Property Ad Guru » Generating Buyer Leads

Shameless Self-Promotion: Getting Noticed Online

Alice Allan — Sun, 16 May 2010 23:12:52 +0000

With almost every real estate agent claiming to be the best and most experienced in their area, choosing an agent can end up little more than a guessing game for buyers and sellers. So how do you make sure you stand out to these (often confused) potential customers?

To begin with, it pays to be original. Whether you’re writing a detailed online profile or simply filling out your Twitter bio, steer clear of overused phrases such as “one of the most experienced agents in Sydney” or “knows central London real estate.”

What potential customers want to know is, exactly how much experience does that Sydney agent have? What does that agent actually know about central London? Be precise and you will immediately encourage more confidence in your audience.

Being honest about your abilities goes hand in hand with being precise. After all, if you overstate your qualifications or experience level, chances are that will become obvious as soon as you start to work with a client.

An over-emphasis on resume details is another potential trap for agents promoting themselves online. You’ll naturally want to highlight your professional qualifications, and buyers and sellers are probably interested in them to a degree. But this interest pales in comparison with their need to be sure you understand their location. The trick is to balance out details about your professional life with just as much (or more) information about the area you cover.

As with any content you publish online, it’s worth having one or two people check over it before putting it on display. This will help you catch any spelling and grammar issues, and possibly prompt you to tweak your message to make it that much more appealing.

No related posts.

How to: Create a Buyer Register

John Hart — Tue, 04 May 2010 23:27:27 +0000

An extensive customer database, built by encouraging potential buyers to register their details with you, is an excellent tool for three reasons:

1. Listing

When going through the listing process, you are able to tell sellers that before undertaking a huge marketing campaign the first port of call is to contact all those buyers you have on your register who may be interested in a property like theirs.

If your register of buyers is more extensive and up to date than that of competing agents, you then have a competitive advantage. Tell buyers that you can be in contact with these prospective purchasers by the end of the day if they list with you.

2. Keeping advertising costs down

If you are in a market where obtaining vendor paid advertising is difficult, having an extensive buyers list you can readily tap into could see you sell property faster and at a lower cost to your agency.

3. Buyers may be sellers too

Registering potential purchasers early enough may be beneficial in sourcing new listings. People often start to look around for a new property before putting their own home on the market. Creating a relationship with them is your opportunity to impress early. For more on this, see our post Buyers are Often Sellers Too.

How do I capture buyers for my register?

You can implement functionality on your website to encourage and capture interested buyers. Things such as newsletter sign-ups, competitions, and property alerts. For a look at how best to set these up, check out our article on calls to action here.

Other ideas for gathering buyer details include:

- Allocate banner advertising for your suburb on a property portal to drive buyers to your site for registration.

- Advertise in your window and any other media, and encourage registration when any contact is made with new people, whether by phone or at a property inspection or auction.

- Develop and promote a Home Buyer’s Guide to use as a lead generation tool and ensure that buyers are required to register their details before receiving a copy. You can promote this on your site and in all advertising and marketing.

There are multiple opportunities for getting people interested in what you do. The challenge is to capture their information and then use it wisely. Don’t over-promise and under-deliver! If you commit to a weekly newsletter, don’t miss your publishing date. If you promise to send out newly listed properties, make sure you do so.

Finally, ensure that you never ever pass on buyers’ details to third parties or anyone who might spam them. Once you have customer details you need to treat them like gold and keep them as up to date as possible.

[Image: olathehomes.wordpress.com]

Nurturing Your Leads Part 1: Turning Leads into Real Business

Referral Programs that Actually Work

Alice Allan — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 23:57:55 +0000

As we learned from a recent survey by international property news website globaledge.co.uk, some agents find it quite difficult to change their online marketing habits, even if they know their strategy isn’t as effective as it could be.

The agents surveyed told globaledge.co.uk that customer referral programs were the most effective way to generate leads, yet only 37.8 percent of those surveyed actually used them. So what’s stopping these agents?

