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.

Every Realtor® wants more leads, but may not know how to get more leads.  When people are shopping for homes, what do they want to see? You got it, listings, lots and lots of listings. IDX gives you the ability to showcase all of the MLS listings on your site. Since people want to see listings, they don’t mind being required to register to view listings, which means a win for you (a lead) and a win for your client (the chance to see lots of listings).

Here are a few tips that can help drive traffic to your IDX search:

1.  Direct all visitors to the IDX search.

People have a short attention span, especially online; they want to see listings right away. Put your IDX search on every page, or make sure every page has a link to the IDX page. The most important place for your IDX search to be is your home page, to ensure it is the first thing your clients see.

2. Use other online tools to direct people to the IDX search.

Use your drip email campaigns to advertise that you have an IDX search (make sure there is a link). Tweet it, Facebook it, and blog about it – whatever you do, just make sure it reaches as much of your intended audience as possible. You differentiate yourself from your competitors by having an easily accessible IDX search.

3.  Utilize the Quick Search Option (URL Builder).

Give your clients the ability to search for homes quickly. For example give them pre-made search criteria, “Ocean Front Properties”, “Properties between 125,000-175,000”, “Foreclosures”. Engage the visitor by giving them a quick option, and then they will want to keep using it.

4.  Include a Call to Action to register and give them reasons to do so.

Include a list of benefits as to why someone would want to register for your IDX. For example:

• All of your searches are automatically saved, and you can go back and review them later!
• You can add any property to your favorites so you can quickly find it later.
• Receive VIP status when you register, including market snapshots, and listing notifiers, etc.

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?

Video is being lauded by the industry as the next big wave. Not long ago, it seemed daunting to think of creating a video and posting it on your website. The tools were expensive and the ROI (return on investment) was not too obvious. Internet download and streaming speeds weren’t supportive either.

With small form factor high-definition video devices like Kodak’s Playtouch, taking great video and sharing it on the Web has become extremely simple and inexpensive. More consumers are flocking to online video sharing venues for information, further proof that film is more engaging than plain text. Google has also begun to place higher priority on video content in its rankings. During the month of October alone, Americans watched over 42 billion online videos!

So real estate agents, take note.

How to tap video in your marketing is an intriguing challenge. There are numerous ideas to consider. But whatever you create, heed the 60 second warning. Shortly after that threshold, consumer attention begins to wear down. Get into the two minute timeframe and you’ve likely lost the audience completely. Of course unless you’ve got some ‘intriguing’ footage media would pay millions to get their hands on.

Whether you choose to create a video to welcome your website visitors, neighborhood information and news videos, home staging tips or client testimonial videos, the 60 second guideline is ideal. It’s just the right amount of time needed to deliver a message with focus, while retaining your audience’s attention.

There is also a strong argument for 45 and 30 second clips. As you practice creating short, focused videos, you’ll get better at cutting the length of your clips for certain types of videos.

How to make the videos compelling is the next opportunity. Besides practicing with lighting and sound to ensure you have solid quality, content and flow play a critical role in the convincingness department.

Large consumer product giants figured the 60 second machine ions ago. Just like in advertising, some tricks and rules apply also to marketing videos. Through years of research and testing, corporations that largely use advertising to sell products figured how a 60 second film should be structured. They apply the same format pretty much in all their advertising campaigns and run them hundreds of times each day on TV costing millions of dollars each year. Because they deliver results. Whether the ad is in 60”, 45” or 15” format, the structure is invariably the same.

While there will be many and much more creative minds than mine out there, here is one story idea you might want to practice with. Irrespective of what your video is about, the points to remember are those that pertain to the structure and flow of the video. It’s the success formula.

Where relevant (may not apply to a property video tour), such as a staging tips video, use the first few seconds to highlight a problem. An issue that the audience associates with and relates to. Second, introduce your solution. It might be you. The home sales pro with tons of staging experience. Thirdly, share some tips on how to effectively stage a home. The next scene should be of a beautifully transformed space. A before and after shot also works great as an option, because it offers a benchmark and tangible proof for the audience. It demonstrates that you are capable of transforming their place into a more saleable home.

To go further, you could close with a secondary, powerful benefit scene. Like a happy client shaking hands with you right next to a ‘sold’ sign. Alternatively, a scene of you delivering the last lines of the video clip with a big smile, next to the ‘sold’ sign, will also do.

