In this world of online marketing and the overwhelming amount of information that is available to us, it’s sometimes hard to know where to even start to try to find the information we need and importantly, keep abreast of what’s going on in the residential real estate world. We all have our favourite local blogs that keep the buzz going about new projects and developments in our own locations; however, it’s important to be able to monitor who’s talking about you online along with keeping up with what your friendly competitors are doing!
You’re likely familiar with Google Alerts – a fantastic tool that allows you to create alerts on key words that are applicable to you (e.g. your company name, project name, etc.). These alerts can be emailed to you and you’ll receive a link to whatever website has referenced your key phrase. This tool is free, easy to use and you can add, delete, modify as much as you want. Check it out.
There’s another online alert tool that’s extremely important in today’s social world. It’s called Social Mention. In a nutshell, it’s Google Alerts but for social media. You can receive daily alerts about you, your company, the people who work with you, and your competitors. When you do conduct a search, you’ll also get some interesting statistics that show you who is contributing to your star status and blogging or chatting about you. This is important information that allows you the opportunity to engage and participate in the conversation about your new developments.
Let us know what your favourite online tools are!
How to Improve Your Online Presence and Get Found Online...
If you want to sell more houses locally, it's likely your goal is to be at the top of the list for most online searches. John Jantsch from DuctTapeMarketing.com has recently written an article on 5 Ways to Get More from Local Search. Here are some of the highlights that we think you will benefit the most from.
Real estate project marketing goals must include a strong online presence today, when a majority of prospective homebuyers turn to the Internet first when beginning their search for a new home. By following these tips, you can look forward to receiving more traffic to your website and to your sales center.
Increase your online presence by customizing your website, individual landing pages, online content, online profiles on social media networks, and more.
- Localize Your Website - Take the time to review your website. Add geography based terms to your page titles, footers, URLs and keywords on your website.
- Create Individual Landing Pages - If your business serves more than one location or community, create individual pages that feature content exclusive to each of these communities. Add information about local community news and events, nearby facilities, schools, churches, etc. Remember to customize your meta-tag descriptions and keywords in the HTML for each individual page! Local SEO Specialist Dev Basu provides very helpful tips on How to Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages.
- Online Content - When adding videos, photos, whitepapers about your company on sites like YouTube, and Slideshare and Flickr, take the time to add localized descriptors, links, and filenames to your content information.
- Online Profiles - If you haven't already done so, create a business profile page on social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. This blog article from SitePoint lists 20 Social Networking Sites for Business Professionals. Browse through to find those that suit you best.
- Get listed on Online Business Directories - Sign up with popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, Microsoft, and Ask.
- Tap into your Networks - Get your friends, associates, and happy customers to talk about you. LinkedIn offers testimonials and you can publish testimonials on your website. Create a Partners page where you feature and link to all the great people you work with from builders, developers, realtors, etc. Ask them to link back to your site.
In addition to the above, there are several real estate-specific directories that are worth exploring. These directories are typically focused on a specific location. There's been a lot of discussion regarding the importance of Craigslist and NewHomesDirectory.com is a directory service specifically for home builders. It positions itself well in the organic search rankings for keywords such as "New Homes San Diego" and "New Homes in Chicago" and their main objective is driving prospective purchasers to your project website.
Are you on the right Social Media track?
Save the date! Lasso's third webinar, in our 2010 New Homebuilder Webinar Series, is scheduled for Thursday, May 20th and features, Marketing Consultant, Carol Flammer.
Do you want more traffic to your website? Learn how to focus on the engine of social media marketing: Blogging. Find out if you're on the right social media track!
It seems everyone posts and tweets these days, to keep in touch with friends, family and clients. But is this all there is to social media? What are the BUSINESS benefits of using social media for home builders and developers?
Learning Outcomes:
- The benefits of blogging
- Which Social Media type will give you the best return
- The relationship between blogging and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Attracting and converting visitors
- Measuring ROI
- And much, much more...
Learn more about this complimentary, 30-minute webinar here:
Missed the past webinars? View the recordings of our previous webinars here.
