Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Today, there is certainly no shortage of online marketing ideas. Because real estate is always about location, location, location, Local Google AdWords are a natural fit in your marketing toolbox. Squeeze pages and quality online content are vital tools for gaining listings and marketing properties along with your services. The bigger trick is first getting eyeballs on your squeeze page to capture email addresses by linking to that value added content such as a special report, free market analysis, or other marketing materials. Google AdWords can be the first link that motivated buyers and sellers follow.
There is nothing wrong with marketing on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media but it’s not the same as Google AdWords and a different approach is needed. Social marketing is about interesting stories and targeting specific demographics. AdWords marketing is about Intent. With social marketing you might post a story highlighting a neighborhood you specialize in with an article about a great bakery that has the best Sunday morning cinnamon rolls. With AdWords, you get your name and link in front of people at the exact time they are looking for the services you offer. Your name and link pops up at the top of the search page when they type in something like “affordable condos in Miami”. Clearly, their intent is finding what you are offering.
You’ll need to figure out your best marketing approach once you grab their eyeballs. You might take the person to a website featuring condos currently for sale or you might use other keywords to attract new listings. You could also take them to your homepage or a squeeze page where they give you an email address that you send a special report comparing/contrasting floorplans or whatever you know works best for your clientele. Through Google Analytics, you can run multiple campaigns using split testing to determine which does in fact work best. If you’re just getting started with AdWords, do your own search for the key phrases you think will work and see what ads already come up. If one particular ad keeps reappearing (daily, weekly, and monthly), you can be certain that phrase is working well.
Local Google AdWords marketing is also known as Geo Marketing (geographical). This helps keep your marketing costs low while closely targeting your audience at the same time. By using key phrases such as “Miami condo” or “Miami South Beach condo”, your ads only appear on the screens of people typing those words in (in the case of Miami you might also get some tourism traffic). The point is that you only pay for the advertising when someone clicks on your ad (pay per click). You’re only competing locally rather than internationally. The cost of pay per click is based on a bidding system. If you were selling widgets internationally, you would be bidding against thousands of distributors and the cost could easily be $15 or more for each person that clicks on your ad. By being local, you’ll have considerably fewer competitors (none in many locations) and you might be able to place ads for pennies per click.
This is only a primer to point out what Local Google AdWords can do for your marketing. You’ll need to become familiar with terms like “exact match”, “broad match”, and “negative keywords”. There are also other strategies you’ll want to try such as targeting specific zip codes. You can also schedule your ads to only run on specific days and times of the day. The bottom line is that even if only 100 people search on your local keywords each month and only 2 follow your link, that $5 or $10 investment will lead to thousands of dollars in sales.
What can you about Local Google AdWords that will help others? Please leave a comment.
Author bio: Brian Kline has been investing in real estate for more than 35 years and writing about real estate investing for 10 years. He also draws upon 30 plus years of business experience including 12 years as a manager at Boeing Aircraft Company. Brian currently lives at Lake Cushman, Washington. A vacation destination, a few short miles from a national forest. With the Pacific Ocean a couple of miles in the opposite direction.
Excellent stuff. I would add the value of retargeting ads. For example, you get a click to your squeeze page but the viewer does not complete the form. If you have a retargeting ad in place it will drop a cookie on the visitors browser and your Retargeting Ad will follow them to other websites. Great way to bring traffic back and make your PPC campaigns more cost effective.
Ben