To recap, here is your ideal video flow:

i)               problem set up / a relevant scene where in the course of a typical process, an obstacle or challenge is encountered
ii)              introduce the solution
iii)             visualize the solution / product at work
iv)            show results / proof that the product or service delivers
v)             compelling benefit visualization

Start by writing down your copy. Once it’s ready, read it aloud. Edit it and re-edit it until it flows right. Next draw up a scene sketch above each sentence, to capture the visual flow as you envision it for your video. Decide on the shoot location and line up any models you want to include in the clip.

Try using this formula in your next video project and let us know how it turns out. Maybe a clip to convince your website visitors that you can make their home search experience easier and stress free. We’d love to share it with our community on our message boards. And of course, if you have questions along the way, drop us a note.

“I am at the airport.” “I am eating a burger, and I’m wearing a red shirt.” “I’m here, there, seeing this or that, and planning a trip to Hawaii.”

If you’ve ventured into Twitter world, you’ve surely come across meaningless tweets. Who cares about what you do minute to minute? Unless of course you’re Kim Kardashian or George Clooney and have a ton of followers who care less about the quality of what you tweet and just want to be in on – I don’t really know what.

On the other hand, as a business communication tool, Twitter can be extremely useful and powerful.

Twitter has gained tremendous acceptance and adoption, possibly because it is also easy to put to work. In its own right, it is a far more effective tool than many other media for the dissemination and collection of information. Because people are increasingly on Twitter, it is becoming a force to reckon with and should be seriously considered as part of your communications arsenal.

To put things in perspective, as at August 09, 2011, 100 million users were reported active and logged in daily to Twitter, with many doing so on mobile devices. The mobile use of Twitter is increasing by 40 percent each quarter, and 400 million unique visitors pop into Twitter each month. That’s up 60 percent from just the start of the year.

Question is, how do you best use Twitter in your business? Today, public relations and marketing are some of the most obvious opportunities. Even within this realm, the room to deploy the tool more widely is huge.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from this article is that Twitter should have a far more substantial role in any business. While it’s virtually certain that no one can yet claim absolute expertise in the application of Twitter in business, there are a lot of opportunities to consider, if we go beyond the obvious and ask the right questions. In fact, Twitter has it’s own fantastic resource for businesses, which can be found at: business.twitter.com

Let’s take marketing for example. Depending on how your business is structured, a few sides of marketing could include publicity, product promotion, member / client communication, market research, product research, competitive intelligence, and customer care. While it is straight forward to think of Twitter when considering external announcements, such as to promote a new member benefit (if you are an association), an event, a technology roll out or announce a new listing, it is only by looking at the business from a holistic fashion that we can discover new areas where Twitter can help. If you are in a highly competitive business and need to monitor the competition, Twitter can help to more easily track competitors’ moves. It’s not only smart business, but a significantly more efficient way to go about it. New information comes right to you. You can also forward any new findings of substance to your teams, by email, with a couple of clicks. To see a great example of an organization putting Twitter into action, check out the account of the California Association of REALTORS® (CAR).

Customer care and product / service improvement is another area that may not be a very obvious candidate at the outset. Create a track to follow your customers. You’d be surprised at the feedback you can gather. Information that can reinforce and highlight the right areas for improvement, or unveil serious issues with ample time for you to initiate corrective action. It also allows you to gather data for presentation to your management, which helps to back up your recommendations with actual market feedback. You can also tap Twitter to deliver useful information to your customers, to make their experience more meaningful and satisfactory. Tip-of-the-day anyone?

A good approach is to examine business pains and objectives from a macro point of view. Don’t limit yourself to parts of the business that come to mind first. Have you considered human resources (HR) for example? It’s another important part of business that can have its own Twitter account to help with things like recruiting, tracking local events and announcements, and disseminate useful messages and re-tweets to staff. How about using Twitter to enhance your positioning and finding out who you’re really up against? Try tweeting “What name and traits first come to mind when you think of hiring a Realtor in ‘neighborhood name’?”

If you are a real estate agent, Twitter is surely one of the tools you want to be able to publish information through, directly from your website. Let’s call it more free, easy advertising, at the very least.

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