Realtor Marketing Ideas
I recently published a post on Active Rain about SEO for property videos.
YouTube is owned by Google. Google is the largest search engine on the world. Google wants to deliver YouTube videos in their search results.
Read more here http://activerain.com/blogsview/4819994/show-up-on-page-one-of-google-for-your-listing-address-with-youtube
Stay tuned for more Active Rain Posts.
Chris “CJ” Hays
#CJ4marketing
Real estate websites, in and of themselves, don’t generate leads. Traffic funneled to a website with quality conversion tools will generate leads. You can have the best website in the world but if you are not getting traffic, your website is equivalent to “a tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it”.
I have chosen this subject today because there is confusion in the marketplace. I see Realtors asking about websites in the various Facebook real estate technology groups such as Tech Support Group for Real Estate Agents, Lab Coat Agents, Tech Savvy Real Estate Agents, and What Should I Spend My Money On, just to name a few.
When asking people for their opinions on which website company to go with, you really need to understand the qualifiers so that you can compare apples to apples. You have a number of categories:
Sites Provided by Your Brokerage or Franchise Brokerage – As a new agent with a minimal budget, take and use every tool your brokerage throws at you. With a smaller brokerage, you may simply have a bio page within their website. With the national brokerages, you will always be offered a website through the brokerage which will have all of your data, listings, and the office listings. Usually these sites will be free or you will pay a small monthly fee for their use. You would register a domain and point it there. The disadvantages might include not having control over your personal branding, not having a blog, and YOUR listing pages might not show up in the search engines. Lastly, if you ever leave that brokerage, you will be starting all over. You don’t own your site.
Sites Provided by Marketing Companies – When you are looking to obtain a website, you will hear people speaking about such companies as Boomtown, Zurple, Tigerleads, Commissions Inc., just to name a few. These really aren’t website development companies. They are lead generation companies that provide their clients websites as long as they maintain their marketing agreement. If you have a marketing budget and want to hire a company to deliver leads via a managed pay per click campaign (PPC), it is a great idea to invest in these tools. If you go with a PPC lead generation site, you should still maintain your own branded website that will develop an online history. If you leave that marketing company and you are starting all over, you don’t own your site, but these companies generate leads. There are also companies that generate listing leads and they may have containers tied to their marketing plan.
Do It Yourself Sites – You are a Realtor and your expertise is in the real estate industry. In addition to all of the usual old school marketing you are doing, you are trying to be tech savvy. Some of you ARE tech savvy Realtors and manage your time wisely, but there are still times when you should hire a professional. More times than not, when I am looking at DIY sites, the IDX is integrated incorrectly. The listing pages are not indexing. You have a bunch of worthless widgets. I see the value in hiring professionals, which is why I have never thrown up a sign in front of my house that says “For Sale by Owner”. And WIX? A huge mistake!
Super Cheap Sites – You get what you pay for.
Sites You Are Renting – Have you ever used the real estate marketing term, “Why Rent When You Can Own”? On the one hand, it can be cost effective to rent a website, but at some point you are going to move on. History is everything. Google loves history. Google loves expansion. Google loves to see blogging every week. Google wants to upgrade your site at some future point, and you will not be starting over.
There are some companies out there that might lead you to believe that you own the site they are SELLING you because the setup fee is $1500.00 or more, but there is a good chance that site is on a shared site network and you are actually renting it. They host the site and provide some proprietary calls to action (CTA’s) and maybe their own IDX. If you choose to leave their hosting, you might be surprised to hear that they can’t just hand you the site. Or maybe you want to create a custom page using unique JavaScript, only to be told that they do not allow this on your/their website. Some of our new reputation clients have sites that do not allow our feedback code. I am not saying rental sites are bad. I have, in fact, sold hundreds of these sites with another company and they were a great value. If you have no time to blog, create content, or to create custom listing pages, however, this might be for you.
The Bottom Line
When you ask other real estate agents for their website recommendations, understand the different types of sites.
If you are just looking for leads, owning a website without traffic and CTS’s that convert is nothing more than a billboard. If you want leads, consider a lead generation company or managed PPC directing prospects to your container, providing it converts.
I recommend OWNING a WordPress website if within your budget. The search engines love WordPress. It is easy to create content and add pages. The sites have blogs and there are so many tools (Plugins) that can be used for marketing.
We provide many options for our reputation clients. Internally and for a reasonable budget, we would acquire an Agent Evolution template. This is plug-and-play ready for IDX Broker, and we would customize the buildup as a Dev-Partner. If we saw a need that required a major custom build, we might collaborate with Virtual Results.
