Marking is changing quickly and it is mind-blowing how quickly it is changing. It was not only 10 years ago that you would want to list your home with a local agent, YouTube was a small unheard of site and Facebook had just been launched.
Now if you fast forward to the market today and you will see social media, pay-per-click and live streaming is the main thing? Did you know that if you launched an agency twenty years ago you would think more of digital marketing than selling homes?
In the past few years, I have been working with independent agents to help them in building up their business through innovation and changes in technology.
Here are the predictions I am going to make for estate marketing in 2019:
1. Agents will look at return on investment with the marketing activities.
While the agents may have used to think about brand awareness in a campaign, they are now going to consider more of the investment is the only way of getting a response. This response could be the building of an opt-in list, live event attendance, or even the ability to attach a value to the campaign to see if it was a success or not.
2. Property marketing is going to start to become better with video and drone footage but even include virtual reality.
The way the photography and the 360 degree tours are now, they have become the new industry standard. This means more and more agents will start to look at this to help in getting the potential clients to come to the property. Not only that you will find that staging, twilight photos, and even drone footage will start to make the agents a higher commission to prove the up-front marketing fee was worth the cost. Not only that virtual reality will become more affordable and this allows the agents to market to buyers who are out of the normal area, for example, to be able to view properties for sale in Menorca.
3. Marketing of the personality will take over for the brand marketing.
We know that we are going to buy from people and this is true from the estate marketing, which you will buy from the individual that you are going to trust. Since this is the case, you will find the brand name will not be as trustworthy as the individual agent who can promote the status as an independent agent. Not only that when you look at the social profile of the agents you will find in most cases they are going to be promoting themselves, rather than the brand of the company they are working for.
4. The advances in digital technology will allow for the automation of marketing of the estates.
You will find that this is going to allow for the agents to start to have more time to spend with the customers, but still have the same reach as before. You will notice that they will also start to get a marketing funnel that will allow the agency to have it running without the owner or marketing department having to hustle each day to find new customers or leads. In fact, more agents will start to outsource this type of work to experts to get it right.
5. The Agents will start to embrace the live streaming aspects of the properties they are selling.
This is going to allow them to get the attention of people. This will be quite a bit easier than what you would expect and it can be very interesting to see the live streaming happening. Not only that when you look at the data usage you will find that mobile content is over 50% of the mobile data usage and that almost 74% of all the Internet traffic was predicted to be based off of videos and watching the videos in 2017 which is a huge increase.
