Marketing Mastery for Estate Agents: Strategies to Stand Out in a Crowded Market

Marketing. It is not that hard to understand really. You simply find people that have a specific problem and show them how you can solve it. The tough part is not the marketing, it is finding the people and finding out what problem they need solving!

In Estate Agency, many agents still do this the way they did before the internet, i.e. find people that are struggling to sell their property and offer them an alternative agent. It is one of the most powerful messages an agent can use but it’s effectiveness can be questionable. Not because of how often it works, as it works well but more in that by its very nature, the properties are proving hard to sell and quite often there is a reason for that, meaning that whilst you may get the listing, if it will turn into a completion, you get paid on is another matter entirely.

Nevertheless, it helps prove the point. If your marketing can be relevant to a person’s circumstances its effectiveness increases. In fact, in 2018, according to a study by Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalised experiences. The study also found that 90% of consumers find personalisation appealing.

We are also familiar with companies like Amazon, Google, Meta and Netflix personalising pretty much everything we see to make it all much more appealing to us as they have access to the data to do it. But how can Estate Agents do something like work smarter like the rest of the world and send very appealing personalised messages to people before they are about to list their property with another agent? The answer is simpler than you may think and sales agents up and down the country are discovering just how impactful it can be.

The technology is called ‘Rocks’ and it is a unique system that sits inside the Lifesycle software. Here is how it works; most agents are familiar with having a database or CRM that they put information into. That information then remains in the database exactly as entered until it is manually updated. However, Lifesycle is a living breathing system, what this means is that it is constantly getting the public to update their circumstances themselves inside the database. It is also then tracking each person’s movement both in terms of appointments but also in terms of what content they have been reading on your website, blogs, emails and social media.

Using all this information, along with the knowledge of the exact areas you cover, Lifesycle processes all this data using over 1 million algorithms to do two things. The first is to make a list in the ‘Rocks’ section of active potential listings, where Lifesycle will present people that have specifically said that they have a property to sell that may or may not yet be on the market but it has also tracked them doing something online that means they are now much more likely to move forward with you or appreciate you touching base with them. The agents using this have seen a large spike in terms of the number of instructions they get per phone calls made when prospecting.

The other thing that Lifesycle will do is automatically start to tailor the content that person starts to receive by email and see on social media to warm them up to your services and brand even more.

Jamie Campbell from Campbells Estate Agents said: “When I think back to before Rocks, I can’t believe how we used to just call random people hoping to get a valuation. We would literally just call through the old database, wasting our time but now it is so much easier. We make less calls and get more listings.

If you also have a Neuron website from Iceberg Digital it communicates with Lifesycle and changes the messages on the website to appeal to the right people too!

Finally, Estate Agency can move away from the 90’s and work as smart as the rest of the world.