The Future of Online Marketing Has Already Begun

The Future of The Internet, is a very grand title, the new report from Pew Internet and American Life Project  doesn’t stop there however. This latest of three installments by The Pew Project focuses on how the integration of technology and communication systems will eliminate the concept of being “at work” or “at home.” To quote

“few lines divide professional time from personal time,” and those professionals are happy with the way work and play are “seamlessly integrated in most of these workers’ lives.” (Pew Report).

Regardless of your stance on that issue the future of wireless technology and the growing breadth of web applications has come a very long in not much time. This is especially true considering I had my first email account in seventh grade (I know I am dating my self there), which was a scant 14 years ago. When you think of how technology continues to develop at an ever increasing rate it is hard to imagine where we will be in 2020, which is the point which the study hypothesizes about. The iphone still looks like something out of Star Trek as far as I can tell. I am sure Steve Jobs already has one that has the ability to scan humans for sickness.

All this aside the report raises some interesting questions particularly for the online real estate market. To use my self as an example; as I told you before, I got my first email account in seventh grade and I just bought my first house, which I found … you guessed it … online. The generation of E-mail and blogging are buying houses and if you are not ready for them then you will be left by the wayside. Online applications are getting more and more important and the best sales tool that will be at your disposal in 2020 is only a glimmer in some programmer’s eye. Read up and stay ahead of the curve.

Here is a link to the full article – The Pew Report

Inman Internet Marketing Webinar

Joel Burslem is hosting a webinar on inexpensive marketing strategies. It’s free. It’s on October 29th. You should attend.

Google Analytics Update: Your Internet Marketing Animated

Google Analytics is updating. The stuff they are adding to the tool is bending my brain. For those of you who are diving into your own analytics in support of a data-driven internet marketing strategy you will be very very excited. For those of you not in this category perhaps it is time to start.

And, of course, if you’d rather be taking care of the core aspects of your business (selling real estate or service or products) then be happy that your internet marketing team can now dig a little deeper and tease out a little more insight from Google Analytics.

This video example shows how you can look at the performance of a keyword for your website, tracked over time. How is this useful?

• Quickly show relationships of valuable keywords
• Show how value changes over time (perhaps in relation to market events or your own marketing efforts)
• Show how customer interest changes over time (again, perhaps in relation to events or your own internet marketing)

I should note that this is just one of several new features that are being rolled out. And not even the juiciest (advanced segmentation is the juiciest or maybe the API or maybe…).

How are your real estate customers using social media?

Forrester research has recently updated its social media customer profiling tool to include data from 2008. Many of you in the real estate business have probably been hearing about blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed and other social media technologies for some time now. Some of you are even using social media tools to enhance your real estate business.

But the questions always remain: Are my customers using social media? Am I speaking into a void? I thought only teenagers used blogs

The Forrester Technographics Profile Tool

There seems to be a lot of information, both anecdotal and research-based, that talks about what specific tools or even kinds of tools people are using online. This makes sense because technology vendors need to demonstrate their relevance. There’s less information, however, about why people are using technology.

And the “why” question is important because it helps us to determine which technologies are relevant for our customers. Identifying why people use technology helps us all develop better services and products. Understanding why people use technology brings us closer to understanding how they self-identify.

The Forrester tool helps you understand why people are using social media technology segmented by age, country and gender. Now granted, this is a pretty broad segmentation and I’d sure love to have more psychographic than demographic information. But even so the tool is great to get a start on clearing up misconceptions about what types of people use social media technology.

The identities that the Forrester Tool breaks down are (from most-active to least-active):

• Creators: The people who make social media.
• Critics: The people who respond and comment on social media.
• Collectors: The people who organize social media.
• Joiners: The people who sign up and connect on social media sites.
• Spectators: The people who look at and consume social media.
• Inactives: They don’t do any of this stuff.

