Online marketing has really become a necessity and an obsession for many American entrepreneurs. Everywhere I go, to every meeting I participate, there is some slant toward promoting your business on the web, with a lot of tools and a lot of cool tricks. Yet one needs to adapt it to the classic activities that are performed offline that remain very important for many segments.
A short video section of the presentation given by me and Daniele to the agents of Century 21 Grant Realty.
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This is particularly true for real estate, where people often go online to study what is available, but then need to go necessarily offline to complete the purchase of the property. In this type of business, like in many other similar business where you have the need to connect with real people, the professionals have to balance their time between organizing and keeping their traditional offline promotional activities and then adding the Web and particularly the social network to multiply the effectiveness of what they do.
This is particularly true for Realtors who, on one side, need to keep a very specific approach to their business also due to the constraints of the license, and on the other end cannot miss the boat of social media. Therefore me and Daniele Bogiatto, my business partner and friend, are putting together a pilot project for integrating web and real estate specifically for Florida Realtors and the project will be carried forward in the next months through the fundamental support of Terry Ogburn, business developer of Century 21 Grant Realty of Florida, Inc. (see my previous post for a short recounting of how I run into Terry).
We have already begun the work with Karen Selby, the broker of Century 21 Grant Realty who is particularly keen at finding new ways of attracting and retaining agents, by giving them more effective tools to do their work. The project will then soon be extended to all the agents in the brokerage. Me and Daniele are both very excited about it as we have a true opportunity of translating everything we know of the Web in a very powerful nation like the US and particularly in Florida, that for some reason has always been on the forefront of innovation and has a very strong presence in Internet marketing.
Roberto Mazzoni
Tags: "Century 21", "Daniele Bogiatto", "Karen Selby", "real estate", "Realtor", "Roberto Mazzoni", "social networking", "Terry Ogburn", broker
Hola Roberto,
This post is of particular interest to myself I am a real estate industry service provider located in Panama. Demographics aside the real estate industry has a serious need for marketing savy to stay competitive.
To many realtors, it means either “prospecting” (i.e. knocking on doors or getting around Do Not Call laws to legally continue cold calling) or “advertising” (sending out lots of direct mailings and postcards and running
ads in newspapers).
Many realtors start off with calling and canvassing neighborhoods but soon become frustrated with how ineffective and time consuming the process is. (How many people do you have to talk o before you find an interested buyer or seller?)
They then turn to advertising in hopes that will bring in clients. Unfortunately, they never take the time to learn anything about their prospects’ needs and end up saying a generic message that sounds like “I’m No. 1, and I would do a great job if you give me the chance. Please choose me.” If a doctor or other professional ran those types of ads, would you call them? Probably not.
After a few months of failed advertising, many real estate agents turn to direct mail. Here, agents send out countless “Just Listed” and “Just Sold” postcards and fliers with generic messages – with a picture of a house and the realtor’s picture on it.
They say things like “Thinking of Selling?
Call me to find out how much your house is worth.” Yada, yada, yada. Perhaps these tactics worked at one time, but in today’s marketplace, every real estate agent repeats the same line and presents the same offer.
So this “marketing” cycle continues until the agent gives up or reverts back to other ineffective ethods in the cycle. This isn’t
marketing – it’s pretty much just a waste of your money.
Marketing is everything you do to create and retain paying clients. If you have any clients, you did some marketing to get them to do business with you – even if it was simply calling up a friend and asking for a favor.
Too much time has gone into marketing instead of doing what you should be doing SELLING. The answer is automate what you can even the followups and spend your time with the people who are buying.
Thank Paul, for you very eye opening and interesting comment.