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.

This week marks the 25 anniversary of the first registered domain name, or dotcom, for mere mortals. Before then, the domain names were for government or educational use.  Since then, many, if not most domain names have been bought, sold, and expired a few times.

Anyone looking for that great domain name a few years ago would have had a hard time finding what they were looking for. Back in 2005 when the $$$ was flowing in real estate, there was a domain name land-grab.

Agents who were looking for a new domain name wouldn’t just buy one, they would buy 10.

Roll forward a few years, and when those bills from their domain name registrar each year, people are being more selective over the domain names they are actually using, versus the ones they meant to use, but didn’t really do anything with after all.

Were agents going to re-up their 10 domains for $100, or pay the cell phone bill?

They paid the phone bill.

What we are seeing now is opportunity. Whereas finding a great domain for your real estate website was a frustrating task a few years ago, it’s now fun again. There are some great domain names out there again.

To blog or not to blog...I think it's pretty clear, BLOG!

Still not blogging? Well, we’re not going to rest until you are. Are you blogging, but not really sure why?

Here’s yet another reason why it is such a good thing. It might get a little geeky here, but we’ll insulate you from the worst of it.

Ok, on a fundamental level websites and blogs are typically constructed using different frameworks. This is essentially because historically speaking they have been built of different purposes.

The Typical Website Model

Generally speaking websites, at worst, are rather like pretty fleshed out yellow pages ads. A series of pages who’s content seldom changes, (disclaimer: this is not the approach we approve of ), how many times does a Contact Us, or About Us page really have to change. So whenever a page changes or new pages are added, its wise to update your sitemap.

In short, a sitemap is a file that features all the links to pages on your website. When you have an updated site map, you notify the search engines that it’s updated and at some point they’ll pop over to take a look.

There is often a delay, of days if not weeks for search engines to come by and check out the changes. Frustratingly there’s not much that can be done to encourage them to by any sooner.

The Blog Model

Blogs are about being current, what’s happening now, or what’s just happened. Their MO is to get news out there.

The whole point of news is that it’s…that’s right, NEW.

When you write a new blog post and hit ‘publish’ something amazing (you might have to be a geek to use ‘amazing’ in this context) happens. Hitting publish, not only publishes your content to your blog but, importantly it sends out a ‘ping’ to the search engines to notify them that some news has just been reported.

Newness is what search engines crave.

By writing content on your blog you are giving search engines what they are looking for. Is it starting to become clear?

The Difference is Remarkable

Whereas it can be days if not weeks for search engines to find your new page on your website, you can get them to see (or index) your new blog post in minutes, which is frankly, astounding. Simply give search engines what they want and be rewarded.

See For Yourself

Click to enlarge

The blog post you are reading was published to the web at 9.15am this morning. It’s now 9.25am and google has already indexed or seen the post and this can only help our relevance in search results… That took 7 minutes.

Most Realtors call us to complain that they can’t be found at search engines. I think we both know what you can do to change that.

We can help you design and configure your real estate blog and coach you in your blog-craft.

"Extra Extra read all about it..."

The irony of Twitter’s Biz Stone sending an email newsletter over the weekend was not lost on me.

Could it be that perhaps the single most efficient tool for disseminating information, the micro-blogging phenomenon, Twitter, really sent out a newsletter by email???

Well, it did, and I, as uncharacteristically, read it.

Ultimately, I think it depends on who’s it from, when Biz Stone sends me and email which begins, “Dear limeyboy..” my interest is piqued.

However, I think that an email newsletter is today, at best, a bi-product of time better spent elsewhere.

Meaning , create a blog post, write to the point, original content, feature it on the homepage of your website, tweet to it, and link to it from your facebook business page, ooh and while you are at it send an email out to your contact list.

A lawyer we know each month sends us a ‘company’ update via email with a pdf attached. We never read it…

Increasingly I think your news is more likely to be read on your facebook business page, where it’s already opened and paraphrased. You don’t have to rely on people opening an email. (It is true that email still works for the “old-timers”)

I would also say that if you are going to send a newsletter make it relevant, which essentially means write it yourself and also don’t send it as a pdf, which is a good format for legal contract but a dreadful format for some warm and fuzzies.

We see lots of very generic content on real estate websites, such as:

• cupboard organizing ideas
• window treatments
• green decorating

Let’s face it, this is NOT why you are being hired, and not what people are looking for. Stay on point and always be relevant to real estate information in your town.

Inman news this morning reported that Move Inc, the operator of Realtor.com expects further revenue declines, and I for one am not surprised.

Of course, in this climate one could argue that revenue declines are hardly news, however perhaps this indicates something larger.

Having worked with real estate agents for the last 10 years we’re often asked our opinion of certain websites, or services that the our agents are being sold.

A year or so ago a company was seemingly going through the roster of every real estate office saying they could help agents lock down the keywords for the sponsored ads at google for a few hundred dollars a month. The odd thing was that company who was selling these things wasn’t google, which was a major red flag, and secondly they didn’t offer any transparency regarding hits, cost/click etc.

We received many calls from agents who felt if they missed this they were missing a once in a lifetime opportunity, (despite the fact that no one can lock down keywords, you just pay more than the other people are prepared to pay for the same keyword and you can always be at the top_.

We’ve also fielded many calls from agents thinking about Realtor.com, should they upgrade to such and such a product, should they join, they’d like us to design them a banner ad for their zip, etc.

