Portal partnerships

by Gillian Kent

Agents should ensure that portals are maximising the flow of consumer traffic to their sites.

Times are harder for agents than they’ve been for years, which is why it is crucial that agents know the portals they subscribe to are working as hard as they can to generate them leads.

Some 82% of homebuyers start their property search online, but how do portals find homebuyers, identify them as potential leads and deliver them to your door?

It’s simply a matter of marketing, which agents need to ensure is optimising their chances of success. Agents should be quizzing the portals to which they subscribe about exactly how they are driving leads to the site, which is information they could use to improve visitor numbers to their own site.

Online marketing

One method of driving leads is through ‘Pay-Per Click’ advertising. This involves portals sponsoring several key search terms with search engines, so that when a prospective homebuyer keys in the terms, the websites who sponsor them will appear at the top of the page of search results. Portals pay the search engine for each clickthrough to their site.

Agents adopting PPC should calculate the value of each click and decide how much they are prepared to pay for each visitor to their site. PPC can become expensive, so it is unwise to rely upon it completely.

Search engine optimisation

By adjusting their site content to maximise the use of contextually relevant key words that are likely to be used in consumer searches,
agents can manoeuvre themselves to the top of search engine search
results. Agents can build links with a number of relevant sites that further improves their search engine optimisation ranking.

Promotions are another effective way of targeting homeowners through online content. Competitions, for example, can be used to
incentivise consumers to visit their site. Promotions can be used on portals too, to help drive traffic and click-throughs. Email newsletters
should also be considered, which could be sent to a registered database of customers who have opted to receive such mailings.

Agents should also consider the positioning of their portal’s online advertising. For example, a link to the portal near a news story on house prices is much more productive in terms of producing leads than a link near a story on the latest celebrity baby.

Offline advertising

There are effective ways that agents can ensure buyers and sellers visit their site directly, rather than via a portal. Print advertising is a case in point, as is broadcast advertising. Neither of these options is the most efficient or cost-effective way for agents to maximise leads; instead, they should be considered as complementary to their online strategy and a way to help build brand awareness and recognition with consumers.

Ultimately, the most successful portals are more likely to be those about which consumers have the greatest brand awareness. When considering which portals to register with, agents must ask themselves which portals a potential homebuyer is going to be more receptive to when mentioned during a news bulletin about the housing market, or during the advertising break in the middle of Coronation Street. Meanwhile, print advertising is still key to any agent’s marketing strategy, so this should not be neglected for the sake of online investment.

The customer experience

Of course, all the brand awareness in the world won’t compensate for a bad user experience. If a portal is attractive, easy to use and yields results, users will return as loyal customers. But agents need to play their part and follow up every lead they receive. Email enquiries are as important as those received from clients who walk through agents’ doors, so they must not be ignored; to do so is tantamount to ignoring a client standing in their office, which is professional suicide, and no amount of marketing will be able to rectify that.

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