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Today, my 70-year-old grandmother has an iPad.  Most pre-teens own a smartphone.  And the term “cloud-computing” is recognized and understood by a vast majority of the population.  Technology is such a ubiquitous part of our lives that most cannot comprehend or remember how to function without it.

Technology plays a comparably significant role for home buyers and sellers, who use the Internet, email, SMS, social networking, mobile computing – and many other technologies to improve both their lives – and the process of buying or selling a home.

Every consumer has some basic demands:

• Speed
• Convenience
• Choice
• Value Added
• Quality
• Service
• Discounts
• Information

Buyers expect a quick response from real estate professionals and quick access to listings of interest.  Sellers expect to know that their listing is online as soon as they have signed the papers.  Both buyers and sellers expect access to information quickly and easily.

Buyers want access to listings from the convenience of their computer or mobile phone while sellers want to be able to access their listing information and view any reports generated from it whenever and wherever they want.

Buyers want to be able to find listings from a website of their choosing, be that Zillow, Trulia, Google, etc.  Just as not everyone chooses the same flavor of ice-cream, not everyone searches for listings using the same website(s).

Virtual tours, downloadable listing brochures, and CMAs, are all pieces that add value to a listing from the buyer’s perspective.  Sellers see value added when their listings are distributed to as many places as possible.

Buyers want access to quality listing data, just as sellers want their home to be advertised in the best, most accurate manner possible.  This also ties in to ‘information’.  Consumers want access to feature-rich sites, and with as many details about a listing as possible.  Listings that display a single, grainy photo, with virtually no additional information are quickly passed over, regardless of their relevance to the consumer.

 Based on those demands, how does technology fit into what the typical consumer expects from a real estate professional today?

In an age when ‘technology’ means everything, and keeping up with the times simply means staying competitive, real estate professionals cannot settle for just ‘okay’.

So how does technology change your game plan?

There will always be a need for technology basics: a domain name, branded email account, and a web presence.  But what are the more specific needs of today, and more importantly, what will be the needs of the future?

Selective Online Marketing

The term “online marketing” is broad.  It covers everything from having a website, to advertising via email, to pay-per-click search engine marketing and search engine optimization (SEO), to participating online in blogs and social media channels.

Because online marketing encompasses such a broad range of activities, it is essential to select the ones that optimally enhance your business.

Is money best spent paying top dollar for a custom-designed website?  What about search engine optimization?  Do the DIY advertising options available out there such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads deliver enough bang for your buck?  There are no universal answers that apply to every agent.  Fortunately however, most online advertising options are fairly inexpensive and provide analytics to help determine the effectiveness of your efforts and your reach.  

Social Media Presence

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ – the list keeps growing, and will likely keep growing.  Once a means to share photos and connect with friends, social networks have been rapidly expanding their reach into areas of business networking, media, and communications.

The advantage of using social media platforms as advertising mediums is that typically the only cost is a little elbow grease.  Social media will continue to be a key channel for online marketing and advertising in the immediate future, and real estate professionals should look to this area for significant business growth opportunities in 2012 and beyond.

Generational and Niche Marketing

The preface to “Rocking the Ages” by J. Walker Smith and Ann S. Clurman states: “Understanding generational values and motivations has become essential because each generation is driven by unique ideas about the lifestyle to which it aspires.  And it’s these aspirations that determine the ways consumers spend and save their money.”

The book continues, “Marketers who use the principles of generational marketing to understand the factors that influence the values and buying motivations of consumers stand a much better chance of spotting trends way ahead of the competition and reaching customers first in profitable new ways.” 

Niche marketing may be equally important to a real estate professional’s marketing plan.  Since many real estate professionals focus on very specific market areas (e.g. condos, commercial, vacation, etc.), their applicable audience needs to be identified and marketed to accordingly.

No longer can there be a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing.  Get to know your audience and the various ways you can market to them.

Do More With Less

It seems like the days are getting shorter, or our time is filling up more quickly.  Either way, technology should help to increase efficiency, not over-complicate things.

Email, instant and text messaging, automatic listing distribution, social networking – all of these tools allow real estate professionals to quickly connect with customers and peers.

