Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

Real Estate Leads Seminar

Why Isn't Your Real Estate Website Getting Leads Anymore?

Getting traffic is great, but worthless if you don't get leads. So I offer you 4 reasons why you are not getting the leads you are used to getting.

Economic-The economy has made viewers picky and less apt to commit to a registration.

Distraction-The social media. Facebook, Twitter, et al. More and more people are spending their free time finding conversations and links at sites like Facebook.

Commodity-The dilution of control of listings inventory. Sites like Trulia, Zillow, and other classified websites have taken over the web. The listings inventory has gone from a Realtor controlled event, to an easily accessed commodity on the web.The only way to decommoditize your business is to let the world know YOU. Not hiding behind a banner. But you.

What are you about and how does that help your prospective client? Most of the way hyperlocality is taught is wrong. Hyperlocality is about your marketplace and how it relates to the local resident's concerns and desires for their home life and the area surrounding it. Bring your world to your website. Be an advocate for your market.

 You need to explore and demonstrate your Unique Selling Proposition. Not just saying it. But demonstrating it through your publishing of blog posts, articles, social interaction and posts, etc.
What is your most wanted action on your publishing? What do you want them to do?

Other Focuses-What other content can you feed into your web site? APIs, Feeds, Widgets can bring in targeted content that your MLS/IDX does not provide. Your brokerage needs to collaberate and publish as a team. Look at Trulia. It has a clasified listings site that has evolved to include market data as well as market FAQ's, and blogs. All provided by the Realtor community. As they and other similar Vortals dominate your city searches in the engines. And you haven't even received a thank you note.

Explore the conversation going on in your prospects mind and enter it. Go after General but also Specific keywords to attract buyers and sellers.Today, the market in most geographies in the country is distressed. The distressed homeseller is looking up phrases like, "how to avoid foreclosure",  "Il foreclosure laws", "Loan modification in Peoria, Il", etc.

Find out More About Publishing Techniques

 

 

 

 

Sticky Content

A terrific and fast way to add photos and do research when blogging or creating articles.

Ed Bernays, Disinformation and Gloves off Thursday

Today I take on the Age of Disinformation. That actually goes back several years to the early 1900s and Edward Bernays. I take on several myths and tricks online. And you are again reminded how writing about anything online can make you an authority.. And is why you need to be creating content. Inoculate yourself from the propaganda online with a healthy dose of skepticism. Or lose at marketing and your budget to nonsense.

WE take on Myths like "quality linking", polls surveyed unscientifically, blogging as an authority without expertise, and bounce rates as a measure of poor SEO.

In this video I mentioned the story of Edward Bernays. Bernays is single handidly responsible for the notion of consumerism to patriotism and freedom. You can thank such American staples as Bacon and Eggs and increased cigarrette consumption to Bernays To thirld world countries being tied to Soviet Moscow and a disintegration of our ethics in promotion.

Some information on Bernays from Wikipedia:

Bernays felt that the public's democratic judgment was "not to be relied upon" and he feared that "they [the American public] could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above". Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.....Bernays held that human beings are fundamentally irrational and untrustworthy, and that it's the duty of social programmers to manipulate the herd for their own good.

Bernays, Carl Byoir and John Price Jones worked together to influence public opinion towards supporting American participation in World War I. One of Bernays' favorite techniques for manipulating public opinion was the indirect use of "third party authorities" to plead his clients' causes. "If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway", he said.

Do you remember President Bush telling us to get back to business of America. This was very Bernaysian. Tying Patriotism to consumerism. Bernays, working for Tobacco industry got young women to parade into the streets with what he called "torches of freedom". Thus, demonstrating their liberation.

Are You the 80 or the 20?

Image by Coneee via Flickr

"In God we trust; all others bring data"  ~W. Edwards Deming, renowned quality control expert who gets much credit for the quality of modern Japanese products

Facebook's users are the size of a Country. So as the logic goes, that is where the business is. Get on Facebook or lose. Well, that thinking isn't really thinking. 

But let's not pick on only Facebook for this demonstration. The evolution of the Internet has been led by more hype than substance.

Snake Oil

Often times selling the hype has been more profitable than the mediums themselves.

"…most people want to believe rather than to know, to take for granted rather than to find out"    James Thurber

We all want to believe that the vitamin will make our bulging belly miraculously melt away. We want to believe that this NEW pink pill will give us the virility and stamina of a 24 year old. And that cream will make the cellulite go poof! in an instant.  And oh how belief works when vanity is involved.  

What makes our decisions even more difficult is that these supplements and routines do have some truth to them. Today's world has produced some miraculous stuff for us.

So its Monday night. A big presentation is due the next day and you can't sleep.

