Real Estate Internet Marketing Concepts

Many agents confuse having a web page on their broker's website with having their own internet presence. These pages are typically very basic in nature, and ultimately do more to promote the broker than to promote the agent. But what happens if you change agencies? And do these web pages generate a lot of leads specifically for you?

A central part of brand creation and promotion is to register your own web domain name. In general, once you decide how you want to brand yourself, you should choose a domain name that supports that branding. This can be your own name (www.roblevy.com) or a name that reflects the kind of business you do, or the location you serve, (www.kansascityrealestateexpert.com).

Once your website is set up, you can promote it in everything you do. It becomes a destination for prospects and clients alike to learn more about you, about your listings, and even about the community you serve.

Different Approaches to Agent Websites

Agent websites range from inexpensive and simple to expensive and elaborate. Some agents spend thousands of dollars to have a custom website built (often by someone who doesn't know the real estate business), only to realize that it doesn't really meet their needs. Unless your situation is unusual, a website designed for real estate provided by a reputable vendor will almost certainly meet your needs.

Choosing among the vendors and the products available can be confusing. Certainly the attractiveness of the site designs is one consideration. But also, what additional services does the site provide? Does it include auto-response email and email campaigns? Does it come with a monthly newsletter? Or are these add-on features that cost more? And no matter what features it comes with, does the vendor provide an upgrade path so that as your needs grow, you can move into a more sophisticated solution?

Real Pro Systems provides two agent systems; Real Pro Silver, and Real Pro Gold. Both of these are based on a premium-quality website designed specifically for real estate. And both include an integrated follow-up system consisting of a monthly e-newsletter, drip email campaign capability, and a blast email tool. Real Pro Gold also incorporates stealth marketing lead generation, an agent blog, and an online home showing feedback tool.

Our belief is that a branded agent website in your own internet domain coupled with a high-quality automated follow-up system, is foundational; you cannot operate successfully in the Internet Age without having these essential tools in place and using them actively. We believe that without them you cannot market effectively or be taken seriously by today's internet-savvy buyers and sellers. Real Pro Silver is designed to establish this foundation for agents who are serious about building their internet presence.

If you are further in along in establishing your internet presence but are looking for a richer set of tools, or for more effective lead generation, Real Pro Gold may be right for you. With a blog integrated in the website, you will get more traffic. With online showing feedback, your sellers will adjust to market reality far more quickly. And with stealth website lead generation, you will engage many times more internet buyers and sellers and turn them into clients.

If you start with Silver your investment is secure. You can upgrade to Gold at any point in time. You will be charged the difference in price between what you paid for Silver and the current price of Gold at the time you upgrade.

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An auto-response email message is a message that is sent automatically in response to an inquiry. For example, if a client visits your website and emails you a question, you could use an auto-responder to immediately reply to the message, acknowledging that you have received it, and indicating when they can expect to hear from you.

An email “drip” campaign is a series of email messages that are sent out on a schedule. For example, if someone requested home search information from you via email, you would send that information back to them over email. But if you make “opting in” to receive your messages a condition for receiving that home search information, you are now free to enroll the prospect in a drip campaign designed for home buyers.

The drip campaign serves several purposes. First, a good automated email message will be delivered on branded email stationery. Second, the quick response from the initial inquiry creates a very favorable impression. Third, sending our regular messages keep your brand on the top of the prospect's mind. And fourth, a well-written campaign with appropriate calls to action can trigger a response from the prospect that leads to a live conversation.

You can create a drip campaign to serve any purpose- buyers, sellers, vacation properties, investment properties, and the like. The key is to be able to group your email addresses according to their interests, and then enroll them in the appropriate drip campaign, based on how the lead came to you.

Drip email campaigns have the effect of incubating leads from early-stage “tire kickers” until they are ready to move on buying or selling a home. Good drip campaigns keep these “lookers” engaged so that when they are ready to speak with an agent, they'll call you.

