers as well. You see, the more listings we have, the more signs we have in the market, the more houses we have for sale online, the more opportunities prospective buyers have to contact the office for more information. It’s simple math: a few listings will generate a few leads; a lot of listings will generate a lot of leads. We include information about our Low Set Fee and Seller Savings in our marketing because this appeals to prospective sellers.
That pretty much covers why we market: to generate leads and develop an inventory of homes for sale (which will also generate leads). Now let’s turn to how we market.
First rule of Marketing: Be Visible! Which means to be seen . . . frequently. At Help-U-Sell Honolulu Properties we work every day to make sure our logo, our company name and our contact information is in front of as many Oahu residents as possible. Much of this visibility is accomplished with signs: For Sale Signs, directional signs, open house signs, office signage. Our goal, often accomplished, is to hear people say, ‘I see your signs everywhere.’
But visibility is not just about signs. We have used magazines in racks at busy public places to generate leads for our listings. And our weekly radio show has been running for almost 10 years, further establishing the Help-U-Sell name in Hawaii.
Today we live in an online world and we work hard to create useful, relevant online content about the local real estate market, the kind of content that is attractive to Google and the other search engines. It’s not just about being on the Internet; we also want to be findable, visible.
Lead Generation is all about Target Marketing, Yes, we want everyone on the island to know that Help-U-Sell Honolulu Properties is HERE and that we can save them money. But we especially want to get that message to the people who have a need to buy or sell NOW and in the near future. So we have to ask ourselves: where do prospective buyers and sellers go when they begin the process? And now, more than ever, the answer is pretty obvious: Trulia and Zillow.
These large national real estate portals do a somewhat flawed job of presenting information about housing in our local market. Their data tends to be inaccurate because they are not HERE. However, they have done an excellent job of marketing their home search capabilities to buyers and sellers. That’s why we have invested in Premiere Agent and Pro status on these portals. As a result, we are contacted daily by people who find us on Zillow and Trulia. One of the first things we do is to get them into a LOCAL search tool with the most accurate data, so that they can participate in the search process without the flaws of the national portals.
Client Base Development means we look backward as often as we look forward. As we move contacts and leads to contracts and closings, we work hard to make sure the people come through the process delighted with the service they received. We hope to earn their help in further developing our business by telling everyone they know about us. We are very grateful to have so many thoughtful and, frankly, glowing testimonials – most of which we never sought. It tells me we are on the right track and haven’t forgotten that the consumer is at the heart of our operation.
But we’re just as grateful for the fact that a sizable portion of our closed transactions come from former clients returning to buy or sell again, and from the friends and neighbors they refer to us. That’s how we grade the success of our company: if the customers we work with are so pleased with the service and the value they received that they become lead generators for us. . . well, we know we’re doing something right! You can’t get better marketing than the testimony of a well satisfied client!