How Could Ray White Improve Their Marketing To Make ‘The Edge’ An Even More Impressive Event?

One of the biggest real estate auction events in the Southern Hemisphere is about to happen on the Gold Coast.

Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach are holding ‘The Edge’ on Saturday 17^th April 2010 at the Gold Coast Convention Centre.

Brett Clements from PropVid sent me the ‘Hot Off The Press’ promo video yesterday.

Now for such a big event I’m sure that there has already been a lot of promotion done by the Gold Coast Network in the lead up till now & it looks like there is going to be a whole lot more promotion done between now and ‘The Edge’.

But I thought I might throw my 2 cents worth in & share some ideas on how Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach could leverage Social Media & the web more effectively to help spread the word.

Here’s ‘The Edge’ video promo.

The video went live on the PlatinumHD.tv site a few days ago & was uploaded onto YouTube 3 days ago. Whilst I think the video is really powerful there are a couple of things that could be changed to improve its conversion.

Changes to the Video: Within the video I’d have the agents website address GoldCoastNetwork.com.au appearing underneath the Ray White Broadbeach, Ray White Commercial Broadbeach, Ray White Mermaid Beach slide (which appears at the 2 minute mark within the video).

Also, towards the end of the video a slide appears saying “Spaces Limited Book Now”

Whilst I think it’s great to include a call to action. It’s important to define what you want people to do. Are they wanting vendors to book their property in now for the auction? Or do they want buyers to book their seat now? Or both?

On the web there is no room for confusion. It’s important that people watching the video know how to Book Now.

Improve Online Conversion: One suggestion could be that if you include the agency website address within the video, then on the home page of the Ray White website they could embed ‘The Edge’ promo video into the top right hand corner (probably cutting out the end of the surf life saving flag or surfer image) and then have a button underneath to say Click Here to Book Now for ‘The Edge’.

I would then send them to a long copy sales page that features some of the benefits of why they should be involved in ‘The Edge’ and provide an opt-in section which identifies if they are a buyer or a seller.

This will allow Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach to leverage the traffic that they already get to their website from Google and their other marketing, plus improve conversion from the people who view their professionally produced ‘The Edge’ promo video.

Obviously, with only 6 weeks to go till ‘The Edge’, to allow for the 4 week cut-through marketing campaign that they mention in the video, all sellers would need to be contacted straight away to include their listing in ‘The Edge’ marketing campaign.

I can imagine that the agency will need to have all properties listed by 20^th March, but due to the size of the promotion & the incredible exposure there’s a possibility that they could include a few extra listings within a few days after this cut-off date. But, that’s obviously up to them.

Here’s a few other suggestions…

YouTube: One of the first things I noticed is that the video could also be optimised a lot better on YouTube. The wording used in the description & tagging has no chance of being found on Google by someone searching for real estate on the Gold Coast & I’m not sure that having it uploaded under the Entertainment category is going to help either?

Blogging: They should integrate a WordPress blog within their company website. This will not only help to market ‘The Edge’ but it will help with their SEO.

They should write a daily blog post about some of the build up towards ‘The Edge’ and ask all the staff to tweet or share each article with their followers on Twitter & their friends on Facebook.

When sharing the articles on these sites they could also ask people to click the like button when uploading onto Facebook and ask the followers to ‘Please RT’ their tweets on Twitter.

When posting daily updates on the blog it’s important to leave the comments section open on the articles because this may get people asking questions about how to be involved & could provide an additional lead generation strategy.

This could also provide an opportunity to set a deadline for the last day before properties will be allowed to be submitted & could create an extra sense of urgency for potential sellers and/or could encourage friends to tell friends to contact the agency so they don’t miss out on ‘The Edge’.

To protect the integrity of the event, Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach are the administrators of the blog so they have control to monitor comments too.

Facebook: I also noticed that Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach have a personal profile on Facebook. Whilst they currently have 67 friends, they should really have this as a Fan Page, because Facebook has a limit and once you get to 5,000 friends you have to change to a Fan Page.

