by threshold | Oct 20, 2020 | Creative, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Thought Leadership
Believe it or not, email is still one of the most effective ways to nurture leads. Though the digital landscape has evolved dramatically, folks across all age groups still use email every single day—for many, it’s the first thing they do after waking up.
Not only is email marketing a reliable way to reach your audience, it’s also a powerful strategy for relationship building with prospects and current residents alike. It particularly excels as a retargeting strategy, keeping your property top-of-mind at various stages of a prospect’s housing search or reminding a current resident of all the reasons to renew. But the best part of all is that it’s one of the most cost-effective strategies you can incorporate into your real estate marketing plan. That’s why the right email marketing strategy can make a major impact on your real estate marketing goals. Let’s talk about some of the top strategies you can employ to get better email marketing results.
Always Begin With “WIIFM”
In other words, “What’s in it for me?” Especially in our busy day-to-day lives, people need to feel confident that your email has something to offer them. If it’s a waste of their time and attention, it could do more harm than good as they form their impression of your brand. So avoid waxing poetical about your brand or providing unnecessary information. All the info you include, every link to another page, and every element of the design should provide some clear value to the user on the other end. Remember, it’s not about you, the brand, it’s about the bridge you create between your brand and the user.
Personalize Emails Whenever Possible
People appreciate a personal touch, especially when they get so many emails every day that are sent to a mass audience. Where you choose to live is one of the most personal decisions you can make, so prospects and residents shouldn’t feel like they’re just a faceless number in your leasing pipeline. When you can, personalize emails with a salutation using their first name or, if applicable, a reference to content from their previous email. Touches like these show your audience that they’re seen as individuals, even in cases where you don’t know anything about them yet.
Send Regularly, But Not Too Often
Whether you’re following up with prospects or communicating with current tenants, you need to show you care without becoming a nuisance. Bear in mind that most people get many emails every day and are likely to ignore, archive, or delete emails that arrive so often they become spammy. Sending an email once a week is typically the maximum you should aim for, while once per month is about the minimum.
There are exceptions, of course. When communicating about a time-sensitive issue like community-wide repairs and renovations or following up on a prospect’s email, don’t worry about the frequency of your sends. These should be considered ad hoc emails rather than a part of your regular email marketing cadence.
When it comes to your marketing-focused emails, planning ahead will help you ensure you’re getting the message out without sending emails so often that it becomes spammy. It will also help you plan ahead to for marketing campaigns appropriate to your seasonality. For example, you might plan a renewal campaign in the months leading up to what’s traditionally your slow season, or you might plan an email advertising holiday deals for new leases to go out in mid December.
Improve Open Rates with Better Subject Lines
Even a stellar email design can be useless if the email is never opened. The most influential factor determining whether a user opens your email is the subject line. In order to encourage email opens, it’s essential that you provide compelling info toward the beginning so that the important stuff isn’t cut off based on the size of your user’s screen and inbox layout. Other tried-and-true strategies include using a number (Save $500 By Referring a Friend), including an emoji (Immediate move-ins available on 1-bedrooms😲), including a first name (Hi, Chad, thanks for reaching out!) or posing a question (Have you seen our pet-friendly amenities?).
Improve Click-Through-Rates By Leaving Room for Curiosity
When your goal is to get users to visit a web page, it’s best to leave them guessing. Provide just enough information to entice them without providing the whole story. This way you’ll have convinced them there’s something they want on the other side, but they have to click through to get it.
For example, say you’re running a special on certain floor plans and you want to direct users to your floor plan page where they can see specials, explore floor plans, and hopefully begin an application. You might leave room for curiosity by saying something like, “Get 4 weeks FREE on select 1-Bedrooms! This and other great incentives are available for a limited time. Visit our website to learn more and see if you can snag the perfect deal for you.”
Improve Click-Through-Rates With a Clear CTA
Since the point of email marketing is typically to drive your audience toward specific actions (visiting a webpage, starting the renewal process, completing an application, scheduling a tour, etc.), it’s important to make that desired action clear. The clearest way to signal this information to your audience is through the use of Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons that stand out from the rest of the email.
Keep the copy on your CTA buttons short and to-the-point; it should be clear, when clicking, what the outcome will be (no one appreciates a bait-and-switch). For example, “Apply Now” should take users to a page where they can start an application. “See Floor Plans” should take users to your floor plans page. A “Learn More” button beneath a headline about specials should take a user to a page that contains more information about your specials. It’s pretty straightforward; just bear in mind that the goal is to match up a user’s motivation when clicking to the outcome they actually get on the other side. Otherwise, they’re likely to bounce without ever completing the desired action. And that experience may even sour them to your brand moving forward.
