Guide to Marketing for Selling a House: Part III – Places to Advertise Your Home

I often tell potential clients selling and marketing their home takes more than just putting a For Sale sign in their yard. An important part of an agent’s marketing mix is where they “place” the marketing. This is the third in a series of blogs on the “4 P’s” of a marketing mix, called “Guide to Marketing for Selling a House”.

First, a refresher on the Four P’s:

We use the 4P’s model when deciding how best to position your homes to be competitive in the market. We also use it to identify the errancies of an expired, or ‘failed’, home marketing strategy. We go through and answer particular 4P’s questions – as we’ll define in greater detail later.

Ultimately we develop the marketing strategy from the customer’s perspective, by asking customer focused questions:

• Does it meet their needs? (product)
• Will they consider it’s priced favorably? (price)
• Will they find it where they shop? (place)
• And will the marketing communications reach them? (promotion)

Guide to Marketing for Selling a House: Part III – PLACE

Places to Advertise Your Home

Place in marketing refers to places to advertise your home. Specifically, how buyers will come to learn about your home being on the market.

The National Association of Realtors recently published their annual survey called the “Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers,” gathering detailed information about the home buying and selling process. The report provides insights into the characteristics, needs and expectations of buyers and sellers.

This report also provided powerful information about where buyers first found the home they purchased:

• 43% – The Internet
• 33% – Real Estate Agents
• 9% – Yard Sign/Open House
• 5% – Home Builder
• 3% – Knew the Seller
• 1% – Newspaper

A comprehensive plan targeting each of these sources is crucial to reaching the greatest number of potential buyers. We actually put a great deal of time into analyzing, planning, executing, and evaluating each message and marketing tool to reach these sources.

Sometimes along the sales process it seems like it’s taking longer to get offers (or no offers) for your home. If your agent is able to outline and illustrate specific strategies to target each source identified above and your home doesn’t sell, chances are that marketing was not the culprit. You need to consider that it could be one of the other three: product, price, or promotion.

Make sure your agent doesn’t try to squeak by with the bare minimum, just placing your home in the Multiple Listings Service and hope for the best.

This is only the third part of a series. To hear more about how we develop the right marketing mix for our clients email or call us today: RisCowan@tds.net or (678) 362-5563.