Any company thinking about creating a presence on Facebook should start off with a Fan Page. They are better for business.

Celebrities, etc should also create a Fan Page. eg. One of my friends on facebook, Jack Canfield sent me an email the other day to ask me to join him at his fan page because he had reached his limit of friends.

Jack now has the task of getting all 5,000 of his friends that he has built up on his personal Facebook profile to go over & connect with him on his new Facebook Fan Page.

( Update: I found their company Facebook Fan Page – See Update at bottom of this article )

Twitter: With regards to Twitter I can’t seem to locate a company profile for them. At this point there appears to be no Twitter account linked to their site & no blog within their site.

Whilst ‘The Edge’ is an amazing concept, there are so many different things that Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach could do to make this the most incredible real estate event ever through Social Media.

(Update: I found their company Twitter account as well see Update at bottom of this article. I searched both facebook and Twitter for Ray White Broadbeach and Ray White Mermaid Beach. I finally found them under the Gold Coast Network.)

Print Media: Having seen the magnitude of the print media campaign from last years event, Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach should be advertising something like,

“For the daily inside scoop on ‘The Edge’ become a Fan on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter” within their campaign.

This could help them to build a huge network of people connected to their company who live within their service.

It’s never too late: Even though ‘The Edge’ is only 6 weeks away, when you think about the real-time nature of Web 2.0, there is still a lot of time available for Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach to leverage the power of the internet & use this impressive Video Production from PropVid to generate the most amazing impression within their marketplace.

2 last things: A geo-targeted Pay Per Click campaign on Google could help overcome some SEO issues, plus a targeted Facebook Ads Campaign would help drive targeted traffic to their video campaign and/or their Facebook Fan Page.

The amount of ‘Free’ online PR that could be generated around ‘The Edge’ could be massive.

If Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach get this right, ‘The Edge’ could become so much bigger than they could have ever imagined.

And, if you tallied up every strategy that I’ve mentioned, they could make a huge difference to their whole campaign for around $500 – $1,000 plus time spent writing a daily update on their blog about ‘The Edge’.

PS: There’s a few more ideas I have about what they could do on realestate.com.au and other strategies, but at this point I just wanted to paint the picture of what is really possible, if a real estate agency embraces Social Media and uses the power of the internet the right way.

Please feel welcome to share your thoughts & ideas.

UPDATE: After writing this article I noticed that Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach do in fact have a Facebook Fan Page under ‘Gold Coast Network‘ and a Twitter account at Twitter.com/raywhitebroad with their username as ‘Gold Coast Network’. It’s great to see that they have established a fan page and a Twitter account.

At the time of posting this update, they have 97 fans on Facebook and 23 followers on Twitter, but unfortunately all the company seem to be posting is there sold listings & providing a link to the Open Homes that they have on each weekend.

Their Gold Coast Network Fan Page could become so much more engaging and simply because of its name, Gold Coast Network, it has the potential to become one of the biggest real estate fan pages on Facebook if they shared some other information about what’s happening on the Gold Coast as well.

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Google Real Estate will force the portals to embrace, open and innovate or die!

Slowly but surely Google Real Estate is making inroads into the Australian real estate market with the recent signing of LJ Hooker on top of most of the major players in real estate in Australia. It will take longer for all of the smaller independent agents to come onboard, however it is clear that this is the beginning of a new era and it is time REA and Domain stepped up to the plate and opened themselves up to the Google way of life!

Why? Because not doing so will slowly end their dominance and when the decline occurs it will be so fast that no maneuvering will make a difference.

Some may argue that Google Real Estate has not made a difference as yet, but these people live in complete denial and it will only be a matter of time before visitor numbers begin declining and Google Real Estate begins its upward March.

Remember, Google only has to get comparative data to make a difference. Google also have a far greater capacity to let people know about it than all other real estate portals in the world combined.

Recently a number of videos have been produced that well and truly show how serious Google is about maps and real estate.

Finding a house on Google Real Estate Maps

Here is one to showcase real estate listings throughout Australia

Here is one on how to refine your real estate search on Google Real Estate.