Real Pro Systems provides a rich follow-up system as part of its Gold, Silver, and Lender products. This follow-up system includes a drip email campaign capability. Real Pro Silver and Real Pro Lender come with one prepared general follow-up campaign, but you are free to create others. Real Pro Gold comes with three prepared campaigns (optionally four). Since all of our systems include a powerful lead management system, it's easy to group email addresses by area of interest and enroll them in the appropriate drip campaigns.

The result is that you can “work” hundreds or thousands of leads almost effortlessly, by letting the system do the work. These are leads that initially wouldn't be worth your time, but using the power of drip email, can be incubated into strong prospects over time.

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Easy Steps to Improve Website Traffic

Let's look at some of the means available for increasing traffic on your website. First of all, the most practical and most effective means is probably the least exciting- you need to promote your website URL in everything you do. Your business card must show your personal web address, and it's a great idea to have your email hosted in the same domain as well. (e.g. jim@jimsmith.com) Every listing flyer, every advertisement, every postcard, should all encourage readers to visit your website. You want everyone you come in contact with to remember your domain as their resource for real estate.

Second, you need to make sure your website has interesting content. This means not only content related to real estate, but also information on the areas you serve. Some agents add a local events calendar, some provide a list of all the public services companies with phone numbers and links, and some (such as Real Pro Gold agents) have a built-in agent blog on their website that has fresh content almost every day. The more valuable and the more interesting, the more traffic you will see.

Third, establish links with local associates. Maybe you work with certain title company staff, loan officers or insurance agents. What other business people have websites, who might include your site as a featured link? The more incoming links you have, the more opportunity for someone to visit your site having been referred by another site.

Search Engine Optimization

Many agents are aware that search engine placement can increase traffic to their sites. The process of making it onto the first page of search engine results is a long-term proposition, and is beyond the skills and available time for most real estate professionals. There are firms that specialize in search engine placement services alone.

The first step is to choose a website that conforms to modern Web 2.0 standards. Search engines literally “give up” trying to read websites built to older standards, and that includes many commercially available real estate websites. Modern sites with a CSS layer and hand-coded HTML (rather than auto-generated by a programming tool) make it easy for a search engine to probe the breadth and depth of the site.

The next is to focus on content. Search engines are programmed to look for content that is relevant to specific search terms, and also related to the page title, meta tags, and other arcane details of web pages. Years ago it was pretty easy to fool the search engines, but not anymore. The best policy today is to give search engines what they are looking for; relevant content that is as original as possible, and properly formatted.

You will need to build out your site with pages of original content that relates closely to the work you do. This could include pages of content about your area, specific neighborhoods you specialize in, your team members, as well as the services you offer. When you choose a website vendor, make sure they provide an easy way for a non-technical person to add pages of content. Whether a site is template-based or not is less important than having the ability to add a significant number of pages of content, and whether the site is structured so that a search engine can easily “crawl” the site.

Knowledgeable web programmers will set “metatags” on each page to highlight the terms that they want a search engine to index and point to that page's content. As a real estate agent or lender, you probably don't want to have to get into HTML programming in order to have a successful website. To that end, Real Pro Systems' websites provide an easy mechanism for you to set metatags without having to be a programmer. This will facilitate the content of your web pages being properly indexed by the search engines.

The points in this section only scratch the surface of all that is involved in search engine optimization (SEO). You will need to decide how much effort or money to invest in SEO to meet your needs. At some point, you would probably rather hire a service to do this work for you so you can spend more time selling houses!

Traffic or Leads?

Most agents believe that they way they will generate more leads is to generate more web traffic, so they become very concerned about search engine optimization, often without attending to the basics of content outlined above. A good real estate website will have a way to capture leads from visitors to the website, and put those leads in an appropriate drip email campaign or subscribe them to an e-newsletter. This is a sound strategy; necessary, but not sufficient.

