First you Market, THEN you'll Sell
RPM's Value Proposition for Sellers:
- You'll have a NYS Licensed Associate Broker who is also a copywriter, photographer, web designer, and internet marketer
- What's so cool about that? Well, your REALTOR® will consume a full week or more up-front, using all of these skills, to give you high-end in-depth market-wide-coverage Internet advertising
- Your REALTOR® will be producing full website presentations that are visually and verbally compelling to buyers Here's one example, and another
- You'll have REALTORS® with a process that will give you a consistent marketing message that will be seen by every serious buyer looking for a residential property like yours...24/7 until your property is SOLD
- Your REALTORS® will give you a marketing plan that will get your house SOLD
- At no extra cost to you
- Unique? This full-court-press service offer from Shelly & David is one that no other agent, broker, or company is able to make
Marketing simplified: When you have a great product (your house), tell people about it!
When your property is on today's market, it's not the only one there. You'll have lots of competition and buyers will have
many others to choose from and compare to. There are many different ways to get your property
in front of people,
most of them on the internet. You'll want to
make the best of the first opportunity to make a memorable impact on your potential buyers: to make your house exciting and its values desirable.
People remember stories better than they remember facts, so stories are the best way to tell people about your house. You want them to easily remember your house so they can't get it out of their mind, like the song says.
Delivering a memorable impression is Residential Property Marketing's specialty. RPM's process sets the stage for presentation, and regardless of whether they are keyword searchers, or real estate listing site searchers, your marketing site will be easily available to them. The RPM process turns the real estate listing, wherever it is found, into a direction sign pointing to your website, an informational Internet presentation all about your house and property.
Marketing is making things MEMORABLE
Visually Memorable: Capture their attention
Residential property marketing, done well, must be visually memorable. The first thing buyers look for is a photo of the front of the house, and often this single image is that they think of when they remember the property. That first photo will likely show up along with photos of other houses - your competition.
You want that photo to jump off the screen,
light their eyes, intrigue
their mind, and touch their heart. That single photo should stand out from the others on the property search page, and stop them for a look further.
Even if you are not in the market to buy a lakefront property in the Wisconsin Northwoods, this photo, taken at 6:00AM with a blazing morning sun, blue sky and still water makes you want to be there anyway, and right now would be soon enough! It draws attention from the foreground and out onto the lake in the background. Your eyes move through the photo, and you spend a little extra time looking at it. Your interior photos need to be just as good, to keep the eyes moving, the mind anticipating, and the heart pumping. Every home is capable of conveying these feelings to it's buyer: even the dumpiest trash-heap fixer is going to have "that look" to it's investor buyer.
Verbally Memorable: Guide their attention
Listings tell, stories SELL
Residential property marketing, done well, must be verbally memorable. The notion that "a picture is worth a thousand words" was
originally marketing copy touting the use of photos at a time when they weren't widely used in advertising. And ever since then this phrase has been used as an excuse to avoid writing good copy, especially with real estate listings! Listings just give the facts, with very little room for descriptive text.
The right words, in a story-like presentation, shown continually wrapping around the photos, will provide the fully intrigued buyer with the message they need to capture their
imagination and provide further memorable information.
Photos are the attraction, and words are the memorable images needed for that lasting impression.
Marketing-Process Memorable: Help them to easily return to your site
The most frequent question RPM gets from real estate sales agents who are unaware of how the Internet works is "who would read all of that stuff, anyway?" Well, for starters, Google does. Google reads every last word of it into their cache, 'remembers' it, and whenever someone is keyword-searching for anything mentioned in the story - will bring your Words-Eye TOUR property website up for them to see. Same thing for Yahoo!, Bing and all the rest. 40% of the traffic to the RPM property sites comes from keyword searches (many because the buyer simply remembered emough about the street address. The Words-Eye TOUR sites are image & keyword dense and loaded with just the stuff that savvy buyers are looking for - photos, details, and an informational story to capture their imagination.
That's the technology side of the process, then there is the human side of the property marketing process: Buyers are emotionally engaged when they are looking for their next home, and when they find one they are really interested in, will want to know everything they can find out about the property. so the buyer for your property will be one to read it. All of it. They'll remember any number of unique details that will enable them to organically remember and conveniently search their way back to the site. 30% of our traffic is from returning visitors coming back again for more.
Know where the buyers are and be there waiting with the message
Any well-managed business does so by first doing what their data tells them to do. The National Association of REALTORS® conducts annual surveys
to inform it’s members where to put their
efforts. The survey published in November 2009 tells us that 90% of buyers use the Internet in their search for a new home. This effectively goes to near 100% once they start working with the help of a REALTOR® sending listings back and forth across the Internet. At their homes, at work, in their pockets and purses, the
buyers now are online.
90% is a powerful statistic, isn’t it? Your listing agent should be using the Internet to it’s fullest capacity to market your property. So what are most seller’s agents and brokers doing with the Internet instead?
They put a listing into the Multiple Listing Service (MLS)! And that's about it. Fortunately the MLS then syndicates the listing out to other websites (Realtor.com, Zillow.com, Trulia.com, etc) that use real estate listings as bait to sell newspapers, magazines, mortgages, home improvement services and other stuff, but still it is only a listing and listings by themselves are very weak marketing. Read it in less than a minute, and then move on to the next house.
There is a lot more to your property than the basic data that will fit in a real estate listing, including emotionally compelling content that may not even come up in a personal showing. Consider another 90% statistic: listings are shared by all REALTORS© so you will get a lot of showings from other REALTORS©. In fact, local MLS statistics indicate that 90% of the showings your house will get will be with agents who are not your listing agent! Even if they have seen it before, they’ll have limited knowledge of all of it’s values - many of which are impossible to describe in a listing.
Do you want 90% of the marketing of your house to be done by some other agent? That won’t be necessary when you use Shelly and David’s Residential Property Marketing. Photography, copywriting, web authoring, internet marketing, all value added services (consuming a week of production time) you will get as a seller client. All leading to two websites like the ones linked to above, attached in several ways to every listing buyers will find for your property, so that the listing is where your marketing begins, not ends.
An informed showing that wins
All buyers have a conversation going on inside their heads when the real estate agent is showing them a house. The subtle messages in the long ad and photos combined with the desires, wants and needs of the buyer will help form much of what they are 'already thinking' at their showing.
By the time they do come for a private showing, they will know all about your property ahead of time, and will be looking to confirm all of the positive things that compelled them to come for a personal showing in the first place. Think about it: when buyers spend their showing time mentally confirming positives, it further strengthens the marketing message your property has on them.
First you market, THEN you’ll sell.
And, you won't be charged one dime extra for all of this work...
The spring market is now underway. Here in the Lower Hudson Valley the gestation period for a sale is two to three months, with the banks doing double, triple and quadruple due-diligence in areas they never bothered with before. Property sales that close in May were sold in February-March. Sure there is snow outside, but that is no reason not to sell!