Feb
29
Build your estate agency´s credibility with customer reviews on your website
Filed Under Online Marketing | Leave a Comment
Word of mouth has always been an essential part of getting business and in today’s Internet era, where total strangers can communicate across time and distance, it is a more powerful marketing tool than ever! A couple of weeks ago, we discussed Social Markers and why you really should be aware of what people are saying about your real estate agency online - on forums, in their blogs and wherever they care to put fingers to keyboard.
But have you thought of allowing your own clients to post reviews of your services on your website itself?
More and more people researching online reviews
Just like an increasing number of people browse the Internet looking for property, the number of people who base their judgement of products and services on online reviews is ever on the rise, and this applies to real estate agencies too.
The thing is that dealing with an honest and trustworthy estate agent is at least as important for property-hunters as the properties themselves - and there is no better way to build your credibility than to let your previous clients do it for you. You can blow your own trumpet as much as you like, but in the eyes of prospective clients that can never compare with the influence of the collective voice of people who have bought property through your estate agency.
Beyond simply publishing customer testimonials
Publishing customer testimonials is indeed one of the most underutilised marketing tools in any business sector. However, because you have absolute control of what you put on your website, this tactic may be seen to lack credibility. What we are talking about here goes beyond that and involves allowing your customers to post their own comments directly on your website and even modify them as they deem fit (there is a variety of inexpensive software that will allow you to do this).
A negative review can actually be a good thing
Don’t let the thought of getting a negative review bother you. A large percentage of people who shop online are used to reading online reviews and will realise that occasionally someone does happen to have a bad experience. The odd negative comment in a sea of positive ones will only help to add credibility to the whole system - after all no estate agency is perfect, and  if every single word that is said about you is a shower of praise and glory, people will think that your whole customer comments is probably rigged.  Moreover, when pretty much all of the reviews about a service are positive, a negative review is perceived more as a reflection of the client, than of the estate agency itself. Besides,  depending on the review software you use, you could be able to respond to any negative feedback with a clarification.
One thing to bear in mind, however, is that it is probably a good idea to not make the system totally public, but to manage the logins yourself and hand them out personally to clients. This will make sure that your reviews are not sabotaged by an unscrupulous competitor.
So go for it! Give your clients a voice on your website and allow them to give you feedback and sing your praises. This one should be a no-brainer for any real estate agent who is devoted to complete customer satisfaction!
Feb
21
Why a bad real estate website could be the downfall of your estate agency – and what you absolutely must watch out for
Filed Under Online Marketing | 1 Comment
Just a couple of weeks ago, our Real Estate Pay Per Click Management partners blogged about the importance of facing the real estate recession head on with an effective marketing strategy. There’s no doubt that this is the time to take stock of the situation and make sure every bit counts - and one of the most important pieces of your real estate marketing jigsaw is, of course, your website itself.
This is why we were delighted to read Jim Cronin’s excellent post on the Real Estate Tomato blog, titled, “Is your website working against your real estate career?”
If you’re thinking that that title is there just for shock effect, think again! Or better still, click the link and read every word of that blog post. You’re sure to learn a whole lot from the vital list of do’s and don’ts that will make or break your website - complete with reasons why and merciless real life examples of those unforgivable practices that do your real estate business more harm than good.
This post resonated with us so much because it just about summarises everything we have been telling our web design clients over the years about how to market their real estate websites and how to make them relevant to their visitors and easy to use at the same time.
Things like:
- Start a real estate blog and provide relevant content for your visitors to enjoy on a regular basis so you build trust and establish yourself as an authority at the same time
- Don’t use Flash intros or welcome screens, but send your visitors straight to where the meat is
- Link to other estate agents, comment on their blog posts and participate in your local real estate community
- Get yourself a LinkedIn account and start building an invaluable social network of contacts from which to source new clients and business partners
- Put an ear to the ground to listen to feedback from both your current clients and prospective ones, so you get a global picture of what your business looks like from the outside
The only one thing we do not totally agree with is where Jim advises against property request forms. We find from experience that a simple, but prominent, quick enquiry form makes it easy for property-hunters to contact with you and is an invaluable means of generating those extra leads.
But all the rest is one bit of invaluable advice after the other.
Is your website working against your real estate career? That really is the question you should really be asking yourself, so if you only read one other real estate marketing article this week - or even this year - make it the Real Estate Tomato blog post.
Feb
19
The newspaper’s swansong and what you must do to avoid going down with the old media when they die
Filed Under Online Marketing | Leave a Comment
If you love leafing through your favourite newspaper over a cup of coffee, enjoy it while you can!
In an interview last week, Rachel Money asked Seth Godin how could newspapers become successful online businesses and Seth took the opportunity to predict that the printed rag will become obsolete sooner than we might expect - just like cassette tapes and floppy disks.
In Seth’s own words:
“Newspapers are going to go out of business in the next ten years all around the world. There are two problems in the United States newspaper industry. One is that you make a living from cutting down lots of trees, making the paper and hiring trucks to deliver the newspapers to stores. That’s not how information travels anymore.”
“The second problem is that newspapers make their money from classified ads. Now those ads work better and cost less online so I think there’s no question that there will be organizations like newspapers, but they’re not going to be in paper form. The sooner that people who make newspapers realize that and get into a different business the happier they’re going to be. They need to concentrate all their efforts online.”
The thing is that no matter how much you may love holding an actual newspaper in your hands, newspapers are more about the news and less about the paper - and in our information age, that news has been available online for hours, and is inevitably out of date, by the time the stacks of dailies hit the shelves.