Perhaps it’s the impression that building a successful customer referral program is too complicated or time-consuming. But the fact is, if you have an email database of past customers, you’ve already got the raw materials you need to get started.

While it’s not particularly hard to implement a referral program, there are a few ways in which companies from any industry can slip up. So before you send that email, take a minute to ask yourself these questions:

What is it about you that’s worth recommending? When you pitch your referral program, remind your past customers what it is that makes you stand out as an agent. The temptation here is to focus only on your sales record, but don’t forget to mention how much you know about the local market.

Is the reward worth their effort? Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. If what you’re offering in return for a referral isn’t enough to get you excited, you can hardly expect anyone else to be. What would you like to be offered if you were the customer?

Is there more than one step involved? If the transaction involves more than simply “tell someone about our agency and we’ll give you X”, you could be setting yourself up for failure. Let’s face it, even a customer who was pleased with your service isn’t going to spend more than a minute trying to understand your pitch, so make sure your message gets straight to the point.

Needless to say, the best referrals are the ones that take place without any effort on your part – the unprompted recommendations that happen because you were just that good to your customers. Still, it never hurts to give people a little incentive.

[Image: blackstonepinless.com]

No related posts.

Finding Advocates, not Just Customers

Alice Allan — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:08:09 +0000

Any advertising – be it online or otherwise – generally focuses on a single goal: encouraging someone to make a purchase. For real estate agents, we could tweak this slightly and say the goal is usually to generate leads.

But if we consider this simple formula for a few more moments, another objective comes to mind: building a reputation as the go-to agent so that those who are familiar with you become your “brand advocates”.

A brand advocate is simply someone who is impressed enough with your brand that they recommend you to someone else. Beyond great service, there are a few steps you can take in the digital world to get people on board as your advocates.

Step one is to figure out where potential advocates might be lurking. This is one area where social media really comes into its own: jump on Twitter, Flickr, or Facebook and it’s possible to find whole communities discussing topics related to your business.

Michele Madansky, vice president of corporate sales and research for Yahoo!, summed up how important social media can be when she told clickz.com:

“The Internet has irrevocably changed word-of-mouth. There’s no turning back. Social media is woven into [advocates] daily lives as well as their purchase processes.”

This new word-of-mouth culture means getting it right in the social media realm is crucial. So once you find an online group that’s right for you, resist the temptation to jump straight in with a sales pitch. Instead, start by tracking what people are saying to find out more about what they really want.

Now that you have a handle on your audience, it’s time to create something worth telling them. This is where we need to reiterate the importance of great content. Remember: content doesn’t have to come in the form of the written word. Competitions, survey results, or a gallery of enticing neighbourhood photos can be just as effective in drawing people in.

Once you have something interesting to offer, it’s time to join the online conversation. But do it carefully. marketingvox.com puts it perfectly when they says that “not trying too hard is key”.

“There’s a stronger impact when you do it wrong in social media than when you mess up in a TV commercial,” Stan Joosten, innovation manager at Procter & Gamble, explained to marketingvox.com. “[I]f I threw a dinner party and then tried to sell you Tupperware afterward, you’d never come back.”

Put simply, creating brand advocates means going a few steps beyond the usual sales pitch. It’s about defining what people want, and giving them an experience that prompts them to give you that valuable mention in return.

Finding the Real Value of Social Media

Going Local for Leads

Alice Allan — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:03:08 +0000

In a recent guest post, Ryan Hinricher said agents need to define their niche market to stand out in the online marketing game. It’s sound advice when you think about it – finding your niche, and owning it, gives you a much greater chance of becoming the agent who stands out when a buyer hones in on a certain suburb.

So, how do you promote yourself online as the expert in your chosen niche? Plenty of real estate portals offer ready-made platforms encouraging this, from zillow.com’s Local Experts section to realestate.com.au’s Local Voices website. But these are not the only options.

