www.lahomegirl.com has been completely redesigned as a custom site and relaunched. The site features a home page slide show with images of Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Hollywood Hills, and Downtown LA, as well as neighborhood info and listings for those communities. The site also features a fully interactive MLS search through IDX broker which makes searching a breeze. There is also a blog and other unique content. The site was custom designed on the webretoolkit platform.
Twitter has been in the news quite a bit lately with the protests in Iran, politicians and celebrities, trying to get their message out, and news reporters seeking a new means of communication. Most business people including real estate professionals are wondering how they can take advantage of Twitter. I’ll have to admit it, I didn’t think Twitter was such a big deal when it first started. After all, it was basically text messages in 140 characters or less to a public website. However, after using it for a while, doing some research, and getting feedback from my Realtor clients, I now see how powerful Twitter can be.
Twittering, like Blogging, does take a commitment of time and effort. You cannot just do it a few times then forget about it for a several months and expect to get results. Twittering is one aspect of Social Media or Social Networking which for the purposes of a Realtor is essentially marketing. Like all marketing, you have to budget time and/or money to implement a succesful strategy. Most agents these days don’t have a lot of time or money, so let’s cut to the chase and get to most important “Tweet” strategies an realtor can use. If you need some help setting up an account or learning how Twitter works, there are plenty of sources on the internet or you can email me.
The two main ways a real estate professional can use Twitter is by people following you or you following people. For a beginner, a good way to learn is to follow other members Tweets in subjects that will help your business or that you simply have an interest in. You may also comment or ask questions in response to other people’s tweets. Following others will allow to learn about new blogs, tweet ideas, real estate news, community info, real estate marketing ideas, etc. To follow me on Twitter, please visit https://twitter.com/varsano
So you have finally signed up, set up your profile, learned how it works, followed other people’s tweets, and now you wondering how in the world this is going to help my business. You need to start sending out your own tweets and broadcast messages of importance to the rest of the world. Social Networks are about a non-intrusive exchange of information, so you don’t want too be too pushy, but you want people to notice you and the properties that you represent. Like your personal business website and your blog, you want to cultivate a reputation as an expert in your field with a specialization in a certain geographic area or real estate function/type.
The most popular tweets I have seen from real estate agents involve the subtle promotion of a listing or open house. You can send short Twitter messages about what makes a property unique or what a great value it is in today’s market. You can also add a link on your Tweet to the properties virtual tour or to the listing on your own website. If you are a buyers agent, then you can tweet about properties that you think are a good buy or talk about markets that you think are a buyers market. Give out neighborhood data and stats. All agents can benefit from tweeting about the current market status. Make market predictions. It will establish you as an expert in your region, help develop a following, drive traffic to your website, generate leads, and eventually lead to more clients and closed transactions.
Some of the less obvious ways real estate agents can use Twitter involves trying things that generate interest but may not be directly related to their core business model. Tweet about new laws or financing programs. Start a contest and give away a prize, it’s a great way to generate leads. Promote a conference, trade show, or community event. Redistribute content or recommend articles and new products that you like.
Harness the power of internet with the cross promotion of different marketing tools. Turn every blog post headline into a Twitter message, make every price change an alert through Twitter, schedule your Tweets to be spread out over the day, and have your latest Tweet be the same as your Facebook current status. Most of these things can be done automatically with little or no effort from you through tools like Friendfeed and Tweetlater. Web Retool offers an affordable and effective Social Networking set up plan that can get you started quickly. Once you get started it is strangely addictive. I have Twitter on my Blackberry and have sent Tweets when I had a couple of minutes to kill. In today’s busy business world, Twittering doesn’t take a lot of time, reaches lots of potential clients, and best of all it’s free.
Email Marketing is one of the most underutilized internet tools at a Realtor’s disposal. Today, just about everyone sends email for business and/or personal reasons, so they assume that they are utilize it effectively. However, sending email correspondence with a collegue or client is far different from an email marketing campaign. Also, sending a text email advertising a new listing to a contact list through gmail is not the same as sending an HTML email campaign through an email marketing service or email marketing software. The advantages of email marketing apply to all businesses, but there are specific techniques that help the savvy real estate agent.
First, let’s define email marketing. Wikipedia provides the following:
E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:
Some examples of email marketing campaigns for a real estate agent include the following: New Listings, Price Changes Open Houses, Just Sold, Newsletters, Holiday & Birthday Cards, Thank You Notes, Events: Community, Charity, or Office/Industry Party.
