You may have considered creating a real estate magazine for clients, but then heard print media is dead. Should you abandon all things offline and focus solely on the online side? That’s a prevailing opinion amongst many marketers across different industries, including real estate. But be careful – some unique benefits slip through the cracks if you let print media go.
If you’ve been kindly paying a little attention to this blog, you’ve probably quickly noticed it has a strong focus on all things real estate online. There’s a very clear rationale behind this: online is where every real estate Agent needs to manifest themselves powerfully in order to sell, and our great dedication is to help you with this.
However, there’s one offline tactic that we at AgentDrive.com think is a crucial ingredient to an Agent’s marketing mix. That ingredient is print advertising in real estate magazines. Here’s why.
A discussion continues
These days when typing “real estate print advertising” into Google, you’ll most likely come across opinions like “Print is dead”, “As a real estate Agent, don’t waste your budget on it”, etc. In huge part, it’s true. Print publications completely lost the influence they once enjoyed so indivisibly. After all, most discussions about whether print is dead or not take place online. That’s pretty self-explanatory, right?
However, there are at least 8 good reasons why local agencies shouldn’t abandon print advertising in real estate magazines. Customer acquisition is not such an easy undertaking, so every real estate Agent needs all marketing channels working to the fullest on seamlessly showcasing properties. Turns out that print advertising does pretty well.
*Stats taken from Magazine Media Factbook
8 crucial benefits of print advertising in a real estate magazine
Here’s how the Association of Magazine Media explains the unique selling proposition of the magazines:
While many real estate agencies have focused their advertising efforts online, a real estate magazine still keeps its stance as an essential part of the Agents advertising campaign. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute predicted that branded magazines would be the top content marketing trend throughout 2021-22.
With no further talks, let’s see the most striking benefits a real estate magazine provides.
1) Less competition and more personality for your properties
An online world, where real estate Agents are fighting over the same keywords to get ranked higher organically, is a very tough world. So many factors are out of their control. Besides, it really takes time to build a decent online presence so customers can easier find your properties online.
Likewise, online advertising is quite a challenge. As today’s Internet users are bombarded with hundreds of ads on almost every site they visit. They stopped paying attention to those ads long ago and even if your advert is right in front of them, they don’t see it – not consciously. Add to this strong competition, and you’ll have at least 2 good reasons why online advertising may not live up to your expectations. In the meantime:
*Stats taken from the Magazine Media Factbook
With that in mind, printed real estate magazine has a huge benefit in that it provides you with much larger room for your properties to shine bright, and often at a much lower price. This makes real estate magazine advertising affordable to local Agents too.
2) Branding the unique lifestyle that your properties embody
Print ads are just excellent to showcase your brand meaningfully. Whether you’re specializing on villas, apartments, or condos, you can easily stress the key benefits and values your properties deliver to homebuyers.
Placing your listings in a real estate magazine also means people get the right brand image of your agency. You’re avoiding negative outside influences as it often happens with ads in local newspapers (you’d hardly want your beautiful properties to be associated with concrete works just because this ad is published next to yours). The real estate magazine eliminates all of this altogether, giving you full ownership over how you want to display your listings.
It also turnes out that real estate magazines are irreplaceable if you want to gain the reputation of a trustworthy and knowledgeable real estate Agent. Isn’t it what you struggle to achieve all the time?
*Stats taken from the Magazine Media Factbook
See how easily magazine media outperforms the rest? Not only you have the opportunity to support your brand, but you can also keep customers happy by offering them alternative formats, and not just online ones.
3) Real estate magazine is a tangible and credible asset for clients
There’s something quite exciting about holding a beautiful magazine full of gorgeous properties, flipping through the pages, exploring them all and marvelling at all those wonderful listings you have to offer.
That’s how it works – people are impressed with what they see. They also tend to take print ads as more legitimate ones. Little wonder – online ads and popups can drive anyone crazy, not to mention they are often misleading and blatantly fraudulent.
On the contrary, print ad is tangible. People literally feel they can trust this ad and contact the Agent at any time.
*Stats taken from the Magazine Media Factbook
4) Fostering huge engagement
In online marketing it’s so hard to cut through all the noise. You only have a few seconds to spark interest in your properties. If you failed, your website visitors just click away to find things that will fascinate them more. And so you lose your leads.
With magazines, it’s totally different. People actually read them, not just scan the headlines chaotically. The average time a person spends on reading a magazine, be it a printed or digital one, is simply huge.
*Stats taken from the Magazine Media Factbook
That’s quite eye-opening, right? These are the numbers every online marketer can just dream of.
5) Long-lasting exposure to properties – and excitement too
Yet another benefit you have from being promoted in a real estate magazine is a long life to your ads. Your online ads, regardless of how effective they may be now, easily get lost in the hustle and bustle of Internet banalities, never to be seen again.
On the contrary, a real estate magazine will stay in offices and homes for months, if not years. It will continue bringing you leads long after its publication, always reaching new people and telling them about your services.
It also turns out that publishing a real estate magazine for clients creates positive emotions and builds genuine, warmer relationships. These stats below confirm it.
*Stats taken from Magazine Media Factbook
6) Huge advertising effect in conjunction with a digital edition
A modern real estate magazine usually exists both in print and online. So basically, you still get online exposure, just this time it’s backed up by beautiful print publications distributed across a whole variety of venues. Besides, with QR codes your readers can easily switch to online whenever they want.
You also get a wonderful opportunity to boost its circulation by promoting the digital edition among your own audience. Your fans and followers will like and share it, and go to your website to find out more, and guess what that means? That’s right, a strong positive impact on your SEO rankings because Google favors websites with a lot of attention and traffic from social media very much.
Here’s a whole post on how to boost local real estate SEO.
7) Reaching wider audiences at a lower cost
A real estate magazine is a perfect opportunity to make the most of your ad campaign at a shared cost. How does it work exactly?
A whole variety of Agents from your neighborhood (and the surrounding ones) can publish a real estate magazine for clients featuring all of your listings. For you, it means a double benefit:
- you share the cost with the other Agents, making your ad campaign much cheaper;
- you get access to the other Agents’ client bases as they will surely distribute the publication to their own networks.
Add to this that print magazines are an excellent way to reach niche markets which are quite hard to target online, e.g. some of the older generations, and you’ll open a whole new pool of ad opportunities.
8) Perfect for marketing luxury properties
If you happen to sell high-end properties, a branded real estate magazine is an invaluable tool. Carefully dropped in just the right places, it does nothing less than actually sells your properties, all the time.
*Stats taken from the Magazine Media Factbook
In the luxury marketplace, print magazines are a must. Stunning photography together with powerful content proves to signal so much more quality of your work than just an MLS copy.
So for every Agent promoting the finest properties to the market, a branded real estate magazine for clients in print is a particularly effective tool to dominate the local market, as this post from Inman Next clearly shows.
Moreover, these curious stats from below explain that people, who you target as prospective high-end property buyers, actually want to read real estate magazines. As their income grows, so does their interest in print publications. In which case, you need to be ready to give them what they want.
*Stats taken from the Magazine Media Factbook
Because so many agents just stopped investing in print advertising, it now turned into a tool that was once widespread to a tool signaling exclusivity. And that’s a perfect opportunity for you to fully capitalize on this.
What’s next?
Print real estate advertising is not dead, but it is shrinking. The benefits it provides are still out there, they just look different than they did a decade ago. Smart Agents can still gain a wide variety of benefits from publishing a real estate magazine for clients.
