More Real Estate Marketing Trends for 2013
by on December 11, 2012
It’s highly unlikely that you got into real estate to become a marketing genius. That said, for you to succeed in the business requires marketing both yourself and your clients’ interests. The end of the year is a good time to reflect on your marketing efforts and decide to focus on the tactics that work for you and replace any that don’t. Last week, we covered a few of what we consider to be hot marketing trends for 2013, and this week we’re wrapping up the list.
Niche Marketing
Many agents are finding it increasingly more difficult to compete with the mass of agents who try to be everything to everyone. Choosing a niche and laser-focusing all of your marketing efforts to that niche group can be a lucrative marketing tactic.
Steve Israel, owner/broker of Buyer’s Edge in Bethesda, Md., takes the niche market a couple of steps further: Not only does Buyer’s Edge deal exclusively with buyers, they specialize in the condo market. Wait – Israel’s niche is even more concentrated – buyers of condos in downtown Washington, D.C.
Israel didn’t cut his traditional real estate practice loose in favor of the downtown condo niche; he made it an additional part of it. “We found a large part of our business is first-time homebuyers. We also know that the condo market is a very vibrant part of the local market and that it lends itself well to being a niche,” Israel said. “We built a website full of so much detailed information about the different buildings that it required building an extensive database as well. It was time consuming and expensive, but, since we began a concentrated marketing effort for it last year, we’ve had good response,” Israel concludes.
Niche marketing works well if you’re in a large market packed with generalists. It takes you from being a teeny fish in a huge pond to being somewhat larger in a significantly smaller pond.
Specializing in a real estate niche also helps you focus your agent branding efforts. Life in the real estate world is much easier when you know who your prospective client is, where to find him or her, and how to appeal to that client.
If 2013 is going to be the Year of the Niche for you, here are two tips to get you started:
- If the thought of cutting loose all the other parts of your business to focus on one part of the market is frightening, do it gradually. While Israel has no plans to focus the entire business on downtown condos, his method may work for you. Start slowly and, as you build up the expertise in your chosen market, you’ll feel more comfortable letting everything else fall away.
- Choose a niche that you are familiar with or interested in. Former military types may want to specialize in veterans. Equestrians might be drawn to ranches or horse property. If nobody is specializing in high-rise condos in your city, there you go. A niche market can be property-type based (such as condos or mobile homes), types of clients (the aforementioned veterans or seniors, perhaps), or location (beachfront homes, golf course homes or homes in a specific subdivision).
Location-Based Real Estate Marketing
Last week we discussed the mobile marketing trend with an eye toward tweaking your website to be mobile compatible. There’s so much more to mobile marketing your real estate business, however, and location-based marketing will be a hot marketing topic in 2013.
Mobile is how 55 percent of adult cell phone owners access the Internet in 2012, and that percentage is expected to explode in 2013, according to Pew Internet. In the 25 to 34 age group, a whopping 80 percent of cell owners use their phones to go online, while 68 percent of cell phone owners aged 35 to 44 have gone mobile.
Now that your website supports mobile access, it’s time to get more creative in how you market your business to mobile users to capture this incredible opportunity. This is where location-based marketing comes in.
Corcoran Group Real Estate in New York is one of the pioneers in real estate location-based marketing. They call it “untethering their agents.” It all started with the Corcoran GroupiPhone app that offers interactive floorplans for all properties, the ability to share property listings either via text message or email and a function that notifies the user of open houses that meet their criteria, as they’re scheduled.
They’ve also included a unique “Get Out Nearby” function that lists fun and interesting things to do near their listings, and the ability to directly connect with Foursquare.
How is it working for them? “The company has approximately 60,000 iPhone users that interact with the app seven to eight times longer than on their desktop site,” according to Lauren Johnson with Mobile Marketer.
There are a number of ways to connect with mobile-savvy buyers and sellers and a number of companies smart enough to create products to help the real estate professional do so. Linkbuildr’s Ryan Clark is raving about what Foursquare can do for the real estate professional. He suggests that you integrate your open house check-ins through an app on your website. “Imagine updating your clients in real time via Foursquare that your open house is well … open for business. This also gets shot off directly to your Facebook page as well as Twitter.”
Face it, a sign rider is a lot like a tweet – there’s only so many characters that will fit on it. In lieu of the flyer box (that the neighborhood kids typically invade) consider putting Quick Response (QR) on your signage. This gives the potential homebuyer instant access to all of the listing’s information. The bonus for the agent is that it’s easy to track who is scanning your QR codes. You’ll find a lot of the old-time sign companies, like Oakley Signs, offering the service, as well as some new players. You can also slap the codes on other marketing materials, such as flyers and postcards.
E-Books
An offer of a free e-book on an agent’s website certainly isn’t a new marketing tactic, but look for it to gain importance as the need to establish yourself as the expert becomes ever more vital.
A prominent Minnesota agent commissioned a freelance writer who specializes in real estate to ghostwrite and compile his e-book, which he swears by.
“We worked closely on the collaboration,” he said. “She nailed it. The book sounds like I wrote it – even my wife was amazed at how she captured my voice,” he continues.
By listing himself as the author, “The book enforces my brand as a short sale expert, while at the same time offering valuable information to those thinking of going through the short sale process. It isn’t “salesy,” at all. It’s straightforward, good, solid information. I get a lot of requests for it.”
Al Ferraguti, owner/broker of Southhampton, Pa.’s Tri-County Realty uses his e-books not to promote himself as the expert but to educate the firm’s buying clients. He purchased two (one for buyers and one for sellers) ready-made e-books several years ago.
There’s no author name on them, which is fine with Ferraguti. “We spend a lot of time educating buyers with seminars and other events, so the e-book is just another way to offer information and to teach – especially first-time buyers. The books are packed with good information.”
Although he can’t say for sure that any deals are directly attributable to his website offer of a free e-book, he does know that the demand for them is good. “We get email addresses, and any time you can do that it’s a good thing. We follow up with the people monthly.” Like everything else in this business, Ferraguti feels that if you decide to offer a free e-book, plan on spending some time marketing it as well.
E-books come in many forms, the most popular of which is as a PDF. A PDF is easy to read and one can usually print the file. You can also publish your e-book to integrate with your mobile marketing campaign (you have one of those, right?). Although iBooks will read PDF files, most agents convert them to the iBook format. Several companies offer tools to assist you with this, such as Calibre, which is every agent’s favorite price: free!
E-Book Content
If you blog, and you’ve been doing it for some time, you may have enough pre-written content to fill a book. Separate your posts into categories, compile a table of contents and you’ve got yourself an e-book.
Another option is to hire a ghostwriter. If you plan on using the book to help enforce your brand, this might be your best bet. Even here you have several options:
- Hire a cheap writer and then an editor to fix his or her mistakes.
- Hire a professional real estate ghostwriter – more expensive, but you won’t need an editor, nor will you have to walk the writer through sometimes complicated real estate information.
- Write it yourself and hire an editor to clean it up.
E-Book Topics
The book topics you can offer come right from a seller’s or buyer’s list of frequently asked questions:
- Lease options.
- Short sales.
- Foreclosures.
- Buying.
- Selling.
- Mortgage process.
- Staging and curb appeal.
- First-time homebuyer tips for success.
- “The Secrets” to anything, from getting the most money to negotiating the best deal.
Next year’s successful real estate agent will be the one who throws off ineffective yet comfortable marketing bonds and begins to think in new ways. What about you? What are your marketing plans for 2013 – what will you be getting rid of and what new methods will you adopt?
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