Posts Tagged ‘offline vs online marketing’

"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.