Our Pittsburgh Home Marketing Plan

Geofencing is a modern digital ad technology we use when it fits that lets us target people in a specified area. When their mobile phones ping off towers in that area, we're able to serve them ads - like ads about your home.

Everyone is watching a streaming service or YouTube - 90% of people access YouTube Daily and 79% of people a streaming service. Paired with technologies like cookies and geofencing, we can identify buyer pools and ensure they see ads for your home on their screens. We advertise on streaming networks like Paramount+, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max, and more plus YouTube. With YouTube, we can target people actively searching for and consuming real estate content local to the market.

Believe it or not, this is still a highly effective method of marketing. Research shows that one in five people know someone actively looking to buy a home and are 90% more likely to recommend their neighborhood or a listing in their neighborhood when they love where they live. A lot of postcard campaigns only send 25 or 50 cards.

When we list a property, our goal is to plan the launch of the listing to be a few weeks out. This lets us get your property ready to show and list, deep clean it, and get good professional photography and videography, and then we time the mailers to arrive in mailboxes several days prior to your open house. When we use video marketing, the mailers will have QR codes that can be scanned to instantly open the video of your property, which have a high utilization compared to other types of postcard marketing.

We don't just send 25 or 50. We send it to your entire neighborhood. Your entire mailing route gets covered end to end, which increases the likelihood that one of your neighbors will spread the word about your house to someone they know who's looking.

Listing billboards are one of our favorite marketing offerings that we have. There is a strategy and an art form to using billboards. The launch week of your listing, we place your home on digital billboards in very strategic, high-traffic locations. By high traffic, we mean places where traffic will come to a crawl and slow down. It's silly to advertise on, say, the parkway when people are traveling at 60 mph and can't look at a billboard anyway.

We target rush-hour periods and run the ads for 2 hours a day during the morning and evening rush hour, when there is a higher probability of somebody having a chance to read it. We also ensure that each digital billboard has a very easy-to-remember URL, because nobody is going to remember a phone number or an address while driving down the road. Something simple like knoxknowshomes.com/your house number or /Elm Street is easy to remember.

As we near your open house, we schedule the ad to change slightly the day before your open house. The ad will change from "Just Listed" to "Open House Tomorrow." The day of your open house, for billboards that are near an exit that goes to your house, they will be adjusted to tell the person to turn left at the next exit or turn left at exit 13, so they know where to get off to attend your open house. The number of days and hours per day that we run digital billboard ads does depend upon your listing package.

You've probably seen what's commonly called a Matterport 3D tour, where you're looking at a listing and you see that they have the interactive tour where you can move through the house and zoom around the rooms. We offer this, but on steroids.

Our 3D tours allow us to input embeddable objects into the rooms, calling out features. We can overlay buttons that people can click that will tell them about a feature. Say you have an upscale refrigerator with some special feature you want the buyers to know about. It will tell them.

We can embed videos on the TV in your living room inside our 3D tour, and the person watching it can view the video that might tell them more about your property. We also can embed into the tour a virtual tour guide who will sit there and tell them about features and benefits of your home.

There's so much more we can do with it, and our marketing team does it all in-house ourselves, maintaining full control of every detail we highlight.

We use professional photographers on every listing. Some real estate agents decide a house isn't that great, so they just take pictures with their phone, but even homes that have major issues still benefit from having quality photos.

We use a mix of both an in-house photography team and one of our trusted professional photography studios that we work with. One of the things that drives us crazy at the Knox Team is that, somewhere in time, everyone decided real estate photos should look washed out and stretched out the way they do. Meanwhile, homes often have really great architectural features that warrant being highlighted.

Sometimes you don't want to show just a wide-angle shot of a room. You want to zoom in on a historic fireplace with the original wood mantle embossed with a really elegant design that's in mint condition. Even if we don't take all the pictures with our in-house team, if a home has really special and unique features, we do come out and photograph those. We don't wash them out and stretch them out using wide-angle lenses because we want to show that off, and that's what buyers want to see. That's how we get people to schedule showings for homes.

We have access to tools that let us identify active buyers who are currently working with an agent and whose search criteria match your home. Instead of hoping they find your home buried on Zillow, we send it straight to their agent, so we find the buyer without waiting for them to come to us. At the Knox Team, we have access to reverse prospecting across four different platforms that all represent different pools of buyers.

The Knox Team uses proprietary technology that we created at Pitch & Parcel for interactive home showings. This is especially beneficial when marketing a luxury property, and it's something that nobody else does. We are literally the only real estate group in the country doing this, except for a few clients who we sell this technology to in other markets.

When a buyer is looking at your home, their agent likely has never been there before and probably didn't have time to really review many details about the property. This allows us, without even being there on a home tour, to be able to highlight all the benefits and features of buying your home and showcase that with the buyer in a way their agent cannot.

When you have a home that has interesting features that warrant being called out, we place NFC tags with signage in your home. This lets the buyer tap their phone to that sign, and on their phone, it will launch information about the feature. This information can simply be text, PDF documents, premade videos, pretty much anything we can think of.

Say, for example, a home has a really high-end oven with smart features. We can record a video demonstrating how the smart features work, and when a buyer is looking at your home, they can watch that video and see how those features work.
But this technology is beneficial in most homes, even for simple things like room dimensions. When we show buyers homes, one of the things that always comes up is, "How big is this room?" Especially when the house is not staged and the room is empty, the rooms will look smaller, and people question, "Will their king-size bed fit in it?"

Using this technology, they can instantly see the room dimensions. We can have it load a photograph with virtual staging, so they can see how a king-size bed would look in the room or how a queen-size bed would fit in the room with other furniture. In some instances, we may even be able to use augmented reality, where they can just see the room in real time with furniture in it through their phone.

It's one of our favorite pieces of marketing technology, with so many uses, right down to when people want to know the age of a furnace, having that information right on the furnace. In order to make the best use of this technology, planning your listing in advance is the best route, especially if it requires filming additional video content to display.

We leverage interactive digital signage and kiosks when possible. Digital signs can rotate messaging and be updated instantly in situations like a price adjustment.

When there's a lot of information to learn about a home, and when space is available and the internet is available in the home, digital signs can be put in the foyer. If a buyer wants to look at additional details, review the listing information, or just request a copy of the seller's disclosures, they're able to do all that instantly while they're in your property. This also allows us to generate lead capture and get that person's information when they request those documents, allowing us to then follow up directly with the buyer.

Another benefit to digital signage is that we can record video. It can be a video of your agent giving an introduction of the home and highlighting some of its features that the buyer's agent may not even know.

We show houses and find piles of cheap photocopied materials on the kitchen counter. Doesn't your home deserve more? That's why we print all our materials on heavy stocks with glossy finishes and magazine quality imagery, typography, and professional layouts. You know, materials people want to take home with them, not trash, that keeps your home in mind.