3 Reasons Why Print Media Isn’t Dead For Real Estate Marketing
You may have heard that print media is dead—that the rise of digital media has rendered print media irrelevant. It’s true that the digital landscape has changed the role of print media in real estate marketing, but print media is far from dead. In fact, when it comes to your real estate marketing plan, we highly recommend you invest in high-quality print media.
There are a few reasons we say that, and we’re getting into them all in today’s blog post. If you’d like to learn how print media can improve your brand awareness, brand reputation, and lease rates, then keep on reading!
Reason 1: Physical Objects for Physical Spaces
There’s no escaping the physical world when it comes to real estate marketing. You may do much of your advertising online, and your property may have a digital presence via its website and social media accounts, but at the end of the day, your product is all about physical spaces that people live and move around in. As opposed to a brand that operates mainly in a digital space (like a SaaS brand, for example), a real estate brand must always connect its digital presence back to a real, physical, brick-and-mortar property.
Because of this fact, physical forms of marketing like print media are that much more important for a real estate brand. Consider, for example, your property’s lease space. It’s essential, particularly in over-saturated markets, to have a lease space whose design is memorable, pleasant, and gives visitors a sense of how living in a unit at this property might feel. Your banners, posters, brochures, business cards, etc. all contribute to how a potential resident imagines conducting all the daily activities of their life within this physical space. Digital advertising alone can’t help persuade a customer at this particular stage of the buyer’s journey.
Reason 2: Cutting Through the Competition
We see digital ads all the time, and we’re usually in the middle of something else when we do. This means that digital media often goes ignored, or doesn’t command enough of a consumer’s attention to drive them to convert. It also means that competition is high for digital media—each digital ad is sharing digital space with a lot of other ads just like it. On top of all that, many consumers use ad-blocking programs when possible in order to avoid ads entirely.
Don’t get us wrong, digital ads are effective in their own right, but pairing them with print media campaigns as well helps generate particularly high-quality leads and drive even more conversions than digital marketing alone. When a potential resident reads a brochure, flyer, or poster, they’re devoting more focused attention to your property, and are automatically more likely to call the office, take a tour, or sign a lease than someone who simply glanced at a digital ad while scrolling through their Instagram feed.
Print media also doesn’t suffer from the same problem of competition (and ad-blocking) that digital media does. The ability to market to consumers in a physical space allows for opportunities to bypass the saturated and highly competitive digital landscape to get your brand in front of your audience.
Reason 3: Old-School Appeal
We expect different things from print media than we expect from digital media. For many, a message delivered in print bears more credibility, authenticity, and gravity than the same message delivered digitally. This impression is not always conscious, nor is it always strong, but it still has real impact on how a potential resident processes information about your property. Presented via print, information is perceived as more accurate, more official, and more worth paying attention to.
This effect is stronger for some demographics than for others, but it gets stronger the older your target audience is. For many adults, especially those over 50, the tangibility of print media is a benefit in itself. Some folks would vastly prefer making a decision based on a brochure they can hold in their hands and look back on later, rather than a webpage or digital ad they may only have seen briefly.
If you’re ready to incorporate stunning print media that drives conversions and raises lease rates into your real estate marketing plan, our team at Threshold would love to chat with you! Contact us today to talk about how we can design, print, and deliver fantastic brochures, posters, flyers, business cards, and more to help meet your brand’s real estate goals.