Real Estate API’s
Realestate.com.au and domain.com.au must open their databases up to the general public to create a whole new wave of web and mobile applications.

I have been pushing API’s with these portals for over 2 years and yet we still have nothing. Maybe Realestate.com.au’s big announcement will include an API?

What can an API do?
As an example any website would be able to carry listings through this API, so community websites, industry websites, councils, agents, even business2.com.au would be able to carry listings, sales data etc. Portals do not need agents permission as agents have signed away all rights to the data when they join these sites.

Signing up should be simple and approval rapid and it should be accompanied by rapidly evolving documentation and examples.

Boon for portals
One other thing we will see is innovation across the board, even things we have not even thought of will take us by surprise, but the biggest boon will be for the portals. It will extend their listings and sales data reach and allow that data to be ingrained across 10’s of thousands of websites across Australia and the world.

Versions
There should be two versions of the API, the free version which carries 3rd parties adverts from the portals and is a little limited and then a paid version that carries no advertising and allows the user to do whatever they want with the data!

Flow on
The flow on effect of this will flow across the industries to jobs, cars and classifieds.

Will this happen?
Don’t hold your breath, large organisations are slow at moving on these opportunities, usually waiting until it is too late. We are fast approaching a time where I think realestate.com.au and domain.com.au will start going backwards unless they really innovate with API’s.

One only has to look at the music industry and the movie industry to see how stubborn incumbents completely ruin their own industries by not embracing and innovating.

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Who Would Have Ever Dreamt It Possible?

When Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile he set a whole new mindset for a world of possibilities and now Google has made yet another major announcement that could change the internet world as we know it.

Do you remember dial-up internet & how time consuming it was to sit there waiting for a website to appear on the computer screen or heaven forbid, trying to watch a video?

Well, if you ever had any doubts about the importance that video will play in the world of real estate marketing you may want to sit up and take notice of what Google are about to embark upon. Read the rest of this article »

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Will Your Agency Be A ‘Favourite Place’ On Google?

Google has recently developed Favourite Places on Google, which incorporates the use of QR Code technology to help customers get information about businesses via their mobile phones and drive visitors across to the reviews on their site.

Whilst the use of QR Codes hasn’t really taken off as yet, they should start to become more and more popular now that Google has jumped on board.

With Google’s Favourite Places, the reviews that appear on Google about a real estate agency will also continue to grow in importance.

Google have said that “We have not yet made a decision about plans for this program beyond the U.S.” but they have already expanded the service into Vancouver, so it looks like it could end up coming to Australia some time soon.

Businesses don’t have to pay anything to become a part of Google’s Favourite Places, but they must have signed up for a free account with the Google Local Business Centre.

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10 Ways Real Estate Agents Could Use The Apple iPad

Will the recent launch of the Apple iPad mean the end of the Listing Presentation Folder or FlipChart style presentation? Will we see agents showing off their listings via the iPad? Or perhaps they’ll be using it to watch real estate training sessions or live streamed sales meetings? Either way, could it be a Game Changer? Read the rest of this article »

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Trend for 2010: “It’s Mobile, stoopid”

Remember the iconic 1980s movie ‘Wall Street’ in which Michael Douglas walks along a beach watching the sun rise while talking into his mobile phone? The thing was about as big as his head (which was big), yet was the symbol of power, wealth, technology and cool. Looking back at it now, the device forces a smile, just like those beige box-like floppy drive PCs of the same era.

Fast forward nearly a quarter of a century, and the current generation of mobile phones are really pocket PCs, things that might have impressed Flash Gordon or Captain Kirk in earlier eras. We check our emails, surf the web, listen to music, take pictures, download and pay for apps – from anywhere. It slips into our pocket, we own it, it’s ours. With the iPhone, it’s stylish to be a geek, and if you’re a newcomer to all this, welcome to the party.

A year ago, mobile traffic to web sites, and real estate sites in particular, did not rate. Yet already 23% of Australians with mobiles use them to access the internet, even though total internet traffic is estimated to be less than 1% through a mobile device (ABS). Still early days.

