Agents are not ready to ditch local paper advertising – yet.
It is no secret that UK local newspapers are haemorrhaging circulation and are among the worst performers in Europe: only 18% of the population read a local daily compared with 53% in Germany, 21% in France and nearly 70% in Norway and Switzerland.
Local papers are also losing money. When new Mirror boss Simon Fox wrote to his staff this month, he said: “What we are experiencing are continued circulation declines and even faster reductions in advertising revenues.”
Johnston Press reported a fall in ad revenue of over 8% in the first half of this year, and Newsquest reported advertising revenue down 5% in the second quarter. Specifically, it said property advertising was down 8.1%.
At the weekend, it emerged that the Daily Mail is trying to sell its ailing regional titles for £110m, having turned down an offer of £1.2bn six years ago.
Sequence chief executive David Plumtree said there have been “gradual reductions in local press spend” over the last four or five years, with vendor expectations on local advertising dwindling.
He said: “We see greater returns on investment in online expenditure, so prefer to deploy marketing and advertising spend online rather than in print.”
But Waterfords, an independent chain in Surrey, Berkshire and Hampshire, is doing three times the amount of advertising in local press than last year.
Managing director Brendan Cox said that this is partly because it is cheaper than leafleting, and partly because of the firm’s new homes business.
He said: “Above nine years ago, local papers were negotiating advertising rates individually with agents, meaning some were paying ridiculous prices.
“At this time, I played an instrumental role in setting up an estate agents association in our area in order to control the power the papers had over agents. Now we all pay exactly the same. The rates are pretty competitive and we have an agreement that these are fixed for the next two years.”
He said local newspaper advertising is cost-effective at £200 per page in a paper distributed to 70,000 homes per week. “If you compare that to a 70,000 print leaflet drop, the delivery of this alone, excluding production costs, would be approximately £3,000.
“I remain an advocate of local advertising and my view is that there is still very much a place for it.”
Spicerhaart says it intends to continue local press advertising “for the foreseeable future”, but is spending more on digital marketing, including YouTube. A spokesman said: “As a group, we are spending more on marketing than ever before and that spend is being spread across more platforms than ever before… [but] the market is changing and you have to change with it.”
Townends, in Greater London and the home counties, says its 2012 newspaper spend will be the same as last year and it expects next year to be similar. However, it now uses advertising as a brand awareness exercise, rather than for advertising properties in standard nine-box property pages.
Beresfords, in East Anglia, is still advertising in local papers and believes strongly in the ‘traditional approach’, while investing heavily in an internet presence.
“We believe a profile across a wide media spectrum is the answer,” said director Terry Holmes. He added: “These days, local newspapers are probably more important in attracting sellers rather than buyers, but those sellers provide our stock. And you can’t sell what you don’t have!”
Harrison Murray in the midlands is also still using local newspapers, with no plans to give it up. Managing director Nick Salmon said: “The days when the phone rang off the hook on the day the ad came out are long gone, but newspaper advertising still has relevance for the maintenance of our brand and remains an important part of a much wider marketing mix. At the same time we are increasing our investment in technology and online marketing.”
Estate agency consultant Mike Day said: “I haven’t got a single client who has withdrawn from local press advertising entirely, but I do have several who are being more selective.
“Many clients now only budget for around 44 weeks of offline advertising a year and so withdraw completely or reduce paginations during holiday months such as August and during December.
“Nearly all clients are now using social media with varying degrees of success. Those who generate interesting content and drive traffic to their own websites, and engage with people etc are seeing genuine returns. Those who insist on tweeting or facebooking every instruction they list just still haven’t got it.
“Online spend has become more expensive as Rightmove, in particular, has raised charges alongside trying to offer some ‘differentiation’ for agents within its pages. After all, saying you are on Rightmove is now a given not a USP.
“Zoopla is looking to gain market share and, in many cases, I have clients paying next to nothing for presence on these sites. This situation will have to change and agents who are presently scatter-gunning by being everywhere will be faced with making choices between offline and online and where online.
