Disclaimer: we have a good friend that works at the Burlington Free Press and do believe there is a role for print in the real estate advertising model.

This blog article on real estate advertising in newspapers from a veteran media executive is a must read for REALTORS undecided about the ratio of print to web investment. The article states that 6 out of 10 real estate agents think newspaper advertising is useless. However, 80% still buy print ads often just to appease the sellers they are representing!  This is consistent with the anecdotal reports we’ve heard from our clients.

We feel that REALTOR are the expert in their field.  With their knowledge of the market and trends, they are best qualified to know how to market their properties and to whom.  If the high quality leads are coming from the web then this is the sort of quality control that needs to be measured and communicated to sellers.  One client of ours has recently started offering sellers $250 back at closing if he never has to run their house in a print ad.  Think that’s crazy?  Try pitching it as your next listing presentation.

Brian Boardman on real estate marketing

Brian Boardman, the broker and owner of Hickock & Boardman  and a longtime USM client, spoke to us recently about the growing trend of moving away from print to web to market properties.

This article from the New York Times highlights how savvy real estate agents are using social networking to target their buyers.

Some important points raised in the article include how the new trends on the web are reaching younger audiences for free. This more tactile marketing by many web-savvy professionals are now sending messages on Twitter, getting referrals on LinkedIn, posting blogs, uploading virtual tours onto the Internet and sending text messages and alerts to customers’ phones when homes come on the market.

Bettie Meinel, vice president for career development at Century 21 Laffey Associates, based in Greenvale, said that because consumers are already online seeing the photos and virtual tours, “that is their first showing.” Actually touring the house shows more serious intent, she explained. “If they like it enough, they make an appointment to come and see that property; that is the second showing,” she said.

Also check out other blog posts on these topics in the social media and video sections.

I receive daily emails from ActiveRain, these cover all kinds of topics. Usually I don’t have a lot of time to read through them; so I skim over the newsletter titles and see if anything catches my eye. Well today one did: “Survey Says… REALTORS Suck”. Wow! I certainly clicked on that one.

The first thing that struck me was that this is a great example of an attention grabbing blog title. It will get your readers to click and read. It is controversial, and let’s face it, people love controversy. As a former real estate agent and the daughter and sibling of two REALTORS I couldn’t resist reading on.

I found the article interesting. I think it is a good reminder to ANY agent, new, old or otherwise, about what your consumer is looking for and what is important to them.  A professional in any field should always be keeping up on the needs of their clients.

Two of the most interesting points for me where:

1. That the most important thing to the consumer is lowest commission and knowledge is the least. My reaction to that was, “No wonder you think REALTORS suck.” In my experience the lower the commission, the less attention paid to the client.

Maybe that’s not true in all cases, but I have a feeling it doesn’t help! So how does the average REALTOR put this information to use? Should they all be slashing their commissions?  Well it turns out that 95% of consumers are still using Agents. Even though the consumer feels they can get just as much knowledge by doing their own legwork, they are still relaying on real estate professionals when all is said and done.

I don’t think this is a free pass and should be counted on, especially in this market. I think it’s important to be the best at what you do and the most knowledgeable about technology, your area, the state of the market, etc. Those are the agents that will get the business and keep it.

2. The example photos Jeff Corbett uses, got me giggling. He could not be more dead on with this point. If all you can fit in the bathroom shot is the toilet, leave it off the listing! Nobody needs to see the toilet. Okay, so the owner did a great job redoing the bathroom, but it is too small to photograph. How about taking close-up shots of some of the details? BUT, please spare us the toilet shot.

The other one that always gets me is the tiny bedroom, that just shows the bed or maybe a corner of the bed and a window. In those cases, how about a video of the property? We can help guide you through this process and you’ll be better off for it!

Just to hammer the point home, here are a few examples of photos you should skip!

Are they selling the bed or the house?

Ahh the lovely toilet… So homey!

Overall its a great article so give it a read! “Survey Says… Realtors Suck!” By Jeff Corbett, Active Rain Staff Writer. You’ll probably find one or two take aways.

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

If your web marketing strategy incorporates search engine advertising and you want to reach consumers wherever they are: good news. Google is now setting up mobile-specific segmenting options that reach the G1 and iPhone operating systems only.

So, for example, if you have mobile real estate web templates enabled on your site, you can set up an ad campaign targetted at a mobile audience. And only pay for those who click through.

If you’re in ecommerce or retail, Google notes that “last Christmas, the iPhone drove more traffic to Google.com worldwide than any other mobile platform.”

One of the advantages of mobile search marketing is that you’re reaching a customer exactly when they are looking for something. Not when they’re at work or at home or tethered to a laptop. Right when they want to find something. Combine this with geo-targetting and things can get pretty interesting.

More details at allthingsd.com.