Make Copy Easier to Skim
Even when you have a lot to say, keeping things brief is the best way to ensure your audience actually digests the information you provide. So keep things short, whether it’s your subject line, headers, paragraphs, or CTA copy. The easier an email is to scan, the more likely your audience is to interact with that email and ultimately take the desired action instead of becoming bored or frustrated and moving on with their busy day. Other elements that can make copy more scannable is the selective use of font weight, color, and size to emphasize which parts are most important. We’ve done that in this blog post, for example.
Use Simple, Branded Email Designs
An email doesn’t have to be stunningly designed to be effective, but it should follow the basic principles of UX. That means a design that provides a clear hierarchy of information, appears legibly on all devices (more on that below), and uses a color palette that’s easy on the eyes. Your emails should also consistently use elements of your branding, including your logo, brand colors, and brand voice so that users know exactly what sort of email they’re looking at as soon as they open it, and any users who receive multiple emails from you begin constructing a consistent impression of your brand, building familiarity and hopefully even loyalty.
Since creating excellent email designs can be time-consuming, creating a number of templates can be especially useful. This way you empower your team to do more with email marketing without an exorbitant amount of work needed to make it happen day-to-day.
Use Mobile-Friendly Designs
Bear in mind that, these days, most users will be checking their email on their phone. That’s especially true during the morning and evening hours. So designing an email that looks great on desktop but terrible on a mobile device will likely result in poor click-through-rates and conversions. That’s why we recommend designing emails for mobile first instead of designing for desktop, then trying to translate that design into a mobile version.
Consider Time-of-Send
The day of the week and time of day can have a significant impact on open rates and CTR. Understand your target audience’s typical day-to-day, then schedule your email sends to go out when folks are most likely to open and click through.
There are a number of philosophies regarding the best time to send out an email. Some like to reach audiences right when they’re waking up in the morning so that their email is at the top of their inbox when they start checking emails. Others find that sending over the lunch hour or as work is wrapping up for the day to be the best time to command the attention of otherwise busy prospects. And different audiences will have different daily routines; for example, consider the different lifestyles of student versus multifamily versus senior housing residents.
The best way to select your time of send is to test the waters. A/B testing is a particularly powerful option to determine what the best time of send may be for your overall audience. Over time, you can learn what times of day result in the most opens and clicks among your audience and then send at those times moving forward.
Build Email Lists With Lead Gen Campaigns and Contact Us Forms
Collecting the email addresses of current residents is easy enough, but building an email list of prospects is harder. While it may be tempting to buy a contact list to expand your email marketing reach, this is a particularly poor strategy for apartment marketers because it mostly results in a list full of unqualified prospects who will ignore or unsubscribe from your emails. They’ll also likely report your emails as spam, which can impact the performance of your email marketing down the road.
So we recommend gathering your contacts list the old fashioned way. The primary way that apartment communities tend to collect email addresses is through contact form fills on their website, but that strategy tends to capture folks later in their buyer journey, when they’ve already entered the consideration phase. Adding other strategies that can collect email addresses from folks earlier in their journey can help bring more prospects into your lead nurturing funnel, where you really have the ability to wow them. Facebook Lead Gen campaigns are one way to capture email addresses from people who have visited your website or searched for housing, but wouldn’t necessarily have reached out to contact you.
Just don’t forget, people are used to getting lots of spam in their inbox, and may feel hesitant to give out their email address. Clearly demonstrating what’s in it for them (i.e. providing clear value) will make them more likely to go through with handing over the keys to their inbox.
by threshold | Oct 6, 2020 | Digital Marketing, Marketing
Wondering why you should work with a digital marketing agency instead of managing digital campaigns yourself? We get this question occasionally, and we understand why. Especially for brands with modest digital marketing budgets, managing your own digital campaigns may seem like a desirable option. After all, with enough diligence and marketing know-how, it’s possible to move the needle by relying solely on your own in-house marketers.
However, for most real estate brands, we recommend partnering with a dedicated real estate marketing agency for digital marketing campaigns, and there are a few key reasons why. Due to a variety of factors, most brands find they get a better value for their spend by relying on industry experts who have the resources and skills to launch impactful campaigns from day one, track their performance carefully with an eye toward the most relevant KPIs for your goals, and then continually optimize for best performance based on learnings, growth, and seasonality. The key is to find a digital marketing agency with no long-term contracts so that you retain control over your digital marketing costs and can pull the ripcord if things aren’t working out. That said, when you choose a partner with expertise specifically in the real estate market, the results will likely exceed what you’d accomplish in-house, resulting in positive ROI. If you’re wondering why, here are just a few of the reasons our clients see better results after partnering with us.