These are set campaigns scheduled to be set to a specific mailing list. Group your contacts into categories such as past clients, current clients, prospects, office collegues, brokerage community, website leads, newsletter/blog subscribers, community/business networks, etc.
Once you organize your contacts and develop a strategy of what you want to promote, then you can really utliize the benefits of an email marketing service or email marketing software. Most services have lots of HTML email templates that are essential webpages sent through email. You can customize them for your business or you can design custom HTML emails from scratch. Having design skills helps during this process, but template solutions are user firendly and provide a professional looking result.
So, now you have your HTML email and organized contact list, its time to let the campaigns fly. Email marketing services and software allow you to schedule the sending of emails at a time of your choosing and with whatever frequency you desire. For example, send your newletter monthly to your subscribers;send your event email a month before the event, then send a reminder a week before and a day before; send your price changes as they occur, etc.
After the campaign has been sent, you will receive all kinds of useful stats to help analyze and plan future campaigns. Example of stats are Open & Non-Open Rate, Links Clicked (optimize your content in the next campaign), Who opened, when, and how many times, Bounce Rate, Unsubscribed, Email Forward Rate, SPAM Reports, and Download report attachments, so you can forward them to clients or co-workers.
Anyone who has tried these campaigns knows how effective they are for the real estate agent. Even if you are an expert at Outlook or Gmail, you are just scratching the surface of what email can do for your marketing needs.
According to the C.A.R. survey, the individual agent’s website is the most important site for internet buyers. This graph was shown during the October 2008 Annual Convention and quickly dismissed as not accurate or not important. Most of the panel’s discussion was focused on the meltdown in both the financial and real estate markets. Being a web designer in the real estate industry, I wish they would have discussed this survey a bit more, but I understand how an impending depression can change the focus of most real estate professionals.
I believe that the graph says a lot about the real estate business on the internet, especially when it comes to the individual agent’s website. Most real estate agents have their own personal business websites and can control the content of the site, even on the most simplistic template sites. Better templates, semi-custom sites, and fully customs site allow you to control the look and functionality of the site. The more control an agent has over their marketing efforts, the more they can make themselves stand out from the crowd. Local MLS sites only allow you to enter and display certain data, plus you are at the mercy of their formatting and distribution. Most other real estate websites either function like an alternative MLS or pull data from an MLS and repackage it. The agent loses control as soon as a listing is entered.
An agent’s website, on the other hand, is a world that they control and are able to form that world in their own image. I’ll admit it, there are a lot of terrible real estate websites out there. There is also a ton of duplicate content. Most agent’s follow the crowd and have a minimal internet presence. The one’s that develop a unique site with content that a potential buyer might find useful are the one’s who have a successful web presence. If you are web savvy buyer in today’s competitive real estate market, you can basically get the same info from realtor.com, zillow.com, local mls, etc. You probably have visited those sites multiple times before you even think about working with an agent.
Once you make the decision to work with an agent, you want the agent who knows your neighborhood best and can tell you something that you don’t know. An agent with detailed neighborhood and sub-neighborhood pages, custom searches, best deals, knowledgeable blogs, lots of property and community photos, and local real estate and news info has the most useful website for the buyer. The real estate catch phrase is “Location, Location, Location,” and “All Politics is Local.” Well, let’s conclude that best real estate websites have unique information about locations and listings.
Any real estate agent with an email address is inundated with solicitations from Search Engine Marketing companies promises to get them to the top of Google for a small fee. Many agents roll the dice and blindly hire these Search Engine “experts” to magically get their site to the top of the search engines. Yes, they usually are successful at putting your ad near the top of the Google, Yahoo, or MSN sponsored results. For those of you not familar with the difference between sponsored (or pay per click) results and organic results, one cost money and one is free. However, getting the free organic results may cost you money through SEO. For a descriptions of these terms, please referr to the Real Estate Web Terms Glossary.
Since many of the Search Engine magicians only ask for a flat rate or a monthly rate, many agents mistakenly think that they are not paying per click and the wizard has yield free results with his web tricks. No, he has signed up for a pay per click account with a budget less then what you are paying him and has incorporated his fee into the total price. For example, if you pay $100 per month to a search engine specialist, they are paying Google $50 per month and keeping $50 per month as profit. You choose a farm area and they set up the Google AdWords account with one or two keyword phrase. For $50 per month you will reach the top of the search engines for one keyword term, but does that yield tangible results?
