Blog / Winning Business
Daniel Williams, Quality marketing for all - Not just the big brands
Images and words matter in real estate. To be successful in our game, you have to make yourself, your brand and your listings desirable and the way that you do that is through persuasive and enticing brochures, magazines, DL cards and advertisements. Real estate and the production of marketing materials therefore go hand in hand.
However, it can be very time consuming and taxing putting together high quality and effective marketing campaigns, particularly if you work in a small office. It can also be expensive if you want to go for a classy finish.
But luckily, help is at hand. In the last ten years, the printing and publishing industries have changed dramatically and beautiful and enticing marketing materials are no longer out of reach for smaller or independent operators.
Daniel Williams is the National Operations Manager at Excel – a digital print solution company that has been working with the real estate industry since 2001.
Daniel explains that in the bad, old days, bulk printing was the only option but now with print on demand services, it is possible to produce, high-gloss, full-quality property booklets in small numbers from 1 to 100 to suit demand at a reasonable price. He stresses, “Gone are the days where we printed 10,000 DL’s. Now we are very much target-driven on the needs of our clients.”
He says, “The industry’s changed; we can’t be waiting a week to turn around a magazine. We need it in our office tomorrow, today. So we’re very focused now on weekly magazines, for example. Weekly magazines that sit out the front of your office, and you can order as low a quantity as 50 in A4 or A5, and even the quirky size of 210 x 210 - that little square size which has been very popular. It’s not about ordering 10,000 magazines; it’s about, “How do I have a more up-to-date product, on a weekly basis, that has a high impact and a low price?”
He adds, “By linking into today’s market and technology, we’re very focused on short run printing, which basically means you can have your property and agent marketing within 24 hours.” Further Daniel’s company doesn’t just handle printing - from their web-based platform, they can also handle property marketing, newspaper advertising, linking into your local board company, all the way through to drop-card campaigns to market yourself as an agent, or indeed as an office. You don’t have to battle marketing all on your own.
Working with Excel is simple. Daniel explains, “Once you have taken the time to set up templates, colours, sizes and text management for all your marketing products, it becomes very easy to maintain quality control across your business and to very quickly and effectively communicate with your clients.“
He adds, “There’s a rigorous process before we actually make the systems live. A key part of that process is, if it’s a franchise even down to an independent agency, we have a style guide, and it’s for us to implement that branding. So we will certainly create all the templates and the product lines available before we go live from that point. We’ll then get all those products signed off by the Head Office or the Marketing Department, so then there’s a confidence within the whole system that you are 100 per cent correct with your fonts and your colours and your file set-ups.”
Excel has all the options currently available, so that when you need that quarter-page ad for the local newspaper, the template’s already sitting there for you. If you need multiple different templates associated for all your photograph options, they’re already sitting there and dynamically chosen on a need-by-need basis.
As Daniel explains, “A key part of the website is to do all the hard work at the beginning before sign-off, so when you have that new listing, you don’t have to be thinking: ‘Do I have this template? I need something re-designed. How do I do this before I submit my newspaper advertising?’. It’s all locked and loaded and sitting on the website waiting to be used.”
Once you have set up what you want, it all becomes a matter of just punching in the information and Excel will take over. For example, if you have done ten appraisals in two days, Daniel says you can go onto the website, fill in all the details of the properties and owners and then hit the print button, and the appraisals will be sent to you, ready for delivery back to your owners, without you having the stress of in-house printing.
“It’s a high-end product at a very cost-effective price,” explains Daniel, “which gives you, as an agent, a point of difference to your competitors - and it is targeted towards the audience you’re pitching for.”
So what’s the bottom line?
Daniel says, “Basically what we’ve introduced now with our delivery times are 24 hours, guaranteed on a national basis. We can deliver 50 brochures at $29.95, and that is also including GST and delivery, on a national basis. We certainly don’t compromise on the printing or on the quality of paper stock used.”
As Daniel concludes, “It is a very low entry point, which basically means you, as an independent office or a larger franchise, can keep the professional image within your area.”
For more information please see: www.excelaustralasia.com.au/realEstateServices.htm or www.PropertyBrochures.com.au
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