There are many options within your control.
CJ Hays – Follow me on Twitter
#CJ4marketing
Inman News just featured a luxury real estate video produced by our client, The Daftarian Group. I wanted to pull the curtain back a bit with regard to the production.
Paul and Lili Daftarian of the Daftarian Group, listing brokers of this property, had a vision to communicate luxury, elegance and lifestyle within a short video that would keep the viewer to the end- 2:45 minutes later.
Lili, as the Director of this shoot, enlisted Ray Shak of Shak Cinema as her Director of Photography. He sat down with Lili to storyboard her vision as a real life concept. Ray’s job was to capture this concept from the air and the ground with his crew of 4 videographers. Their ultimate goal was to sell the house and not the car or other objects that help tell this story. Ray stated, “The focus should always be the house. The story kept the video progressing and therefore did not lose the viewer’s attention.”
The still frame prior to the start of the video communicates there will be a story within this video, increasing the probability that the viewer will hit “play”. Most luxury videos I have seen are nothing more than shots of the home from cameras mounted on drones, UAV’s, steadycams, dollies and jibs with no human lifestyle interaction. I feel storylines sell houses.
Within the first few seconds, we see the professional actors Lili hired, Jerry and Veronica, leaving a luxury mall located in the area. This was prior to the store opening in order to shoot in a controlled environment. The car belongs to Paul, so it was always available at any hour.
The next part is really what got my attention when I first saw the video. The UAV shots following the car blew me away. I had never seen that in a luxury real estate video before. Lili stated that it was important to communicate the proximity of the house to the Pelican Hill Resort. The house is a half mile away and is located within the Pelican Hill community. The challenge was that Pelican Hill does not allow filming of the resort. Through the shots of the car driving to and up Pelican Hill along with the wide UAV shot above the house, it clearly communicated this.
Once they get home, and to minimize the time it takes to show off the house, the couple separates, featuring the master bedroom, kitchen, and the amazing game room where they rejoin to share a refreshment outside.
There was one shot that was not planned in the original storyboard. There is a scene that starts at 1:24. As the camera moves through, the couple are standing in the doorway where the UAV leaves west and turns around, looking back to see the couple standing in the doorway from afar. Ray and his crew originally shot that as an experiment. In reviewing the shot, it looked so amazing, they reshot that part of the scene intentionally.
The sellers are still living in the house and Lili did not want to disturb their surroundings, so she provided all of the props that were used in the shoot.
Cameras Used: Red Epic, Red Dragon, Sony A 7s
Interior Shot platforms: Steadycam , Ronin and sliders.
Single Property Website www.sixsunsetharbor.com
Daftarian Group www.daftariangroup.com
Ray Shak www.ShakCinema.com
First off I want to give a shoutout to Matthew Bushery at Placester.com who recently wrote a great article on Yelp.
Today’s post is inspired by a Realtor I spoke to this afternoon as I was going over their reputation report. Other then their awesome Zillow reviews, the Google footprint was a bit weak. And their Yelp page showed 7 reviews with a 2-Star average rating. There were “18 other reviews that are not currently recommended” below the line.
This always upsets companies or business professionals reviewed on Yelp. Using this image below, I will lay out a response that will hopefully help you to understand a bit more about how Yelp works.
When I Googled this Realtor, the 2-star Yelp review was staring me in the face. I know they felt harmed by Yelp for hiding 18 5-star reviews and publishing four 1 star horrible reviews. Setting aside the fact they will never be able to terminate their Yelp account, I wanted to offer some insight.
Two of the negative reviews stated the reviewer actually had completed real estate transactions with this agent. I had suggested that if these two reviewers were making this up, the agent could ask their broker to write a letter stating they never had clients with these names which could be submitted to Yelp for review.
On or about 9/16/2012, this agent or somebody representing them sent out an e mail to a mix of prior clients, friends or family letting them know they established a Yelp account and they were asked to leave you a 5 star review.
Starting on the 16th and continuing through 10/24/2012 a total of fourteen 5-star reviews came in to Yelp. That is unnatural and is a big red flag. Then when you see that most of these reviews have had zero activity in the past three years, based upon their algorithm and tracking, Yelp assumes they asked all of these people to leave them positive reviews which is against their guidelines.
The “zero friend/one review” accounts under the line, most likely signed up to leave them a review and then immediately left that review, never to be heard from again on Yelp. Yelp tracks that. You simply cannot ask non-Yelpers to leave you reviews or they will be buried.
