Friday, July 23, 2010

How effective is print advertising?

I was working on a continuing education class today when I found a nugget of information that was too startling not to share.

Before I share the statistic, let me share a little background. Whenever Luis and I list a house, we always talk with the potential seller regarding print advertising. We do pretty much no print advertising. There is a reason for this. Three years ago, we did quite a lot. However, we decided to keep some statistics ourselves on the return on investment for our print advertising. Care to guess what that return was?

ZERO

It was rather surprising and sobering, and we consequently discontinued doing print advertisements for ourselves and special ads for our properties. We warn our sellers that we do not do prints ads for this reason. Buyers are not looking for homes in the paper; only the sellers look there. We don't even have a good return on open house advertising in print. At the last two open houses we hosted, one had zero percent attendance because of the print ad run by our broker and the other had only one couple out of six list "paper" as how they heard about the open house.

So, today when I found the following statistic, it both surprised me and made perfect sense.

More buyers found the home they actually purchased from a yard sign rather than from an advertisement in a home magazine.

1%of buyers found the home they bought through a home magazine. 14% found the home they bought through the yard sign.

It is interesting food for thought for home sellers, is it not?

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