Is Print Advertising a Good Way to Prospect for New Clients?

I keep reading that print advertising is money down the drain. Direct mail marketing seems to d better.

What I've determined in my area is that print ads to drive leads are successful in certain geographies and in certain price ranges.  At least for me, I don't do any print ads for myself - just online and direct referrals.

Very recent statistics show print advertising at around or less than 2%, including newspapers and real estate magazines. I certainly don't spend my dollars there anymore.

Rachel - the ONLY print advertising I have are my business cards. Everything I do is electronic! My blogs, other internet media - I have not used print advertising in YEARS!

Hi Rachel,  I'm betting most of the comments will be against doing print ads.  there are stil some niche markets but they are getting fewer and fewer.

It must work. Some of the agents I know who spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on print advertising, are the busiest by far. They have a print media presence.

Long time ago I tried print advertising and all it got me was others trying to sell me something. I turned to direct mail marketing, which is not necessarily an ad, but something of value to prospective home sellers. From my experience, this has been a good move.

Rachael,

You are most welcome. I'm very happy to hear that you find some value in my comments. As someone who is new to AR I definitely want to contribute where I can.

I've been doing some reading & research into marketing. and one idea I found was to run several versions of a print advertisement to see what gets the best response. So essentially you need to do some experimentation with your messaging. Especially if the ad does not seem to be getting the response you're looking for, it would be a good idea to try a different approach - especially with the headline.

Readers may not be as familiar with Auctions - at least they're not common around here -  so you need to give them one clear benefit (not a feature) that sets you apart, and should at least get them to call you to learn more.

What are some common complaints or issues that people tell you about when they come to use your service? If you can identify a few, maybe one will jump out at you as the catalyst for your new headline.  

All the best

Rachel,

As you can see from many of your replies print marketing can work if done properly.  And what you also notice is a lot of agents have pulled back on their print marketing.  What does that say to me??  Less competition with agents sending out print marketing.  For me personally, I use to send out about 1,000 postcards a month to my farming area a few years ago.  It was in the area I lived in.  I noticed I received about 3 or 4 postcards from other agents as well.  I use to get frustrated because of the time it took to get responses back from the postcards I sent.  But now I noticed I don't get any other real estate related postcards.  So my compeittion is just about gone (postcard wise).  And since I recently started up my farming campaign again I've used a company called Farmbo.com  It really takes the frustration out of farming and makes it much more effective.  I can write whatever message I want on the postcards they send out.  The company also personalizes each postcard to every homeowner I mail to.  Besides that, they create a website for each homeowner on my list.  I tell them exactly what I want on the website, with all my information.  So the homeowner gets a personalized postcards, with their name in the web address and then a personalized website with the exact message I want to get across to them.

The best part is that I get emailed when a homeowner goes on their site to read the information.  So I know exactly which homeowners to follow up on with more detailed information.  I've used it for a few months now.  Before I would send out cards for 3 or 4 months without hearing a word.  Now everytime I send out the cards I get emailed when any homeowner shows some interest.  Then I usually send them a little packet with my marketing material, a letter, my bio, and a return addressed response card.  In only a few months I have had 4 appointments, getting the listing of 2 (one under contract already and also one buyer from those listings who just put in an offer on a place) and 2 more who said they will be ready to list soon.  So the frustration of just sitting and waiting of someone to call me is gone.  And I always try to be creative with whatever I do, so I think the personalization of the message, postcard and websites grabs homeowners attention a little more then the basic postcards.

And although it is tough to keep putting out more and more money for things, I have been considering ramping up the postcard campaign more and just concentrating on listings and bringing in a buyers agents to handle the running around.  But I might be getting ahead of myself with that.  But the pricing discount for the larger orders on the Farmbo.com website does make that attractive.  Only time will tell...

Good luck with your advertising in 2012!!!

Rachel,

We place a "branding" advertisement in 2 local papers...although the first few months we did not see much direct business from it.  However, we have now been doing it about 20 months and when we sat down the end of 2011 to finalize our 2012 budget...it's not something we will discontinue anytime in the near future.  Our Return on Investment is over 600% for the past year...it's the one print avenue that has worked for us, other than mailings, that we will continue to use.  The key is to be consistent...we are in the same place every week. 

Good luck to you!

My firm takes out two pages in the Real Estate Book. Frankly more to keep sellers happy than to actively get leads. The good news is TREB feeds to a whole bunch of web sites.

I have to be honest with you, I don't use print advertisement anymore... It didn't bring me much of the luck.

Tatyana

In this hi tech marketing age, print media is not a way to go, I am sure still some people uses it. But if you get a good deal maybe you can consider, otherwise there is so much you can do with your online presence , its just overwhelming sometime.

Hi Rachael:

I think you might want to look at any marketing effort, not as "instead of", but rather "in conjunction with".  You do not want to put all your eggs in a single basket, simply becuase all types of people respond to different things.  To make it more complicated, they also respond to different things at different types of day.  I may be all over social media, during the work day, but when I get home, I may just want to plop down on the couch, read a magazine, go through my mail, or watch TV.  So as the day progreses, my desire to be interactive has turned into being reactive, by the evening time.

While print is certainly declining, there is still value in print publications, and targeted direct mail, IN CONJUNCTION with online advertising and social media.

Just some food for throught....

Hi Rachael,

I am happy to hear that my comments are helpful. Please let me know how things work out. I am interested to know what changes work for you in your marketing efforts.

All the best.

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