Be proactive

Once your property is on the market, you will stand a much better chance of a swift and lucrative sale if you utilise online marketing tools. Stressful as it may be to move house and as tempting as it is to just list the property and then sit back and wait for the buyer to come along, you need to be pro-active to get leads on the sale. Ask any successful sales person and they will tell you this exact thing.

Three Step process

There are three main steps to follow if you want to do this correctly. Lets assume that you’ve listed your property online, first. Great! You have a website with your home and relevant information. What good is that if you haven’t got people coming to visit the site? So here’s step one:

Traffic Generation

Traffic Generation is all about getting people to visit your site, and there are a number of easy ways to do this.

1. Search Engine Optimisation. First is by paying for it; top companies do this all the time in paid agreements with search engines like Google, so that their product will be the top hit when searched. This is a process known as search engine optimization. If someone searches for “property in (your area)” you want yours to be the top hit.

2. Paid advertising. Whether its taking an ad or board advertising, the sky is the limit with this form of advertising. The more creative you are, the better.

3. Social media. A cheap option but such a powerful tool which is available to everyone. Don’t stick to one social media outlet. If you’re a Facebook person, try Twitter. If you’ve got both, try LinkedIn. Get the message out there – have your friends share it as much as you can. Social media has the added advantage of having a personal touch to it. You can post video tours of the property, you can put some of your own (and indeed the home’s) personality into your pitch and this will result in stronger, more interested leads. Our second step is:

Lead Generation

People visiting your website doesn’t make them leads. A customer in a shop who doesn’t make a purchase isn’t a customer – he’s just a browser. A common approach here is contacting people who visited the website and finding out why they visited. The important part here is opening a dialogue that will hopefully lead to a lead. It is also during this stage that we should look outside of the website and follow up any interest from our above mentioned strategies to see if any leads develop from there. Treat every person’s interest as a very hot lead – you never know when someone’s initial flutter of interest can be nurtured into a full-on desire to buy. This brings us neatly to Step Three: 

Lead Nurturing

Once you’ve wrangled up some leads its time to build on them. Again, this is about creating a personal touch and adding some personality into it. Remember that old adage that people buy people. The last time you were sold something, it was likely due to the sales person having made a good impression on you, probably in the first few micro seconds of you meting each other. Building a relationship with a potential buyer is essential – this is one of the biggest purchases they will make in their life time so it needs to be right for them. A personal, nurturing contact will make all of the difference.

Follow up

It is important to remember that nurtured leads are likely to return to your business again over a competitor, if they’ve been handled well. They are also more likely to recommend your services to a friend or colleague. Therefore it is essential that the nurturing of a lead doesn’t end with the sale. A follow up contact six months down the line, or a thank-you card/email goes a long way to making the person feel special and that their business has been appreciated. Again, this a brilliant use for Social Media because not only is it a convenient way to follow up with sales, but the public nature of this approach shows the rest of the world what you’re all about. Anything you can do to gain a “like” or share is invaluable because likes and shares are the new word of mouth.