How would you like to convert leads better than 97% of Homebuilders and Developers?
Lasso's first webinar of 2010 will feature acclaimed builder and developer consultant, Mike Lyon. Mike will provide an easy-to-follow roadmap to a successful Online Sales Program for New Home Builders and Developers.
Join Lasso and Mike on Thursday February 18th at 10:00am PST (1:00pm EST) and find out . . .
- The online sales formula and process for home builders and developers
- Online marketing tactics that are tailored just for home builders
- A detailed overview of the follow-up process
- How to track and measure the success of your program
- And much, much more . . .
Attend this webinar and you'll have the opportunity to win:
Learn more and register HERE.
I listened to a webinar recently where Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki were keynote panellists providing their insights for 2010. As part of the closing, they were asked to make a recommendation to the audience for 2010 . . .
- Guy quickly said ‘Never ask someone to do what you don't want to do".
- Seth challenged everyone to turn their TVs off for a week and read a couple of books. Learn.
Given it's Januar
y and it's a time when we resolve to do better, refresh our thinking or take new approaches, I thought it appropriate to develop a reading list both for myself as well as professionals for new home builders and developers who really want to learn more about online marketing. Traditional forms of marketing are costly and there is an accelerating shift to more online marketing options; which are often more effective in producing results.
So taking Seth's advice, the following is a list of books that are worth a read this year for anyone focused on marketing, sales or customer service whether its new real estate projects and developments or other consumer goods - the same principles apply.
- Linchpin: Are you Indispensable? By Seth Godin - (to be released at the end of January) - Godin shows that the key to being indispensable is overcoming the fears that hold most of us back. Seth's the most influential business blogger in the world, and consistently one of the twenty-five most widely read bloggers in any category. Anything written by him is worth a read and get's you thinking.
- The New Rules of Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott - How to use social media, blogs, news releases, online video, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly.
- Browsers to Buyers by Mike Lyon - Internet Marketing for Home Builders. Learn more about creating a successful measurable online sales program.
- Inbound Marketing: Getting Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs by Brian Halligan and Darmesh Shah - an actionable "how-to" guide to getting found via Google, the blogosphere, and social media sites.
- Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, Outmarketing Your Competition by Guy Kawasaki - From competition to customer service, innovation to marketing, he shows readers how to ignore fads and foolishness while sticking to commonsense practices.
- Social Media for Builders: It's Easier Than You Think by Carol Flammer - Social media expert Carol Flammer demonstrates the power of this new marketing medium through case studies and online outlet created specifically for the home building industry.
A final read is a free ebook by Seth Godin. It's entitled What Matters Now. It's a thought-provoking read and worth the time.
A Vancouver Real Estate Blog recently posted an interesting video showing how IKEA used facebook (successfully) and created an engaged and interested following.
Updated Comment: The link below has been removed. To watch the video created by Forsman & Bodenfors, go to YouTube or register and view online at www.creativityonline.com.
The question was posed - think Real Estate Project Marketing - how could home builders and developers use the same concept and see success?
- Do you see people tagging themselves in pictures of show homes and display centers? Telling you what they like best about the project. Which display suite suits their style? All their facebook friends would see the picture (of your project).
- Do you run a contest to let everyone who tags themselves in pictures have the opportunity to win something? (again, everyone in these people's circle of friends will see the pictures and learn of the contest). Imagine the traffic that could generate to your sales center!
Maybe you can think of other ways this can be successful. The point is traditional ways to market real estate projects may not be as effective today as they were in the past. Thinking social, thinking viral and thinking outside the box is important for success.
I showed this video to a friend who has not jumped on the social media band-wagon and has dug his heels in a bit when it comes to facebook - his first response when I asked him about the application to real estate was these people probably wouldn't necessarily be considered a target for the real estate project. Good point, but maybe one of the 130 friends that many of these facebook gurus have will be interested . . . it goes viral, there is no better way to spread the word.
What is the risk? There is risk, there always is, but if you plan it out and consider your options, you can minimize it and really have some fun. You may be surprised - this approach to marketing may just bring you a great ROI.
