Articles

Building an Effective Marketing Budget
Top Five Challenges Facing a New Agent Online

Top Five Challenges Facing a New Agent Online

For the lucky few, starting a real estate business is as simple as announcing yourself to your rolodex packed with wealthy friends, family and associates. For the rest of us, it's time to get real. To build a real estate license into a career, you have to be able to approach it just like anyone starting a business. You must:

Understand your market
Have a story about yourself that matters to your market
Be able to tell that story effectively

It's on this last point that I typically consult with new agents, particularly regarding their online strategies. But what we usually find is that their online presence can become a key element not only of telling your story to the market but of understanding that market and developing your story. There are five key challenges facing nearly every new agent that must be addressed in order to be successful online.

To be Found
To be Contacted
To Develop a Brand
To Add Value
To Measure Success

To be Found

Building a real business will require you to go beyond your family, friends and associates. To make that happen, at the risk of being obvious, people need to find out about you. I divide the marketing methods you will use into two general categories: offline and online marketing.

Offline Marketing

As my area of expertise is online marketing, I won't deliver a treatise on the subject of offline marketing but I will cover some basics. The fact is most agents need both online and offline marketing to work together to be successful.

One of the areas I'll highlight in offline marketing is the mythical 'Word of Mouth.' We all know it should our biggest source of business and we know that we get it through giving great service to our current clients. But is that it? Serve well and wait for the referrals to come through the door? Absolutely not. In sales you have to ask for the sale, right? Well you also have to ask for your referrals. All the time.

This is the first area where your online and offline marketing come together. Not only should your Web site provide information for current and past clients to make it part of the value you provide, it should ask for referrals! Ask visitors to your Web site to recommend this site to others or use the inquiry form as a way to pass a referral.

The same principle of online and offline working together should be present in all of your offline communication. Your business cards. Your property brochures. The ad you have painted on your car. Do they all promote your Web site? They should. Involve people in as many ways as possible and give them every opportunity to hear your story.

Online Marketing

Being found online can be alluring but, in many ways, more difficult than being found in the real world. In the real world, you are going to be visible to people (unless you stay in your house all day which I don't recommend.) Your properties and advertisements will be visible. But there's just no guarantee that your Web site gets found. It is estimated that there are 11.5 billion web pages out there. A quick Google search for "real estate" turns up about 270 million results. How on earth can you improve the odds that people looking for what you've got will find you?

There are three main ways I'll discuss here: links, online ads (or paid searches) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO.)

Links. A link is simply text or an image on someone else's Web site that users can click to be taken to your Web site. Who would be so nice? Well, your broker should be, for one. Other business relationships, such as law firms, or banks could be another source. Also, you may have community connections or memberships with organizations that would be willing to provide a link on their site. The best thing about online visitors from these sources, they may already have a connection to you and be likely to do business with you.

Action:
Review all your business and community relationships and ask for a link to your site
Online ads (or paid searches.) Many Web sites and search engines will allow you to place ads on their Web site with a link to yours. Some of these ads, primarily on Search Engines, only require you to pay when someone clicks on the link to your site (pay-per-click advertising.) In that scenario you indicate to Google, for example, how much you are willing to pay for your ad to appear on the results page for searches for keywords you choose (as a sponsored search.) Google and others also provide ads to other web pages, also based on the keywords found on that site. If you select your 'keywords' wisely — matching them to the areas you work in and the services you provide — you can try to find the right people with your ads.

Another way of doing this is to advertise where your market likes to go. Where does your market go online? Probably a lot of the same places you go. If you don't visit local sites very often, the next easiest way to find out where they go is to ask them — the same way you might ask them what local newspaper they read before placing an ad.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Not only could a dissertation be written on the subject but many already have been. SEO is the ongoing struggle to make your Web site appear at the top of the search engine results (like Google.) These are not the paid ads (or 'sponsored results') but what we call 'natural results.' If Google returns your site near the top of their results you are likely to have people find you. If you are returned lower, or on subsequent pages, your odds are slim to none. So an entire industry has sprouted up in the eternal struggle to rise in the results.