Here are a few key things to look for when shopping for technology and business solutions:

Flexibility

Mobile phone providers offer different package options to their customers for a very specific reason.  Not every person wants or needs all of the same features.  Some require a data plan, while others are happy with just a plain old telephone.  Some want call display, others call waiting, still others voicemail.  Mobile carriers are successful because they allow their customers to choose which features work best for them.

The same should be true of a real estate professional’s online marketing solutions.  Keeping up with the times means having the flexibility to choose the tools that work for each individual’s personal and business needs.  Gone are the days of being forced to pay for features that will never be used, all because “it’s part of the package”.

Online Education

Real estate professionals need to be able to further their education quickly, easily, and in small, digestible chunks.  What can be learned via online education?  Perhaps the answer should be, “what can’t be?”  Product demos, online marketing trends, industry trends – the list goes on.  Online webinars, learning platforms, and other mediums provide real estate professionals with the ability to learn affordably, from almost anywhere.  Taking advantage of these opportunities provides you with a needed competitive edge.

Automatic Listing Import

Time is money.  If real estate professionals are required to re-enter their listings multiple times to get additional exposure, value has already been lost.  Accuracy is also a concern when a listing is added manually to multiple sites one at a time.  Since technology should be increasing efficiency, real estate professionals need to research tools that will help them distribute their data to numerous destinations from one entry point.

Syndication

Exposure is a key piece to every real estate professional’s marketing plan.  Consumers want their listings advertised in as many places as possible.  Syndication is a key piece to the puzzle as it generates massive listing exposure at little or no cost.  Enhanced tools such as predictive marketing help identify the areas of interest to your audience and market to them accordingly. 

Control Over Listing Data

While syndication and listing exposure are important, significant value is lost when there is no control offered with regards to the flow of listing data.  Control should be provided to every stakeholder including agents, brokers, and MLSs/Boards/ Associations.  Reporting also needs to be provided to every level so each party can determine if the destinations to which they are distributing listings are serving their best interests.

Another factor to consider is data licensing agreements.  Make sure you are confident your technology and syndication partners are serving your best interests – what do they do with your data?  What is the licensing agreement?  Are you able to easily access their data agreements and terms and conditions statements?  Answers to these questions should be clear and easy to find.

Mobile Capabilities

Research suggests that the most valuable piece of technology is still the phone.  Today’s smartphone is portable, multi-functional, and easy to use.  Real estate professionals should be able to have access to listing information quickly and easily directly from their mobile device.

A staggering and increasing number of people are relying on mobile.  For the youngest generation, it is all they know.  The ability to deliver a seamless and enjoyable browsing experience on mobile devices will only become more important as the smartphone revolution continues to take root. 

Opportunity Awaits

While some have the time and desire to learn how to code and build their own tools for online marketing (including websites), the majority of real estate professionals view their time as better spent serving their customers.  For these, a full-featured, automated service that encompasses all of the above requirements is a must.

Some might be thinking, “Technology is not a new thing, this is the same information we’ve heard in the past.” And you’re right.  Technology as a whole is not a new concept.  However, effective use of technology is.  Many have chosen to jump on every technology bandwagon that has come around, without sitting down to evaluate its true value.

It is important to remember that no matter which direction a real estate professional’s online marketing plan takes him or her, effective use of technology should increase efficiency in the areas of workflow, listing advertising, lead generation, and contact management.  If the chosen solution(s) does not do this, it is time to re-evaluate.

To borrow a line from Bob Dylan, “the times they are a-changin’”.  The world of tomorrow is taking shape today, and now is the time to embrace change.  Adapting to the new world order can be a difficult task, but for the real estate professional who is able to stay in touch with the new breed of customer…vast opportunity awaits.

Marketing properties is where the magic is, and owners evaluating your services want to know that you can do this better than anyone else.

You’ve supplemented your traditional marketing plans with Syndication, an automated way to advertise the client’s home on over 50 high traffic websites and search engines, and promised to allocate a budget towards Enhanced Listings. Two very powerful marketing tactics proven to boost exposure to more online buyers, and that can generate up to twice as much interest in the property, or more.

But just in case some of your local competitors are up to the challenge, here is another one that has ‘wow’ written all over it. An idea that can make any wise seller sit up.

