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|  Developing a Property Marketing Plan Listing and Marketing Checklist Marketing Media To Consider Advanced tip Property Advertising Techniques Advanced tip Advanced: Getting the Most from Your Advertising Dollars Online Property Marketing Advanced tip Conducting Open Houses Advanced tip Advanced tip Alternative Selling Options Advanced tip Complying with Fair Housing Broker tip Property Disclosure Broker tip Common Property Hazards Broker tip Advanced tip Property Marketing Quiz Bright Ideas: Property Marketing More Resources: Property Marketing Code of Ethics: Property Marketing | GETTING THE MOST FROM YOUR ADVERTISING DOLLAR Your Home Magazine Advertising Dollar Debra Lewandowski, director of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage’s Previews Divisions in Chicago and publisher of The Previews Magazine, a five-color luxury home magazine, shares her thoughts on ways to make home magazine advertising more effective. Q: Why should home magazines be a part of your property advertising program? Lewandowski: Home magazines are just one important piece in a good overall marketing plan, but they are effective in letting you target your market more narrowly than general newspaper advertising can. Home magazines also are an effective way to do cross-selling among listings. Q: Previewsis geared to a luxury homebuyer. Is that the best market niche for using home magazines? Lewandowski: Not at all. Previews is targeted for homes of $400,000 or more, but Coldwell Banker also publishes a monthly Buyers Guide that includes all our listings in the Chicago metropolitan area. It’s more a matter of finding a publication that is positioned correctly for your market and is distributed in a way that will reach your target buyer. Q: How is Previews distributed? Lewandowski:Previews is printed three times a year—twice in the spring and once in the fall. We insert it into the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune that goes to certain affluent areas, direct mail it to a private mailing list, and sell it at Borders bookstores. The Buyers Guide, on the other hand, is distributed as a free publication at local grocery store chains, train stations, other metro-Chicago businesses, and in freestanding boxes. Q: What can a salesperson do to make an ad stand out in a home magazine? Lewandowski: First, use fantastic photography. At Previews, we don’t accept digital photographs because they will not print well in the magazine. Most digital photos are only 72 dots per inch in resolution, which produces a fuzzy image when it is printed at high resolution. We also limit the amount of copy, so we encourage our sales associates to try and capture the essence of the house, rather than just concentrating on the number of bedrooms. Finally, always include the price; I don’t think any ad is effective without the price. TIP: The biggest mistake that real estate professionals make in writing home magazine ads is trying to cram too much information or too many listings into too small a space, says Riley Stephens, 2001 President of National Association of Real Estate Publishers, an association of independent home magazine publishers. Stephens advises his advertisers at Mesa Publishing to use Ad Writer, a software program geared to real estate advertising. Getting the Most From Your Advertising Dollar cont. > | |