Since agent websites are intended to be heavily branded for the agent, they will only attract leads from one portion of the market- those that don't mind exposing their identities to an agent who may call them. However, many internet home buyers and sellers are not ready to speak with an agent, and will not feel comfortable registering on a branded agent website.

Consequently, generating traffic alone will not necessarily generate leads, especially from “lookers” who are early in their search process. A very powerful lead generation technique is “stealth” website lead generation (see “Stealth Website Lead Generation”). This approach does not rely on SEO to drive traffic at all, yet is a proven lead generator for “lookers” who are not ready to speak to an agent.

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Smart agents know that they need to fill the “top of their sales funnel” as well as work on prospects that are looking to complete a transaction in the near term. This means they know they need to collect names and email addresses from these early lookers and incubate them over time so they become the agent of choice when the prospect does want to speak to an agent.

A “stealth” website is a very effective way of doing just that. These are called “stealth” because they do not overtly brand the agent in any way (although some states have certain labeling or disclosure rules that mitigate against some of the “stealthiness”). Instead, they offer information of interest to the site visitor, often under the promise that no agent will call them.

While there are many potential kinds of stealth websites, Real Pro Systems prominently recommends three; one for home buyers looking to see what homes are available that meet their criteria, one for home sellers wanting to know what their property is worth, and one for FSBO homeowners to advertise their properties. In each case, the visitor registers on the site to receive specific information of value, and they have to provide their email address to receive the information they have requested. In turn, their email addresses are automatically enrolled in an appropriate drip email campaign and added to a monthly newsletter mail list.

Stealth website are nearly invisible to search engines though. They do not provide much content, if any. So how do home buyers and sellers find them?

Again, it comes down to basic advertising. Promoting the sites on every postcard, on the back of every listing flier, and even in small dedicated newspaper advertisements produces results. When supported by the promise that an agent will not call, home buyers and sellers will visit the sites and feel “safe” in providing their email addresses in order to receive the information they request.

Many Real Pro Systems agents actively promote their stealth sites in these ways and receive 50 or more leads per week from them alone. These leads percolate in the drip email follow-up system, and these agents get phone calls every week from prospects they have never met, but who now want to list a home or start looking at homes.

By their very nature, stealth website leads are typically buyer and seller prospects who would never register on a branded agent website. Yet by providing the information they request, and honoring their need to not be contacted directly, they can become serious prospects and then clients who will do business over time.

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First of all, email is far less expensive than sending a paper newsletter in the mail. But it is also far more flexible, and can produce much faster response from the recipients. Let's look at the reasons why.

Flexible – You can easily add content to Real Pro Systems' electronic newsletter (e-newsletter), even at the last minute. Since the format is HTML, you can include pictures, charts of data, or links to articles of interest on the web. And the most important link to include is to your own web site!

Faster Response – A printed piece of paper can make an enticing call to action, but responding to that call always means the prospect has to shift another medium in order to respond; making a phone call, visiting a web site, etc. You lose a lot of interest in the time it takes for the prospect to follow up.

When an electronic newsletter includes a call to action, it can be executed by the prospect immediately. It might be a link to new properties for sale, or a reply email button so a recipient can ask a question. The speed of the internet can make a huge difference in your ability to turn prospects into clients.

Reusable Content- Real Pro Systems' approach to an electronic newsletter gets double duty out of the content. Every monthly newsletter is posted on your agent website, so web visitors who are not on your mailing list can also read your newsletter.

Easy to Pass On – An electronic newsletter arrives as an email. As a result, the recipient can forward it to one or more people they know with a click of the mouse. In each issue you can ask the recipient to forward it to anyone they know who might be interested in buying or selling a house. In the case of an email message that is so easy to do that you are far more likely to get referrals than with “snail” mail.

For these reasons and more, an electronic newsletter is one of the lowest cost yet most effective ways to stay in touch with your clients and prospects. And as you know, the more you are in front of your prospects, the better the chances they will call you when they are ready to do business.

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