This post is the third of a series of six posts dedicated to the results of The Real Estate Agents study conducted by Network Communications, Inc., The Real Estate Book and The OSR Group. The scope of the series is outlined in this post.
In studying the media choices of top agents, we discovered that the agents invested the lion’s share of their marketing dollars in three primary targeted media vehicles to reach consumers: specialty real estate magazines, all forms of internet marketing and their personal web sites.
Newspapers, traditionally the bastion of real estate advertising, garnered a substantial share of top agents spending, but that spending was concentrated mostly among longer-term agents with significant marketing budgets. Among newer agents, and those agents with more constrained marketing resources, there was significantly less investment in newspaper advertising, creating a negative outlook for the role of newspapers in the real estate media mix in the future.
What Media Do Top Agents Use for Their Marketing?
The most widely-used media for marketing are those that are simple and free: yard signs, e-mail and broker web sites.
The two most frequently used paid-for media by top agents are their personal web site and specialty real estate magazines, at 86% and 84% respectively. Other widely used sources include Internet Listing Services, such as Realtor.com and Trulia, and direct mail.
Search engine marketing is used by 61% of the agents; this source becomes an important driver of traffic, along with their specialty print advertisements, to their personal web sites.
A quarter of the top agents in the survey said that they used blogs and other social media to promote their services. While the survey does not track the shift in usage over time, 40% of the respondents said that they intended to increase their spending on internet media, and one likely place to gain more investment is the social media category.
While usage is an important indicator, we also wanted to understand where agents committed the bulk of their marketing dollars. We asked top agents to estimate what percentage of their monthly marketing spending went to specific media categories. The results demonstrated that the majority of the investment went to three key categories: specialty real estate magazines, personal web sites and internet marketing.
The implication of this distribution of investment is that agents are seeking to invest their money in media that intersects most cleanly with people engaged in the home search, and that they are looking to funnel leads to their most important points of contact — their web site or their telephone.
Newspapers continue to garner significant economic support, at 16% of total spending. However, further analysis shows that a disproportionate amount of that spend comes from agents who have more than 20 years experience, or agents who spend more than $1000 per month on marketing.
Analysis of Media Share by Budget and Years of Experience
A further look at the data points to interesting differences between where agents invest their marketing dollars.
Agents who spend less than $500 per month on marketing (but more than $250 a month, our minimal level for the survey), spend slightly more of their marketing budget on their personal web sites and other media than do agents with marketing budgets of more than $1000 per month.
The relative choices are interesting. By investing in broader media, albeit more expensive, the higher-spending agents are driving more leads to their web sites and their phone lines. For the lower-spending agent, the web site becomes a vanity piece unless investment is being made to drive traffic to that site. At less than $500 per month, spend something more than $115 of that budget on a web site is not a recipe for driving strong, qualified leads.
The comparison in spending choices between newer agents with less than 10 years of experience, and more established agents with more than 10 years of experience reflects the changing face of media in the real estate industry.
Agents with less than 10 years of experience invest proportionately more on internet marketing and specialty real estate magazines, while longer-tenured agents invest the difference in newspapers.
In fact, agents with less than five years experience spent 26.6% of their budget on specialty magazines and 26.4% on internet marketing, compared to 22.8% and 22.7% respectively for agents with more than 20 years experience. Conversely, the longest-tenured agents spent 20.1% of their budgets on newspapers, while agents with less than 5 years experience spent only 11.2%.
This is not to suggest that age plays a factor in media usage. In fact, the results of the survey show that agents of all kinds of experience use new media almost equally. They simply make different choices in terms of where to invest the bulk of their marketing dollars.
In Part 4 of this six-part series, we’ll look at what top agents’ key goals are in their marketing efforts.