They’ve Mastered The Art of Digital Marketing for Real Estate
When you work with a dedicated real estate marketing agency, you’re paying for expertise, and that expertise pays you back. A real estate marketing agency has the advantage of immersing itself in the ins and outs of your real estate market, staying on top of industry trends, and understanding your target audience. Not only that, but they also have the aggregate learnings of hundreds if not thousands of digital campaigns and market surveys already informing their strategy. There’s just no substitute for the sheer volume of experience you’ll be leveraging when you partner with a digital real estate marketing agency.
And digital marketing for real estate truly is an art. With so many marketing tactics to choose from, platforms to familiarize yourself with, potential messaging and design strategies, user behaviors to understand, and so many other factors, there’s no single, simple way to determine the best strategy for you. It takes a lot of insight, tenacity, and attention to form a strong digital marketing strategy for your needs within your market, and many brands find they simply don’t have the bandwidth to devote to those demands.
See more reasons why an agency with the right experience is crucial to your real estate marketing plan.
They Have Access to Digital Marketing Tools & Resources You Don’t Have
Partnering with a real estate marketing agency also means getting cutting edge tools you wouldn’t normally have access to. For example, platforms like Facebook and Google have programs for preferred partners that may provide access to new features in beta (i.e. before those features go live for a wider audience) like Smart Campaigns, Google Lead Generation, and more. But not everyone can become a Google Premier Partner or a Facebook Certified Partner, so working on your own, you might miss out on campaign options that could be driving better results for your specific needs.
Not only that, but with a direct line to dedicated representatives for these major advertising platforms, campaigns run by preferred partners of Google and Facebook enjoy extra support to ensure they’re set up for success and able to take full advantage of the options available. And a little extra support can go a long way, since advertising policies and tools on these platforms are constantly changing. An expert digital marketing partner helps you stay up-to-date on all the algorithm, feature, and policy changes and ensure you’re not violating any policies that might result in paused campaigns or compromised results.
They Know How To Track Digital Marketing Campaigns & Optimize Performance
Launching a digital campaign is just half the journey when it comes to digital marketing. In order to make the most of your digital campaigns and get the results you need, it’s essential to know how to track and optimize against your most relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). There’s a lot that can be tracked in Google Ads, Facebook, and other platforms, and each KPI tells you something different about user behavior and campaign success. Knowing how to interpret the data (and ensure it’s being collected accurately) is indispensable to successful digital marketing for apartments. Beyond that, any digital marketing partner worth its salt will have access to and experience using tools and resources that allow them to forecast, budget, and optimize campaigns so that you’re not just getting campaigns up and running, you’re seeing them pay off with the right results at the right times and for the right cost.
It Frees Up Your In-House Teams To Focus On Closing The Deal
Especially when it comes to property management, we’re constantly blown away by how much our clients take on day-to-day. Chances are, you’ve got plenty to worry about already, and could use some extra bandwidth to focus on where you can make the biggest impact. When you partner with a digital marketing agency for apartment marketing, it allows you to zero in on the decision phase of a renter’s journey without also worrying about how to build awareness, command attention, and generate leads. In other words, you can focus on nurturing the leads that come in, wowing prospects with great staff interactions, and ultimately closing the deal, all of which is essential to your overall marketing success. Freeing up your in-house teams to focus on these aspects more attentively enhances your marketing and reduces lead drop-off within your sales funnel.
Learn more about the renter’s Digital Buyer Journey.
by threshold | Sep 1, 2020 | Digital Marketing, Marketing, Thought Leadership
We get this question often: “Can I pause my digital marketing now that I’m 100% leased?” It’s a reasonable question. You might be thinking now is a great time to save money by cutting back on ad spend or completely pausing digital marketing altogether. But ultimately, we don’t recommend this strategy when it comes to digital marketing for apartments. In short, it won’t benefit your apartment marketing plan as much as you think.
Why? Well there are a few reasons. In fact, there are enough factors involved that we decided it was time to put it all together in an easy-to-reference blog post. Whether you’re one of our digital clients or a real estate brand looking for marketing advice, we hope this can answer one of our most frequently asked questions.