“Offline still has a place as it is invariably very localised and can attract sellers and landlords if not buyers and tenants. Of course, many local papers have died and so the choices are becoming more limited and some are no longer worth advertising with as their circulations and distribution are poor. Many also feature syndicated copy across many papers and so are becoming less of a local benefit.
“Most agents are creatures of habit and have a herd mentality and live their lives scared of doing anything different to the agent next door, when it is the points of differentiation that set the top agents apart from the rest.”
He added: “Advertising spend has been moving online and away from offline for the last ten years plus, but talk of its demise are premature. Property has usually been a loss leader for the local press who make their money on recruitment and motors.
“All of these sectors are moving online and so, whilst the local paper may not be dead, it looks terminally ill.”
It’s an important debate – and your thoughts, as always, are welcome.
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Comments
I bet half of you on here does not even know what the most successful form of advertising a property in picture form is?
Paper advertising is still a very important part of the wheel. While the property portals are great platforms for people activaly looking where do you advertise for new stock?
Lets face it if you have no instructions you will soon feel the pressure. Your presence locally is very valuable and the paper is still a powerful tool to use unlike a website, lets face it if you only advertise on such portals how are you going to gain or be in the face of someone who is not looking for at least another 6 months? You become invisible.
Advertising YOURSELF / COMPANY and what you can do or what you can offer will keep your name in the forfront, testimonilas are great for this.
So whislt the days have gone when someone walks in to your office with a paper full of circled details have gone I believe you need to be activaly involved in all fronts on marketing. Did you know that 64% of vendors only have 3 agents around?....that's a lot of instructions or chances a lot of you are missing. Fingers in all pies come to mind.
circlation ??
The local newspapers are Leeches and do mot provide anything with their poor circlation ang diminishing readership lets all get real move on and pull out.
I agree with Marketeer and Richard Rawlings. Portals for property, papers for your brand / presence / offering.
If all you think papers are capable of is placating vendors then you are no marketing professional.
Our local paper kept putting the price up (a bit like rightmove do now...) because they knew we had no alternative.
Then rightmove came along and blew them out of the water. They made no effort to retain our business when they knew everyone was close to jumping ship.
I'm glad we no longer advertise in the newspaper, it is a vendor gimmick and nothing more!
I just wish all agents would be brave enough to collectively pull out of local press advertising altogether - permanently.
If we're honest all it does is placate vendors and generate the odd 'nosey neighbour' enquiry.
Your comments are spot on Marketeer.
We DO advertise in our local paper and have changed the ad to reflect the ads purpose in recent years.
We also advertise on our local newspapers website and direct traffic to OUR website as a result. Click through rates are pretty good too.
As I have mentioned before we also list our properties on the local newspaper website and their app and we get leads from this as well. In actual fact we have seen increasing numbers of leads from the paper's site/app in recent weeks as they use their ability to promote their site/app in-paper. Which in a way proves the value of local print advertising!
You have to question an agents motives if they stop advertising in the paper. I wonder if they would be happy to shut the office and have no boards as well?
As I said in the story, we still believe local papers are l relevant to our marketing mix, just in a different way than before.
Of course internet based marketing is vital, and it's a medium that will only grow.
But not surprisingly, use of the internet, social media etc falls the older the age range. At the same time nearly half of properties are owned by people aged 55 and over.
The properties, the price, the buyers and the sellers are a really diverse spread so I'm afraid there is no 'silver bullet' when it comes to property marketing!
We've built a business that focuses 100% of its marketing spend online. It's been pretty successful so far without resorting to hard copy ads although we tried two big campaigns recently and neither worked at all despite one having a readership of 1m people.
Its telling within this article and the related comments that not one reference is made to any specific statistics that might demonstrate that newspaper ads work. One would imagine that if there were any evidence anywhere these days that sales or instructions are gained from organic sources, it would be heralded here by at least one of this forum's old school advocates? The absence of anything at all in this respect does make you realise that newspaper ads are a mixture of tokenism and 'this is what we've always done' on the part of the traditional industry.
