Online Real Estate Marketing and Drilling in the Wrong Place

I just wrapped up another real estate oriented web site campaign. As usual I am often flabbergasted by the mere nature of these campaigns and the people who put these together. Even though the format for these campaigns are clumsy at best they often mirror mistakes I see in other campaigns in different industries. The premise for these campaigns usually center around one web site and one domain name.

It is falsely perceived that the web site’s branding strength will be dependent on how clever the domain name is. This becomes a non-issue in the grand scheme of things and when you think about how many web sites are out there trying to accomplish the exact same thing in the marketplace. What you really need is a way to create more online awareness and online presence.

WHERE IS YOUR MARKET?

There are free tools you can look up on Google to help you narrow down your market. In fact you can get pretty precise with this by going to http://www.google.com/trends. This will tell you where your specific audience is in a geographic location. The toolset is a little limited because you can only type in a couple of words to look up a particular subject. But still, it’s a lot better than gnawing your teeth in your sleep and fretting over the details.

I would think that in a mortgage and real estate market you would want to get REAL specific on your location. I am surprised at how many real estate professionals take this very casually online. More than often I am surprised at that these tactics are often ignored.

The numbers are astounding. I feel for the entrepreneur who has to shell out a small fortune for direct mail. These postcards and letters rarely reach the right prospects. I can tell you stories about how these slick, highly polished pieces of direct mail often make their way to the garbage can. I ran across one campaign that was $15,000 dollars to produce. This postcard campaign got no results. Obviously the business owner was upset and wanted to stop the bleeding. Without flinching the business coach who ran the event coldly told the business owner to run the same postcard campaign three more times. He stressed that if he ran it over again, (to the tune of $60,000) he could get a 4% response rate. Or maybe he could get a 2% return on his postcards if he was somewhat lucky. It wasn’t much to go on and the business owner slumped back into his chair.

You see – I think that’s terrible.

Not only is the prospect out of luck he is clueless on what to do, where to go and how to go about his business. In fact, I will say this outright because I think you need to hear it Mr. Real Estate professional. The other thing that really irked me was the advice given on door hangers and other types of direct response mail.

I got some news for the hopeful people of Michigan. The people have left the state. A healthy real estate boom begins with people and that’s bottom line. It is a little hard to sell to a memory of what used to be. I find the conditions in Michigan horrifying to say the least. I also find the situation there to be relatively sad and out of touch with reality.

There is an online component to this entire mess that seems to be missing. I find this to be very critical to success. Many web sites out there in the marketplace are floating in space. They are not anchored down by any keywords or are focused for any niche population. Most real estate web sites are a lot like junk mail. They never get found and they simply never get read.

The real estate market is loaded with dead ends and headaches. But all of this can be easily avoided by finding your right target market. You need to go where the fish are. A lot of real estate sites I see by Remax, and others lack the essential online “guts” in their web pages to ever get listed. They are not equipped to be indexed or found online in any way.

Worse, real estate professionals get a web site because they think that’s the way to do business. They never spend any time with it. They never direct people to it in any way and they never try to steer prospects to it for any reason. In short, nobody sees the darn thing.

Getting a web site and then not looking at it is pretty reckless behavior. I mean, if I had a choice to do that or nothing I would choose nothing. It makes perfect sense to me if you are not even going to be looking at it. The only thing a web site is good for is leverage. I use mine to save myself the headache of talking on the phone to unqualified prospects.

I personally detest talking on the phone so why would I want to spend the entire day talking to broke people? There are a lot of people in the field who are that lonely and want to talk to a complete stranger. There are a lot of desperate women out there who need a man and will call businesses looking for weak minded men to hook up with. As pathetic as it sounds there are a lot of people out there who are just broke and bored. I am clueless to why anyone in this situation would want to solicit vendors – but they do.

I show these people my web sites and get them off my phone. I only deal with serious minded individuals and you should too.