Awareness Marketing Never Rests
The primary reason we don’t recommend pausing your digital marketing when you’re 100% leased is that your digital marketing plan should find ways to reach prospects at every stage of their buyer journey, and that includes the awareness phase. In fact, being 100% leased presents the perfect opportunity to scale back your other strategies (like retargeting and lead generation) and focus more of your attention and spend on awareness tactics.
Put simply, now is the time to make your audience aware of your brand before they even have the immediate need to find a new apartment. Building that awareness among your audience allows you to enjoy better results later on, as more people will move into your sales funnel further down the road when availability opens back up.
We’ll tell you more about how you can implement awareness tactics in the “What To Do Instead of Pausing Digital Marketing” section below.
You’ll Rob Yourself of Optimization Potential
You’ve heard that practice makes perfect, and it’s true for marketing too. Any good apartment marketing plan includes room for learning: learning about your market, your audience, and what works for your brand.
Marketing is most expensive at the beginning, and that’s partly because the best digital marketing for apartments engages in continuous optimization. Your goal isn’t to get it exactly right from the very beginning; it’s to start smart but get smarter along the way as your KPIs deliver valuable insights.
And the learning never stops. User habits, market trends, local competition, and a thousand other factors will keep you on your toes. Especially during times of change, it’s important to stay abreast of how your marketing strategy is performing. Even under normal circumstances, pausing your digital marketing and then trying to pick up where you left off once your occupancy starts trending downward again is harder than you might think. That brings us to the next point:
Momentum Loss Means Higher Costs Later
You may have heard that it’s energy-efficient to maintain a relatively stable temperature in your home even while you’re not there. This is because your HVAC has to work much harder to bring your home to a dramatically different temperature than it works to maintain a consistent temperature over time.
The same basic concept is true when it comes to digital marketing for apartments. After all, another reason that marketing is the most challenging at the beginning is that you’re starting from zero: zero brand awareness, zero brand loyalty, zero brand trust. The best marketing results emerge once you’ve gotten over the awareness hump to earn a little cultural currency.
In other words, your marketing campaigns have to do the most heavy lifting when you’re starting from a standstill. Though pausing campaigns may not have negative short-term effects, in the long-term, you’ll lose the progress you once made in terms of building awareness, recognition, and trust within your market, and the next time you start, you’ll be starting fresh, subject to those higher start-up costs as you once again lay the foundation you need for better results.
Put in technical terms, before it has a chance to normalize again, your Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Conversion will initially rise, likely to the degree that it will offset any money you saved by putting your campaigns on pause.
Continued Momentum Means Lower Costs Later
If lost momentum means higher marketing costs later, then the converse is also true, and not just because you’ll benefit from continued optimization and stable brand recognition. You’ll also benefit from other advantages that can only be built over time.
As brand awareness and loyalty build with continued marketing over time, so too do SEO rankings and brand reputation. These elements give you a stronger foundation to draw from later so your paid marketing isn’t pulling as much weight; you’ll be enjoying organic traffic and providing great reasons for prospects to convert without paying as much to get your message in front of them.
Plus, if you continue generating leads now, you’ll have a larger lead base to start nurturing when availability returns. Imagine having an eager audience waiting to hear that you have apartments available for move-in. In fact, that leads us to our next section:
What To Do Instead of Pausing Digital Marketing
Instead of pausing your digital marketing entirely, we recommend switching your focus to the digital marketing strategies that help you out most in the long-term. Since you don’t need to put as much spend toward short-term strategies that earn quick results, you can redirect that spend to set yourself up for reliable results when you need them again.
Specifically, focusing on awareness campaigns, SEO, and reputation management is a great apartment marketing strategy when you’re 100% leased. As far as ads go, focus on awareness tactics highlighting your key differentiators like stand-out amenities and desirable location. Facebook campaigns, YouTube campaigns, and geofencing can be useful awareness tactics to employ during this time.
Beyond that, we also recommend establishing a Wait List (or “VIP List” if you want to get fancy) collecting the information of leads that come through right now. This way the conversions you get now can still help you later on when you need to sign new leases. This is especially useful for senior housing communities—whose prospects often have flexible moving timelines and may wait months to find the perfect place—or student housing communities where pre-leasing is the norm and turnover season is predictable.
Conclusion
While pausing your digital marketing may seem tempting once you’re 100% occupied, continuing your digital marketing efforts can actually save more money and earn better results in the long run. If you’re thinking about scaling back your digital campaigns, consider redistributing spend to awareness tactics, SEO improvements, and reputation management efforts that can promote long-term growth.