For a better understanding, here’s a slide show:

Using the Technographics Tool to Improve Your Real Estate Marketing

Alright, you’ve gone over to the site, played with the pull down menus and seen the pretty charts. Lot of fun right? Well fun isn’t enough (especially these days) so let’s see what we can do with this kind of information to make your internet marketing more successful. Here’s a nice numbered-list to get us started

1. Identify your best audience demographic
2. Discover what your audience likes to do via the Technographic Tool
3. Make changes to your internet marketing that reflect what you know about your audience

Identifying an audience demographic

Hopefully you already know something about the sorts of people you tend to work with in your real estate business. If you don’t, then perhaps you might want to use MSN’s demographic prediction tool. This will at least give you something to get going if you can’t hire a demographics consultant just yet.

For this example, I’m going to use the demo prediction tool to look at the demographics for people searching for “Vermont Real Estate.” The tool tels me I’m looking mostly at a Female demographic aged 35-49.

Discovering what your audience likes to do

Using the information from step one, I fill out the Forrester Technographic Tool. The age demographics don’t match up perfectly so I choose the one that fits best: 35-44.

Turns out that, according to the Tool, my audience is using technology fairly average. They are most below-average as Joiners. They’re most above-average as Critics.

That’s nice. Now what?

Make changes to your marketing based on what you know

Ok, so the audience is unlikely to be Joiners and more likely to be Critics. Perhaps I will reserve some of the resources I would be spending on social networking sites (advertising and participating). Then I can take those resources and re-allocate them to online marketing initiatives which encourage feedback, ratings, comments and other participatory technologies.

Would I make changes to an entire business model based on data collected using MSN’s demo prediction tool and the Forrester Technographic Profile Tool? Nope. But I would use this to make tweaks and start deeper research into my audience.

The Tool is Updated: What are the trends?

Now that you have a sense of what the tool is and how you might use it to help out your real estate business, maybe you’re curious about trending of this sort of data. I heard about this tool being updated from Josh Bernoff (via Twitter of course) and he mentioned that the growth of social media adoption is in the 35-55 year old demographic.

Bernoff has a blog post outlining the changes between 2007 and 2008 in the use of social media. It includes a bar chart showing the changes in each of the categories. The biggest jumps are in Spectators and Critics. There is very modest growth in the Creators category. Here’s what he says about age demographics in his post:

Social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives.

This is important for anyone who continues to believe that their social media strategy should consist entirely of a Facebook “fan” page and should be run by the college intern. There are some great opportunities ahead using social media as part of your real estate online marketing plan. Do like Bernoff does and use data as your secret weapon.

Your Website is Running for Presidential Office

An online visibility metaphor

Presidential candidates travel the country to gain exposure and voice their platforms; your business should be traveling the Internet to spread the name and message of your business. In the political world we hear speeches, in the online world we read blogs. Just as your neighbor has an Obama ‘08 bumper sticker on his Subaru, a client of yours may link to your site on their Facebook page.

In the end the candidate with the most relevant policies, best speeches and most bumper stickers will usually take the White House. The website with the most inbound links and popular blog posts will rocket to the top of a Google search result page.

Step 1: Make sure campaign headquarters is staffed and ready. You want to promote a site that is appealing, useful, promotes your business objectives, and is full of good content. This is about the functionality of the site. It doesn’t matter how many people go to your site if it doesn’t convert them, a bad site with good visibility will promote your brand as “the guy everyone knows but no one uses.”

Step 2: Hit the campaign trail. Not only should you host a blog and post often but respond to comments. Be an authority! Be friendly! Be helpful! It is important to gain presence “on the road”; be sure to comment on related blogs, this will give you presence and help you start developing inbound links. As we all hear, inbound links are crucial to your internet marketing.

Step 3: Diversify, Web 2.0 style. Besides blogging there is a whole country full of social media voters. Get to know and use Facebook, Twitter, Localism, YouTube etc. All these keep your audience in tune with you and all provide inbound links as well. This is huge because as the demographic of social media users grows and ages more and more of your audience will be using social media tools. For some insightful tips on blogging as related to social media, check out Chris Brogan’s blog.

Online visibility is a cornerstone of your internet marketing, without it your website will fail to reach the critical mass required to make you President. Or whatever it is you’re after.

