Simple, Cost-Effective Ways to Produce Professional-Quality Marketing Materials

Simple, Cost-Effective Ways to Produce Professional-Quality Marketing Materials
A guide to turnkey real estate marketing vendors
by Real Estate Marketing Sage staff

So…you have some marketing ideas or maybe a full-blown marketing plan. You know what you want to do. Now all you need to do is execute, which probably means figuring out how to design your marketing materials, produce them and send them out. You want them to look professional and drive your message home.

Easier said than done, right?

Wrong! Improvements in technology have made it progressively easier to produce professional-quality marketing communications pieces. Today, there are a number of vendors that provide turnkey solutions for pulling together nearly everything you’ll need to market yourself or a property effectively. Turnkey in this context means you’re working in design templates they provide and customizing them with your text and images. It may also include built-in options for output to print or digital formats and for distribution via web, mail, or email. A good turnkey vendor can replace as many as 10 different vendor relationships you’d otherwise have to manage.

Technology has enabled these vendors to vastly improve the quality and variety of their templates over time. If you choose the right provider, you can get almost the same level of quality as you would from working with a graphic designer, web developer and offset printer, but with a lot less effort on your part.

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These are some of the key criteria to evaluate in each provider before making a final selection:

Quality of design: You want your marketing materials to make you look good. They should also allow you to present a consistent look and feel that will help build your personal brand.
Ease of use: The main advantage of using a turnkey vendor is saving time effort. The system should be extremely easy to use, otherwise it defeats this purpose.
Breadth of products supported: To save time and to achieve a consistent look and feel, you’re best off to use one vendor for all your materials, instead of one for print, another for virtual tours, another for email, etc.
Cost: Providers fall into two groups – those that charge a subscription fee to use their system and those that charge on a per-use basis. Carefully evaluate the value provided against the cost – particularly the incremental costs of printing, which can vary widely and add up over time.

We’ve chosen four turnkey providers to detail here on the basis of these criteria: Imprev, Color for Real Estate, Sharper Agent, and Xpressdocs.

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