Now IF any of the inactive Yelpers became active, there is a chance this activity might get the reviews after 10/24/2013 published
I was going to suggest getting an additional letter from the brokerage or providing transaction documentation tied to each name of those below the line for submittal to Yelp, but if it was within the dates I mentioned, it probably wouldn’t matter because so many reviews came in within such a short time-frame. You might be able to do this with the three reviews from 2014/15 and get those upgraded.
They have all of these reviews from 2012, most of which don’t count. Six from 2013. Two from 2014 and only one this year. This shows they had a push in 2012 and then sat back to allow natural review postings which is why these four one star reviews are published along with the reviewers Yelp activity.
A correct strategy at the moment the client is doing the happy dance, for all transactions moving forward, is to mention you are building your online reputation and to find out if they are active online reviewers. It really would not take many to push you up. But they have to be Active Yelpers.
They want active Yelpers to be motivated to find the vendors they do business with and leave honest reviews on their own. You also can’t just sit back “hoping” you get reviews. You have to be proactive. You need a plan. We have that plan.
CJ Hays @area51testpilot #CJ4marketing
On August 6th, Inman News published an article called, “Online agent ratings may be inflated, but they’re still valuable”, written by Teke Wiggin, Technology Writer for Inman. The article seems to be focused on Zillow reviews. I will go point by point.
“Realtors have become restaurants” is the name of my seminar, so when I saw the opening paragraph of the article stating that consumers were using third party review systems for restaurants, hotels, and product purchases, I was pleased to anticipate the body of the article.
YES, consumers are using third party review systems like Yelp, Trip Advisor and the like to look at the credibility of vendors or products. However, while a foodie may use the Yelp app via their phone to look for a quality restaurant, the majority of consumers are first using the search engines to look for (Google) the name of the business, business professional or product. Consumers are Googling Realtors.
What do they see on page one of the search? Do they see gold stars? Do they see only Zillow? Do they see a Realtor’s Yelp account? Does the Realtor have a Google business page? Do they have Google ratings? Seriously, when a consumer Googles a real estate agent, they had better see multiple review systems in place. Having reviews across multiple platforms increases the credibility of the business professional.
A statement is made in the article that online agent ratings may be inflated. What does this mean? The article seems to tie this statement to the fact that Realtors are only asking the really happy consumers to leave reviews, thus skewing the online rating of the agent. Yes, if you as an agent are guiding ONLY your happy consumers to leave you positive reviews on Zillow or elsewhere, then a consumer may not be seeing an accurate representation of your integrity and professionalism. With that said, most consumers won’t realize this.
Another statement reads, “The reason why negative reviews are few and far between may be because many people who aren’t thrilled with an agent’s performance don’t feel the need to broadcast their disappointment”. I totally disagree. You have heard variations of actions consumers will take depending on their satisfaction with a product or service. They might tell a few people if they’re happy, but they will tell the whole world online if they are really upset!
The question is whether or not the agent is tech savvy enough to have third-party review technologies in place, other than Zillow or an internal survey based system. Yelp can be a little intimidating for agents that don’t know how to use it correctly. You can embrace Yelp to your advantage. I have clients getting 10 solid leads a week from Yelp, but that is for another day.
Google Business is also a huge factor. It is safe to assume that if the largest search engine in the world has a review system, you should probably pay attention to it.
When I had first read the headline that “agent ratings may be inflated”, I thought the article had to do with the fact Zillow reviews can be gamed. And in fact, there are methods to game almost every review system with the exception of Yelp. As a former Fraud Examiner and having worked many online fraud cases, a number of odd agent reviews were brought to my attention which I investigated. I saw review numbers that did not add up.
I know, for instance, when we load a client’s customer list into our CRM, which sends out an email asking them to click on a link to leave an online review, we will get a 25% return. That 25% does not come easy. There is an entire trickle system in place to get the customers to leave their online reviews. I then compare the percentages I am aware of to numbers that seem excessive. When I see rating numbers that are equal to or even exceeding the known transactions of an agent, the red lights go off. I know how it is done.
If you are a Zillow client and you focus on Zillow for your lead generation, then by all means focus on your Zillow reviews, as you will stand out within their marketing system. Same goes for Trulia and Realtor.com. But please open or claim your Google and Yelp pages. I may not click on your website or Zillow, Trulia or Realtor.com page to see your reviews.
