DesignPal - taking the pain away from marketing your agency

by Craig Vile, Director of The ValPal Network

One question that as an estate or letting agent you'll be asking on a regular basis is how can we improve our marketing?

When committing financial spend to promoting a message, you need to decide whether you are intending to promote your brand or generate leads.

Marketing that centres on branding is more of a long-term project and certainly important, but for many agents - considering market conditions - lead generation will take priority.

So, if you decide to launch a marketing campaign with the aim of generating vendor and landlord leads, you then need to think carefully about the messaging you're going to use.

In this instance talking about your company, team and past successes just isn't going to cut it. You need to create a compelling message which plays on the wants, needs and desires of consumers.

One common feeling that you can capitalise on is the UK population's obsession with house prices. By asking homeowners how much their home is worth and telling them they can find out in just 60 seconds by using the ValPal tool, you can get the engagement you require to generate leads.

Here at The ValPal Network, we've found that adding a location into this question - for example ‘how much is your home in Coventry worth?’ - significantly increases conversion rates.

If you are generating too many leads for your sales team to service, you can tweak your marketing messaging to make it more time-specific and targeted. Before asking consumers how much their property is worth, you can ask whether they are thinking of selling or letting a property in a certain timeframe. This pre-qualifies the leads and means that your team will only be contacting the serious prospects who are thinking about taking action in the near future.

However, all of this planning and strategising can be time-consuming, taking up large amounts of your much-needed 'brain space'. That's why here at The ValPal Network we have come up with a solution to make marketing easier for you.

The vast majority of The ValPal Network's members don't have a marketing department and it's rare for an independent agent with one to four branches to employ full-time marketing staff. That's why it can be difficult for some agents to dedicate the necessary time to their marketing to ensure their messaging and visuals are as good as they need to be in a competitive marketplace.

Our solution, DesignPal, takes the marketing messages that we know are working for our top-performing agents, incorporates your branding into a template and provides you with the marketing material you need to make a splash in your local market.

This messaging can be refreshed and revised on a regular basis to make sure your marketing has the maximum impact. Whatever route you decide to go down, we're here to do the thinking for you.

The best thing about DesignPal is that it comes at an extremely low cost to you, the agent. As we use a templated system which incorporates your branding, we can offer you an extremely useful service which is very reasonably priced.

So, if you're thinking about launching a leaflet or canvass card marketing campaign or want to send an HTML email to your database, you no longer need to think about the messaging, design and building process. DesignPal is here to do that for you.

For more information on how DesignPal could help to speed up and revolutionise your marketing campaigns, click here.