Once you’ve defined your own area of expertise, another strategy is to seek out websites that are focused on the same area. Then, get in touch and see if you can organise an exchange of content for a link back to your website, or even just a by-line including a mention of your business.

Of course, online social networking is another part of the puzzle when it comes to positioning yourself as a local real estate expert. The trick here is to focus on what you love about your niche when tweeting, updating Facebook, or commenting on a blog.

While you can get away with slipping in the occasional listing, it’s important to balance these with updates that show how engaged you are with your local area, to the point where your friends and followers associate your name with the place.

Of course, don’t forget to ensure all your “real-world” advertising – things like window displays, flyers, and your shop front – include all your online contact details. Over time, these three steps should go a long way towards establishing your reputation as the local real estate expert.

No related posts.

Looking for Realtors to Test a New Application – ListGlobally

Simon Baker — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:13:31 +0000

The team at Classified AdVentures (owners of Property Ad Guru) has been working hard on a new product called ListGlobally. This application allows agents to advertise their listings on market leading property portals around the world.

For example, an agent in the US or Australia can up load a listing and have it appear in the international section of such market leading sites as Rightmove in the UK, Enormo, Immobiliare in Italy, and Immobilienscout24 in Germany. Over the coming months ListGlobally will be adding more partners to its distribution list.

Not only is this a great way to promote your listings to an international audience, it is also a great tool to differentiate yourself from your competitors when marketing to potential sellers.

If you would like to be a guinea pig and help us test the application for free, just go to www.listglobally.com and click the link on the home page to register for a free trial. Once we receive your request, we will be in touch via email with your login details.

Google Real Estate – Should Agents Bank On It?

Simon Baker — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 03:57:04 +0000

The news just over a week ago that Google was “entering” the UK/European market has sent the share prices of Rightmove and Seloger into a tailspin. Seloger dropped by 9% while Rightmove has plummeted a whopping 17%. Seloger has since recovered to its pre-news price while Rightmove continues to be significantly down.

So let’s look at what happened, will the property portal landscape change and is this impact on the share prices is justified.

An article by the Financial Times (Dec 2 titled “Google set to enter UK property market”) seems to have set the cat amongst the pigeons. The article stated that Google is in talks with British estate agents and that “experts” say that an entry by them to the market could pose a serious threat to existing property websites. The article didn’t talk about what Google was going to do and Google didn’t comment. So there is really not much to go on. So the only guide we really have as to what Google may do in the UK and Europe is what they have done in Australia.

Google “entered” the Australian market 6 months ago (July 2009) when they made it possible for agents, brokers, franchise groups, and portal sites to place their listings on Google Maps. When a user does a search on Google Maps (not the main Google search) for real estate, Google plots the houses in its database on the maps and users can then click on the various dots to see if they like the houses and then are driven back to the advertiser’s site.

At that time, there was a similar uproar and many were predicting the death of realestate.com.au and domain.com.au and the REA Group share price dropped nearly 7% from $5.90 to $5.50. However in the 6 months since the announcement by Google, the REA Group share price has increased 60% to $8.84, the traffic to the site has increased from 4.5m UB’s in June 09 to 5.4m UB’s in October and analysts are predicting an additional 20% revenue growth for the REA Group in FY 2010.

In August, PropertyPortalWatch wrote about the challenges for Google knocking over the market leaders. Here is the link to the article called “The Challenges for Google Real Estate”. All of these still hold true.

Many hope that Google will be the saviour from the “big bad” commercial property portals and deliver free marketing to the agents. However this is a simplistic view and underestimates the challenges Google faces. The challenges include gaining enough listings, maintaining their quality, driving traffic to the maps area, and ensuring the interface is attractive to consumers.

