In a recent press release, RE/MAX boast 99.9% of the national share of voice in TV advertising in the US for the first quarter of the year, but RE/MAX & other real estate franchises should take a close look at how ineffective their marketing of these TV commercials has been over the internet.
RE/MAX claims:
“While many of the real estate industry’s biggest players are scaling back their TV buys due to economic realities, the RE/MAX share of voice for national TV advertising jumped from 50% in 2008 to 99.9% in the first quarter of 2009.”
RE/MAX have done a good job with their new straight talking TV ads, but I can’t help but think that they could increase their audience by leveraging their video content across the internet via their huge network of agents/staff, databases of clients and via social media.
Whilst it was great to see that RE/MAX have taken the initiative & leveraged their video content by uploading the commercials onto YouTube, unfortunately that’s where their effective use of the internet for these videos seems to grind to a halt.
The collective online marketing power of a franchise like RE/MAX is enormous.
They have something like 100,000 Associates working within their company & their LeadStreet campaign successfully created a database of a Million More Leads in Six Months for US Agents, yet upon writing this post the Kick – 2009 RE/MAX Commercial is the video that appears to be their most popular out of their 2009 commercials uploaded onto YouTube so far, but it’s had less than 10,000 views over the past 4 months.
How to Promote Your Real Estate Videos Online
Here’s just a few ways that real estate franchises & independent offices could use the power of their existing network to help promote their brand, generate lots of Free traffic to their videos & enhance their online marketing presence.
- Embed the YouTube video within a short blog post.
- Include a link to the video within email marketing campaigns.
- Tweet about the video on Twitter.
Imagine the power of marketing that 100,000 RE/MAX Associates could have if they used some of these strategies to promote these professionally created TV Commercials out to their network of clients & associates via the internet.
If each Associate only got 10 people in a month to view the commercial, that would equate to approx. 1 million viewers per month for FREE.
In fact, if RE/MAX franchise really wanted to, they could get 10’s of millions of viewers to their videos each month at almost no cost. Now that’s what I’d call a powerful message.
Finally, there are over 100 alternative video sites other than YouTube. Real estate franchises should be uploading their videos/TV commercials onto some of these other sites as well to help generate even more FREE traffic & exposure of their brand.
12 Comments
Robert Simeon
Greg,
A great story here where the common theme to me (I could be wrong) is that although they love the concept of video they still don’t have a targeted audience. Rather relying on the “hope” fact or that a potential client may actually be in the right place at the right time to view it.
Not a sound strategy – as you know I am from the school of identifying your audience and let them “read all about it” with videos to accompany. I think with video it is still to be decided the best platform for delivery given that many obviously can’t view videos at their place of work.
For mine it keeps coming back to the aircraft carrier (individual agency website) where videos, newsletters, Twitter, Facbook etc are fired off from the main deck where they then land the interested parties back to the carrier.
Still we live and learn – great article.
David Ross
Hi Greg,
I speak with principals and agents daily about real estate video, not just on what products are available but on how to use the content effectively and the biggest hurdle that I come across is the perception of value (or lack of) that the medium offers agents coupled with a general lack of knowledge of video and the effective uses of it.
Unlike traditional forms of marketing content, video is still not part of the everyday marketing fabric for most agents therefore understanding how to get the best use out of it is difficult.
There are multiple distribution channels for video to be used in any video campaign (property or profile) ranging from your database, your website, your blog, to social media, the portals, TV, mobile devices, podcasting, iPhone apps, DVD’s and on email signatures etc etc. Sure some are more effective than others, but the key is that you are giving your brand the best possible chance to be seen by spreading across multiple platforms.
As long as the content is of good quality and relevant to your market then it can be very effective in building brand and profile.
Well done REMAX for the the initiative, the application though probably needs more thought.
David
Greg Vincent
Robert & Dave, you are spot on about the concept of sharing content across the web.
Real Estate Franchises have used the power of leverage in offline media campaigns extremely well for years. Their company brands appear on agency shop-fronts, signboards, newspapers, stationery (business cards, brochures, etc, etc). Most of the front line branding of a Real Estate Franchise is paid for by the business owner or their clients. That’s an effective use of leverage.
Yet online the franchises appear to be placing most of their emphasis around their branding appearing on the major portals & their company website. Yet, as an example, if they looked at the power of some of the marketing that agents like you do for the R& W brand Robert, I believe that R&W should be providing you with top quality video content that you could promote out to your network & these videos could be re-used across the franchises entire network time and time again.