You turn on the dumb box and holy smokes. Girls are Going Wild! Better turn that in case the wife wakes up. ;-)  So you flip the channel and there is this slick dude in a suit talking about all these health secrets that THEY do not want anyone to know.

And oh my Lord would you look at the hotties he is explaining this to?   This sales pitch has all the great elements. It Us Vs Them (creating and defending against a common enemy). The Implication of Sex. Those girls are from Playboy and not your librarian for a reason boys. Therefore we males just lost a bit of our cognitive resistance .

And thus we are playing with fuzzy deductions in logic that only work because we want to believe. And the logical conclusion is derived from illogical stretches of poor logic.

At the end we are left with Who are THEY? And what is it they don't want us to know. None of it is explicit. At best it is all inference tugging at emotional triggers.

Buying on Emotion and the 80/20 Rule*

But what about the argument that you need to work Facebook because it is growing at such rapid rates?

This isn't new by the way. This was the argument with Twitter, Blogging, SEO, and Even Websites.

The logic is the same that many of us have used to join MLM's, Religions, and even our careers. Without logic.

I have seen this in sales presentation after presentation. Set up a premise that you can never prove, by proving smaller conclusions that pretend to prove the original premise. Each step getting further and further away from any proof at all while somewhat proving the previous conclusion.  Enough steps make "sense" without ever really proving anything. But the buyers head is going up and down over and over again.

Don't worry. That is how the world buys and sells. It is called being human.But in order to buy anything we have to want to believe.

It's why the newly single 40 year old Male buys a Porche and the 40 year old Divorcee hits the plastic surgeon within weeks of her final divorce papers. Emotion always drives us.

Of course we all have to make decisions without all the facts. Even in court a prosecutor never has all the facts. He or She merely builds a case and the jury makes an emotional decision backed up by the logic of the case.

In fact, even if you could get all the facts by that time the opportunity has passed ( a line used in getting buyers off the fence in high pressure selling by the way).

There is Gold In Them That Hills -for some

So I am not saying to abandon Twitter or Facebook. I am saying that you should learn to ask, "show me the money" more often. Don't blog because everyone is doing it. Don't Facebook because everyone is doing it. Do it because there is money to be made. And don't start until you have a pretty good idea how that money will come to you.

Our team takes our clients down the path of proven SEO and Social Media that converts.

*The 80/20 rule is Pareto's principle that states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

How to Increase Sales By 61%

A cool video of a talk by Dan Kennedy. Some interesting ideas that came from this set of videos. (I have included the first one).

Ever notice how much direct mail you get? Next to nothing anymore right? Kennedy points out that like Infomercials the Internet Mediums are begging to get regulated. The Government is not likely to over regulate mail however, because they own it!

Other ideas I picked up.

Cross Marketing- Often we get stuck in a certain medium. We start blogging and that's what we are bloggers. We get on Twitter and now we are social media zealots. In fact, I like to remind folks that I consult with that as marketers online it would be more apropriate to think of ourselves as publishers.

The idea being to produce information and distribute our information far and wide.  A blog is just part of that. Facebook is just one place where our message is sent.  So by cross Marketing to many mediums we can increase our sales. Kennedy points out that "People who receive an email and catalog offer buy 61% more." How can you increase your message with direct mail and online methods?

Great Rule Headlines: Can you place a one liner in the newspaper with your headline and a call to action saying call us at 1800-123-4567. Will they call you? If not then scrap the headline and start over.

Rules for Graphics-Will it lead to prospects contacting you? If not scrap it. We are not running an art store.

Offer great guarantees-Offer a great guarantee to eliminate the risk for your prospect to do business with you. 

In the end Kennedy reminds the audience that we are all salespeople. Its not in fashion to say that any longer but we are.

Why Marketing to Only Women May be Your Best Move This Year

Image by freddthompson via Flickr

 If you have been around real estate anytime at all then you know that the women pick the house. In fact, women have become a major economic force in our society.

Not only are they earning more. Married and Cohabiting women making 80% of all buying decisions. Women also make half of all business purchases. Women spend $5 trillion a year!

Not only that unmarried women have more money than ever. This is in part because women make up 66% of all College campuses and 46% of the workforce.

My goodness the women even wear the pants in my beloved sport of football! Yes that's right.  80% of all NFL purchases are made by women who are only 40% of the fan base.

Marketing to Women Rule #1
The rule is when you market to women you get the men!

Marketing to Women Rule #2
A Woman scorned by an industry is an industry in decline. The beer industry has traditionally been male and has watched the female market move to spirits and wine as this industry has been more appealing to women. Subsequently, men are also now drinking less brew and more wine and spirits.

Stalking Your Customers

Google has opened up what is called remarketing in Google Adwords. Remarketing means that as the visitor leaves your site, you can serve them ads on other websites as they travel across the web.