See also: Joel Burslem’s Future of Real Estate Marketing blog where he gives this practical tip to real estate marketers: “…create unique campaigns with mobile-ready landing pages as well as mobile-specific calls to action (e.g. “Call 1-800-XXX-XXXX for help with your home search”).”

Related articles:

• Target Google AdWords to Android and iPhone

Image via CrunchBase

C|Net’s Webware section has recently published a list of 11 “troubled web companies.” The piece appears to consist mainly of hypothesis by Rafe Needleman based on the various business models of the companies involved. Zillow made the list at position #4:

The real-estate site’s revenue model is advertising. Real estate and bank advertising. Unless the real-estate research site starts charging for foreclosure listings, I don’t see it doing too well in a hunkered-down economy, in which people are trying to hold on to their homes for dear life, not upgrade.

Not sure why Zillow was singled out among all the various real estate search aggregators, but I would imagine the same criticism would hold for any of them. For that matter, the same criticism might hold true for all advertising-based businesses as credit issues are not limited to real estate and banking.

Myself, I don’t entirely buy it. Needleman’s rationale for including Zillow involves the non-paying audience of the site (”people … trying to hold on to their homes for dear life”) and not the paying part of the Zillow audience. A commenter, Renoir, put the opposite spin on audience situation (emphasis is mine): “Zillow provides a valuable service and homeowners will be checking their home prices like they check the stock market to see which one rebounds first.”

Certainly banks and real estate are going to be looking pretty carefully at their expenditures; all businesses will. But do any of them think that decreasing their visibilty will help them improve their business? If Zillow can find a way to demonstrate value in a crumbling marketplace I’m sure they’ll do fine.

On the other hand, not everyone who is in the real estate profession today will be next year. If the ones that disappear are the ones who are advertising then I suppose there’s more merit to Needleman’s claim that Zillow is “troubled.”

I can appreciate C|Net’s requirement to publish eyeball-gathering content regularly. But a more interesting article might have actually looked into the business models of the “troubled” companies far closer and perhaps included financial information where it was possible.

[Update: Spencer Rascoff CFO and VP of Marketing (yeah, I admit that sounds a little funky) was interviewed by BlogTalk Radio and had this to say (about 19 minutes into the audio on the linked page):

Our whole goal is to get traffic to the website. Last month we got almost five and a half million people to the website. Up 42% versus the same time last year. ... Our advertisers are typically real estate brokers or agents who are advertising themselves or their listings. As well as large national advertisers that are trying to capitalize on this decision point of buying or selling a home. Which drives a lot of purchase activity whether it be a new car or TV or washer/dryer or a new lawnmower or new cable service or new cell phone or you name it. A lot of those kind of transactions occur around the home buying transaction. So we sell a lot of advertising to a lot of those types of companies.

Later on (about 29' 20" into the audio on the linked page) Rascoff is asked about the direction of Zillow and he says:

So we're a private company and we've raised almost 90 million dollars in venture capital. We someday may go public. We have very patient investors. The traffic is going great and the revenue monetization is coming along nicely our key areas of focus are improving the quality of the data that we have, the accuracy of the Zestimates, the information we have on all these homes, the quality of the listings. We have a lot of work to do on mortgage marketplace to really blow that product out. And we have a few other things up our sleeves as well so, we're busy

Ok so obviously these are a just nice simple answers to softball questions. But perhaps they could serve as a starting point for asking more pointy questions if someone wanted to determine if Zillow really was "troubled." Things that come to mind might be:

• Just how patient are the investors?
• What amount of the ad inventory is taken up by larger nationals or other types of clients who are likely to continue advertising through our current financial situation?
• Insert your question here.

My guess is that, if pressed, we could have answers to these questions. And then, based on those answers determine whether Zillow is "troubled" or not. But calling them troubled because they are a content play doesn't quite seem worthy of the "troubled" moniker. As my brother-in-law might say: that's just calling a dog a dirty name and hanging it.]

[Update Again: Today Zillow let go of 1/4 of its workforce. From the Zillow blog Rich Barton says:

This week we are reducing our workforce by 25%. This was an incredibly painful decision for me and the leadership team, but, in the end, we concluded that we had no choice but to securely batten down the hatches as we sail into a major economic storm.

He goes on to say (repeating some of the information Rascoff gave during his phone call the day or so before):

One of the reasons this is so difficult is simply because the business continues grow. In the midst of the madness that surrounds us, we counted 5.4 million unique visitors to Zillow.com in September, which was a 42% increase in traffic over this time last year. Fear, value-shopping, and curiosity are driving people in record volumes to our site. ... While our revenues do not yet cover our expenses, those revenues have been growing at a rapid pace and we will continue to have open positions in areas that are directly tied to revenue, such as advertising salespeople.

Best of luck to the Zillow team past and present.]

