How pay-per-click can do the trick for estate agents
Google PPC can get estate agents quick results especially if you are looking for more valuation requests, says property marketing expert Nelly Berova.
If you’re not using paid search, maybe you’re worried it means extra costs for your business or that reaching people this way is less credible than relying on organic results? We’d argue that there’s a place for both methods, working together to maximise your access to leads and prospects.
To demonstrate, here are five key benefit to utilising PPC for estate agents.
1. Need for speed
Paid search works especially well if you are just starting up or expanding into new locations. To explain – search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of getting your content higher up the Google search engine results pages (SERPs). Using SEO to attract an audience takes time and a fair bit of work – your strategy will involve keyword research, honing your meta data, establishing backlinks and more. Industry experts reckon you’re looking at three months minimum before your content starts to effectively rank for a desired search term – even longer if it’s a commonly used term.
With paid search, however, you can get results almost straight away. This is why both elements of your strategy are important. You need paid search to get your brand out there, noticed and recognised while your organic strategy is building. You also need paid search so you can quickly test out your concepts and ideas on a real audience with instant results you can build into your campaigns
2. Amazing analytics
Metrics, data, analytics – whatever you call it, measurement of your campaign is vital to your success, helping you react to audiences and align your messaging and methods to what works. You can get plenty of analytics information to measure your organic search, but issues such as privacy concerns have led platforms to restrict what is available for free.
It’s a different story when it comes to Google PPC. To make this form of advertising as attractive as possible to clients, the platform offers a higher level of analytics. This is another benefit of launching your estate agency PPC campaign. You can get useful intel early in the campaign to develop your organic search strategy, for maximum benefit.
3. Optimising every step
The analytics that come with paid search are especially useful for tracking each step of the customer journey. As a reminder, the customer journey refers to the steps people need to go down before conversion – from becoming aware of your brand to advocating on your behalf. This analysis can help you see which ads are working and which aren’t, where people are engaging with you and what elements they are ignoring. This means you can tweak your paid search campaign, remembering that even small adjustments can have a big impact.
4. Better targeting for campaigns that hit the mark
The ability to target your messages to precise audiences is one of the key advantages of PPC advertising. Developing your ideal customer persona is a cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy. Only by knowing exactly who you are looking to convert can you really get your tactics and messaging right. With SEO you’re doing this by making quite a lot of assumptions about your customer’s lifestyle, situation and the things that keep them awake at night. But with paid search, you have the ability to target by location, interests, habits, income and preferences, which can be hugely beneficial.
5. Great for building your future customer database
You can also use paid traffic to develop your pipeline of prospects and add them to an email list. Some of the prospects you reach through paid search will be ready to convert – ie people about to make a house move for whom the next step is booking a valuation. However, others may be browsing the internet for research. They may be dreaming of stepping up the housing ladder to a bigger house or a new location but be not quite there yet.
For these customers, urging them to book a valuation will be too premature. Instead, take a softer approach. Offer them the information they’re searching for in the form of free downloads, guides or webinars – in exchange for email sign-ups. Help them to start building a relationship with your brand, which you can develop over time. While they won’t convert immediately, this slow approach, launched with paid search, can really get them onside.
In summary, investigating Google’s PPC for your estate agency could be a good move if you want to see results more quickly than with organic methods. It can also give you access to great analytics to start measuring and tweaking your campaigns quickly. While there are costs to paid search, we believe that these benefits make it a worthwhile investment.
Want to know more? Contact Nelly and her team at Art Division.