And, just to provide a little more ammunition for coming up with a facebook strategy - the fastest growing demographic group on facebook is the over 35 group!
Let us know what you think.
Guy Kawasaki writes one of the most popular blogs in the world and is a leader in social media and online marketing. He has written several books, his latest Reality Check - The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition. (It's worth checking out.)
In a p
ost earlier this year on the Business know-how blog, Janet Attard wrote about Guy's 10 tips for using Twitter. Guy is a huge fan of using Twitter to help spread the word about your business and to help potential evangelists find you.
As many existing new homes builders and developers have already discovered, Twitter is a fantastic way to provide updates and information about new homes projects and communities. As 2009 comes to an end and we begin a new year, your social media marketing strategy should be an important component to your 2010 plan and it may be time to take Twitter to the next level within your company. Check out Guy's tips below:
- Defocus. Don't ignore the A-listers, but don't focus all your attention on getting them to pay attention to you, either. The important thing is "who loves your site" and becomes an evangelist.Twitter is a numbers game, and you need to have lots of followers. You want as many people as possible to find and follow you so they can "send the message up."
- Automatically follow everyone who follows you on Twitter. "I think it's arrogant," Kawasaki said, "if you think you are worth following but don't think the people following you are worth following."
- Have a goal for using Twitter and a way to measure how you're doing at achieving that goal. He suggested one good tool for doing that is Retweetist, which shows how many times you've been retweeted. (A retweet is when someone repeats what you said so people they know will see it.)
- Make interesting tweets. Like most other things on the Web, one way to get people to love you is to post information they want to know about.
- Monitor what people are saying about you. You can monitor the tweets about you by searching for your ID, company name, industry segment and by watching @ replies.
- Save time with various social marketing productivity tools. One such tool Kawasaki mentioned is Adjix, which is a Firefox plug that makes it easy to post to Twitter from any place on the Web, and also shows how many times people clicked on your links. Others include Tweetdeck and Twhirl, which both provide ways for individuals to monitor Twitter, and CoTweet, which is a tool for companies that need to coordinate multiple people using Twitter (for instance a support team).
- Copy best practices. On Twitter that means looking at how other companies are effectively using Twitter to engage with their customers and build buzz. JetBlue Airways and Amazondeals were two good examples of Twitter use he mentioned.
- Be willing to "squeeze the trigger" on Twitter. One way of doing that -- one that is somewhat controversial, he suggested -- is to set up searches for things you'd like to get known for, and then automatically tweet a response when that search term comes up in a tweet. The tool he likes for doing that is TwitterHawk, which not only generates the automatic response, it also remembers who the response was sent to so you don't keep spamming them with the same response whenever they mention the topic again.
- Make it easy to share. Add a Share on Twitter button to your Website.
- Be willing to take the heat if you use Twitter as a tool. People will say you are a spammer, that you aren't using it right. And for that, Kawasaki has invented a new acronym: UFM. It stands for UnFollow Me. If you don't like what he is tweeting, he says, just UFM.
Paul Gillin is a technology journalist who has worked almost exclusively online for the past 10 years. He advises marketers on how to establish an online presence and optimize their use of social media. He is the author of a book called Secrets of Social Media Marketing - how to use online conversations and online communities to turbo-charge your business! (A current favourite business book.)
With respect to setting up a social media marketing plan, Paul refers to the age-old question: What's the return on Investment? He admits it's true that it's difficult to calculate ROI for social media as many of the metrics are undeveloped; but he counters that with a different type of ROI - Risk of Inaction. In the case of setting up a blog, facebook business page or Linkedin group, the cost is pretty negligible and the risk is insignificant.
We're seeing many real estate builders and developers enter the online social world - announcing projects and providing updates on Twitter, executing great targeted ads on facebook as well as developing blogs. They all provide potential for lead generation for new home sales as well as assist with search engine marketing.
Risk of Inaction can apply to many areas of business. In times when the economy is in turmoil and consumer confidence is at a low, perhaps it's time to make some changes and do things a little bit differently. So next time, you have to think about the Return on Investment for something, think also about the Risk of Inaction!