Mobile Marketing and Real Estate Go Together Like . . .
How to make the perfect PB&J
Our little magazine has always been a hyper-local, mobile-enabled advertising vehicle. We feature local homes and real estate agents and place it in targeted distribution locations all over town. Home buyers and sellers pick it up, put it in their pocket or purse, and take it with them to search for homes, and agents in the magazine and on the websites they see featured there.
We’ve been doing this for over 30 years.
This experience has been crucial in our adaption of mobile technology as part of our overall strategy.
A few things we’ve learned –
1. Home buyers and sellers are short-term customers. Once they’ve made the decision to buy or sell, there is a very short window of opportunity in which to engage them.
2. A significant percentage of the 2 million unique users who go to RealEstateBook.com and NCI’s suite of sites are new every month - not repeat visitors. High churn. Once they’ve selected a home or a real estate agent, they typically don’t buy or sell again for another 6-7 years.
3. Therefore, you have to be everywhere THEY SEARCH for real estate information.
4. And, you have to SEARCH FOR THEM through advertising. It’s not their job to find us. It’s our job to find them.
Here’s why mobile works well with real estate advertising.
- 73% of local searches are performed through mobile web browsers*
- More than 48 million mobile users accessed maps on their device in May 2011, marking an increase of 39 percent from the previous year. *
- In June of 2011, time spent on mobile apps and sites surpassed time spent surfing web sites on a laptop or desktop computer.**
- By 2013, more people will own smart phones than personal computers or laptops.**
- 14 million mobile users in the U.S. representing 6.2% of the total mobile audience, scanned a QR or bar code on their mobile device in June 2011
- The most popular source of a scanned code (49.4%) was a printed magazine or newspaper.
In other words, more and more consumers are using their phones to surf the web - and using an offline source to drive local traffic to a mobile enabled site makes perfect sense - especially in an industry like ours in which location is key.
Want to learn more about mobile marketing for real estate? Contact your local Real Estate Book representative. Enter your zip here to find yours.Our offering now includes single property mobile websites, text codes, and QR codes - at no additional cost.
Because print advertising and mobile marketing go together like . . peanut butter & jelly. Bees and honey. Bacon and eggs. Baseball and hot dogs. Football and tailgating.
Ok . . please excuse me. I’m hungry now.
*comScore, Inc. Research ** Nielson Research
Enough about me. Let’s talk about you.
Ah . . . the joys of giving.
Be generous this holiday season. Here are 3 ways to give to home buyers and home sellers in your advertising and a special offer from The Real Estate Book. Read on . . .
Give the people what they want. In your advertising, buyers want to see . . . PHOTOS of homes. Multiple photos of the rooms inside, the yard, and the special features. Don’t make them work too hard. Make it FUN to look for their dream home.
Sellers want you to MARKET their home. Make it stand out. Advertise it. Before you ask for a price reduction, be sure you’ve done more than put a single photo of the front of the home on MLS and and buried it for free on listing aggregate sites. Showing them that you are doing everything you can to reach potential buyers makes them feel SPECIAL.
Tell them how it benefits them. So, you’re a top agent. Good for you. Consumers want to know what you are going to do for THEM. Talk about how you’ve helped your clients, not about how they’ve helped you. Show success stories on selling a home quickly or helping a buyer find the perfect home. Offer a free consultation, downloadable community resources, checklists to help them get ready for the big transaction.
Be responsive - quickly and appropriately. An automated phone message that takes 5 minutes to navigate before you get to a live person or a voice mail with the promise of calling them back within 24 hours means that they will most likely hang up on you. An auto-reply on your email means they will most likely email someone else. Advertise the best way to reach you and do your best to answer your phone personally and respond to voicemails and emails as quickly as you can. Your TIME AND ATTENTION are the services they want - along with your expertise.
Here’s our gift to you. We’d love to tell the world how great you are. Send your best sales story of 2010 along with a photo if you’d like and we’ll post it here on this blog, on The Real Estate Book Facebook Page and we’ll tweet about you on Twitter. So that people can find you, include:
- Your Name
- Company Name
- City and State or Province
- Your Phone Number & Email Address
- Your Website or Blog
Send to Marketing@treb.com and we’ll do the rest!
Thanks for all you do and HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
Are you so far ahead that you’ve left yourself behind?
Filed under: About Marketing, Real Estate Industry Research & Articles, Real Estate News, Social Media, Uncategorized
When will you scan this?
The late comedian Mitch Hedburg once said, “I am tired of following my dreams. I am just going to find out where they are going and meet them there.” Funny.
But . . . it does make me think - can you get ahead of yourself? Our world is evolving so quickly, it’s easy to feel left behind and yet, sometimes we get so far ahead of ourselves that we lose touch with today.