Boost your plan with a promise to create and launch an entire website just for the client’s property! Offer to give their property a home of its own on the World Wide Web. How much cooler value is there?

A dedicated website makes it much easier to find the listing on the Internet, enhances its presentation and bolsters its position on search engines. It’s important that the seller understands the relevance of this plan to the sale of their property. Emphasize the importance of search engine rankings and better presentation, as your seller may not be as Internet savvy and may not completely appreciate some of the ideas.

As well, explain that over and above online prospects, that many local buyers interested in the neighborhood typically drive around the area to physically check out inventory. That for this target, it’s inconvenient to stop to scan QR Codes or jot down the agent’s phone number.

Technically, this means that more drive-by prospects are likely to miss or forget the phone number, if they try to commit it to memory. The more determined would try various way to look up the property on the Internet or ask their agents to research it. However that is not as convenient for them, nor as promising for you. There are too many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ involved.

Your single property website idea mitigates these risks, hardly costs anything per property and is as easy to set up as 1 2 3.

When a listing has its own website with its own street address-based URL featured on the lawn sign rider, such as www.123edwardsStreet.com, it becomes extremely easy for driver-by prospects to recall. Encourage your seller to distribute that URL to friends and neighbords.

Single property sites also help to differentiate a property within a certain neighborhood, make the agent behind it seem like a star, and sets you up to capture more leads for your client, more quickly.

With high end single property website solutions today available for pennies per property and can be set up in minutes, the only thing that’s left is to get out there and seal that new listing deal.

A quick sale at the highest price possible is every home seller’s objective.

In your presentation, you’ve covered the local newspaper ad, if you still do that. The open house is nearly a uniform expectation, as is the mailer. And of course, the local broker and agent caravan.

Here comes the kicker. Differentiation, and punch.

In the first part of this series we explained how Listing Syndication, a free service, can help you to win new listings. Syndication is a key ingredient for any successful listing presentation pitch today.

The next piece of the puzzle, also within the realm of powerful property marketing, is enhancing your listings.

Enhanced Listings, sometimes known as Featured Listings, is a paid advertising option offered by many real estate websites and search engines. Compared to regular listings, Enhanced Listings are typically much more prominently and more nicely displayed. The strategy makes your client property stand out from the hundreds of local homes listed on the same site.

Enhanced Listings also come across as better properties, which promotes more interest and typically leads to more clicks. One popular real estate website promises over 100% more clicks with their showcased listings option. How is that for another great bullet point in your listing presentation? Doubling views? Such statistics can go a long way towards getting the home seller’s attention and appreciation for the value you bring.

There are a plethora of options to feature listings online. Quite reasonable too, in the grand scheme of things. Such placements can typically be purchased for between $25 and $100.

If your budget allows, boost your marketing plan with an enhanced advertising component. It can definitely strengthen your pitch and help you to stand out. Bring along some glossy sample ads from a few sites you would advertise the client’s property on. If you prefer to use a laptop instead, research and open a few pages in advance, to avoid any Internet connectivity mishaps.

At worst, if an Enhanced Listing strategy helps to net you a new listing, the investment in time and money would have been worthwhile.

If you have your own website and/or blog, you might have trouble keeping the content fresh. Fresh content helps your SEO, and also gives visitors a reason to come back to your site at a later date to look for updates.

You can add valuable content to your site(s) in several different ways—you can create new content from scratch, you can curate content by bringing already published information in front of a new audience, or you can generate content by communicating with a community by starting and adding to existing conversations.

Creation
Creating content from scratch is probably the most obvious way to get content, but also the most time consuming and mentally taxing. In order to create content, you often spend a lot of time researching before you begin writing, and sometimes even deciding on a topic is difficult.

Curation
To curate content is much less work. When you find an article or some piece of information that you think would be useful to our audience, you can extract some quotes or statistics from the original work, then explain what you learned or found to be relevant within the article—as long as you give proper credit and link to the source. This allows you to “piggy back” on the content written by others. A good example is how NAR does their daily news here.

Communication
Getting people to communicate and hold a conversation is the third way to generate content. This can be done by telling people your thoughts about a particular topic, and/or asking questions. People like to share their opinions, they just need to be asked first sometimes. It is also important to not just start a conversation then leave—it is helpful to nurture the conversation by maintaining a voice in the discussion.