Localism sponsorship Land Rush schedule posted

Real estate social networking site, ActiveRain has posted the schedule for sponsorship opportunities on their neighborhood site Localism.com.

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.

Take Matt’s Advice. 5 Tips Your Real Estate Site Needs.

In case you missed the recent video interview with Matt Cutts at USA Today, it’s a must-watch . I’m happy to report that the advice our Internet Marketing Team has been offering to our clients is right on track. So, don’t just take our word for it, take Google’s search guru’s word:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page.

That’s right. Your keywords have to be prominently placed, but not over-stuffed. They should occur naturally in the content of the page. What Matt doesn’t say is that you want to make sure that keyword or keyword phrase is in your page’s headline, also known as an H1 Tag. Read more

Understanding and Using AIDA (including 22 things you can do to improve your site performance)

The name Aida (made famous in Verdi’s opera) means “visitor” in Arabic and “reward” in Swahili. This post is about the marketing acronym, related to visitors and rewards, outlining consumer attitudes: Attention-Interest-Desire-Action. I’ll present the concept, orient it in relation to your site visitors and give you some ideas on how to use this conceptual model for your own marketing.
Read more

Short followup on Craigslist and HTML

The HTML that will allowed on Craigslist should be enough to make a nice layout. You get images, tables (as much as I abhor table-based web development), headers and the font tag. Sure it’s like we’re rolling back the clock to 1999. But it won’t be too difficult to make attractive ads with the tags allowed.

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.

On-site Optimization for Real Estate Part 2: Getting ready to measure

Last time we discussed the overview of a site optimization process, so I bet you’re ready to get rolling on improving your site. But before we can start implementing our process we need to chart a course. Let’s get started.

Determine the objective

For most real estate sites, the objective is to increase qualified leads (the people who are looking for the kind of property you like to sell or selling the kind of property you like to buy). Maybe there are other objectives as well. Think about this as you begin your process. Maybe sometime in the future your goals and objectives will change, that’s fine. The important thing is to know what your goals are so that you can track them.

Track your progress

Once your objectives are determined, it’s time to figure out what metrics you’re going to use to track your progress. The TLA (three letter acronym) used to describe the metrics that connect to your objective is KPI (key performance indicator). It’s very important to remember that every KPI is a metric but not every metric is a KPI. There are hundreds of reports a decent analytics package will produce for you. Not all of them relate to your objective. An excellent rundown of what makes a metric into a KPI can be found on Dennis Mortensen’s VisualRevenue blog:

7 KPI characteristics

1. a KPI echoes organizational goals
2. a KPI is decided by management
3. a KPI provides context
4. a KPI creates meaning on all organizational levels
5. a KPI is based on legitimate data
6. a KPI is easy to understand
7. a KPI leads to action!

I know it’s easy to let your eyes glaze over as you read that handy list. But resist the urge. Note a couple important items like #2: a KPI is decided by management. That means you. Your analyst (me) can make some good suggestions but ultimately you’ve got to decide that it’s relevant. If you don’t, then everyone will just be spinning their wheels. Take the time to understand why your analyst is suggesting a specific KPI and make it a conversation.

Another great one is #5: a KPI based on legitimate data. You need to understand your analytics package and establish your degree of confidence in it. You also need to understand what your analyst is doing with the numbers outside of the analytics package (yes, we’re making spreadsheets and trying to provide more context–Google Analytics has some pretty graphs, but we need more).

Number 7 is the most important of all: a KPI leads to action. If you can’t do anything with the data, if you can’t base a business decision on it, then it isn’t worth tracking. It may be interesting. Entertainment is interesting. Analysis needs to inform action.

For some examples of KPIs for real estate sites, check out my guest post over at MyTechOpinion.com: Three KPIs for Real Estate Websites.

Now what?

Take a deep breath. If you’ve come this far chances are good that you’ve done more than your competition: you know what you want to do and you know how you will measure your progress. And you are committed to making improvements to speed your progress. You’ve done the thinking and now it’s time for acting.

Next time we’re going to cover setting up a benchmark study (so we can see if any of our decisions and actions are helping or hurting).

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