With global economies still struggling out of recession and commercial and residential property still subject to fluctuating demand, now – more than ever – is the time to prepare for battle. Whether you’re brushing up on your Realtor marketing knowledge in lean times, getting to know online solutions that will bring you to a whole new potential market or learning how to compete in a cut-throat real estate hotspot, “getting digital” is now a critical element to a Realtor’s marketing strategy. Realtors in the quaintest neighborhood in the country, as well as those in the ‘up and coming’ district with ‘pot of gold potential,’ are all looking for new ways to promote their services online.
Your potential home buyers are spending more and more time online, and much of that increase is due to mobile devices. This means that the game is changing: People are reading fewer and fewer newspapers. Magazines are still being consumed but the benefit really comes if you can afford the prices for glossy advertisements that are of a compelling size and nature to capture a buyer’s attention. Potential clients are searching Google and Bing for content, looking for real-time information, consuming news online on their own time and generally looking to connect with like-minded people for business or social purposes.
So here are five new online Realtor marketing ideas that range in budget, from large to small.
APP UP YOUR BUSINESS
Most of the current drive in the handset market comes from applications on devices like iPhones. If you can afford to build one of these, then good for you! Make it useful and not just about the properties that you’re showing; perhaps build in some useful local knowledge with a media partner that can provide information about local amenities, events calendars and social groups, in return for some branding. While the cost of this might be perceived to be high, a couple of decent commissions would probably pay for it. Make sure you work with a developer that has previous experience of getting applications into the iPhone apps store as this can be an arduous experience.
GET SOCIAL
There’s been a surge in location-based services in the past six months, with a whole swathe of them cropping up for multiple mobile devices. It may be worth investigating whether there’s the opportunity to sponsor or insert ads specific to a local area or offer a free coupon for coffee sponsored by your agency, when people ‘check in’ to certain places. Providing something low-cost for free that’s relevant and that can say something compelling (“We offer a great and surprising service”) will separate you from your competition. Don’t, however, join the service and then check in when you’re visiting potential properties – that’s a sure-fire way of giving the game away to competitors and opening doors for criminal activities, so be warned!
BE A STREAM OF HELPFUL INFORMATION
While Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has been around for a while, it’s still a really useful feature to enable people to see new properties that you’ve just listed, open house meetings that they can sign up for, and so on. RSS is great as it means that people are proactively signing up to your service, which means that they want to hear from you. It’s pretty simple to edit an RSS feed and integrate it into your website, but Twitter also can do exactly the same job in a much easier way. The advantage with Twitter is that people can ‘retweet’ (re-post) your news to their followers. So if you’ve got interesting properties available to view, you can list these (keeping the details to a minimum unless there’s security on the premises) and reach a large audience. Don’t keep it all to property listings, however – again, it’s about affinity, trust and service. Show your businesses’ personality and its relevance in the community; talk about locals (in a nice way) and local businesses to show your knowledge.
THE BAR CODE
Something that is growing in popularity is the QR Code, or 2D Barcode. They are starting to show up on everything from magazines ads to goods and groceries in the supermarket, enabling readers and customers to quickly scan and find information about the item, including the price. This is a fun and low-cost way of quickly getting information to people on mobile devices, as the popularity of downloading this software is growing (in fact, large brands such as Coca-Cola and Marks & Spencer in the U.K. are beginning to utilize them for competitions). A QR Code can be made for free at sites like http://qrcode.kaywa.com and can point either to a telephone number, SMS number or web link. Blend this with the next tip and you’ve got a fun way of finding out information quickly and at low-cost to both you and your customer.
AN ONLINE ADDRESS FOR THE PROPERTY
It might be a little too much like overkill to build a full-blown website for every single property that you have listed, but there’s a much cheaper alternative that will enable you to give all of the contact information for your business as well as a good deal of information about the property. It’s called a .tel domain. A .tel domain name costs as little as $10 per year, with no additional hidden costs – no hosting and no maintenance. These domains are lightweight sites created to be perfect for mobile devices (although it can be seen perfectly well on computers as well – optimized for all formats, in fact) so that potentially interested customers can see the details of the property quickly, cheaply and have all of the contact information in the format they can access easily. Blending a .tel domain and a QR Code is a simple way of getting customers to quickly access the information and save it if they’re in a hurry. Additionally, like other domains, .tel names are accessible in search engines like Bing and Google. And you can update it within seconds without hassle (even from an iPhone) to say ‘under offer’ or ‘sold’ just like a real-world sign. Simple!
~Ben Anton, 2010
Learn more about purchasing .tel domains for real estate at TelSweepstakes.com.
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