Purplebricks restart ads, what should you do about it?

By Mark Burgess, CEO of Iceberg Digital and Best Selling Author of 'Where Did My Industry Go?' and the upcoming 'The Estate Agency Revolution - How to make your business VITAL through data.'

Purplebricks are due to restart their national advertising campaign today. It focuses on the fact that they now do in house or virtual viewings and valuations and it will run on TV and social media but what can you do in order to hit back as opposed to grinding your teeth quietly?

The worry for agents is that new potential sellers will see this advert and go to Purplebricks but it does not have to be this way. Using the technology available to agents you can make sure that it is far more likely that the right people see your adverts than it is they will see Purplebricks, or any other competitor for that matter.

TV is still considered to be something every company aspires to advertise on but for the majority of people, when the adverts are on the TV, they end up checking their phones! It is no longer the holy grail for advertisers.

In fact the stats are overwhelmingly in favour of phones being the place to be. In 2019 the top smartphone users spent 4 hours and 30 minutes per day on those devices, according to productivity software company RescueTime, which estimates average phone usage to be 3 hours and 15 minutes per day.

However this has risen by as much as 200% since lockdown according to an article in the Independent!

Of course anyone can choose to list their property at any point, but the most likely people to take action from an advert right now would be anyone whose property is either currently on the market or that you have been out to value in the past 12 months but has not yet made a decision. So how do you make sure your ads fall directly infront of those people so that they are seeing your version of the Purplebricks ads more than theirs?

Lifesycle has a partnership integration with Facebook, what does this mean for you? It means that if you place all of your old (and new) market appraisals into Lifesycle, you can then DIRECTLY target just those people in Facebook with adverts! You can also regularly send them emails that link through to articles just like we did with this one.

Imagine, filming your own mock version of the Purplebricks advert with not so small print text saying NO fixed fee will be payable etc (The Purplebricks ad has info about the fixed fee appear in small print along the bottom of their advert) and knowing that will land in front of all of your prospects more regularly than anyone else's adverts, TV or no TV. In fact forget their ad, just make your own explanation of how you can help.

But what about all of the people whose properties you have not yet valued? Don't worry you can target them too but in a much smarter way. By default, if someone is not thinking of selling yet then they won't be interested in such a direct ad but Lifesycle will help you to push 'useful' content out across social media and then track those people through a funnel, showing them adverts for just useful content or instant valuations, or eBooks, or Face to Face valuations at EXACTLY the right point in their journey and you do not even have to be a techie to set this up. It is simple and is what lead to so many suppliers and agents talking about the platform here.

If you would like to learn more about how to set up a real marketing system for your business so that you can fight back, book in for a call with our CEO Mark Burgess and he will walk you through the principles and the system to show you how it works for agents and why so many agents are moving to the Lifesycle way of working. You can book in for a call here.