#1 Professional Photography
Photos are the most important form of marketing because they are the consumers first visual point of contact with your listing. First impressions are everything in marketing. If the photos are bad, home buyers will never pay attention to the other forms of marketing used to list your home. Technology and photography are sometimes at odds though. I recently wrote an article called How To Get The Best Photos When Listing Your Home and I got slammed by a few photographers who do not sell real estate. So let me start by saying what should be obvious- the tech options I’ll describe below are specific to real estate and are proven to sell homes, but they do not necessarily reflect basic photography practices for all industries. Here are some photography technologies that you should be aware of as a consumer to help you determine your listing agents knowledge of the field.
#2 HD Video Walkthroughs
In my experience, video is the most powerful selling tool for marketing real estate. You can display the best assets of a property and control the pace, while adding text that conveys special characteristics about the property. Below is a video I made for a listing a couple of weeks ago. Notice how the overlaid text sells the high points. It also distracts from any objections that may keep the buyer from looking at the property. The areal drone footage at the beginning creates a dramatic entrance that immediately captures the buyers interest. Would you want this kind of marketing for your listing?
#3 Social Media Ads
Social media is a powerful way to get the word out about your home being listed online. When I list a home, I take the video that I created and post it in a Facebook Ad that is targeted to potential homebuyers in my local areas. These ads get thousands of views and get shared all over. Social media is a technology that is constantly evolving and will always be used for marketing. Currently very few agents pay to market their listings on Facebook. This will likely change over time, but for now you won’t see many listings there.Once your listing is in a Facebook Ad campaign, it stands alone in a consumers news feed. When it’s a video, it starts playing automatically and captures local viewer’s attention immediately. Everyone knows someone who needs to buy a home, and Facebook Ads are a great way to get your listing in front of your local community within hours. Other social media sites do not offer the same exposure as Facebook, but can help drive traffic to your listing as well, such as Pinterest and Instagram.
#4 Professionally Designed Materials
As long as there is marketing, there will always be graphic design. Graphics can be used on individual property pages (example from the listing in the video above), in videos, blogs, Facebook ads, marketing print materials, and on and on. Knowing how to create stunning graphics can help market a home with style that other listings do not have. Before hiring a listing agent, ask to see some of their print and/or design materials. It will let you know if their design sense is current, or stuck in another decade. Their website will usually reveal this as well. It’s important to have a Realtor who has good design sense and knows how to make every piece of marketing material look amazing.
