Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
We have made no bones here at RealtyBizNews about pointing out real estate professionals engaging the web with "less than" perfect effectiveness. The fact is, 99 percent of Brokers could probably care less about the web. Given the trend toward digital, they simply know digital branding must be addressed, somehow.
The same hold's true for many other business sectors. Marketing, advertising, any communicative business out there has great incentives to do more than pay lip service to social channels, email, conventional advertising, and so on.
The image of a father, his wife and kids looking over his shoulder as he sits at the PC, all gazing gleefully at that future home - the potential streaming out of their eyes - gleaming dreams of home ownership, the family dog running around the picketed fence yard - this is a nice fantasy. But, for most of your websites (yes, you reading this) no sooner have Bob, Carol, little Ted, and infant Alice landed on your site, than disgust or disinterest have sent them surfing away to someone else's. The same holds true for your Facebook and Twitter, to say nothing of your cookie cutter direct mail outreach. There you sit, Jack on the rocks in hand, spending the proceeds of last year's commissions at the 19th hole - wondering, assured even, that the good times will roll again. Unfortunately, it ain't happening.
Take a look at the infographic courtesy HubSpot below. Try and integrate the reason contained within, into your marketing (yes agents need to do marketing) schema. Come on, what else have you to do? The phone cannot be ringing off the wall.
In our experience, not only have agents failed to engage adequately via the web channels, but when they do reach out, it is often with the wrong tone or mechanism. As the graphic suggests, it's not mechanized marketing clients mind, it's the lack of value, the lack of human element, the incorrectness they see. Getting "good" and useful information is never a bad thing, people thrive on their need to know. Unfortunately, the real estate industry is one of the worst in the world for professionals "glued" to antiquated ideas of business.
In summary, in order to survive these difficult times, professionals have to think inside and outside the proverbial box all at once. This only makes logical sense, just like our cool graphic shows - tried and true, meets the dynamic world of real time interactions. Are your channels all clear? Or do your customers need tin foil and rabbit ears to pick up your grainy signal? It's the 21st Century peeps.
Top image courtesy © James Steidl - Fotolia.com