About a year and a half ago, the 7-pack for residential Realtors in the US was removed from Google. It still existed for commercial Realtors and for some reason, residential Realtors in Canada. The 7-pack was a tool provided by Google when searching for businesses. You search for a business type and a map would show up in the upper right side of the screen, tied to 7 businesses marked from A through G. You would have to have a Google Business page, formerly known as Google Places, combined with some SEO, a website and hopefully some Google reviews. I personally think the 7-pack was removed to harm SEO for residential Realtors in the US. Six weeks ago the 7-Pack for residential Realtors came back. This was awesome as many of our clients who, via our process were located at the top of the seven-pack.
Yesterday I was demoing our reputation marketing services to a luxury agent in California when I noticed there were only three businesses located on page one of Google where there should have been seven. I had incorrectly assumed because the community was so small, I was only seeing three.
Today this article comes up online called, “Google Local Shakeup: 3-Pack Only, 7-Pack Removed; Addresses & Phone Numbers Gone“, by Jennifer Slegg. Wow, as I was basking in the fact the 7-pack came back, it is now the 3 business “Snack Pack”. You can read the article for the details.
An organic marketing target seven spaces wide would be better but three, but this is enough for us. These business listings are organic in nature and we have a plan that works. Call Us.
“Realtors have become restaurants”. This means consumers are Googling realtors like they would a restaurant, looking for their online ratings and reputation. People want to go to major directories that they trust and rely on everyday for reviews about products or services before they buy. What your prospect sees in the first 5 to 10 seconds in the search engines is EVERYTHING.
Things have changed for realtors online. Back in the day (not long ago), realtors, teams and brokerages dominated the organic search results. Most of the consumer property searches were taking place on realtor or team websites. Now they are using Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin and Trulia for their searches. Even longer ago, the consumer was spending more time on your website reading your content. Today they are looking for houses. They want to see that you have testimonials, but the majority are not actually reading them in detail. In fact, when I was in the real estate website business, we would always have a testimonial page that had a two sentence snippet with a button that said “read more”. Nobody ever clicked on the read more link because they just want to know you have testimonials.
We know realtor reviews are important. We knew this over a year ago when Sean McCrory launched Agent Reputation. Many clients later, the subject is coming up more and more at real estate technology events and national franchise meetings. Reviews were discussed at the T3 Summit and T3 experts released a report on realtor reviews. Placester published an infographic from survey results. I agree with most of the results, and I get the fact that when you are paying Zillow for marketing, it is wise to have as many Zillow reviews as you can get.
I have also heard, “Regain control from 3rd-party review sites”. It has been suggested to use an internal survey system to create internal ratings and reviews that people can see when they go to a realtor’s website. I love surveys to help the agents learn how to better serve their clients. We have surveys, but that is not the focus of this post. Some of the “teachers” out there are promoting INTERNAL reviews because everyone is scared of BAD reviews. They are scared that somebody might go sideways on Google or Yelp. That is OK, providing you have enough GOOD reviews. Having no reviews can be just as bad as negative reviews. People want to see reviews on a major directory that they trust, before making a buying decision. Surveys have shown that if you do not have at least 6-10 positive reviews, many potential clients will not trust your service.
A very high percentage of your prospects, especially listing prospects, are Googling you. What they see in the first 5 to 10 seconds, on page 1 of the search results, is everything. There should be 5 gold stars everywhere and not just the review systems provided by the likes of Zillow and other real estate vendors. It is pretty safe to assume if the largest search engine in the world has a review system, you should be paying attention to it. All realtors should have verified Google business pages so that you have an opportunity to get on the Google 7 Pack (that just came back for residential realtors).
Most agents know they need to focus on agent online reviews. However, as an agent, you need a method to facilitate getting the third-party reviews. We do that.
Let’s get back to the subject matter. If I just want to Google you, how am I seeing your internal reviews? Do I have to assume they are on your website and then go to your website and then click on a link to see them? What if you don’t have a website or are using the free site your franchise or broker is providing you? What the search engines see is more important than your INTERNAL system.
If you have one, how really satisfied are you with your reputation vendor? Are they facilitating your reviews out to the third party sites like Google Reviews and Yelp? Are you in the Google 7 Pack? Call us for a free testimonial commercial.
Recently our Director of Marketing Chris “CJ” Hays, was invited to do a live interview with talk show host Danny Vegas, on WCBM. CJ talks about reputation marketing, and the importance of online reviews when it comes to generating more real estate leads. If people are going to list their home with you they need to trust you. Online reviews are like recommendations, and they need to be on the right websites, and highly visible.