As always, if you’re looking for professional advice concerning which tactics you should be using while 100% leased, you can always reach out to our marketing experts for a free conversation—no strings attached.
by threshold | Dec 10, 2019 | Digital Marketing
Internet Listing Services (ILSs) have long been a major part of the marketing strategies of real estate brands, and it’s not hard to see why. These online listing sites like Apartments.com, Apartment Finder, and Zillow help real estate brands ensure their properties show up in Google search results, driving clicks and conversions while freeing up the property management to focus on concerns beyond digital marketing strategy.
However, ILSs may not be the best marketing option for real estate brands today, and a shift away from these services is already beginning within the real estate industry. There are a few key reasons for this, which we’ll discuss, but the main takeaway is this: internet listing services simply aren’t worth the money real estate brands spend on them—at least, not when relied on as heavily as they traditionally have been.
So what should real estate brands be doing instead? Well, the answer is complex, and we’ll get into it, but the short version is that these brands should be diversifying their digital marketing mix. Let’s talk about why and how.
Internet Listing Services Are Easy But Not Efficient
We’ve already touched on why real estate brands have been putting their marketing dollars into ILSs: it makes things simple. It is a truth universally acknowledged that most property managers have enough on their plate without worrying about how to optimize their digital marketing strategy. Many real estate brands choose to let ILSs worry about that stuff for them, knowing they can benefit from the strong SEO and SEM of established ILSs that prospects already recognize and use.
However, real estate brands are beginning to understand that they’re not getting as much bang for their buck this way. While ILSs do bring in leads, brands are likely to pay a much higher cost per lead than they would on other digital marketing strategies like paid search or retargeting ads. Not only that, but ILSs could be delivering less qualified leads, resulting in fewer lead conversions, which brings us to our next point….
Internet Listing Services Can’t Verify Conversions
In other words, ILSs can’t prove their worth or provide you with analytics that help you make smart decisions about your marketing spend. That’s because when a user lands on an ILS after searching for housing, your property appears along with competing properties in the area, and users often click through several listings as they peruse their options. That means that ILSs attempting to track conversion rates by either a first-click or last-click attribution model can easily provide an inaccurate or incomplete report of your conversions from their site.
So, unless these prospects take a tour, start an application, or otherwise reach out to property staff, you may never get a chance to verify where that lead came from and how much value ILSs are really adding to your marketing strategy. And with unclear analytics, you miss out on the opportunity to evaluate and optimize your strategy along the way.
Relying Solely on ILSs Means Missing A Big Opportunity for Growth
In addition to missing out on the opportunity for continuous optimization, relying solely on an ILS for your digital marketing means limiting your brand’s marketing potential in other ways.
One of the shortcomings of ILSs is that they don’t do a good job of making your property stand out from the competition. Instead, they lump you in with your competitors and provide easy opportunities for your prospects to shift their attention to properties other than your own as they search. Other digital marketing strategies like PPC ads and SEO give you more opportunity to stand out from your competition and make a strong first (or second, or third) impression.
Speaking of making more than one impression, another shortcoming of ILSs is that they only allow you to intervene at one step of your audience’s buyer journey. Every prospect goes through a number of different stages as they search for housing, and using an ILS tends to be one of the earlier stages in the digital buyer journey. Being able to reach your audience early in their journey is great, but reaching them more than once is better. If you limit your digital marketing to just ILSs, you’ll miss out on opportunities to stay top-of-mind and catch your prospects at later stages of their journey when they might be more likely to convert.
Another way ILSs fall short is that they tend not to create strongly qualified leads when used alone. Again, that’s because the ILS user experience places your property alongside your competitors’ and limits your opportunity to wow your audience. Spending your marketing dollars to instead create a website experience that is both conversion- and search-optimized allows you the opportunity to connect with your prospects through compelling branding, provide your audience with reasons to trust, and deliver all the information a prospect needs to convert.
So What’s the Answer?
We actually don’t recommend that you stop using ILSs entirely. ILSs are currently a useful way to reach prospects at a key part of their housing search. However, there’s a lot more you could be doing.
That’s why we recommend diversifying your marketing mix. Keep ILSs in that mix if they’re helping you, but consider allocating some of the spend you’d normally put toward an ILS to other digital strategies that are cost-effective and provide more opportunities to reach your prospects and stand out from the competition.
Creating a conversion-optimized website with strong SEO is a fantastic start. Consider also launching search ads through Google Ads as well as retargeting display ads that help you stay top-of-mind for prospects who have already encountered your property through their online housing search.
