May
08
2008
To gain an edge in today’s overly competitive market, we have to think beyond the usual marketing avenues of the past. As Web 2.0 develops and evolve, it has created some new technologies and marketing principles that could be applied to the real estate market.
Crowdsourcing is leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. Applying the principles of crowdsourcing can be a very powerful tool to accelerate the sales of new construction properties.
To illustrate. The best marketing tool of any new development project on the internet is it’s website. Developers spend a large investment time and money to create an amazing website/marketing tool. Currently, the website can only be used by a handful of people (usually the in-house sales team) as a marketing and sales tool.
Realtors will not send their clientele to the new development website. With the in-house sales team’s contact information on the website, there’s a huge potential for the Realtor to get cut out of the transaction. With only a few people using it, the website’s market penetration is very limited and thus the development’s exposure to buyers is limited.
Imagine what would happen if that new development’s website was provided to the 2 million+ Realtors in the US and the millions more around the world to use as a marketing and sales tool? It would exponentially accelerate the development’s exposure, reach and velocity of sales. Real estate agents are the crowd!
With the invention of Agent Shield’s Web 2.0 technology, the crowdsourcing principle can be applied to accelerate the sales of new construction properties.
Apr
30
2008
In a soft market where the volume and velocity of sales have slowed down significantly, a lot of companies/people are cutting back on their marketing. Right now is the time to do more marketing! If we focus on marketing now, we can captures more market share because there’s less competition. Although we have less dollars to spend on marketing, the key is to spend those dollars effectively and understanding (not guessing) how those dollars are producing (ROI).
In developing a marketing budget and strategy, there are a few things that we should do.
- Try new marketing avenues
- Focus on attracting internet buyers/online shoppers
- Track and quantify every effort/dollar (ROI)
Try New Marketing Avenues: If sales are sluggish and we are not receiving results; try something new! Using the same marketing avenues and efforts will produce the same results! We all understand this but for some reason, maybe because it’s comfortable, we continue the same marketing efforts but expect the results to be different. Get out of the usual routine.
Focus on attracting internet buyers/online shoppers: With 90% of real estate buyers already shop online for homes, we need to focus our marketing efforts to attract these online shoppers. We should allocate a larger percentage of our marketing efforts/budgets online.
In the real estate industry, online shoppers are our ideal clients/demographics (especially if we are looking to accelerate the velocity of our sales). Here are some interesting statistics (thanks to Dakno Marketing).
- The average internet buyer spends an only 2.2 weeks working with the Realtor to find their home. The traditional buyer spends almost 6 weeks!
- Internet Buyers only previewed an average of 6.65 homes while the Traditional Buyer previewed 21.7.
Buyers who use the web as an important part of their buying process are usually savvy and have already invested the time to educate themselves. We can spend less time educating and more time selling.
Track and quantify every effort/dollar (ROI): Unlike expensive traditional media (newspapers, magazines, billboards, painted busses, etc), online marketing is track able and quantitative. It’s tracked automatically (avoid the human error associated with asking “how did you hear about us”) so the data is accurate. Every online marketing effort (paid or free) is 100% track able. If set up correctly, we can use Google Analytics (which is a free service) to calculate our actual ROI. Understanding which marketing avenues and campaigns are effective is one of the most important factors of any marketing.
What online/marketing avenues have worked (or not worked) for you?