Now, we wholeheartedly agree with the mantra that every small business should try new things if common sense suggests their might be some gain in doing so. However, we don’t know a single agent who subscribed for more than one billing round of an extended/or add on product. That’s not to say they don’t exist, as I am sure they do, but we haven’t talked to them, and the numbers coming out of the company suggest that may not be far from a wider truth.

My Dad Always Said, “You Can’t Go Wrong With (virtual) Bricks & Mortar”

Ok, so i added the word ‘virtual’ there, but this what i mean. You can conceivably spend a few thousand dollars on a banner ad campaign for a zip or two which runs for 6 months or a year or whatever.

Ask, yourself this, how many times have you clicked on a banner ad? And, if you did, did you buy the service or product?

Once you have paid for this, and perhaps didn’t get the return on your investment what do you have to show for it, other than a piece of artwork shaped like a bookmark in your ‘My Pictures” file. And that’s just it, agents are spending thousands for try out, once they don’t want it, they have nothing to show for it.

If those thousands of dollars had been used to create a niche focussed real estate website it remains. Your next advertising spend continues to promote your storefront.

Buyers Are So…Promiscuous…

On a more fundamental level the problem with Realtor.com is that of buyer promiscuity. Once they have seen your listing, they are off to the next, and then the next. If you have more than one listing where they are looking the odds are, at best marginally better, but not much. The main issue is that at Realtor.com you do not control the inventory.

We were talking with an agent this week about a proposed website and they were eager for us to link to Realtor.com . This is the last thing you want to do. It’s like sending them to the homepage of your local MLS in the public section and say, “Go find a home, ooh and when you find one, don’t call that agent who’s name is on the listing, call me”…good luck with that.

Controlling The Inventory

Sounds hard huh? How do you control the inventory? Easy, IDX.

Let’s face it no one cares about your listings, well a few people do, the home owner, you do, your manager does, …who am I missing? I think that’s it… So once buyers see it, rejects it you better have everyone else’s listing displayed on your site for them, which of course you do through IDX.

At Realtor.com it’s always been about your listings, and of course how nice to sell ones own, however normally…

your listings probably don’t comprehensively represent the real estate market in your town…oh, and that reminds me, that’s what people are looking for.

Make sure your IDX website does.

It's not rocket science...

It’s interesting how often the term ‘Niche Marketing’ is banded around in the real estate marketing community.

Though it’s certainly true that most agents ignore this when it comes to organizing their marketing strategies both offline and online.

However, if you think about it, the principles are nothing new or indeed revolutionary.

“Niche Searching” is how the the market has always operated.

Home buyers and sellers don’t go to google and type in three town names and then tack on a homes for sale: eg: “chester mendham randolph homes for sale”. Instead they search by niche, eg: ‘randolph homes for sale” for example.

If niche marketing techniques are revolutionary it’s simply because they align the information you are providing with what people are searching for.

Aligning the two isn’t exactly rocket science!

"In the red corner, OFFLINE MARKETING, in the blue corner ONLINE MARKETING...

As we trawl the ever expanding sea of real estate marketing information we often see statements such as the title above.

We think this is to misunderstand marketing on a number of levels.

Firstly this statement is simply too adversarial. As if it’s binary, either, or.

Once you have your real estate website, and it has arrived at the first page of a search engine for key words it was designed for, (you did remember to do that bit right?), it can be easy for agents to think that they simply need to sit back and wait for the leads to come in. Hopefully that will happen.

However, these leads will only come in from those people who THINK to go to a search engine to look for this type of information online. We all know people who would not think of doing this as the informational-gathering-starting point. If you visit a home and they still have yellow-pages lying around, that may tell you something about where they look for information.

For those ‘offline people’, (hello  mum), they require offline marketing to tell them that this resource exists. Don’t ignore them.

Vanessa Fox, formerly of google and Zillow says that perhaps as much as 67% of all search comes from offline channels. That means the hard copy you are sending out.

The best results we see are when both offline and online marketing are engaged in an innovative, harmonious and collaborative way. I think if the question is rephrased to:

Traditional offline and online marketing

VS

Innovative offline and online marketing

I think the distinction is clearer.

So what is, Innovative Offline Real Estate Marketing? Our friend Josh Wilton, Manager of Weichert Princeton, is really leading the charge in helping his agents re-imagine what offline marketing should be.

The age of the ‘static’ one dimensional direct mail piece is dead and never to return. By the time your ‘Just Listed’ card or ‘Just Sold’ card hits the neighborhood it is old news. The customer has already received 10 different auto-emails from competing agents and your card is an antique. Instead think of your direct mail as a commercial for your website. If you sending a ‘Just Listed’ card, have your website promoted more heavily than the house itself. For example one 1000 piece mailing that promoted a website generated 4100 ‘requests’ on that website within 10 days! You basically double the impact of your direct mail campaign. Josh Wilton, Weichert Princeton.

We couldn’t agree more.

The “Just Listed” is useful to two people, the agent, who is promoting themselves, and the seller who sees a glossy picture of their home, and doesn’t realize the agent is promoting themselves.

The problem is for other 998 recipients, they could care less about either. They are interested in

1. what’s currently for sale in their town
2. what sold
3. their home’s value,

Did we just let the cat out of the bag?

If your mailing doesn’t address what your audience wants to read you might be better off not simply going through the motions.

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