In my office we use pretty much every medium available to advertise and promote. We use television commercials for both image advertising and to highlight some of our bigger commercial listings. We use social media, blogging, Twitter, Facebook, ActiveRain, and email to reach our clients as well as potential clients. We use direct mail to get out to the exprired listings, new listing and just sold postcards, as well as marketing to newly married couples as well who may be purchasing a home.
We have also used a lot of different print advertising methods. We have used everything from a full page color ad to spotlight a lirge commercial listing to the smallest classified ad we could legally run with all of our state required information for a business for sale. To the left is the copy we ran for a new office building we represented just up the street from our office. This was a full page ad was run on a Friday on the back page of the front section of the newspaper just above the daily weather report.
In the past we have run classified ads, mostly on the weekends and mostly on high traffic weekends. We tend to do a reverse print (black background with white print) to make the ads stand out in a sea of black print on a white background. To try and get the most bang for out buck we typically run several properties in one ad. If we're trying to highlight one property in particular we will even run multiple ads on the same day. We have to give specific instructions to the local paper to ensure they don't run them right next to each other.
Some other print ads we've done in the past are in local sporting programs for high school sports as well as the local university sports as well. We've tried to make them a little bit comical too with agents wearing football helmets and the like.
Our whole office spends over $150,000 per year on print advertising alone. Over the last few years we have decreased our spending on print advertising and increased our budget for building our website as well as spending money on television ads too. In the future, I still see print advertising budgets to shrink. We did a study recently of past clients and most reported that they expected us to continue with print ads.
Personally I think a lot of print advertising is done to placate sellers into thinking that their property is being marketed more. I rarely get a phone call or lead based on something a person saw in the newspaper. It's typically from something they saw on the internet. For the time being until we educate our sellers we'll continue to spend the money on print advertising.
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