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| A Quarterly Publication of the Raleigh Regional Association of REALTORS® |
October 2008 Issue
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About Us March Dates to Remember
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Get up to speed
with Internet marketing and don’t look back Let’s play devil’s advocate. You’ve held off on Internet marketing, because...? You’re doing fine with the tried and true. Obviously, your head in the sand is obscuring your vision. You think it’s just a fad. Is the dust – the sense of being left behind – starting to trouble you? It’s too complicated and you’ve been too busy to think about it. If you don’t get up to speed, you’re not going to be in the race. It’s not too late to trust your instincts – that guardian angel whispering in your other ear – and get on the Internet, where the home buyers are. According to Realtor.com – the top-rated real estate Web site – today a whopping 84 percent of home buyers start their search on the Internet. Realtor.com also reports that buyers are nine times more likely to find the home they purchase on the Internet rather than in the newspaper and 34 times more likely than in the traditional new home magazines. Relevance is next to godliness That’s a tall task, but not impossible. Savvy Internet marketers start by using solid database and direct marketing principals. Know who your customers are and what their needs are. Then segment into manageable “communities,” with like interests. “Anticipating what (customers) want and providing value at the right time, place and format is what is needed to win,” states Omniture’s Online Segmentation Marketing Guide. “When done well, segmentation and database marketing will make your customers feel content about having a relationship with you.” No matter what kind of segment you want, it should uphold the following:
Dina Griggs, GRI, e-pro, CRS, of Fonville Morisey segments visitors on her Web site, www.dinagriggs.com, using a “First to Know” feature. This gives home buyers visiting the site the option of receiving alerts on listings that meet their specified property, size, price range and location. They also can direct the frequency of the alerts. Griggs then sends e-mails with customized MLS property listings (not just her own) that match their criteria. In addition, those who register can create a personalized online account where they can learn more about properties of interest. A former computer programmer and systems analyst, Griggs recently was presented a Real Estate Online Marketing Award of Excellence from Realtor.com for consistently providing great marketing services on behalf of her buyers and sellers. Griggs’ Web site posts listings enhanced with virtual tours and photos, and provides useful home buying tools and information. It also keeps the online visitors on her Web site longer and returning. Backed by Realtor.com statistics and other industry research, Griggs explains that 96 percent of online home buyers are looking for properties, not real estate agents, per se. “They don’t want to know so much about you, the REALTOR®, they want to know about the property.” She stresses the value of video and abundant photos to showcase listings on the Web: “These days people are very visual.” She also recommends detailed property descriptions, giving as much information as possible. By displaying more photos, crafting better descriptions or adding a full motion video, more attention is brought to the unique selling attributes of a home, making it stand out from competing properties and ultimately helping to attract more qualified buyers, said Max Pigman, vice president of Realtor.com, in presenting the award to Griggs. Although Fonville Morisey has an in-house photographer, Griggs invested in a new digital camera with a wide-angle lens. She photographs the areas in which the listings are to give Web site visitors “a complete picture” right from their desktop. “The No. 1 thing home buyers are looking for when they start their search is a good neighborhood,” says Griggs. Her Web site also includes more than 35 links to community resources, such as news outlets, area attractions and cultural venues, www.ncreportcard.com for school information and local police departments. “Good schools and safe neighborhoods are important, so we need to give buyers a few Web sites that they can check themselves for this information,” says Griggs. Griggs notes that Realtor.com is the No. 1 Web site for residential real estate. Buyers and sellers spend
four times longer on Realtor.com than any other real estate Web site, she says. She also suggests posting listings for free on such Web sites as Zillow, Craig’s List and Google Base. “When I list a house, it’s on at least 25 Web sites,” she adds. Make it a page turner “The first real step to (online marketing) is to think about where you want to position yourself in the market,” says Tim Payne, president of Click Optimize Internet Marketing. “Then secure a good domain name. I encourage clients to find a domain name that actually matches a popular search term, such as ‘mikesraleighrealestate.com,’ so it shows up in search engines quicker.” This is a search engine optimization, or SEO, technique. If you haven’t heard the term yet, it’s an important one in the Web design world. Note that Payne’s example contains words that home buyers interested in Raleigh are likely to use in a Web search: “ Raleigh” and “real estate.” Including something unique and memorable, like your name, helps increase the chances that the domain name you want hasn’t already been taken. Payne strongly recommends using a professional for search engine optimization and marketing, where the goal is to design and maintain Web sites that please the search engine gods. The goal of search engines, like Google and Yahoo, is to answer requests for information that are relevant to key words entered by the user. The number of matches that result are in order of relevance, most to least, and can be pages-upon-pages long. If searchers can’t find what they’re looking for on page 1 or 2, it’s unlikely she will keep clicking to review the middle or last pages. Wikipedia, the online interactive encyclopedia, explains that Web search engines work by storing information about a vast number of Web pages. A Web crawler (also known as a spider) follows every link it sees to analyze the contents of each page and determine how it should be indexed. Influencing factors are titles, headings or special fields called meta tags, all of which can be designed into Web pages for SEO. It’s a fairly technical and specialized service provided by Internet marketing firms. Just beware that no company can guarantee placement at the top of a search, contrary to what some may promise, says Payne. After all, there’s only enough room at the top for a select few. Fortunately, perhaps, each search engine has its own unique search parameters that constantly change and are downright mysterious, even to computer geeks. So search results are relatively fluid, says Payne, which means there’s an opportunity for other Web sites to creep in at the top. He who hesitates is lost The challenge for online marketers today is to make sense of all that is now available to connect and build relationships with prospects and customers. There are new communication media, like blogs, podcasts and wikis. There are new data management and analysis tools to provide “real-time” information about your market. Like anything else, comfort level and skill rises the more you read about and put into practice what’s new. And there are lots of best practices from which to borrow. Just go online, and Google “internet marketing.” (Ketler, a free-lance writer living in Roanoke, Va., is also editor of Neighborhood Builder and Mississippi Builder magazines.) |