Even if Google is successful in addressing the above, they will only be delivering clicks to the agent’s site not email leads. The agents will need to invest more in higher quality sites to convert the clicks to leads. This, of course, comes at a cost. The old adage holds true, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

It will be interesting times and if I was an agent, I would be putting my listings on Google. However, any clicks I get from Google should be supplemental to my existing online marketing strategy and not replacing my use of established portal sites.

Tech Trends from the NAR Conference: Part 6 – SMS and Email Yard Signs

Simon Baker — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:47:13 +0000

Welcome to the sixth in our series of technology trends from the NAR Conference held in San Diego, California from the 13th through 16th November.

In the previous installments, we wrote about realtors having a mobile presence, the continued existence of video and virtual tours, low cost websites being offered to realtors in the US, the use of local information on realtor’s sites, and the rise of listing syndication.

In this second last installment, we look at the rise of businesses offering listing information delivered to your handset after entering a code from a yard sign.

The advertising and promotion of a house is all about generating leads from both buyers and sellers. The usual methods for generating leads are to advertise the listing in the paper or online and then collect the phone based or email based leads as they come in.

One method for collecting leads that made its debut around five years ago is to promote a special code on a yard sign and then potential buyers can SMS this code and receive back details of the house. However realtors who used this technology when it first appeared more often than not claimed that they didn’t receive too many leads.

However, with the rise of the Internet browser on mobile phones and the increasing 3G coverage, these applications may be coming of age and providing agents with another method to collect leads.

At the NAR Conference, there seemed to be a dozen or so providers of yard sign SMS and email technology. These providers allocate a special number to each house and then when this number is SMS’d or emailed, the providers quiz the MLS and return detailed information about the house to the phone.

If a consumer uses this approach, they are immediately providing the realtor with a phone number that they can use to follow up the consumer.

Of course this approach only works if someone is outside of a house and is interested in more details about that house. The approach also falls over as if someone has a browser enabled phone, they can also just open a browser and quickly search the realtor’s website for the listing – thus saving the cost of an SMS.

While this technology looks and sounds sexy, I am still sceptical about the true efficacy of the approach and whether the realtors will ever generate enough leads to warrant the investment in the technology.

Two of the providers showcased at the NAR conference were txt2look.com and mobilerealestateid.com.

zillow.com: Photos Make a Dramatic Difference

Alice Allan — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:50:10 +0000

Earlier this year, US real estate marketplace zillow.com published a blog post detailing exactly which qualities led to good listing performance. Their data showed exterior home photographs, as well as specific neighbourhood details, attract the most attention.

Now, zillow.com has followed up with data that shows the dramatic effect photos have on the traffic a listing receives.

Director of broker relations Sara Bonert writes that a listing with just one photo will get 75 percent more views than one with no photos. Five photos cause a 170 percent increase in traffic over no photos, 10 photos cause a 275 percent increase, and 20 photos bring in 350 percent more traffic.

zillow.com uses the data to highlight their recently added photo display function that exposes additional photos when they are hovered over with the mouse.

The statistics are no surprise to propertyadguru.com. Check out our advice and tips on making the most of property photos, along with our tips on how to make your listing stand out.

AgentWorld Moving to iPhone

Alice Allan — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:50:14 +0000

AgentWorld, the US website that aims to connect buyers and sellers with agents, says an iPhone application is in the works.

Licensed real estate agents can become members of AgentWorld for free and post public profiles, photos, videos and blog entries to the website. Members can also create “buzz” by posting mico-blogs about recent sales, new listings, open houses, price reductions and local market information, along with new designations and skills they have acquired.

A recent press release quotes co-founder Tyler Kraemer as saying the forthcoming iPhone release will allow agents to post their real estate news directly from the application.

It seems AgentWorld is gradually becoming established as an information source: the release also states that many AgentWorld profiles are now appearing on the first results page of Google searches for an agent’s name.

“This is extremely valuable to agents, who really need to have those top results point to something they can control and something that promotes their image and reputation,” says Kraemer.