Part of this could be the catch up of consumers, part of this could be the lack of mobile-ready websites and the small number of ‘real estate’ apps in the iphone App Store. A recent search of “real estate” apps turned up only 5 Australian ones (plenty of American), among these a couple of multi-office real estate agencies, and among the main portals only Domain are present.

In the States, Zillow.com were reported as saying up to 35% of their weekend traffic comes from mobile devices. Pete Flint, CEO of Trulia.com, claims (more believably) their mobile traffic is in the “5 to 10% range”, while a year ago “it was negligible”. Although iphones account for only 8% of our mobile devices, 50% of mobile traffic is coming from iphone apps. Realestate.com.au, in Australia, reported “exponential growth” to its mobile site in December (150,000 unique visitors), claiming this to be “additional” traffic.

Whatever the claims and stats being bandied about, it would appear that mobile is going to be the trend of 2010. Social media is “…like, so 2009”.

It makes intuitive sense that mobile traffic should figure more this year – the technology is here, you can be walking down that beach watching the sunrise and getting your real estate fix. There are apps being developed where you point your camera phone at a building and can see which properties are for sale, at what price and what has sold recently. Househunting is an activity that still takes us out and about, checking into home opens, trawling suburbs in our cars, walking down streets. With the mobile in our pocket, do we really need anything else?

So get ready for the upsurge of mobile web designers and iphone app developers. (There will be snake oil salesmen among them.) And with that, the question – do we “mobilise” our web site or get an iphone app developed, or both, or neither? The former allows your site to be accessible on most, if not all net-ready mobiles (much more fiddly to have coded than you might think). The latter allows people to download your app, have it in their menu making it easily accessible. Apps are sexy and cool, great PR spin, but are more expensive to develop. And how do you get YOUR app downloaded, especially when (in say a year or two’s time) there are hundreds of Australian real estate apps in the iStore, rather than 5? This is the brave new world we seem to be moving into.

Photo Credit – Jamie Riddell, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamieriddell/2166586104/

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Video Tutorial: How to Create a Free Real Estate Blog in 25 minutes

The word Blog is short for the word “web log”.  Blogs first started in the late 1990’s but really became popular around the year 2000 and today there are hundreds of millions of blogs around the world. You are even  reading a blog right now.

Social Networking followed blogs by about 5 years and started gaining momentum soon after the millennium. Websites like Facebook and Twitter have gained hugely in popularity and proactive agents have been early adopters of social networking.

The problem with social networking from a marketing perspective is that their instantaneous nature means that they are very much like throwing handfulls of snow in a snowball fight and hoping some of them hit home. Stop throwing and you will stop hitting people. This means that to get great results you have to be constantly posting which can be very time consuming for many agents.

Tweets on Twitter have a lifespan measured in minutes and will normally be most effective within 10 to 15 minutes of posting. Facebook posts are a little longer lasting but their effectiveness is still measured in days. Blogs posts on the other hand keeps on giving days, weeks, months and even years later.

At Nerang First National we have had our blog going for a little over a year now and during that time we have posted up 57 articles which equates to around 1 article per week. Posts that I made in the first month are still being read and attracting visitors over a year later.

In the context of our snowball fight think of blog posts like rolling your snowballs down the hill at the opposition. You write an article just once and every day it’s readership is just getting bigger and bigger with no further work from yourself.

To illustrate  this here is the statistics for two o four posts.

Funny Real Estate Photos was posted in July 2009 and has been one of our more popular articles.

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Thinking About a career in Real Estate? was written in late August and even with a limited audience that this subject would appeal to the views have been very good.

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Then you get more time sensitive posts like “Local Christmas Lights on Display” which attracted about 400 views in just the few weeks before Christmas.

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The first two articles were written when the readership was only a fraction of what it is today. If they were written today they would have much bigger peak in the first few weeks.

Every month the readership of our blog increases and in the past year we have had close to 10,000 views on the website. If the month on month growth continues we should see well over double that traffic over the next 12 months. But blog readership is not all about web visitors as articles can be read a few other ways including an RSS reader like Google Reader, and through email subscription. Unfortunately tracking those views is far more difficult.