All that said, I’m [ed note: clearly] no business forecaster, I have no insight into how Zillow is run or managed and I’m sure I’m missing something. Please correct me in the comments.

Google Analytics is an effective tool to track the performance of marketing activities and advertising campaign. And it’s fairly easy to do: You cook up a special URL (commonly referred to as “link tagging” or “campaign tagging”) and then track how many people come to your site and do what you would like them to do. It even shows a great funnel.

Campaign-tagged web addresses are great for analytics, not so great for memory

“Campaign tagging” or “link tagging” a web address is just putting a question mark and a bunch of variables into the web address so your analytics package knows that this page is being viewed because someone has viewed an ad. Deeper in the article you’ll find a tool to make this fairly painless so don’t fret.

This tutorial is about marrying a link-shortening tool like ListingNumber with Google Analytics. The reason you want to use a link-shortening tool is because your campaign-tagged URL looks something like this:

http://www.unionstreetmedia.com/staff/gdewald/?utm_campaign=Best-Strategist-Ever&utm_medium=Newspaper-Display-Ad&utm_source=Seven-Days-Vermont&utm_content=Pretty-Chart&utm_term=-

The above example would be for my fictitious Best Web Strategist Ever campaign running in a local newspaper. In addition to being incredibly vain, the web address is sort of long to put in a short little print advertisement, right? This is where shortened links come in handy.

Making a web address easier to remember.

If you’re a Twitter user you’ve probably seen shortened links (usually by TinyURL). Link shortening just takes a long web address (like the one above) and makes it into something short like this: http://tinyurl.com/best-web-strategist-ever. Lots easier to remember, which is important when someone sees your link in print and has to remember it when they get to a computer.

Vanity URLs

There’s another way to achieve the same thing. I could buy a domain name that is short and set up a redirect to my page (many single property web sites for real estate do this sort of thing). An example, from my big-headed campaign might be something like www.bestwebstrategistever.com. That’s called a Vanity URL: an easy to remember web address that exists only to redirect you to a harder to remember address.

Vanity URLs also have the advantage of letting you build branding power on something you own. The URL is yours, the traffic is yours, it’s all yours (insert evil-genius laughter).

Unfortunately, setting up Vanity URLs costs you time and money. You’ll pay between $8 and $25 per year for your domain plus spend time researching it plus spend time filling out the online forms to buy it plus spend time working to get the redirect in place. For fake campaign example, I bought www.best-web-strategist-ever.com and www.bestwebstrategistever.com for $20/year and it took me about 15 minutes to get it all set up. I buy domain names and set them up all the time. If you don’t buy domains and set them up all the time then it will take you longer.

Link shortening services

If you just want to get your print tracking up and running quickly (or if you want to track your social media campaign using links that social media-ites are familiar with) then go for a link-shortening service. The TinyURL I set up above took all of two minutes and cost me nothing.

Tracking the campaign via Google Analytics is the same whether you go with Vanity URLs or Link-Shortened URLs. Quick Recap in bullet list format:

Advantages of Vanity URLS

• Your brand
• You control everything all the time

Advantages of Link Shortening

• Quick
• Low cost
• Familiar in Social Media

For this tutorial, I’m going to be using a link shortening service called ListingNumber. This service has the potential to become a useful brand for the real estate market. If consumers become used to seeing a ListingNumber web address in the ads they see, then they’ll get used to treating those ads like real estate advertising (for better or worse).

ListingNumber also has it’s own analytics tools for those of you who don’t already use Google Analytics. Since ListingNumber is geared towards marketing, I suspect that it will be quicker to incorporate features that are useful to advertisers.

So we’ve covered the concepts of campaign tagging, vanity URLs and link shortening. Time to get to work.

The process of tracking advertising via analytics

Here’s our workflow:

1. Generate campaign tagged URL (very long web address in a short period of time)
2. Enter it in our link shortening service (very short web address in a short period of time)
3. Track results in Google Analytics or ListingNumber

The first two steps will be done via forms and shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes total (not counting thinking).

Generate your URL with a Campaign Tagging Tool, for free no less

I’ve spent the afternoon playing with Google Docs to make a form-based tool so you can create your own campaign tagged links. My spreadsheet relies very very heavily on the excellent work of Justin Cutroni over at EpikOne. The main changes to his original link tagger are that I modified it for use with Google Forms so it’s slightly more automated.

Please note, this thing is totally non-secure so don’t enter anything you don’t want to share with the world into the tool. Use at your own risk. If you want your own custom implementation I recommend you either call my boss and hire me to do it or use Justin’s original.