Therefore, you can follow a visitor all over the web with your advertising.

At the Adwords blog they explain it this way:

Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad.

The practice of consumer "stalking" is not new in other ad networks. And it is my opinion as AdWords alternatives become more popular Google is opening this new opportunity as a way to compete against these other advertising networks.

ERA Repositions Brand

Anne Blumenstein
ERA's new VP of Marketing
anne.blumenstein at era.com

ERA Real Estate recently concluded their International Business Conference (IBC) and Anne Blumenstein joined me for Fun Friday to discuss their new moves and how agents and brokers alike may learn something from this new rebrand effort. Laugh at me as I put my foot in my mouth within the first 30 seconds of this interview.

ERA Brand Map

Anne Blumenstein is vice president of marketing, ERA Franchise Systems LLC. She is responsible for the shaping, development and execution of the company's market-facing direction and all marketing strategies and functions in the communication of ERA Real Estate's value proposition to its affiliates and their consumers. Blumenstein's group ensures the implementation of a range of marketing initiatives that includes interactive marketing, advertising, public relations and direct marketing Anne also works with franchisees to assist them in optimizing the value of their affiliation with ERA Real Estate.

Blumenstein joined ERA Real Estate in 2009. Prior to that she served as vice president of field marketing and media for the Carl's Jr. division of leading fast food operator CKE Restaurants where she oversaw local restaurant marketing, media planning, advertising placement and consumer promotions. Additional marketing and franchise experience includes work with the Jack in the Box restaurant chain, Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, Inc. and McCormick & Schmick's Seafood Restaurants, Inc.

Experienced in the targeted use of digital marketing, social media and public relations, Blumenstein brings more than 20 years of integrated marketing experience to her new role, as well as a successful track record of developing franchise support and growth models.

Anne Blumenstein earned a BA in Economics from Humboldt State University, and an MBA in Marketing from Loyola University Chicago.

Rapid Fire Content Syndication

See how I syndicated my post yesterday through the use of Ping.fm

Realtors Top Marketing Preferences

 

Home Gain just released a survey of REALTORS. The goal was to determine the top marketing choices. The results are surprisingly offline.

As with all surveys or polling I see anymore I take meaning from it with a very cynical eye. Poor scientific methods and cooked books seem to be so common they are hardly noticed. Recently Global warming scientists and Big Pharma have been busted for cooking their so called science. While online  folks can say whatever they want to say.  I have seen real estate vendors running press releases of "survey results" while in actuality it was nothing more than an online poll on the front page of their website.

I am not implying any wrong doing from good ole Home Gain. I am just being skeptical of their methodology. For example they mention at the top of their press release that:

HomeGain Survey Identifies Real Estate Agents’ Top 10 Marketing Preferences

Recent HomeGain survey reveals the top marketing choices of real estate professionals in 2010; Referrals ranked number one; MySpace ranked last; Realtors show continued interest in using postcards/mailings

Preference does not mean efficacy, it merely is an implication. Therefore, is this list below truly a list of what is working in today's marketplace? That goes unanswered until you get to the list which says 10 "effective marketing strategies".  So we get the words choice, preference and effective.

Which leads me to believe perhaps the study is flawed, or maybe the PR writer got lost in the words. Nevertheless here is their finding:

Top 10 Effective Marketing Strategies for Realtors (Cumulative Average Scores, 1 = Least Effective / 10 = Most Effective):

* Referrals (8.7)
* Featured Listings (4.8)
* Email Campaigns (4.7)
* Postcards/Mailers (4.6)
* Blogging (4.1)
* Online Lead Generation Services (4.0)
* Facebook (4.0)
* LinkedIn (3.6)
* Outdoor Ads (3.6)
* Print Ads (3.6)

Top 10 Marketing Objectives for Realtors in 2010 (Cumulative Average Scores, 1 = Least Likely to Use / 10 = Most Likely to Use):

* Referrals (8.9)
* Email Campaigns (5.7)
* Postcards/Mailers (5.4)
* Featured Listings (5.2)
* Facebook (4.9)
* Print Ads (4.3)
* Blogging (4.2)
* LinkedIn (4.1)
* Online Lead Generation Services (4.0)
* YouTube (3.5)

Now, I let me interpret this. I have been saying for years that a terrific marketing strategy is to go where everyone else ain't. Direct Mail works.  It should be part of anyones sequential marketing campaign. Notice I say sequential, not send to the world without a purpose.

Any marketing be it Facebook, email, or snail mail should have a step two, three and beyond. 

Top takeaways:

• Careful on what is written as fact.
• Realtors still prefer plug n play solutions for their marketing.
• Referrals are still and always will be the number one lead source.