Today I came across an excellent article via Twitter; Missy Caulk directed me to it and I’m glad she did because it is another wonderful piece on Selling Your Home in a Buyer’s Market by Bill Gassett of Massachusetts.
One thing I particularly find interesting is his advice on selecting an agent. Remember, one of the critical goals is find an effective marketing person for your property. Bill suggests taking a moment to Google the agent you are considering hiring and he asks the important question, “If an agent does not know how to market themselves how could you possibly expect them to do a good job marketing your home?”
I’d like to take this wonderful advice a step further. Look at what comes up when you Google them. Do you find purely self promotion? Or do you find an agent that is really speaking to consumers as well? This is an important distinction. If it’s constant self promotion, they are effectively marketing themselves, but are the focusing on the needs of consumers? The type of agent providing listings, market information, and quality content throughout the web, is more likely to attract a prospective buyer for your home through those efforts.
Don’t forget, in today’s world - buyers are online - not in magazines.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Lynsey I am glad you found my post useful. I completely agree with your premise that the google results should not only be about personal promotion, the problem however, is that you have no control over the results. As you mention, the things that would be great to come up in search results for your name would be the marketing you are doing for specific properties.
That will never happen though because there are far too many sites that would beat out something like an advertisement for a home. My blog and website will come up 1st but after that it will be other sites like social networks and other sites you have a profile on. You will have to travel to the 4th to 5th page to find marketing type posts if you have any strength in the search engines.
I agree that you have to go a little deeper to find listings, but I think that for an agent like yourself, your blog and website (likely to be found in the top of a Google search) will be viewed as valuable information and not just self promotion. Your Trulia piece is an example of the type of information you are providing as a service - not just ‘Hire Me’ type marketing. Unfortunately, so many of the agent websites don’t serve the consumer on a deep level but instead are online business cards and little else.
I also find the Google search doesn’t go very deep with some of those agents. Many of the online marketing experts are pages deep in search results.
Thanks for your comment. Definitely a great point.
What is really amazing is how so many agents lack the knowledge or effort to make themselves appear online. It is so easy to beat an agent at the listing table that does not know how to market online. It cracks me up when an agent thinks good marketing is having a listing in Realtor.com and nothing else.
Hi Lindsey, gotta love these Google alerts, I can’t even remember tweeting this. guess I did.