Are typos in your property descriptions impacting your business?
In the digital arena, agents have a lot of challenges when it comes to being heard by their target audience.
First, inboxes and phone screens are busy places; the average person receives 121 emails and 64 push notifications every day. That’s a lot of brands competing for their attention.
Second, your audience is busy. The 24/7 cycle of work, family life and social media mean attention spans are short.
Third, digital marketing ads often have strict limits on word count – so you have to make every word count.
Fourth, digital marketing can be synonymous with big budgets and high ad spends. But it doesn't have to be. Christopher Watkin , an expert in the industry, comments, "Being successful as a self-employed estate agent doesn’t have to cost you any money with regard to your marketing." He notes that the key elements are, "turning up 2 to 3 times a day on social as a familiar name and face and producing educational or entertaining content which is of interest to local homeowners. It’s as simple as that."
Those are (some of) the obstacles. Now for some solutions. Optimising the copy you use in your digital marketing can help you cut through all the noise. We asked our Senior Copywriter, Jen Harris , for some of her favourite free online tools to help you stand out. Here are her top 4.
Accessed at https://hemingwayapp.com/
In the fast-paced digital world, you need to get your message across quickly. That means crafting copy that’s punchy and concise – and The Hemingway App helps you do this. “Writer Ernest Hemingway was known for his bold, direct style,” says Jen. “He didn’t beat around the bush.”
The Hemingway App identifies ways to make your writing more direct. Simply paste in your text and it will highlight sentences that are hard to read, words which have simpler alternatives, phrases that might be unnecessary, and so on. It also gives you a readability score to help keep your writing simple and easy to understand.
Accessed at https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer
People consume digital content at a dizzying speed. And trying to stop a social media scroller in their tracks and take notice of your ad isn’t easy. That’s why great headlines are so important.
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CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer helps you understand the ingredients of a great headline so you can make sure yours gets noticed. It looks at power words, emotional words and uncommon words as well as word and character count, clarity, sentiment, reading level and more to give your headline a score. You can then tweak it to push up your points and improve your headline.
“If this tool has a downside,” says Jen, “it’s that it doesn’t know your audience as well as you do. For example, if your headline includes a reference that will resonate with your target market, the Analyzer might not appreciate that. But in general, it gives a good indication of how effective a headline will be.”
FYI: The basic version of this software is free with the option to upgrade to a premium subscription.
Emails are one of the most important tools in an agent’s marketing strategy. You probably put quite a lot of time into writing them. Naturally, you’ll want to get as many people as possible to open them – which means you need a great subject line.
SendCheckIt is a handy way to test your subject lines before you send them. It measures your subject line against millions of data points and scores it out of 100. It also suggests ways to improve it – from making it shorter to adding stats and emojis to avoiding spam triggers.
In her 10 years of experience, Jen has learned that writing successful email subject lines isn’t an exact science. “When it comes to email, there are so many factors in play. But SendCheckIt helps you craft subject lines that are likely to perform well based on data from millions of other sends.”
Accessed at https://www.thesaurus.com/
As we've said already, to be noticed in the digital landscape, your copy needs to stand out. A simple thesaurus can be a key weapon in the fight. Type in an ordinary word and it will give you alternatives that are more powerful, emotive or unusual – perfect for cutting through all that noise.
“The reason I like thesaurus.com is that you can click easily from word to word and explore lots of options. But just be careful to catch any American spellings!”
Typo hunter, property lover.
2 年Absolutely! It’s so important to have someone check descriptions with a fresh/expert pair of eyes. Which is exactly what I offer agents/agencies. Lack of quality in a listing often implies lack of quality elsewhere. Correct spelling will help with successful selling. Until it reaches conveyancing, where commas are few and far between ??