Back when selling homes on the front lines, often there are times during the year that are slower and we would set out to design a flyer to offer the typical ‘free appraisal’ that agents Australia wide do everyday. Now we were just as guilty of printing the same flyer every real estate agent does. You know the ones, they’re probably beside your desk right now. Does this sound familiar?

Free appraisal / Thinking of Selling
For a complimentary free appraisal of your home contact us today.
Email, Phone, Mobile, Fax, Web even the office address!

These flyers usually had a pretty crappy conversion rate of 1-3% or about 3 calls to 1000 homes in a good market. Lets not talk about the distribution method which was unreliable at best or in the green bin at worst!

Other flyers we used that had a higher conversation rate were the ‘We will be in your street from such and such a time’ followed by the similar contact information. This is where the purpose to the message comes into play.

Marketing must have a purpose no matter the medium, style, words or how it is delivered to your audience. The ‘In your street’ type of flyer had a stronger purpose than the generic ‘Free Appraisal’ and it also featured a deadline where people responded to.

Knowing this, how could you be better at crafting stronger marketing messages to increase your conversion rate, reduce your printing costs and increase business?

How to create a powerful marketing campaign

Successful marketing is part craft and lots of trial and error. Now the trial and error part is something I discovered late in my real estate career and wish I took advantage of the power and results it can produce. Yes it can take a bit of planning and preparation work but a bit of planning can lead to huge results.

So instead of going out and asking a colleague if you can copy his ‘free appraisal’ flyer and print thousands of low converting flyers why not take this cheaper and more effective approach instead.

Designing the message and purpose of the flyers

Draft up 10 different flyers in Microsoft Word and go with 1/2 an A4 page, the size will stick out amongst the pile of DL sized flyers in the letterbox. Stick with black and white for now as this is the test and message overpowers class any day of the week.

Each flyer should have a big bold heading to draw attention and capture the readers eyes

Your message should be benefit based and lead the reader to the conclusion to either call, email or visit website. This is the important bit, don’t go sticking your complete letterhead contact information on it. If the flyer has only one contact way that is better than 10!

Now think of the headings and spend most of your time on these. Each heading should be 10-20 words, not 2 or 3 as there is no substance in ‘Free Appraisal’. Use current events or geographic specific stuff to help you and keep the information local. If the market is slow/fast this can be used in the heading. If your suburb has lots of 3 bedroom homes and these owners tend to upgrade, write about that. For example:

Feeling the squeeze in your 3 bedroom home?

Running out of space in your 3 bed home?

The market is slow but this does not mean it is a bad time to sell

Come up with 20 heading (some will be binned) and have your friends who are not real estate agents or company colleagues read them. This is important as a real estate agent is not your target audience and their opinion is biased and skewed.

Write a good paragraph to follow on from the heading. You may only need 3-4 paragraphs that can go with the 10 headings however this paragraph is the most important benefit based writing. Talk in simple terms with a clear end result in mind. Eg;

This A5 Marketing Flyer may not always work but it may next season as people need to be reminded over a period of time through your marketing campaigns. Not to mention your message may not apply to people of 3 bedroom homes in your area.

Make sure the font on the flyers are nice and big and easy to read, small fonts never work. Have you ever gone to the letterbox, picked up a pile of flyers and on your way to the bin end up reading one without even trying? I know I have so bigger is better, but it must be non bold and smaller that the headline.

Distribution method

Once you have crafted 10 flyers, run them past your friends to make sure they are easy to read and contain no estate jargon. Even the word appraisal is real estate jargon…

Print at least 100 of each flyer and distribute them throughout the suburb taking note of which streets got a specific flyer. Create a simple excel file to track your results because this results recording of the test is the key.

When a caller calls find out the address at least so you know which flyers are working and which ones don’t. Now we have only done 100 of each and the sample size may not be big enough to get the best results, but you will definitely be able to find one or two flyers that are way better than the rest. Print a few thousand of these flyers and run it for a couple of months and continue to track your results.

Keep running test flyers in the meantime as they are quick cheap and easy to do. Marketing is not an exact science and never will be as we people have to many variables to cater for. But you must at least try to cater for one.

Instant results with online marketing

Now the coolest part of running tests like this is the ability to do them online in minutes and be able to drive traffic to a specific page and monitor results. Having a website will alleviate the need for you to rely on expensive print flyers and you will be able increase your business in days instead or months with an effective pay-per-click campaign.