If this is sounding like a lot, we get it. You can’t become a digital marketing expert overnight, and many folks in the real estate world simply don’t have the time to devote to it. Still, there’s a cost-effective way to incorporate better marketing strategies into your budget. Can you guess what we’re going to say?
If you guessed, “work with a marketing agency,” you’d be correct. Better yet, work with Threshold! We specialize in the real estate industry and we have experience working within your budget to create great marketing results. Best of all, we’ve got a team of expert digital strategists who can help you launch effective marketing strategies and optimize them as you go, so you’re always getting the most effective marketing for your spend.
If you want to learn more about digital marketing with Threshold, chat with a team member today! We’d love to get you started.
by threshold | Aug 27, 2019 | Digital Marketing, General, Marketing, Thought Leadership
Updated June 22, 2021
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, after asset management companies rushed to implement quick digital marketing solutions, Property Management Software have become more ubiquitous than ever, but so has the demand for strong agency/client marketing partnerships. With this surge in demand for digital real estate marketing, knowing the recipe for a great agency partnership is more important than ever. As real estate marketing agencies work to prove their worth, knowing these strategies for excellent partnerships is essential. Likewise, as asset management teams seek out ways to stand out from the crowd of competitors using the same PMS marketing tools they are, an agency partnership that honors their unique needs and goals can be particularly rewarding. For a timely comparison between Property Management Software marketing solutions and the advantages of a strong marketing agency partnership, check out the Pros and Cons of Relying on Property Management Software for Real Estate Marketing.
If you’ve read our blog post on How a Strong Agency/Client Relationship Can Make or Break Your Real Estate Marketing Plan, then you know just how important a healthy agency/client relationship is. Not only is a bad relationship unpleasant to deal with, it also impacts your bottom line (for both clients and agencies). But it’s easier to identify a bad relationship once it exists than to build a good relationship from the word go. What strategies can clients and agencies use to develop relationships that work for them?
Whether you’re a client looking for cost-effective marketing results or an agency looking to wow clients and encourage loyalty, today’s blog post will help you craft relationships that are mutually beneficial. So let’s get into it, shall we?
Emphasize Mutual Success
Your relationship isn’t just about contracting services and exchanging deliverables; it’s about partnership. As you make plans, launch campaigns, and review performance together, bear in mind that each party is made stronger by the other, and each party’s success is intertwined with the other’s. When you emphasize mutual success, you foster an attitude of working together (rather than simply performing transactions) that not only creates a better experience for everyone, but also creates better marketing results.
Acknowledge Uniqueness
Each client and each agency is unique—they are made up of unique individuals, have unique needs and areas of expertise, and experience unique challenges. A partnership works best when each party understands the other fully, and neither has a one-size-fits-all attitude toward working together. Cookie cutter strategies not only underperform due to their imperfect fit, they also communicate a lack of investment in the partner you’re working with.
Set Clear Expectations
When you don’t set clear expectations, needs go unmet and frustrations are inevitable. In order for work to get done together smoothly, everyone needs to know what is and is not expected of them, and when. Be honest and upfront about the limitations of what you can provide, and ask for clarification on what others need from you. Don’t wait until things are going wrong to have these conversations.
With clear expectations set, your projects will suffer from less scope creep, fewer disappointments, and a consistent plan that helps work get done on time and on budget.
Respect (And Take Advantage Of) Expertise
Neither the client nor the agency knows everything they need to know to create excellent marketing results—and that’s okay. In fact, it’s crucial to recognize where skills and access to information differ so that everyone can come together to inform your big-picture real estate marketing plan. That said, it’s not enough to ask for the input you think you need, you have to also put some trust in the expertise of the other party. Neither the client nor the agency should be—or even can be—dictating every single detail of the work you create together. Take advantage of your partner’s expertise and trust them to inform the areas where that expertise is relevant.
Establish Regular Communication
You’ve heard before that good communication is crucial to a healthy relationship, and that’s true for agency/client relationships as well. Calls and emails should happen on a regular cadence, not just when questions or issues arise (though they should happen then too). This ensures that all teams stay on the same page, issues are caught early, and a healthy rapport is maintained. All this translates to the marketing results you achieve together by encouraging steady progress through all your projects together, with fewer missteps along the way.
With these tips under your belt, you should be able to cultivate strong agency/client relationships that create mutual success as well as mutual happiness. If you’d like to learn more about agency/client relationships, or you’d like to start building a relationship with our team at Threshold, contact a Threshold team member today! We’d love to chat with you.
