With the continued focus on digital marketing in real estate (and in almost every industry), it could be easy to buy into the belief that print marketing is dead. However, foregoing print marketing completely in your real estate marketing strategy means you’re missing out on a proven effective and direct way to reach prospects and retain existing clients.
One of the major reasons that print marketing works is because it’s tangible – it gives consumers something to hold in their hands, to easily come back to, to share with others, and to keep for further use. How many times have you walked into a home for an appraisal and seen a property postcard or calendar or real estate brochure of yours hung up on the fridge? Hard to do that with digital marketing! With so much information being presented to individuals on multiple screens on a daily basis and attention spans that are shorter than ever, print marketing delivers an opportunity for people to process the material on their own time. This gives a greater chance of them absorbing and being affected by the information versus seeing a digital ad on Facebook for a split second and forgetting about it instantly.
Another reason print marketing works for real estate agents is that you can easily tailor it for your audience, providing the personalization they crave. It also allows you to deliver specifically localized information, whether it’s for one particular street or a neighborhood or your farm area. You’re able to reach a wide range of ages while delivering information that creates an element of trust in you and your business. As an added bonus, you can easily measure the effectiveness of print marketing based on the direct responses you receive.
Finally, this age-old marketing tactic allows you to maintain a consistency of quality and experience between your online and offline marketing. You can choose the photo quality and paper/card stock to ensure your listing and your brand are being presented in the best way possible. It’s harder to do that with digital marketing, where you often can’t control the device your information is being viewed on and are confined by the constraints the digital marketing platforms put on word count and photo sizes.
So, what are the most common print marketing materials for real estate agents?
For the widest range of impact, your offline branding and lead generation marketing should echo your online marketing. If you have a listing online, you can create a postcard, brochure, or flyer for the property to get it into people’s hands. CENTURY 21 Redwood Realty agents use our Marketing Studio 2.0 product to create all of these kinds of print marketing materials to spur interest in a property and put that property in front of potential clients at the right time.. A major feature of this platform is that each stage of a listing transaction, from pre-listing to sold, triggers automated, relevant marketing. Once your listing is entered as “Coming Soon,” the process is triggered and over 30 marketing pieces are created specifically for your listing and delivered to your email.
For example, postcards can be quickly created to announce a new listing or the sale of a local listing. Other postcard templates that are popular with our agents include our seasonal postcards, recognizing and commemorating special holidays and our market update postcards (MarketWatch), which can provide local median price information or recent sales information for a specific period of time.
CENTURY 21 Redwood Realty agents also use brochures to expand on the presentation of a property, with the opportunity to choose from anywhere from 2 to 8 pages (for those extra-special properties) to provide photos, floor plans, and other information that can be left in the home for any potential buyers previewing the property. And, yes, we’ve made it super simple to upload and print quickly, so anybody with even basic technical abilities can achieve amazing results.
MLS integration is included, so all an agent needs to do is to enter the relevant MLS number to trigger the auto-population of the listing’s photos as well as key property details and the property description. If the agent wants, they can customize the brochure even further by choosing which photos they want to highlight throughout the brochure.
Want to grab someone’s attention about a change in price, an upcoming open house or an invitation to learn more about working with you? Try using a door hanger. CENTURY 21 Redwood agents find it’s a quick way to make a big impact and an instant reminder that you service a particular area. Some agents even incorporate door hangers into their pop-by strategies, leaving door hangers along with small treats or other items to give clients something to remember them by.
Want to give print marketing a try in your real estate business? Fill out the following form to schedule a demo of our Marketing Studio 2.0 product.
