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When hosting open houses for your exclusive listings, you’ll need to do more than just a simple email blast and newspaper ad to promote them effectively. In fact, there are several other real estate marketing methods you should prioritize and employ to spread awareness of upcoming showings you will host that can get lots of walk-in traffic and generate lots of interest in your listings.
Take a look at the 10 unique offline and online marketing tactics below you can put into play to garner considerable attention and traffic for your open houses and, in turn, help you make the most of your listings’ open houses.
1) Produce a visual-heavy blog post that highlights the listing in advance of the open house.
Blogging can be one of the best marketing investments for your time. You can spend just 20 minutes crafting a real estate blog post (yes, it can be done in that amount of time) about your listing showing and detail what makes the property great to draw more visitors to the event. In fact, this is one of the most effortless lead generation activities you can perform. See some examples here.
2) Build a single property site for your open house listing that showcases its features.
Seller agents with high-profile listings often want to make the most of their promotion of those residences — and for good reason. If you mainly sell $250,000-and-under properties, for instance, and then secure a new seller client with a home value in say, $500,000 or higher, it’s evident you ought to pour more of your real estate marketing energy and dollars into promoting the high-priced listing than you have for previous ones you’ve represented.
One of the premier ways to maximize the marketing for this type of property is to dedicate a single property site for the listing itself. Single property sites allow you to focus entirely on (you guessed it) one of your listings and expound upon the details of the home for potential buyer leads — for instance, a map showing popular businesses and top-rated schools nearby and more info on specific room types and amenities at the property (e.g. laundry room, balcony, office, backyard, etc.).
3) Send a weekly email to your buyer leads list that features the open house blog post and/or single property site.
Hopefully by now you’ve done some work to segment your list. Once you’ve identified the most important group of buyer leads, it’s time to start sending them email marketing campaigns.
For home buyer leads in your real estate CRM, your best bet to spark their interest in your listings and open houses is to email them the aforementioned blog post and/or single property site you created for the listing. Because the important first step is getting the email opened, make sure you announce the open house details right in the subject line with details they would find most interesting. Learn more about using email to promote your open house.
4) Post numerous photos and videos daily to social media that show the best of your real estate listing.
There are many ways to use multimedia on social networks to promote your open house — including images and recordings that advertise your listing and exhibit its many top features. Whether that’s Facebook albums, Instagram videos featuring quick preview tours, Twitter event updates, or even Pinterest boards to showcase the best of the property and area.
5) Create a video montage of previous open houses you’ve hosted to entice buyer leads to attend future ones.
Publishing content to your real estate website with relative frequency is a must. No, that doesn’t mean you have to be glued to your computer screen half of every day. It does mean, however, you should spend your time wisely to craft content that will hit the right notes with the right audience — something you can easily accomplish with great real estate video marketing.
Create a collection of all of the aforementioned open house and listing showing collateral you shoot: property tour footage, images of the listings’ exteriors, clips showing you working with clients, the collateral and food you give out, and the like. Edit this into a fuller video as one of your big branding assets to share on your homepage and elsewhere on your site that promotes not just a single open house, but rather all of your open houses, and display what the experience is like touring your listings and having you as a sales rep.
6) Advertise your open house using Google AdWords and Facebook — just be sure to target local buyers.
The sheer number of targeting options available to advertisers on AdWords, Facebook, and other platforms and social networks is staggering. On Facebook, for instance, you can target your real estate ads to potential buyers for your listings by age, location, gender, interests, behavior, and even connections (who better to sell to than a friend of a friend?). This all adds up to a great advertising avenue for your agency and a premier method for garnering attention for your open houses.
The big fear for many agents is wasting precious marketing spend on ads that won’t get any clicks (or at least not clicks from the intended demographic), but these ad channels offer plenty of tutorials to simplify the ad creation and targeting processes, and there are several guides that can give you advertising insights for Facebook and how to get your AdWords strategy off the ground, so check out those before hitting go on your event promotion ads.
7) Work with local publications and public relations pros to advertise your open houses in your housing market.
While you shouldn’t rely solely on traditional advertising methods like print ads and press releases to gain the kind of attention needed to move the needle for your business, it doesn’t hurt to cover your bases with your open house promotion by leveraging popular newspapers, magazines, news stations, and other outlets in your market. You may even occasionally hire public relations professionals to give some guidance on how to promote your agency.
Start by making contacts and building relationships with publishers and PR pros and explaining your marketing goals. From there, you can determine which offline and online publications work best and what PR person has an ideal advertising plan for getting you lots of open house traffic. Consider this promotional endeavor a more off-hands approach, but since you’re an agent — and time is a highly valued commodity — it’s okay once in a while to let others aid your digital presence and brand awareness efforts (as long as it’s within budget).
8) Email buyer’s agents in your market with clients conducting home searches to alert them of your open house.
Of course, relationship-building doesn’t end with local press members and bloggers — it’s also important to connect with several other agents in your market, including buyer’s agents who may have clients looking for a listing like yours.
Send weekly emails that provide your open house schedule for the next week and the core information about the listing(s) in question: list price, square footage, days on market, and (when applicable) the willingness of your seller clients to bargain and make concessions to sell their residence. This last detail often sparks the interest of buyer’s agents with clients who aren’t willing to get into negotiation battles with sellers and are willing to meet at (or at least near) the middle to make a deal.
9) Create a unique virtual tour of the listing in advance of the open house.
From Matterport to Floored, there is a growing number of companies that provide cutting-edge 3D imaging technology for real estate agents and brokers that can add another dimension — literally and figuratively — to their listing and open house promotion. For your featured listings, you can have one of these 3D virtual tours crafted and published to your site, but don’t forget these innovative graphics can prove helpful even during in-person tours.
The cool thing about many of these imaging platforms, though, is they paint an even clearer picture of all that comes with the property and allows visitors to get more detailed information — from architectural blueprints of the property to images showing what a home could look like with different furnishing setups — that can prove vital in their decision-making process.
10) Work with premier home staging professionals to make your real estate listing look even more attractive to buyers.
Few buyers bid on homes for sale after a single open house visit. Buyers with sufficient interest in one of your listings will, in all likelihood, request a follow-up private visit in which they can get more details on the listing. But the key to getting to this point with prospective buyers is to make the home for sale look stunning — and data from the National Association of REALTORS backs up the importance of staging and obtaining this aesthetic for your listings:
- 81% of prospective home buyers say it’s easier to visualize the home when it’s professionally staged
- 32% of buyer’s agents say staged homes often increase the price point at which they believe their clients will have to bid
- 46% of buyers would be more willing to tour a home for sale online if it has been professionally staged by the seller
Unless you have a background in home design, your best bet to make your listing look amazing is to hire home staging pros who know how to fashion a home accordingly to maximize interest from buyers and make it as appealing to them as possible.
Download our free Open House Sign-in Sheets today to use at your next listing showing.
