Grow your brand presence, build your website traffic and your very own remarketing audience.
The era of digital marketing is upon us. We can see rapid uptake amongst agents and brands as they get comfortable with this new and essential advertising medium. This is truly exciting for the industry because it’s beginning to challenge the notion that traditional property portals are your only option when it comes to online marketing. We’ve seen ample evidence amongst our clients that early adopters are starting to see market share and reputational gains. But we are also seeing a proliferation of people ‘dabbling’ with multiple solutions, and seriously diluting the benefits that digital marketing brings.
So what do we mean by dilution? Think about what you want to achieve with digital, and it’s more than just running ads across social media and websites. Digital marketing should grow your brand presence massively, it should build your website traffic and also build your very own remarketing audience.
Let’s consider your brand first. This is what people remember and what establishes mind share in your prospective vendors. When you use multiple digital solutions, your ads won’t look consistent. Whilst AIM ads are 100% on-brand because of our artwork engine, many others are generic templates or, worse, an ad for someone else with your logo on it. Imagine having 3 different signboard looks in your area, you wouldn’t want that, and given digital ads will be seen more than anything else you do – you might want to ensure your ads are consistent & on-brand.
Next, let’s consider your remarketing audience. You should want to grow this, just as you try to grow your email list. A remarketing audience is built when someone clicks on one of your ads and allows more of your ads to be shown to those same people – many of whom will be researching future vendors. When you use multiple digital marketing solutions you aren’t building a single, large, remarketing audience. Rather you are building separated silos that you cant easily use, or (as is the case with many AIM competitors) you are not building your audience at all, you are building the audience of the supplier who uses it to target your competitors’ ads as well as yours.
Finally, consider website traffic coming from people clicking on your ads. Many solutions, especially from traditional property portals, direct traffic back to their sites – and away from your sites. Website traffic is one of the main reasons portals use when justifying their cost, and we often wonder why agents would willingly send more traffic back to these sites when they know it’s only going to encourage further price rises later. The more your marketing budgets are subsumed by the property portals, the less budget you are likely to have for marketing that is independent of them, and designed to benefit you. It’s a vicious circle, and one the industry is already well aware of. Standardising on a digital solution that builds your traffic, at scale, is something you can also use to brag about when talking to prospective vendors – and our AIM solution will tell you exactly how many website visitors you are receiving.
In conclusion, we feel it won’t be long before digital marketing is a standard ingredient like a signboard. If you accept this, perhaps it’s worth considering an office-wide approach and then choose a digital product that ticks all the boxes – not just some of them. Whilst it might be tempting to try every new product that you are contacted about, think about whether you would do this with any other category of marketing. How about a new sign look every other week? Different brochure layouts on different paper? What about a letterbox drop with the printer’s logo bigger than yours this week? I’m sure most would agree this would be highly undesirable. So, unless you think Digital Marketing doesn’t matter, think about whether you want to dilute your digital strategy, just as you are getting started.
Contact us at sales.digital@campaigntrack.com now.
