Marketing Your Home in the 21st Century

Silicon Valley is the home of both technology and innovation. Businesses and consumers now expect more than the status quo in nearly every aspect of their lives, and this is no different with regard to the home-buying and home-selling processes. There are many aspects that contribute to the success of selling a home, but none are more effective than the marketing of the property.

Achieving the status quo is no longer a recipe for success. Home-buyers want to see, feel, and experience the home on their own time, while home-sellers need to stand apart from the rest of the competition. When marketing your home in the 21st century, you need to think of the process as a fully integrated approach. Print and online marketing, when blended with both the right real estate agent and guerilla marketing practices, create the most successful mix.

Right Real Estate Agent 

No amount of marketing or money invested in showcasing your home will make a distinct difference without first selecting the right agent, but that agent will not achieve the highest possible price if that agent does not invest the resources necessary to reach all potential buyers. The ability of your agent to understand the market and best distribute the marketing budget is key. Your agent should have contacts across all levels of the process that allow for not only the best monetary value, but also the highest quality work possible. The right agent can use these tools and work within existing networks to spark much more interest in the home.

Print 

Print marketing, which includes newspaper advertisements, flyers, and brochures, still holds major sway for both buyers and sellers. When creating these materials, you should never settle for what everyone else is doing. It is simple to create a pre-purchased template for an ad, or even glossy double-sided brochures created at your local shipping and print store. Instead, work with your agent to carefully analyze your home. Your agent will help you first decide which features best highlight the home, and then how to showcase them.

For all print marketing, start with the best photos possible. This is the easiest way to make your home stand apart. Work with a photographer to emphasize features of the home that will leave viewers wanting to see the home with their own eyes. The right photographer will understand this is not simply about art, but about beautifully capturing these spaces.

Your real estate agent must then make the critical choices of which photos to place in the print marketing. Take your three major print items and look at them holistically with the goal of selecting unique content that has a strong sense of continuity. Let the photos in the print marketing do the talking for you and use ad copy to highlight the features not evident (See DeLeon Realty Marketing Perspective: It’s All in the Details on page 8 of this edition). This may require some additional investment too; consider sending out postcards or even pre-mailer brochures by EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) through the USPS. This allows you to get your materials in front of potential buyers before even listing the home.

Online 

Marketing your home online allows your home to truly shine. Based on data from 2014, the National Association of Realtors® found that 92% of home-buyers use the internet in some way in their homes. With technology today, particularly in Silicon Valley, it is quite simple to get digital content out there. However, what proves to be difficult is the ability to have better content than everyone else. Instead of placing photos of your home in a moving slideshow with music, consider creating a high-end, professionally produced video. You can even take it a step further and have the video narrated or hosted by your agent or an actor or actress, highlighting the unique features of your home.

Also, you now have the ability to capture a 3-D rendering of your home. Utilizing technology similar to the mapping applications used for street directions, companies can now create a 3-D tour of your home that allows potential home-buyers to explore the home from every possible angle, on their own time. This gives a cutting-edge perspective of your home’s floorplan.

In addition, creating a single-property website can showcase all aspects of your marketing through photos, videos, tours, and details. This tool enables you to share all the content that 92% of home-buyers are looking for.

Guerilla Marketing 

This is the area of marketing that most people shy away from, yet can have the greatest impact across multiple viewers. Guerilla marketing incorporates techniques that are both creative and cost-effective, with the goal of obtaining the most attention possible for a product. These techniques can include both print and digital forms of marketing, or even some tools that do not fit into either category.

Consider doing a social media campaign with Google, Facebook, and Twitter to gain attention. Plan an event or a party to invite people not to just view the home, but to experience it as it is meant to be. At DeLeon Realty, we look at every home individually and make the decision on which media strategically shows it off the best. Along with the above-mentioned tactics, we even use television and movie theater commercials for listings that are best advertised by those formats.

DeLeon Realty understands that, in order to stand out from all our competitors, we must present clients with the largest, most comprehensive suite of marketing offers possible. The aforementioned methods are just the foundation for the strategies we use for our homes.

To get the best value and return for our clients and for ourselves, we know that we must be willing to risk our own capital to make it a reality. We pay for each home’s staging and the first month of furniture rental. We also pay for videos, television commercials, photos, printing, Facebook and Google ads, newspapers, brochures, and much, much more. When it comes to marketing your home in the 21st century, it would be foolish to do the same thing as everyone else and expect a better result.