Here’s what you need to do to generate your campaign tagged URL:

1. Decide what your landing page is (for my fake ad campaign I’m using my Union Street bio page).
2. Fill out this Campaign Tagging Tool form.
3. View your result in the spreadsheet (it will be towards the bottom, sometimes takes up to five minutes to refresh)
4. Copy your result (it should start with your landing page from step one). VERY IMPORTANT: DOUBLE CHECK THE LINK TO BE SURE IT’S YOURS. OTHERWISE YOU WILL BE SENDING PEOPLE TO SOMEONE ELSE’S PAGE.
5. Paste that link into a browser and check the page. Is it your landing page from step one? If not, go back to step 3 and repeat. If it is yours then move along to the next section.

Use ListingNumber to generate a trackable short link

Ok, you could use TinyURL or something else. But we’re using ListingNumber because of the branding benefits (for real estate agents anyway) or because it has built-in analytics (for those who don’t use Google Analytics).

Let’s turn a very long URL into nice short URL:

1. Paste the link we made in the previous section into the form at ListingNumber for question #3 (destination web address).
2. Fill out the rest of the form (note in particular that question number 2 could serve as a simple version of the campaign/medium/source/content question you answered using the Campaign Tagging Tool).
3. Test the shortened URL that ListingNumber sends you via email.

There you go, you now have a shiny new shortened URL that you can use to track ROI on your print advertising or anywhere. In case you’re curious, the ListingNumber for my Best Web Strategist Ever ultra-vanity fictitious ad campaign is: http://listingnumber.com/rx

What next?

Well you can use ListingNumber’s own analytics package to track your ROI or you can track from Google Analytics, under Traffic Sources -> Campaigns. I prefer GA because there’s a bit more flexibility for generating insights on advertising and setting filters etc. But if you don’t currently use a web traffic analysis tool then go ahead and use ListingNumbers’ analytics. I’ll do a more in-depth review of how to use their service later.

Also, if we’re really lucky, Michael Rahm (the genius behind ListingNumber) will help us skip all the stuff with my Campaign Tagging Tool by incorporating all that right into the ListingNumber creation part.

Any questions?

Hat tip to Dustin for mentioning Listing Number at Inman Connect ‘08.

Vermont is August 8th, NH and NC are August 6th, Massachusetts and Illinois are August 5th.

People who have amassed more ActiveRain points will be able to have access earlier in the day.

In a recent study of 500 consumers, Yahoo! confirmed that people use the Web to ensure that the selected agent will best meet their specific needs.

Key findings include:

• Home buyers and sellers consider approximately two agents on average before making a final decision
• The Internet impacts consumer trust. Forty percent of respondents credited a site in increasing their trust in the agent
• 74% of people who accessed an agent website got there with the help of a search engine
• The online research process is quick and intense: consumers spent an average of 12 hours online researching agents and 75% selected an agent within one week of starting their search

Online resources provided introduction to new agents as well as promotional deals:

• 45% of respondents used the Internet to learn about agents they didn’t know existed
• 41% discovered special deals and promotions offered from an agent through the Internet

However, there is a disconnect between advertising dollars and consumer behavior. Based on Yahoo!’s study, 77% of respondents used an online source for information during their research process compared to 34% for print. But, according to a recent analysis by Borrell Associates, Realtor advertising dollars have yet to catch up to where home buyers are going – the Internet. While this year’s online media spend did in fact double from 2005, capturing 32% of the overall advertising spend, newspapers continue to get more share of dollars with 40%.

So, if you’ve been struggling with where to focus your advertising budget, these numbers should help resolve the debate. While print-advertising will always be demanded by your sellers, you’ll find your buyers via a well-optimized web site that is found easily on search engines. If you want some support, Union Street Media’s Internet Marketing Team is here to help. You can choose from a variety of services that suit your budget.

I would consider the outcry to be pretty much a false alarm (let me know if I’m wrong here). But it still provided a great opportunity to listen to customers and hear what they think about real estate marketing efforts.

First, you’ll want to be clear about the difference between “organic search” and “paid search.” Organic search results are a product of a Search Engine’s algorithm (a fancy word for method), rather than paid advertisements. Search engine algorithms are a bit of a mystery and always changing – and Google and Yahoo like to keep it that way. Until you’ve spent some time (and perhaps money) to optimize your site content and understand the variety of elements that contribute to the algorithm, ranking high on a Google search engine results page (SERP) with “organic” search can be frustrating and challenging.

Another way to get traffic to your site is by setting up a “paid search” campaign with a tool such as Google AdWords to generate more traffic to your site. If you’ve done a good job delivering those people to the right part of your site for their search terms (known as a landing page), those new visitors will hopefully “convert” by contacting you and/or registering on your site to make best use of the search tools the next time they return. You can also use what you learn from your advertising successes to help inform decisions on your site content, but that’s a topic for a different post.

You can get started with online advertising on your own or get in touch with the Internet Marketing Team at Union Street Media. You can also keep following this blog for more information about internet marketing for Realtors. In particular, follow G. Dewald’s series on Website Optimization for Real Estate.