Property Marketing: Print or Digital?

It is the dawn of of technology, where people are reluctant to read a book, let alone buy a newspaper for regular property information.  We are buying our groceries, our clothes, and our cars over the internet... and houses are no different.  We take a look at the benefits of digital marketing, and why it is winning the war over print.

Mobility and Reach
The beauty of digital marketing is that it goes wherever the consumer goes.  And in South Africa, where mobile phones account for the majority of internet activity, no longer does a consumer have to sit in front of a computer to go online; they can browse anywhere. Print newspapers are cumbersome to people who are constantly on the go, and one copy is one potential client. By committing to managing your property online, agents can market it at a much wider audience. 

Objective Results
Online marketing offers measurable outcomes. We already know that after a print ad gets published, there is no realistic way to track its performance. The same does not hold true for a social media campaign – we can track how many engagements, clicks, actions and page “Likes” each of the showday ads have generated, and agents can continuously edit any aspect of the adverts throughout the campaign. After the campaign has ended, agents can view every important statistic and reroute their next campaign accordingly to get more feet through the door.

Cost-Effectiveness
We all want maximum bang for minimum buck, but print advertising is very expensive and you can’t really be sure that your rands are being put to good use.  Even with spending the extra money, you have little to no guarantee that your ad is ever going to reach anything close to 30,000 people, and no way to track who DID read it. Not to mention that print media offers such limited media, whereas online you can add multiple pictures and links to a property at no extra cost.

Targeted Audiences
Classical advertising mechanics are simply unable to offer precise marketing to a target audience. Shopping online offers refined searches, multiple collated results, and is immediately filtered according to the prospective client’s searches to make the process so much quicker. Whereas with mass mailings, for example, only those individuals looking for property will actually read the pamphlet; everyone else will throw it away.  This waste of resources adds up quickly, whereas internet marketing is vastly more effective when you consider its ability to target a specific demographic of the population.

Ease of Use
When potential buyers continuously search for information, search engines can be optimised to track their interest and offer more similar properties according to these keywords.  Because listings are consecutive, it makes comparative shopping so much easier with a much broader range of properties available to them within their location, budget, and other specifics.

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