Module 4: Marketing Online

Welcome to Part 4 of the course and this time we are going to be looking at Guerrilla Marketing online. So at this stage we are going to be looking at social media and how that can be used, free ad sites on the internet; how to use YouTube to market your properties; for sale by owner sites and also a little tip on email. So social media sites, now don’t feel obliged to do any of this, if you’re not techy then stay away from it; you can get pretty good results by not going online at all; but in this age where we have all these facilities online that we can call on it’s almost weird not to use them. So using social media is more about letting friends and your kind of circle of influence know what it is you do, rather than a aggressively marketing yourself because these social media sites in general especially Twitter and Facebook, they are mostly used for socializing, people don’t go on there looking to buy their house or sell a house; so it’s really about just informing people and in general what you should do is, certainly with Facebook, post just normal day to day family type stuff on your Facebook page and maybe 20% of the time talk about what it is you do and maybe post case studies of how you have helped somebody sell or buy a house and that way word will get around about what you do and you will end up being the go­to guy or girl for buying and selling houses.

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So Gumtree or Craigslist, Craigslist is more popular in the US and the rest of the world whereas Gumtree is the go to free ad site in the UK. So these, the criteria does change from time to time, for a long time you could post free property ads on Gumtree but I think that that has been tightened up now so you may have to pay a small fee to advertise on there, whether it’s property wanted or property for sale, however it’s going to be a lot cheaper than posting on Rightmove for example and there is a lot of traffic on there. There are a lot of people looking and so you going to get a lot of exposure for relatively little cost and that is what Guerrilla property marketing is all about after all.

So YouTube, you find that YouTube videos can often rank better and faster than websites, the reason for this is that a new website is not going to be known by Google at least to begin with

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whereas YouTube is a very big site, in fact I think it is the 3rd biggest site in the world after Facebook and Google. So YouTube videos get ranked generally a lot of the time on the first page especially if there is not that much competition, so if you’re putting up a YouTube video talking about your home selling or home buying capabilities and you’re targeting it specifically to your local area then that’s going to come up when somebody looks for home buyer in Glasgow, or home buyer in Ayrshire or home buyer in Cambridge for example, so it’s very important to not forget your call to action so talk about what you do and maybe some case studies and stuff like that and don’t make the video too long, people’s attention span on the internet is very, very short, so maybe 2 or 3 minutes max and don’t forget your call to action that just means you saying something at the end of video, saying either give me a call on this number or go to our website at this address or click the link below the video; just tell them what to do next in order to move forward to contact you and if you are putting in a link associated with your video to your website and obviously if you don’t have a website there’s no need for this, but if you’re going to do this then you always put the link, the very first thing in your description because if that video is ever shared then the link is the thing that is going to show first in the description, it will cut off after a certain point so put the link first.

It’s also the visible thing underneath the video without people having to search for it and what you should do is try and put a bit of text in the description and the easiest thing to do is to just type in what you have said in the video or a portion of it, a little bit of text anyway and that gives something the search engines can find and know what you are talking about and therefore be able to find you and rank you on the first page. This can also be used for sale on properties so if you have a property for sale and you want to find a tenant buyer then you can do a tour so you just use your phone and do a quick tour of the property, recording a little video, perhaps with some narration and you can post that on YouTube and maybe post a link on your adverts and that way you are going to get more people interacting and they will be able to see; the people that view your property are going to be better qualified; there is not going to be as many time wasters. They will be able to see exactly what they are getting into and you will only have highly qualified people looking at your property.

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For sale by owner sites; so these as opposed to your normal sites like Rightmove and so on where you got mostly estate agents advertising properties for sale on behalf of clients. For sale by owner sites are just as it says they’re people selling their own houses themselves they are doing their own viewings themselves and the rest of it and they are not aligned to an estate agent.

Now we also have if you are looking to buy properties then you can look at Gumtree and Craigslist and this is a great way of cutting out the estate agent because you are always going to get a better deal if you are not having to negotiate through an estate agent, you’re going direct to the seller. The way to find these is search engine “for sale by owner” and perhaps your country or region to narrow it down a bit, and for example in the UK a popular one of these is the littlehousecompany.com and these sites can be used for either finding property for sale and if you monitor them and see how long the properties have been on there, you might find bargains that way and also for sale if you want to get extra exposure for sale on your property at a less cost than an estate agent then these can be used in that way as well but mostly for probably finding sellers. Finally a tip on email signature and this is quite an easy one, just set this up in your email program whether that’s online like Gmail, Yahoo or something or your email on your computer like Outlook, just go into settings and set up an email signature, so this is just a small amount of text that’s going to be added to any email you send and anybody receiving that email will be aware or be made aware of what it is you do and how that you might be able to help them.

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Maybe they know somebody, maybe they want to sell their homes themselves or they are having trouble and you don’t even have to have a phone number or a website on there, you just hit reply to the email and that way you can get in contact with them and help them out. So it’s all about having lots of different hooks in the ocean that people can bite onto and that’s how you are going to catch your sellers.

So in this marketing online session we have covered social media, free ad sites, YouTube, for Sale by owner sites and email and in the next section we are going to be looking at how we can market for tenants and/or tenant buyers for our properties.

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