These days, the race for buyers’ hearts and minds is being won by sophisticated marketing campaigns featuring a mix of daytime, dusk, elevated or aerial photography, coupled with marketing tools such as floor plans, virtual tours, virtual furniture, online property tours or professional copywriting.
The types of photography or marketing tools required depends on the marketing your agent recommends for your property’s target audience – whether it be newspaper ads, signboards, letterbox drops, online listings, window displays etc.
While standard daytime photography is the cornerstone of the vast majority of campaigns, it’s important to understand the benefits of the other types of photography and marketing tools on offer. Let’s take a closer look at each of them in turn.
Elevated photography, taken from up to 20 metres, and aerial photography shot from a plane or helicopter, are great for highlighting a larger home’s selling points such as size, location, pool, landscaping and surrounding topography, none of which are captured by regular photography.
With its blending of natural and artificial light, and resulting atmospheric photos, dusk photography gives a campaign the ‘wow’ factor, bringing properties to life and helping buyers imagine returning to a welcoming home.
There’s more to choose from than just black and white floor plans these days.
Another powerful marketing tool is a virtual tour, where multiple images are seamlessly blended to form an uninterrupted 360 degree rotating tour, allowing buyers to virtually inspect a property online.
While property staging or hiring furniture can be prohibitively expensive, a more affordable option is to virtually furnish rooms. This cutting-edge technique involves inserting images of furniture into a picture, giving a highly realistic finish.
Online property tours offer an affordable ‘video’ of a property, using an image slideshow set to background music and/or voice-over and including written descriptions. The final tour is provided as an internet link for use in your online listing.
Other types of property videos range from professional ‘films’ of an agent walking and talking viewers through a property, to more modest productions featuring an image slideshow with moving lifestyle or local area footage.
It’s important that the wording used in advertisements, brochures and everywhere else to sell your property is professionally written to captivate buyers.
Writing needs to take into account its target market, avoid jargon and read professionally (spelling errors don’t inspire confidence).
Check whether your agent does the copy writing in-house or outsources it to a professional copywriter. If you don’t like their in-house style ask about engaging a professional for your campaign. Great copy writing should tell the story of your property, and help buyers see themselves living there.
As well as understanding what’s available in terms of photography and property marketing tools, you also need access to quality suppliers.
Agents have usually tried and tested various suppliers, and will be able to recommend those they think are best. But don’t be afraid to ask to see examples of the supplier’s work beforehand – after all they’ll be playing a key part in marketing one of your most valuable assets.
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