What mix of the three C’s do you use in your own content strategy?

You approach a store or restaurant and immediately form an impression that is pivotal to whether you enter or not. You haven’t even set foot in the place yet! Once you’re in, many things come into play to reinforce your initial perception, neutralize it or negate it. If the store is well managed and the hosts manage to further the image they portrayed on the outside, through the setting, environment and overall experience, you might just buy and even come back again in the future and maybe even bring a friend. If on the other hand you get disappointed, you might leave and go somewhere else across the street.

We’d all agree that the ideal scenario that is a storefront is very appealing, inviting and makes you feel good about approaching the place. When you walk in, you are greeted in a like fashion and the environment is pleasant, clean, refreshing and up to date.

But it takes work to keep a place up like that every day. Consistency in the way the store and the merchandise are presented is paramount. But also the quality of product, service and staff knowledge. Everything works together to build a brand that makes people want to associate with. It’s part of running a successful business.

The same applies to your online storefront. Yes, your broker or agent website.

Consumers today come online to research and shop. The perception they garner as soon as they land on your home page is, like a brick and mortar storefront, paramount. Once they are in, quality content and information, and quick, courteous and knowledgeable service will be expected. An engaging environment with useful information that reassures of your knowledge and focus on the customer is yet another feather in your cap. Else, there are many other places they can go to for their need. That would be your competitors.

As real estate professionals, many may question how frequently a website should be updated or revamped, and fresh content added or updated. Whether design elements should often be upgraded or left alone.

Think of it as a store. A business that you run. Always fresh content, busted bulbs quickly replaced, broken or stale items removed or replaced, always up to the image you want to portray, always compelling and a stand out compared to your competition. As for the storefront and signage, clean kept and updated every once in a while to stay with the trends and maintain a fresh up to date look is also important. That’s your overall website design, colours, font and so on.

It’s simply good business sense.

But to build and maintain a sparkling image for your brand and website takes some work. Ideally, a bit everyday of the week. And once in a while, a major overhaul. So aim to login to your site daily if you can, read through and update some content with new data and information, or add some new photos, or articles, tours, neighborhood news, buying and selling tips, and respond the messages. Also add new services or capabilities if you have access to them.

Put yourself in your prospective customer shoes. What would attract them to your store? It’s all about them. Think and act that way when it comes to your website and suddenly you’ll find more people coming over to visit. They may also tell a friend or two about you.

That’s just how it is.

If it’s not Jeremy, it’s Alicia or Rob, or Jennifer. Everyone sells homes and they spend thousands each year repeating that message over and over in their advertising. You see that message on bus benches, local papers, postcards and business cards. The problem is, home sellers already know that. In the mind of a consumer, every real estate agent sells homes. It’s what they do for a living.

How do you differentiate yourself in your marketplace? What is the unique promise that the market should associate you with and that is going to make customers call you instead of the next agent? What is your most powerful strength as you see it and as told by past customers? Is it negotiating skills, is it speed of sales, is it your local network. 

Even if you happen to be the number one sales person in your franchise this year, building your advertising with that being the main proposition can leave you scrambling next year unless you retain the top spot again. Meanwhile the opportunity to build a sustainable promise would have been pushed out an entire year, with an extra year’s budget to go along.

Advertising works best when the promise it delivers i) hits a hot button, i.e. delivers a relevant, compelling benefit, ii) is something you can deliver on better than anyone else and can show for it, and, iii) it is consistent so that the association of the promise with you and your brand builds in your audience’s mind over time and eventually becomes synonymous with you and your service.

One of the hardest parts in creating a compelling selling promise is going about it methodically. It takes time, patience, consistency and a very objective mind. And when years later people think of you first whenever the subject of a top negotiator comes up, you would have hit the advertising home run.

Competitors would be hard pressed to try and compete with you in the same context. If they try, they’ll be seen as a ‘me too,’ and lose credibility

Find your ‘unique’ strength, make sure ‘you can deliver on it’ and push that message ‘relentlessly’.

For more on the subject, here are two articles we published over the past year about unique value proposition.