Why Should We Advertise Online?
When we talk about effective advertising today, who would have believed just a few years ago that print ads don’t even come to the table.  We simply advertise in print not to attract buyers, but to please sellers it seems.  Our company has reduced our print spend by 70 percent over the past 5 years, and we plan on reducing it further this year.

Print Ads Don’t Work
If you worked for my company, you would have heard this phrase for the past 5 years as we have been battling agents and managers who previously insisted that we need to be in print.  Since our tracking system tracks every call now,it’s no surprise that the story is crystal clear…print ads don’t work.  The greatest ammunition that we can use for this discussion is the statistics that we have accumulated.  When you show the agents the cost per customer in each of the mediums, online kicks ass.  That’s right, I said it…it is such an overwhelming fact at this stage of the game that print vs online shouldn’t even be talked about.   Our records show that we now spend half as much for customer acquisition than we used to and we are attracting twice as many customers. Now, there can be some error here due to the inappropriate recording of print customers, but I think that it’s not far off because the managers that wanted to keep print alive made sure that each print lead was entered into our system.

If you can’t measure it, don’t do it!
One of our mottos since the economic downturn forced us to be better brokers is “If you can’t measure it, don’t do it.” Online advertising is a lot easier to track as you can analyze visitors that were referred to your site, the number of times your brand was viewed, the number of leads received, and the number of sales that directly resulted from specific advertising.
We learned that more pictures and better pictures resulted in more leads and better placement on certain sites and we were able to increase our picture volume to increase success rates.  We could never figure this stuff out with print.   We’re getting to fine tune our ad placements online and reallocate important funds to effectuate more leads and sales. These times demand that we are more accountable for our expenditures.  We are transparent to our agents and managers and are constantly trying to do more with less.  We have succeeded the transition online and we will continue to get better at it through measuring better with the tools that our online vendors are providing us with.

Attracting Buyers through SEO
Search Engine Optimization and positioning.  Our seo strategy is to make sure that we are always in the top three search results in each market we serve.  If you were to search on google today for Brooklyn Real Estate, I’m sure that when you find Fillmore.com in the top three.  Along with that result, you will see Trulia either right above us or below us depending on the day.  You might see a few other sites pop up on the search results page also.  I like to be the logical choice for all those who are looking for Brooklyn Real Estate, and they will get to us either by clicking right on Fillmore.com, or when they click on Trulia.com we will be prominently featured.  Even if the consumer would choose sites like hellobrooklyn.com you would find that fillmore.com will be very visible on that site.   We want to be no more than 2 clicks away from the consumer when they are looking for a home.  Again, it is our responsibility to engage the consumer when they come to our website and to manage the experience while providing excellent customer satisfaction.

Fillmore’s customer satisfaction team has already begun to monitor the consumer experience levels that are provided by our agents.   We realize that there is a lot of room for improvement and we will soon unveil a system whereby those agents that receive exceptional satisfaction ratings will benefit by receiving more customer leads.  By giving the performing agent more leads we are hoping that our conversion ratios will grow exponentially.  There is just no room to tolerate the low level of service that the consumer has come to expect from the real estate industry.

Zillow or Trulia?
I believe that the question is not Zillow or Trulia, but rather how each of these sites along with others can help you gain more customers online.
Zillow: Zillow seems to be a great tool for home sellers today.   We make sure that our agents are aware of the Zestimates before they go on a listing presentation.  I personally follow the trending reports on  Zillow and believe that there is some value here for us as an industry.  Recently, we have been receiving buyer traffic from Zillow and I am hoping to explore ways to attract more buyers and sellers to our company via Zillow.

Trulia: Trulia helps us to attract tons of buyer leads for our company and these leads result in real sales volume for us.
I also believe that sellers are going on to Trulia too to see what competing properties might be going for on the market.  When the seller explores, they will find that Fillmore has an abundance of inventory and will hopefully select us as the right firm to represent them as well.  We  are exploring the new self-serve ads that Trulia is rolling out to help us attract more sellers…and that’s what our agents are looking for after all.

I’ll let you know how our new online marketing ventures pan out.  If you have any suggestions, I would welcome them here.
I will also keep you up to speed as to how our tracking and conversion plans are working out for us.
As the conversation continues, we will further explore the procedures that we employ to improve customer satisfaction and our efforts to help raise the bar in the real estate industry.

As you can see, we’ve only just begun…and we have a lot of work to do.
I’m ready for the challenge….are you?

Let me know if I can ever help you on your path of excellence.
If you have any ideas that you would like to share, please feel free to discuss here or contact me.
John
800.528.MORE