The fact that RE/MAX
Robert Simeon
Thanks Greg – as for Head Office contributions no thanks. They have no idea of our online platform and I like it better that way. Always a free spirit 🙂
Matt Stenning
Hey Greg,
I totally agree with you on using online videos as part of real estate promotion. If agents don’t start to embrace Web 2.0 as part of their marketing the competition that does is going to be so far ahead.
Not only is it online video agents need to be using it’s all of the social web. With Australia being in the GFC (Great Financial Crisis) agents need to be reaching more customers cheaper, and what better place then using social media.
Awesome stuff Greg!
Matt
Greg Vincent
Robert, I hear what you’re saying but if head office produced a series of great corporate videos that you felt comfortable using within your marketing then you could leverage off each other. ( I know it would have to be high quality for you to even consider it ).
If you promoted the video & the rest of your group promoted the video there can be a lot more power put behind a networks marketing message.
Dave, I
Robert Simeon
Greg,
In theory a great concept for the respective Head Offices although I maintain that none understand online which is most evident by the standards of their respective websites.
For quite sometime I have maintained a stand alone perspective and I can’t see that changing anytime soon. For mine the agents that simply relied on Head Office online direction are the ones that have gone backwards too.
I doubt that respective Head Offices would not even know what SEO and SEM stand for – it is simply just not their go. 🙂
David Ross
Hi Greg,
One of the real myths around real estate video is that it is expensive.
Compared with other mediums, the relative price and flexibility of the medium make it very cost effective. For example, the starting point for an agent video profile is around $700 which gives you a good quality video up to 90 seconds in length. It obviously goes up from there. Property videos are cheaper again.
In relation to Robert’s point we have found that generally franchise groups at a corporate marketing level move a little too slow for the demands of their key operators so you will often find a disparity in the short / mid term marketing goals leaving key operators to innovate on their own.
When a corporate office acts decisively, the results work very well. McGrath in SYD (video), Hodges in MEL (video) and the Ray White Group (in-room video auctions) are a few examples. It is not necessarily easy but from a brand perspective, the consistency it provides is valuable.
David
Sean Wyld
With Remax taking such a TV centric advertising approach and Century 21 effectively doing the opposite allocating their entire TV advertising budget online at the start of the year, it will be fascinating to see how each companies market share and profit fares over the next 12-24 months.
Greg Vincent
Thanks Dave. Do you find that a 90 second video is enough time for an agent to get an effective message across?
Also, with regard to video on mobile devices, there appears to be quite a lot of agencies that have embraced bulk SMS campaigns. Do you feel that agents are better sending a text based SMS message that links across to the video embedded on a web page or are they better to send out the video directly as an MMS video? (taking into consideration the costs).
I’d prefer text based SMS linked to a web page, only because I’d prefer that the client visit my website. I haven’t done any testing on sending video out as just a bulk MMS, I’d be interested to hear if agents have tried sending MMS videos & what sort of response they get.
Sean, I think that you only have to look at how inexpensive & flexible the internet is compared to TV to see that if Century 21 allocate their money correctly into clever opt-in marketing campaigns they could build an absolutely massive database of customers & build their brand with consumers that want to hear their message rather than using the interruption marketing approach that the TV advertising relies on.
Dollar for dollar, my monies on Century 21 coming out on top, especially if they can create some great database building strategies.
TV marketers are realising that it’s becoming a lot harder to get a TV viewer up off their couch & get them to run to their computer to register their email details. The offers have to be almost unbelievable to get somebody to act nowadays. Also, people don’t turn on the TV to search for property. The internet is where they go to search.
I believe for RE/MAX to come out in front they will need to leverage the internet by re-purposing these videos across the web & use lots of other effective online marketing strategies to stand a chance of coming out in front.
Greg Vincent
It’s great to see that Coldwell Banker have been leveraging their real estate videos & their network by marketing their own branded video channel on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/coldwellbanker.
Here’s an excerpt of Coldwell Bankers recent results from an article on Inman http://tr.im/pFIL
‘One month after launching a branded YouTube channel, Coldwell Banker Real Estate LLC says the site now offers 1,700 videos and has attracted more than 200,000 visitors.
Coldwell Banker’s YouTube channel, “On Location,” has been among the top 10 most-viewed branded channels on YouTube since its launch, the company said, thanks in part to the more than 1,300 original videos uploaded by its brokers and agents”
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