There is an argument that agents advertising in hard copy form promotes their brand locally. But if all local agents stopped placing ads in their local gazette, no one agent would have that advantage or indeed disadvantage and it would save £ thousands. The papers must love the fact there is still the illusion out there that commands that everyone must do a particular thing because everyone still does it.
In terms of seller awareness, traditional agents have their office fronts too. However the rents and rates that go with such an expensive means of showing who they are in the High Street, are certain to render these glorified ad hoardings as redundant as news print too, especially as high fees are further squeezed and sales volumes continue to drag along the bottom.
Remember when eBay and Gumtree put paid to the classifieds?
I am passionate about this subject and agree with Michael Day. I see so many agents moving away from the press to their detriment, having missed the point that they should be using the press to attract instructions more and buyers less. But simply advertising property is not the way to do this. That's boring!
Smart agents recognise that interesting, meaningful, relevant and timely content is key here so that people will say "I always trun to your page first". So why not replace a quarter page of ads with advice articles and comment? I've written over 500 of these for my clients, many of whom also use them for their online content so there is a balanced and deep-drilling marketing strategy based on good advice delivered generously.
In terms of vendor/buyer balance, you might want to check out the following article "Portals-v-Newspapers" at www.estateagencyinsight.co.uk/services/articles/52/portals-v-newspapers-another-perspective.php.
Have a great week,
Richard
Local press can still offer benefits to an agent, but not the same benefits it used to. Buyers don't search for properties in the paper any more, but vendors do expect to see their agents presence there, so that's who local press advertising should be targeted at.
Use less space more effectively by showing benefits you offer for vendors, and direct buyers to your site where they can view properties properly.
Now let's try and look at this dispassionately. I have no allegiance to local press just looking at this from the outside and from a marketing perspective.
In the sense that Estate Agents need to get enquiries from potential sellers are they any different from a retailer of any sort? They need to get people into their office or on their website just as a retailer does with their shop.
In that respect marketing themselves means having to advertise their services in just the same way that Coca Cola, Tesco etc do. But how many do?
Portals do not sell the brand or the experience. They are fantastic at showing off Agents stock and putting it in an environment where it can easily be found 24/7. But in reality what does it do for an Agents brand and how does it encourage people to pick up the phone and ask you to value their house.
The audience is different and thus the marketing approach should be different.
Portals connect buyer with seller in a way that local newspapers used to when they were the only means of seeing 400/500 odd properties in one go.
How do you as Agents market your services and brand to win instructions?
The key difference is that the majority of Estate Agents do not have a marketing budget to promote themselves and their services. They expect their marketing to be supplemented by those who sell houses with them.
From a marketing your brand and services perspective rather than selling houses why would you ignore local newspapers?
They reach throusands of local people week in week out. Yes their readership is declining over time but that's due to the many different ways to access news nowadays and changing reader habits.
In the majority of cases when you incude the local newspapers websites their audiences are actually increasing in the local markets that most Agents operate! In your market how many Agents promote their services on the local newspapers website? They should. Remember great marketing starts with an audience.
What hasn't changed is the way that Estate Agents use the local press. They still run 30/36 small boxes on a page and expect the same results that they got 20 years ago pre internet. Sheer folly.
In my opinion the marketing advice that i would offer is not to ditch local newspapers but change the way that you do things.
Let's be honest not advertising in the local press won't kill a business but how much will that business grow without a brand presence in their local area?
If it's terminally ill why not take it down to the vets and put it out of it's misery.
Move On. Interesting and slighty contradictory comment: You say you keep your name in the local paper once a month yet also say it is a waste of time. Why advertise at all?
The local papers are a waste of time we now advertise once a month just to keepour name there and have done simce march it has had no detremental effect whatsoever! our advice is pull out save your £ for media that really works.