Real Estate Marketing Blog

Google Goes Black

Google Adwords for Real Estate

The mystery around Google stems from it behaving like an evolving,  living breathing organism.

And this organism spins baby.

For years they have spun their positioning algo into a multitude of layers of complexity. Making it impossible for mere humans to get into a top search engine position.

Along comes AdWords (their money Enterprise) and the mystery has continued. They constantly keep their methods shrouded with their eye on profit:

"Automatic Matching automatically extends your campaign's reach by using surplus budget to serve your ads on relevant search queries that are not already triggered by your keyword lists," Google's email reads. "For example, if you sold Adidas shoes on your website, Automatic Matching would automatically crawl your landing page and target your campaigns to queries such as 'shoes,' 'adidas,' 'athletic,' etc., and less obvious ones such as 'slippers' that our system has determined will benefit you and likely lead to a conversion your site."

In other words, Google will automatically take the money an advertiser isn't spending and spend it on searches the advertiser hasn't explicitly approved. For the average advertiser, this is not a good idea....."They're offering you the exciting opportunity to bleed every penny of your budget every day, advertising against keywords that you didn't want to bid on," says Dan Thies an Adwords expert.

It makes sense for Google to keep the animal complex as the profiteers would easily game the system. As an example click arbitrage is a real problem as marketers buy ads on one engine for pennies and send the visitors over to a page with Google Adsense that pays several pennies or dollars more.

This tension between market and Engine,will no doubt stay with us a long time.

Real Estate Advertising

Total real estate ad spending has dropped 3 % so far this year, while spending on the online segment has grown 25.8%, hitting $2.6 billion. Borrell projects online real estate advertising to grow at 12.4% next year while total real estate advertising continues to compress. The report forcasts that agents and brokers will be spending more ad dollars with online media than with the newspaper within as little as three years.

Meanwhile....

Younger Online News Consumers are Not Newspaper Readers

A new comScore, study of the differences in online behavior among heavy, medium, light and non-newspaper readers showed that non-newspaper readers are likely to be younger, but are actually heavier than average online news consumers. Meanwhile, heavy newspaper readers are more likely than average to engage with traditional print news brands online.

Those age 65 and older are nearly 3 times more likely than average to read the print edition of newspapers 6 times per week, while those age 18-24 are 38 percent more likely than average to not read a print newspaper at all during a typical week.

Positioning

Marketing is to a large degree about positioning. Redfin claims advantage over their competition. Their Unique Position seems to be superior savings . So they did a customer survey and found:

• 95% Customer Satisfaction (CSI).
• On average their clients net $5,048 more.
• On average they refund back $10,520 in real estate commissions.

What are you doing to Positionyour company, and what are you doing to prove that position?

Why now is a terrific time to buy a home

John L Scott just released a PDF that I recommend you read and take as a guideline for your own current marketing materials. Titled, "Why Now is a Great Time To Buy a Home."

I have said before that you should build up your own "positive" real estate arsenal of news and material to get into the hands of your buyers and sellers. Contrary to the current Internet mantras being published, real estate sales is about, um selling. If you are not going to tell your clients the good side of real estate, who will?

Real Estate Industry Gets a Black Eye

Marc Davison wrote over at Inman a piece on the long term identity crisis of the lowly surveyed real estate agent. He gives some good advice.

Do you want to stand out from the crowd? I have some advice to add to Davison's . First of all do not worry about the crowd and the low public numbers of the industry. And worry about your numbers.

One of the big reasons that agents have such low survey results is that after every real estate boom, the media has tons of "my agent did this to me" stories. Fraud, deceit, pushy sales tactics is why the industry street cred gets a black eye.

Use some of the strategies and tactics that Dave Lakhani shares in his interview. Boldy tell the world that while others may have been pushing squirly deals, you played it straight. While others used pressure sales tactics, you were willing to walk away from the deal if it didn't smell right. Prove your integrity and relevance for your market thru your online and offline communications. Don't say it, prove it.

Dave Ends the Real Estate Recession!

How To Dominate Your Local Real Estate Market
......(from recession to boom!)

Dave Lakhani
http://www.boldapproach.com
Listen to the whole interview to discover a secret link on Dave's website that contains a ton of free gifts for you. Like an interview with industry great Seth Godin.

What does Jimmy Buffett's Parrotheads, Apple Mac Heads and the Kiss Army, all have in common? They all enjoy a large fan base of zealots for their products and services. Dave shows you how to create your own army of followers that will guarantee your success in any marketplace.

Dave Lakhani has been described as a "Marketing Genius","Business Acceleration Strategist" and "Multipreneur" by his peers and the media.

Dave shares with you million dollar ideas that he charged me a ton of money when he originally taught me these principles. He opens up and shares:

• How to get clients to find you.
• Building Your own Cult-Would you like to build a list of clients as fanatical as an Alabama Bible Revival?
• The difference of manipulation and persuasion.
• How to position yourself as the expert in your local market.
• Dave actually builds a model to dominate your Real Estate Market in 90 Days or less.
• How saying no to business, can actually get you more yeses.
• Why facts tell, stories sell.
• Building your million dollar expert persona.
• A completely unique and wildly effective new way to virtually guarantee that your prospect will buy in your area.
• Why money follows action.
• How to make your listing irresistible.
• Why getting people out of their head and into their emotions will guarantee you real estate selling success in any marketplace.

Belief in your product is the most important thing in sales. So how how do you succeed when your home prices keep dropping? Dave shows you how to deal with what might seem like a crisis of conscious for some. 

This is by far the most revealing sales training I have heard in a very long time. In fact, I guarantee you have not heard this from any real estate trainer.

General and Specific Keywords

If you wanted to buy the book Influence, would you type "books" into the search engines? Or "Influence, by Robert Cialdini"

If you wanted to buy a Maytag Washer, would you type "Washing Machine" into the engine? Or  "Maytag 27" Top-Load Washer with SuperSize"?

The former will render larger volumes of visitors, the latter will render less visitors, more sales. So you are likely to get closer to a 1 to 1 conversion.

Real Estate and The Long Tail

Targeting general keywords is like a Billboard on the Highway while a specific or long tail word is akin to a targeted direct snail mail piece.

Homesah are Better Than Home

Hitwise says using the plurals in your keywords pull better than the singular.

I say why not at least test both?