Real Estate Marketing Offline Vs Online

August 9th, 2010

Let's get online vs online marketing in perspective

Why do you want your real estate website on the first page of google? Simple, to get more leads. So, once your there are you’re done right? Wrong!

Being found in search is key. Creating an effective online presence for your real estate brand by building the right site, in the right way is essential for real estate agents who want to take their business to the next level. However many agents think that once that has been achieved they can sit back and wait for the leads.

Well as an aspiration it’s admirable, however they may be leaving 50%* of their sites visitors unaware of their site’s existence. (*I don’t claim to know the % here, but probably neither do you! : -) the point is your site will be more effective the more eyeballs reach it)

It’s certainly true that more and more people use search engines as the starting point for information gathering, but one could argue that an equally sized group don’t. For those people, they don’t know you built a site to provide them with the information that they crave. Perhaps, they wouldn’t know how to go about finding this information online anyway.

That’s where offline marketing comes in. 50% of your audience need to receive the mailing telling them where to go to find this information. They’ll get the mailer, see the domain name and then type that into their browser giving you a direct hit.

Google analytics & real estate

Tracking traffic...terrific!

You can track this traffic through your website’s analytics software. Visitors to your site who came from typing in the URL or domain name are called a direct hit. Direct hits are usually from mailers, advertising or business cards. If you can track this, you can start to figure out which offline marketing avenues work most effectively. (You can learn more about using analytics to track your marketing spend here).

Another benefit of creating a niche focused, or community website is that it makes the offline marketing a more realistic proposition as you have already limited the geographical sphere of you reach.

Remember that your mailing pieces need to also promote the main topic people are interested in, which homes sold, which homes are available, what’s their house worth. That should be the focus of your website.

Josh Wilton, Manager of the Weichert Princeton office says it like this:

A real estate agents job is to market themselves. Period, end of story. The more they market themselves, the more money they put themselves in a postion to make. A key mistake that Real Estate agents make, is ‘I have a website…now what?’ If the website is well constructed you will get Search results and business that way, though you don’t want to rely soley on that. Realtors have traditionally been neighborhood specialists, namely, marketing themselves to a neighborhood, getting marketshare etc. Results from Realtor direct mail is generally around .003 (that is 3/10 of a percent). We also know that nearly 30% of a realtors farm will check out their website

Why would a realtor not want to increase their presence in their farm via the website. Google does only some of the work, they need to do the rest.