The formula is rather simple: more website traffic = more potential leads = more lead conversions = more potential clients = more closed transactions
However, just driving targeting traffic to your website is not enough. Just because you have a high ranking Google Ad for “Los Angeles Homes for Sale” or “Beverly Hills Real Estate”, does not guarantee a lead or client. First, the ad has to be written properly so you have a high click through rate. Does your ad standout from your competition? Is it relevant to their keyword search?
OK, someone clicked on your ad. Now where do they go? Do you you send them to your home page? Most agents to have their home page as their landing page, but it is absolutely necessary to have relevant content and lead capture tools on that page. Generally, it is a better idea to have a targeted custom landing page that caters directly to the keyword term that the visitor searched for.
Keep in mind that once you have done everything right that the lead now needs to be converted into a client. That will take time and patience. You will need a strategy for the conversion process, just as you need a strategy for the lead capture and search engine marketing. Throwing some money at an “expert” who guarantees “results” is not a strategy, it is a gamble. Getting to the top of the search engines is merely the first step of what should be a comprehensive plan to market your real estate business on the internet.
House and Clouds
I love this house stock photo shot with the blue sky and clouds. It’s suburban nirvana.
I recently had to create a floorplan for a property based on some crude measurements. Since I am most familiar with Photoshop, I ended up creating the floorplan from that application. However, after a few minutes I realized that wasn’t the best program for the job. Illustrator with some special plugins or brushes probably would have been better but not ideal. Then I realized that there were several cool floorplan tools available that didn’t require CAD training or an Architecture degree.
http://www.2dplan.com/ looked the best to me, but like most busy business people I wanted something that would produce great results quickly with a minimal learning curve. Does anyone have any recommendations?
See the results of my PS4 design below:
I have always been a believer in a multi-pronged approach to marketing, specifically online marketing. If you have a great website, but don’t do any internet marketing, email marketing, or social media you probably won’t have good results. The converse is also true, effective marketing that directs users to a website lacking content or smart design will also yield bad results. Those are basic truths for any business. They are also very elementary for anyone engaging in a sophisticated internet strategy in 2010.
Everyone has a website and a Facebook account today, so how do you carve out your niche? I came across an article in the Keller Williams Realty magazine Outfront that gave a little bit of insight on how a real estate agent can capitalize on the new social media. “Social Media Mavens – Share Lead Capture Strategies,” gives three examples of effective marketing strategies. I particularly like Digital Farming by Liz Landry because she “utilizes a niche website, a blog, and a Facebook page.” It is that combination of different mediums with different target audiences that will maximize exposure and yield the optimal results. Landry says that her blog is all real estate but Facebook is 80% community and 20% real estate which is example of how online etiquette and specific target audiences need to be approached. She also implements video which continues to grow in popularity as another avenue of viral marketing.
You can read the article here: Social Media Mavens – Share Lead Capture Strategies
Please send any strategies or ideas that have worked for your business.
Real Estate Marketing Definitions
(1) “Employee” includes an individual who has an independent contractual relationship with a real estate marketing organization and performs real estate marketing activity.
(2) “Real estate marketing activity” means procuring or offering to procure prospects to purchase, sell, lease or rent real estate by telemarketing, mail or otherwise.
(3) “Real estate marketing organization” means any person, including a partnership, association, corporation, limited liability company or other organization, other than a real estate marketing employee, that engages in real estate marketing activity and is licensed.
(4)(a) “Real estate marketing employee” means an individual who receives compensation from a real estate marketing organization for performing real estate marketing activity.
(b) “Real estate marketing employee” does not mean an individual licensed
Advertising laws are aimed at protecting consumers by requiring advertisers to be truthful about their products and to be able to substantiate their claims. All businesses must comply with advertising and marketing laws, and failure to do so could result in costly lawsuits and civil penalties. So before you start an advertising campaign, it’s important you understand some basic rules.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is the main federal agency that enforces advertising laws and regulations. Under the Federal Trade Commission Act:
Additional laws apply to ads for specialized products like consumer leases, credit, 900 telephone numbers, and products sold through mail order or telephone sales. State and local governments also regulate advertising, and enforcement is usually the responsibility of a state attorney general, a consumer protection agency or a local district attorney.