Technology has certainly changed the real estate industry and we can be challenged by when to embrace the next new thing - now or later? You CAN do anything. The questions are - SHOULD you and WHEN should you?
When I started in the business 17 years ago (I was a child), the MLS was private and few agents had their own web presence. I was thrilled when my pager could recieve text messages. In 1999, when I joined The Real Estate Book, we launched one of the first websites on which consumers could search for properties - RealEstateBook.com. Listing syndication was the big thing and we were one of the first sites to push our advertisers’ listings to Yahoo, Zillow, Trulia, Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Then, widgets and IDX feeds. Social media and mobile quickly followed. Today, QR codes are an example of a new technology with the potential to significantly impact real estate marketing.
I tried to find a statistic on the current number of consumers - who have smart phones + a QR reader + a current desire to buy or sell a home + who would actually USE the code to learn more about the home. Needless to say, this was not a readily available statistic. I am sure they exist and will increase over the next 18 months. The integration with print makes these especially interesting to us.
My point is - WHEN do you begin to invest money and time (which translates to money) into this technology? It’s quite probable that at some point, you should. Just when?
As a self-confessed tech geek, I love all the new pretty shiny things and want to play with them. As a marketer with an eye on ROI and ROE (Return on Effort), I watch where my current traffic and leads are coming from, how they are converting, and what other benefits, such as existing customer engagement or brand building, that we reap from a particular campaign or media channel. When the time is right, we incorporate a new channel, test, adjust, evaluate and potentially launch.
Not every pretty shiny new technology that sounded so cool makes the cut. Sometimes they fizzle or are replaced by something more advanced before they gain enough momentum to be worthy. Sometimes, the return is just not enough to justify the investment.
So, while investing in the future is smart, timing is still everthing.
Want to watch future trends? Here are just a few places I watch.
Future of Real Estate Marketing
5 Truths About Real Estate Marketing
1. Your Competitor is Talking About Your Marketing Plan. The marketing plan is the #1 reason sellers chose an agent and the #3 reason agents lose listings.* If you are not talking about yours, your competitor will.
2. Today’s Consumers are Multi-Media Multi-Taskers. Home shoppers consume information and use about 4.5 sources** when choosing a neighborhood, a home, an agent. Every piece of information they see is relevant, whether it’s online, in print, or on a social site. They use them all.
3. Your Advertising Reflects Your Professional Reputation. Premium positioning and good design reflect a quality agent. Low priority positioning and bad design reflects a lower quality agent.
4. Be Clear About Your Call to Action. Most advertising fails because the consumer is confused. Should they call, email, go to your site or your blog? Why? More information? More listings? Market statistics? Tell them specifically why and how to act.
5. It’s Not About You. Think benefits. #1 Buyer’s Agent? You helped more buyers find their perfect home and wisest investment. #1 Sales Agent? You helped more sellers get the best price for their homes – even in a difficult market.
Real Estate Book Representatives help you stand out and get results in print, online and through social networking – and we’re willing to be measured. Go to Store.RealEstateBook.com to learn more.
*2010 Independent Study of Home Sellers, NCI
** NAR 2009 Study of Home Buyers & Sellers
Hansel & Gretel and the Map to Consumer Behavior
Hansel & Gretel
Are you misreading the map? Like Hansel and Gretel on their way to the house of sweets, consumers leave a bread crumb trail of the activities they use to search for real estate and real estate professionals. The only problem is that the Hansel and Gretel’s of today are not cautiously stepping down a single path. They might as well be flying over dumping breadcrumbs with a crop duster.
You see, today’s consumers are not using any single media. We search magazines, newspapers, websites, blog sites, social sites, mobile apps, television, radio, and billboards - basically anything that enters our stream of consciousness. We are inundated with information and are accustomed to digesting and analyzing large amounts of information. The National Association of REALTORS survey of home buyers and sellers indicates that they consciously searched, on average about 4.5 sources of information when shopping for a home. And, that sounds low to me.
Crop duster
I recently read an article on the Six Ways to Effectively Track Offline Sales on eConsultancy.com - an interactive site for digital marketers. It lists a number (6) ways to link your offline advertising efforts to your online presence - with a reminder to digital marketers that the ultimate goal is to map the effects of consumer behavior throughout an integrated offline and online campaign.
If you were to map your behavior, for example, you might find that you watch TV while reading the newspaper, or a magazine, or surfing the net. You see an ad in a direct mail piece for a restaurant and you look them up online and check their reviews online or on a mobile app. The brands you find most memorable and the purchases you make are often influenced by the frequency and quality of your interaction with that brand - through multiple means.
That’s why saying that you are investing all your efforts, money or business in your social media marketing plan, or your website, or just your print ad, for that matter, means that while you’re looking for Hansel and Gretel on a wooded path, they are flying over in a crop duster.
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