We talk about digital marketing for estate agents a lot, because that’s what we live and breathe. We genuinely love helping agents make the most of their online presence to grow their business.
But we do want to take a second and make one thing clear. Yes we talk about ‘lead generation’ and ‘SEO’, but the thing at the very heart of what we do, is exactly the same at the heart of every good agent – it’s all about people first.
Every ‘lead’ is a real person with real motivations, fears, concerns, likes, dislikes, questions and goals. Every ‘click’ from Google is the same. We can talk about algorithms until we’re blue in the face, and sometimes we do, but at the heart of everything, you’re in the business of helping someone who needs something, and usually there’s a lot at stake.
Whether that’s a tenant looking for a property that accepts pets, an apprehensive new property investor, someone looking to sell the family home to help pay for their parents’ care fees, or an accidental landlord who wants you to take on managing their property after coming up against the tenants from hell – everyone has a story.
There was a property industry story published recently, about agents turning away from portals and putting more of their money into their website and digital presence. This is great news in many ways, but one of the comments underneath said something that really resonated with me: ‘what happened to people first?’.
For us it’s not either/ or. The last thing we want agents to feel, is that their online output needs to somehow be different to how they work offline. It should be an extension of it! If you simply treat your digital marketing output like a robot focusing on keywords and SEO more than what you’re actually saying, you’re missing the point of it all entirely.
We saw a really fantastic example of this in a blog post written by CAM Properties Residential Lettings in Hayle, Cornwall about the problems facing the housing market in West Cornwall, with buyers of second homes pushing up property prices for local people, making it near impossible for them to buy.
It really resonated, and was picked up by local media in both print and television news as a result.
That was without a single thought about Google keywords, but it’s passionate, it’s caring, it’s fair and above all, it’s human.
You can read the article here.
Katie Gillingham
Katie is a Freelance Copywriter living in rural Dorset with her daft old Labrador. She first started writing content for the property industry back in 2015, and loves nothing more than bringing brand voices to life!