In addition to our own readership we have also been lucky enough for about 7 or 8 of our blog articles to be picked up and republished in the Gold Coast Bulletins Lifestyle Guide with full credit back to our agency. We also use many of the blog articles on our facebook page and in our email and printed newsletters.

I talk with other agents all the time who want a start a blog but are often put off because they believe that it costs a lot or is beyond their technical skills to setup. So to show people just how easy it is I decided to take setup a blog another First National member and use screen capture software to capture the process and offer it up as a video tutorial.

The Blog I set up was for Bushby First National in Tasmania.

I asked them to provide me with just three things

1. Create an account on Wordpress.com. I could have done this as part of the process but this way they get to select their username, password and email that they want.
2. A header image  to suit the theme I was going to use which was 770 pixels x 140 pixels
3. Copy of a first article with matching pictures.

Using just those resources I was able to setup a blog on Wordpress.com and post the first article in around 25 minutes and it was all absolutely free. I took a couple of calls in between so you may see the video jump around where I stopped and started a few times.

Now what you will not see is an amazing professional Propvid style special effects, professional voice overs or mind blowing editing. What you (hopefully) will see is a quick and easy way to get your first blog up and running today. So be kind with my video skills… even you Brett!! :)

Wordpress.com is not the only free blogging service around but it is the one I recommend. The services uses the Wordpress blogging platform albeit a very locked down version to provide a free blogging service.

Wordpress is the underlying blogging platform that runs the Business2 blog and in a followup article I will cover options of how to upgrade your blog. This will cover domain mapping and even upgrading to a self hosted wordpress solution just like Business2 or my personal blog at glennbatten.com. A self hosted version of Wordpress allows you to install your own plugins and themes and provides greater functionality but you need to crawl before you walk and so a Wordpress.com blog is the perfect start that provides you with access to a powerful upgrade path for the future.

Anyway on with the show. The whole tutorial covers three separate videos thanks to Youtubes 10 minute limitation.

You will notice that the address of the blog in the video is bushbyfn.wordpress.com. Since creating the site Bushby First National has since purchased their own domain bushbyblog.com.au and used the Domain mapping upgrade on Wordpress.com (about $US10 per year) to map this new domain to their wordpress blog.

If you follow the tutorial and use it to setup your own blog please share it’s address with everyone in the comments section. Also, if  you are a real estate agent and already operate a blog for your agency then please share its address and your experiences to date so those considering setting up a blog can be inspired and learn from your experiences.

I would highly recommend any agency who wants to interact with their community, increase their brand profile and leverage more visitors to their main website consider starting up a blog. You don’t have  to go into as much detail in your articles as I have  on some of them.  Keeping it topical, opinionated and up to date is far more important.

Anybody who has been reading my articles on this site will notice the occasional cross over articles on our blog where I have written on the same subject but just from different angles. The article titled “Google Real Estate and Nerang, Highland Park, Carrara and Worongary” is the perfect example. Just write whatever comes into your head that you want to share. At first it may seem a bit foreign but you will soon be knocking out articles with ease.

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Making online your “very owned” point of difference

Rupert Murdoch once said, “The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, “It’s the biggest thing since Guttenberg,” and then someone else said, “No, it’s the biggest thing since the invention of writing.” Which is why I want to write about it.

Why, then in Australia (and everywhere else for that matter) do so many real estate agencies struggle with the basic concepts of intelligent online activation strategies? Read the rest of this article »

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Single Property Websites

Websites dedicated to an individual property listing are a common trend amongst real estate agents in the US. Many American agents use specific web based applications like vflyer, postlets and mymarketware to quickly and cheaply create a single property website. Single property websites aren’t really used by agents in Australia rather they appear to be opted by private sellers who can’t gain access to the larger Australia real estate portals.