But you don't need to know about all of that. The actual methods the search engines use to determine the results are incredibly complicated and forever changing. But I can give you four basic principles which tend to work in a site's favor:
1. Content. It matters what your site talks about. Google uses automated 'bots (short for robots) to 'read' your site's content and decide who (of their searchers) should see your site. Make sure your content is relevant to what you do and where you do it.
2. Popularity. To some extent, search engines look to see how many other sites link to your site as a gauge of popularity. BUT BEWARE. The days of setting up tons of reciprocal links solely for this purpose are over. Search engines figured it out — as they always do — and the practice can even lower your results if abused. The bottom line is to link to real relationships as much as possible.
3. Structure / Code. Without getting too technical, a Web site can give Google a basic map of their site. Google tends to look more closely at this shorthand than at the content itself. A good Web site will have this code built in for you.
4. Time. This is the most sobering one of all. We all want our sites to be found on Google immediately but the truth is that search engines, especially Google, take some time before deciding that your site is worthy of inclusion. Even longer before they are likely to rank your site high in the results. The best thing you can do is to get your site up as soon as you can to get the clock ticking.
See how you can enhance your SEO efforts with Professional Agent Web sites

To be Contacted

Okay, so now you've got them to your Web site. And you recall vaguely that someone told you that getting people to your Web site would somehow make you money but you can't remember exactly how that was supposed to work...

For most agents, a Web site will only make them money if it delivers contracts for buyers and sellers. And data from the National Association of Realtors tells us that most buyers and sellers (between 60% and 70%) only contact one agent! You want to be that agent! So when a potential buyer or seller shows up on your virtual doorstep, the Web site only has one job: get them to contact you. A Web site can't close a deal like you can but unless the Web site encourages them to contact you; you'll never get the chance.

Of course, there's a lot involved in your Web site that will encourage them to contact you, much of which will be covered in "To Build your Brand" and "To Add Value" but there's a critical and simple key that is often overlooked. Your Web site needs to make it as simple as possible to contact you. I'm often amazed at how difficult some Web sites make it to register interest.

To make things as easy as possible you need to focus on two things.

Making sure a prospect can contact you from every page on your site. That's right. Every page. If at any point they get the notion to contact you, they should be able to start that process with one-click.
Getting what you need and nothing more. How many times have you filled out an online form that went on and on and on... I have more times than I care to remember. Why do people do this? Because they get 'information greed.' They get excited about knowing all this information about the prospect but they forget that the key is to have the form filled out. And study after study has shown that the more questions you ask, the more likely they are to drop off. You don't want that! A form should be as simple as possible. For real estate agents, this means only asking for their name, what they are trying to do (buy or sell) and their contact information so you can respond appropriately. When you call them you can ask them for their dog's name. Until then, stick to only what you need.

To build your brand

Over the long term, you are going to want a brand that goes beyond the brand of your broker. What if something happens to that relationship? Do people have a clear sense of who you are and what you are about as a real estate agent? Do you?

Your Brand stands for your unique knowledge and services and how you consistently deliver them. Your Web site is part of your brand image whether you like it or not. What does the appearance of your Web site say about you? Do you have images and information about yourself that will help people connect with you personally? Do you clearly explain what makes you different in ways that would matter to prospective clients? Is your name all over your site, including the domain name of the site?

To Add Value

What can you provide to a prospective seller? Of course, your knowledge of the area and market conditions is critical. But you also offer sales and marketing support. Can your Web site contribute to this story? Are you able to feature properties online in a way that entices buyers? Are you driving potential buyers to your site through off-line and online marketing vehicles? How many visitors do you have to your site each month?

What about for buyers? Does your Web site contain information about your community that you have prepared for them (or do you rely on canned content of questionable relevance?) Do you have links to critical partners that can aid them in their home buying process?

How does your Web site fit into the overall picture of how you serve your clients? In the end, you can only be in one place at a time but you can use technology to more effectively serve your clients at their convenience. But most importantly, if you do provide this value through your Web site, are you telling and selling that story effectively?

To Measure Success

They say that nothing succeeds like success and it's true. If you find something that's successful today, it's likely to succeed tomorrow. But how do know something is successful? By measuring carefully. Fortunately, a good Web site can make measurement much easier if they are designed to measure the right things.

First, you need to know how many people are visiting your site and for how long. These baseline statistics can let you know how your overall marketing campaigns, especially offline marketing campaigns, are going. But looking at how long people are staying on your site, you can measure the effectiveness of your content. Going one step further, you can also know which pages are being visited the most. This is critical when deciding where to make changes to your site.

Next comes the really important stuff — how are visitors getting to your Web site. You need to measure the sources. Are they coming from search engines, online ads you've placed, direct navigation (typed it in after seeing your Web site in an offline ad, perhaps) or links from your partners. By knowing which of your marketing efforts are making the difference, you can push the 'more button' on the most effective methods and reduce your spend / effort on the lower yield activities. Also critical is to know what keywords are being used to find your site in search engines. If there is a particular term that many people are searching for and then ending up at your site, you need to know that. You can then increase your focus on that keyword in your content to increase your search engine results.

Conclusion

To be successful in building your business as a real estate agent, you need to go about it in a thoughtful and systematic way. There's no one way to build a business but if you make sure you are doing what you can in all areas and measuring what works best, you'll put yourself well ahead of your peers. Professional Agent can be your best partner in achieving success. Good luck and good selling.