Internet Essentials for Estate Agents in Spain

This 6 part article has been written specifically for estate agents, developers and promoters in Spain. It will help you to make the most of Internet marketing.

Generate more sales leads
Create higher quality leads
Convert more leads to viewings
Convert more viewings to sales

Article Contents

Introduction to Internet marketing - why market on the Internet at all?
Listing properties - making the most of your most valuable content
What's wrong with your web site? - 10 mistakes that keep visitors away
Making sense of statistics - hits, pages, cookies, visits and visitors
Saving time managing properties - exporting and distributing property details
Property photos that sell - professional photography tips

Part 1 - Introduction to Internet Marketing

Why bother with the Internet?
Cost comparison
Summary

Your web site, even a property portal like Kyero.com will never make a property sale for you. What they can do is fuel your sales process with more prospects than you would imagine possible.

When it comes to high-value sales, the Internet is effective as a marketing tool rather than as a sales process. Typically, the higher the value of the product, the longer the sales cycle and vice versa.

The Internet can be successful at selling products in the hundreds, even thousands of euros price range - but practically speaking, the higher the price, the fewer the buyers, the longer the sales process.

At hundreds of thousands of euros, a typical property will never sell over the Internet.

Why bother with the Internet if it can't sell property?

The answer is that it's the single most effective marketing medium for Spanish properties because of:

The high cost of print advertising
The low market penetration of most printed publications
The geographical distribution of your prospects
The huge adoption rate of home Internet access worldwide
The ubiquity of Internet usage worldwide
The low cost and ease of Internet-based communication

When you get it right, Internet marketing is as good as it gets - just consider these rough numbers comparing print advertising to Internet advertising.

You take out a full page advert in a reasonably well published and circulated glossy magazine. Assuming you've already paid for the artwork and that you've negotiated aggressively on price, you'll be spending around 1,000 Euros per month, possibly a lot more depending on the publication. How many people will see your advert?

Let's say that the magazine has a monthly print run of 50,000 and let's agree that every single copy somehow gets delivered to a different potential prospect. Lets also accept that, because it's a well-produced magazine, it stays on the reader's coffee table for a full month and that three of their friends pick it up too.

Your 1,000 Euro investment in print marketing gains you access to 200,000 prospects. That's a cost of €0.05 (half a centimo) per prospect.

Compare that to using a property portal like Kyero.com. For a monthly investment of 100 Euros, you'll get access to 500,000 prospects each month. Using Internet marketing in this way, it's 25 times cheaper to reach each prospect - €0.002. It's also more effective than print advertising:

The whole idea of advertising is to create a response, to get a prospect to hold up their hand and say "Hey, I might want to buy something." With print advertising this is notoriously difficult to achieve. Internet marketing permits, encourages and facilitates an instant response from a prospect.
You can't manage what you can't measure. If you currently use print advertising, how well is it working? How many people get the magazine? see your advert? respond to you in some way? If you're not 100% sure, that's because nobody is. It's virtually impossible to track accurately. Even the best estimates are exactly that - an educated guess. By contrast, when done correctly, Internet marketing delivers precise statistics that you can actually do something about.
Have you ever run a print advert only to find that you made a mistake? Apart from being frustrating, it's also a waste of your marketing time, energy and money. By contrast, Internet marketing is instant. When you make a change it's immediately visible to a worldwide audience. There's no delay in reaching your market or reacting to changing sales and marketing priorities.
How much information can you cram into your single page magazine advert? How will that affect it's appeal and your response rate? The truth is that because printing and distribution is costly, you're limited to how much space you can use. Publishing electronically, there's a more favourable relationship between space to cost. This means that you can provide much more information to your prospects so that they are better qualified when funnelled through to the next stage of the sales process.

It's not true that Internet marketing is always and in every way better than print advertising but it does have some significant cost and marketing advantages. That being the case, it's common sense to consider Internet marketing as the first option to pursue before print marketing - because it gives you low-cost instant access to a broad customer base.

Summary

Internet marketing isn't selling: Setting realistic goals and expectations for your Internet marketing is the fastest way to have it feeding your sales process with more prospects.
With the advantages of cost and immediacy, marketing on the Internet gives you quick access to a broad prospect base.

Next: Part 2. Listing Properties