So what is a single property website? It’s basically a website which is dedicated to a single property which is for sale or lease. Here is an example of a vflyer property website which is hosted on the vflyer website and also a postlets site. There are basically two types of single property websites, a subdomain or an individual domain website. Both vflyer and postlets offer a sub domain service which allows an agent or vendor to have a single property website as a subdomain of vflyer or postlets.

Mymarketware offers agents and vendors the option to have their single property website under a unique domain name which the agent/vendor can select. Although this option is a little more expensive because it requires more work to setup, it is a lot better for SEO if a descriptive domain name which reflects the location and type of property is selected.

What are the benefits of having a single property website for your listing(s)? A lot of the suppliers of these websites rant on about how having a single property website will improve the likelihood of a buyer finding the property on the internet. This is a little unrealistic given how competitive the online real estate segment is. Even when one of these sites is indexed by a search engine it will never rank above the real estate portals, most real estate franchises and any real estate agent in that geographic area who has a reasonable online presence. Unless you are lucky enough to secure a domain name which represents what a user will type into a search engine then i don’t see too many buyers finding the property website before they see it on a real estate portal or agent website.

But where I think single agent websites can help an agent or real estate agency is improving their online presence and SEO of their existing agency website, helping attract buyers and vendors to their agency. If you are creating an individual website for every single listing in your agency then an average agency would be creating 70 to 100 websites each year. These websites will be specific to the property type and suburb the property is located in and all will link back to the main agency website. Also, once a property has sold the status of the property will change to sold on the property website but the property website will remain on the web forever.

What does all this mean? This is great for your agency website SEO.  Over a period of time you will have a bundle of websites all with content, keywords and domain names specific to the suburbs your agency operate in. How this really helps your SEO is that you can link all of these websites back to your main agency website increasing the direct traffic it receives. Also, it’s these links from websites containing similar content to what your website contains which search engines dig and will improve your page ranking.

I’ve seen one service in Australia MyPropertyAddress who cater for this niche market but I’m not aware of any other existing services. If there are any others out there then please make yourself known!

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Mohbe – mobile phone real estate

Both Domain and REA have created mobile phone websites allowing users to search and view property through their mobile phone. However, I’m not aware of any agency websites which have been optimised so property seekers can view the agencies properties through a mobile device. This is all about to change due to a nifty web application called Mohbe.

Mohbe allows real estate agencies in any country to have their own agency branded mobile phone website for all of their property listings. The mobile phone websites are viewable through any mobile phone which has an internet browser and access to the internet.

Mohbe specialise in providing real estate agents with mobile phone property listing websites without the agent having to do anything.

But this isn’t all that Mohbe offers agents and property seekers. What makes this product completely unique are the options available to a property seeker to get the property url into their mobile phone.

Each mobile phone property website has its own unique QR Code and Mohbe tiny url making it easy for property seekers to navigate to through their mobile phone.

Mohbe uses the latest in barcode technology by allocating a QR Code to each property. A property seeker will scan this QR Code using their mobile phone camera which will then automatically load the mobile property page in the phone’s browser. For those users who do not have a camera phone, they can quickly enter the Mohbe tiny property url into their browser eg Mohbe.com/3467. Agents enter their listings into Mohbe either manually through the interface or automatically via xml data feed from their real estate property listing company.

Now this is really cool as it means agents can display these QR Codes in all of their print media eg. Sign boards, newspaper ads, magazine ads, brochures, flyers and even in their window displays. Imagine taking a photo of a QR Code displayed on a property sign board and being able to view a complete virtual tour while your standing on the footpath. It also means agents can display more property listings with less property information reducing the cost of print marketing.

The only shortcoming I see with the application is that although the agent’s logo is included in the mobile property websites, the website is branded with the Mohbe blue which could conflict with some agents branding. I’d really like to see the application allow agencies to choose from a colour pallet, the background colour so it blends better with their agency brand. I also think within the interface they need some kind of summary of listings, accompanied with a way to sort property listings similar to the Domain or REA back-ends.

Putting these small issues aside, Mohbe is an innovative and useful application which should be embraced by the real estate community.

Note: Agentpoint was responsible for the design and development of Mohbe and has an equity ownership stake in it.

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