Old School Is... New School?

When a real estate brokerage, team or agent is asked about what they are doing regarding their own individual marketing efforts, the answers might surprise you. The majority of agents in the United States have an almost even distribution of their marketing dollars between print and digital marketing. To shed some light on how agents spend their precious marketing dollars, it is important to identify exactly what constitutes print vs digital.

Print Marketing

Print marketing generally consists of local ads and direct mail efforts to land a buyer or seller. Commonly these include:

• Local ads in print material (newspapers, brochures, etc.)
• Direct mail campaigns consisting of market analysis reports, home values, exclusive offers, and highlighting potential buyers of a particular home
• Yard signs and sign riders
• Promotional materials that can be handed out

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing falls into three categories:

1. Online buyer and seller lead generation
2. Paid search and social marketing
3. Paid advertising/sponsorships on websites

The most common mediums of digital marketing include:

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads on Google Adwords
• Facebook marketing and boosting posts
• Dedicated ads on specific websites, such as a local school or business site.

In today's digital world, why do agents still spend 40-50 percent of their limited marketing budget on print? The first reason is because, traditionally, agents always have. Before web advertising was readily available, print marketing was king. However, in order to combat their digital counterpart, print marketing companies have made it as easy and cost effective as possible to create and launch print marketing campaigns.

The second reason is that with the saturation of digital ads, paper ads are still proving to produce leads IF DONE CORRECTLY. There are many companies that combine digital data to power print marketing campaigns that provide genuinely useful information to potential buyers/sellers in a very timely manner. Predictive analytics (with homeowner demographic and financial data) basically makes this a science.

If you or your agents have not incorporated a mixture of print and digital marketing into your real estate business, I highly recommend you implement both of these methods into your marketing strategy.

To view the original article, visit the Inside Real Estate blog.