A recent article on propertyadguru.com by Simon Baker argued that print advertising is obselete, and has been replaced by online advertising.
It seems that many agents agree, including Tom Tognoli, founder and COO of Intero Real Estate Services in the US.
Intero Real Estate Services has cut its spending on advertising from $3.2 million a year in 2004 to just $500,000 this year, a massive reduction achieved mostly by switching to online forms of advertising including portals and exploiting blogging and social media. The company also invested heavily in its website.
At Inman’s Real Estate Connect Conference in San Francisco last week, Tom spoke of the company’s approach to advertising, saying that before pulling the plug on print advertising, it’s important to have a new marketing plan in place.
Tom said that Intero was amongst the first to syndicate listings to trulia.com, and everyone was up in arms when they started. Intero then began expanded this approach, syndicating listings to other sites and spending money on online banner ads and featured listings. Today the company spends less on banner ads and featured listings, with Tom arging that if a brokerage has a dominant share of its market, it can achieve a big enough footprint online through listing syndication, with ads of limited value.
VP of sales for trulia.com, Sean Black, was quoted by Inman as saying that agents and brokers should ask themselves four questions about any online marketing technique they are considering employing:
- Where do I get traffic and leads from, and can it scale?
- Where can I reach the most new-home shoppers?
- Where can I get the best targeting?
- Where can I get tracking by agent and listing?
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