Learn about By Design's effective online sales strategy to ensure a sale of your home

Choosing an estate agent is a tricky process that can have a considerable impact on your home-moving experience and the success of your sale. Yes, there are differences between the fees charged by the agents, but more important is the impact on the ultimate offer and price that you achieve for your property which, for most of us, is our most valuable asset. 

One element of comparison between agents that is often overlooked is the agent's online presence and marketing strategy. 

Most agents will have a website and also promote their property listings onto a portal for property searchers to find the properties for sale. But is that enough? 

Property portal websites are akin to a search engine specifically for properties. Open to anyone with access to the internet, there is no targeting for the listing to ensure that the statistics of how many views a property has had online are actually relevant. 

Portal websites for properties are nearing a social network, a voyeuristic audience that likes to look at available properties. Are the people that have clicked to look at the photographs a) actually looking to buy, b) in your location and c) able to pay your asking price? Perhaps they are visiting a new town and are interested to see the average house prices for that area. They are most definitely NOT all serious buyers. 

But is this coverage enough? Will your property be seen by enough potential buyers, serious or otherwise, by simply using the portal websites for promotion? 

At By Design, we don't think so. 

To reach the correct audience of target buyers fully, we believe that you must ensure that you are promoting the agency and the properties they are marketing in the places where the target audience will find them. 

A robust online marketing strategy with a visible presence is vital to access the full spectrum of potential buyers within a particular audience. 

Simply relying on property websites is not enough. By Design believe that online marketing and promotion go much further. We have a solid social media presence, utilising organic reach and paid-for advertising. We use SEO-driven content and PPC advertising online too. As well as a whole campaign with The Times. As an innovative company, conscious about sustainability and trying to remove unnecessary paper and printing from our business, we have focused heavily on the online audience for The Times, and it has paid off. 

Our campaign with The Times reaches 85,000 per month with an audience of viewers within the higher end of the market. But interestingly, they have reported that the readership of printed newspapers reaches approximately 4 million adult readers per month, compared to a huge 13 million adult readers that access this information online. 

By Design believes that having an online marketing strategy and solid presence is vital - print is dead. We want convenience as consumers, or both products, services and information. Reading the morning paper on the train from your phone is convenient. It is not convenient to wrestle with a broadsheet, particularly if you haven't got a seat that morning. 

Embracing the modern way is something that agents in the UK are slow to take up, and many of the high-end agencies in the country are still printing hard copy brochures to end up in the recycling bin and filling newspaper ad space which is, compared to online ads, hardly being seen. 

To ensure that you get the right coverage and promotion when you sell your home, you want to choose an agent to put your property in front of the right people, the people most likely to buy. That is the clientele with the budget to purchase a property in your price range, not just nosy neighbours.

Get in touch today to learn more about how By Design has become the fastest-growing agency network in just 6 months.