5 Minutes with... Andrew Simpson
5 minutes with... Andrew Simpson, Founder of The Property Marketing Company
Having spent time at one of the world’s leading advertising agencies, McCann, what is the biggest agency strategy that property businesses are missing out on, and how does your agency bring that to them?
So we work with estate agents, commercial property companies, luxury Airbnbs, boutique builders and any service to the property industry. There are two gaps that really keep coming up, and they are connected. The first is structure, not spend. National brands never run one ad hoping it converts. They usually run a funnel: brand awareness, retargeting, then a dedicated lead-generation stage, each with its own budget, its own creative, its own job to do. Nobody has this, but to be honest, how would they know? People usually boost a listing post, get some activity, and when it doesn’t perform, they get put off marketing altogether, not realising there was never a system there to begin with. Not having a retargeting layer catching the people who looked but didn’t enquire is just a waste of money. Not everyone is ready to buy today, but in six months, they might be, so by tracking them, we can retarget them further down the line with a lead gen or stronger CTA later on down the line.
The second gap is tracking. Agency campaigns run on Meta Pixel integration from day one; every click, every view, every enquiry is measured and fed back into the campaign. We install that same tracking infrastructure so the numbers guide every decision; when to scale a campaign up, when to pull one back, and which stage of the funnel is actually doing the work.
What I do is take that agency-level structure and tracking and rebuild it at a scale that fits the client’s budget; sometimes a fraction of what a national brand spends but built on the same logic. It’s not necessarily about big spend. It’s about not wasting the spend you do have on a single campaign, running with no tracking and not knowing whether it’s working at all.
Portals like Rightmove, Zoopla and Airbnb take 10-15% or more of an agent’s margin.
How do you help educate a client from using well-known websites to investing in their own Social Ads Performance Funnel that will help reduce their reliance on the property portals?
The first thing I want to make clear is that this isn’t about replacing the portals; it’s about not being entirely dependent on them for demand. Whether it’s Rightmove, Zoopla or Airbnb to be one listing among hundreds, someone else owns the demand and you’re renting access to it. Property Marketing is changing; there’s more time spent on content and people owning their own brands and becoming more visible. With a Meta Ads Performance Funnel, you’re creating your own demand and becoming even more visible than your competitor. Every lead that comes in sits inside your own audience, your own retargeting pool, a database you own outright and can market to again and again and the more consistent you become, the bigger your audience. Clients notice an increase in traffic and leads, almost straight away. It depends on the audience to budget spend, but within days, there’s real interest showing up: view counts, engagement, website views and comments on properties or listings that would normally have just sat on a portal page. That’s Stage 1 of The PMC Method (Expand Your Reach) doing exactly what it’s built to do: introducing the brand to the right audience, whether a buyer or new listing or just a sales conversation.
Then Stage 2 kicks in, where we retarget everyone who engaged or watched and show them the next level of intent. This is where trust gets built through case studies, testimonials,
and direct objection handling, moving them from “they don’t know you” to “they trust you.” That trust converts into Stage 3 - qualified leads ready to buy, list or stay with you - and the cost of reaching that same warmed-up audience again starts dropping, because meta is very intelligent and it learns who your exact target market is for each bracket of house sale or holidaymaker. It’s not a switch-off from portals. It’s giving a client a second demand engine they own outright, running alongside the one they’re renting, and because I only take one client per sector, per region, whoever moves on this first is the one who gets it in their area.
Tell us about the free visibility audit you offer to property businesses.
Every client gets a full growth audit with their name on it. It’s not a generic checklist; it’s a document built around their business specifically. It’s how we start with every client, as we need to take a deep dive into their digital profile. In almost every audit I run, there’s a moment where a business realises something new, which gives them an outside, honest view on where their business stands versus their competitors.
What’s included:
The gap analysis - what’s happening in your market that you can’t see, and what’s quietly holding you back
Three free quick wins you can action immediately
Competitor breakdown — who you’re up against, where the open ground is, and where you win
Customer profiles — the specific people in your market who don’t know you exist yet and how to target them
Next-step recommendation — a single test campaign or a fully managed system
Most property businesses have never had anyone map this out properly. They’re running on instinct, good photography, and reputation. It’s something that should be done every six to twelve months to see if your position in the market has changed or needs to.
Talk us through a client who had no structured marketing at all before working with you, and what changed once you built their funnel?
A client came to us with ad hoc social posts and no structure; no way of knowing what was actually working, no retargeting, no follow-up system, hadn’t uploaded third-party information for meta to learn from and just individual pieces of content going out with no plan behind them.
We rebuilt their marketing into a proper three-stage funnel - awareness, retargeting, lead generation - across both UK and US markets simultaneously. Within that structure, they generated close to 300 leads at a headline cost as low as £2.29 per lead in the UK and £2.19 in the US. But the number isn’t really the story.
The real shift was that they went from having zero visibility into their marketing - no idea what was working or why - to having a system they could see, measure and scale on demand. That’s the change every client is actually paying for, whether they’re selling homes, managing a portfolio, or running a short-let business: not more content, but control, insight and information on what’s really working and building their own valuable database of warm leads they can call on when they need them. The more visible you are, the more people will trust you.
For more information, please visit thepropertymarketingcompany.co.uk
Hungry for more?
Read up on the latest news, delicious eats, travel treats and seasonal style trends in FEATURES, or browse a curated selection of our FEATURED PRODUCTS, meander through our guide to the finest things to do in Cheshire and beyond in WHATS ON or partake in our COMPETITIONS.
About The CHESHIRE Magazine
We are the definitive guide to luxury lifestyle in the North West. Latest news, delicious eats, travel treats and seasonal style trends. The Cheshire Magazine is the largest luxury lifestyle title for the North West of England, dropping directly through the letterboxes of VIP subscribers from the Wirral to Greater Manchester plus all the villages and towns in between and digitally available as a subscription in print and digital on issuu.com worldwide. We specialise in connecting luxury brands to likeminded consumers.
If you are interested on how you can partner with The CHESHIRE Magazine, read more about us. Or get in touch to find out more about marketing, featuring or partnering with the Cheshire Magazine in print or online.