And no, you won’t have to carry around your laptop to read the latest news at the beach! Emerging gadgets like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader - with their capability to store hundreds of books, download the latest news and stuff via wireless and show it all on a display that uses the patented E-ink technology to give an eyestrain-free paper look - are a taste of things to come as print media exits stage left in the very near future.
What does this mean for your business?
Even if you don’t run a newspaper, the increasing shift to online media is already affecting the way your customers consume information, and consequently, the advertising methods you have to use if you want to reach them. Seth Godin’s advice to newspaper publishers to get out while they can also applies to everyone who relies on the old media for their advertising.
If that’s you, or if your current view of a website is a kind of static digital brochure that once created will last you for the next so many months or years, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you have a whole world of online marketing and advertising possibilities to discover - a myriad of ways to promote your business better and more efficiently. The bad news? Simply that if you don’t embrace these new technologies, you run a very real risk of being left behind and losing out to your more savvy competitors. But no bad news is really bad if it is perfectly avoidable, is it?
So let’s take a look at a few ways how you can lever the Internet to your marketing advantage today.
1) Give your customers regular fresh new content
Your website is the perfect way to get all the latest information to the masses instantly. This sounds obvious, but few businesses really take advantage of the opportunity to publish on the cheap that blogs and content management systems offer. Not only is this an excellent way to encourage visitors to return to your website, but the search engines love fresh information too!
2) Engage in dialogue with your audience
Marketers would give anything to find out what’s on the mind of their prospects. Now you can! Your blog and website comment forms can be an excellent platform for your customers to voice their opinion and tell you what they think of your business. After all, if you don’t know, you cannot improve, can you?
3) Test and track your website performance
You don’t have to have the perfect website right off the bat - and that’s in fact impossible! Look at your website as something you can test and improve. With applications like Google Analytics (which happens to be free) you can find out how different pages and elements of your website are performing and test different versions in real-time. That way, you build on what works and your website evolves and improves in a series of increments based on what works.
4) Run a targeted pay-per-click advertising campaign
Pay-per-click ads fall into the category of ads Seth Godin was referring to as working better and costing less online, in the quote at the top of this post. In a nutshell, they work better because you can track your ads performance in detail and improve them just like we suggested you do with your website, and they cost less because you can target your pay-per-click campaign only to the people who are likely to be interested and only pay when you get results in the form of clicks to your website.
5) Start an opt-in e-mail list
Whenever anyone contacts you through your website, offer them the opportunity to sign up to receive updates, your newsletter, or whatever value you can offer on a regular basis. As your e-mail list grows, you will have a captive audience of people who actually want to hear from you and you’ll be all set to engage in what Seth Godin calls Permission Marketing. Read all about it in Seth’s book (hint: it’s not the same thing as spamming your mailing list with ads).
6) Embrace and use ‘new’ technologies
Many of the so-called ‘new’ technologies like video and audio are as old as TV and radio, but now you too can become your own producer with a simple camera or microphone and little else. In a recent post we discussed how estate agents can easily stand out with a simple video presentation of their properties that takes next to no skills to make. Even better, come up with some innovative idea that might go viral like the famous Will It Blend? videos that spread like wildfire and have been seen by millions on YouTube.
And that’s by no means an exhaustive list of the ways you can be using your website and the Internet to get more business faster. Want to know more? Contact expert internet marketers Sorted Sites now to discuss how you can make the most of your online presence!
Feb
13
Why you should be concerned about your business Social Marker
Filed Under Social Networking | Leave a Comment
Once upon a time, businesses had full control over their image and branding, as long as they had enough money to hire people who knew what to do. The mass media made it possible to get their message out to the masses and influence the thoughts of individuals as they sat in the safety of their living rooms.
Today, the advent of social media and the social web has brought about a revolution. For the first time ever, is the individual who has the power to speak and, as Jay Deragon says in the Social Media Today blog, people’s conversations are having a strong influence on the image of a company - for good or for bad.
Jay explains how the conversations of people who have experienced a product or service create a collective impression of that brand - something Hugh MacLeod calls the brand’s ‘Social Marker‘. When your customers, employees, or even providers talk about you in the social media - and yes, they are talking - their conversations have a knock on effect and are able to spread very rapidly. One person tells another who tells another, and suddenly it’s thousands, or even millions, all talking about you!
‘Who are your customers?’ and ‘What do they want?’ have always been two fundamental questions for any business to ask. But now, the focus really has to be on, ‘What are your customers saying about you?’, both because this question has a direct bearing on the real image of your company that’s out there, and also because by listening to your customers, you can answer the first two questions with a deeper insight than ever before!
Like Jay Deragon says, people don’t want to be managed (by media campaigns, websites talking down to them, and all that jazz). They want to be heard! They want to voice their opinion about the companies they deal with and that includes you. People are clamouring for attention all over the Internet - in their blogs, in their YouTube, in their e-mails. You name it!
Want an example of the power of one man and his social network? Take a look at what happened when a client ran into a dumb customer service rep while trying to cancel his AOL internet account and blogged about it. The resulting media circus left such a lasting effect that if you google the words ‘cancel aol‘, three out of the top six results you get refer to this unfortunate incident that happened over a year and a half ago! A big, black and persistent blot on AOL’s Social Marker.
So, have you got your ear to the ground - or rather to the Internet? If not, it’s time to become aware of the conversations that are happening about your business both online and offline. Jay rightly says what we all know - that people are frustrated by unfulfilled promises and old sales and marketing tactics and that they are “speaking out and are managing, creating and influencing markets.”
Can you afford to plug your ears? Or are your company’s actions going to scream, “We heard you” to the collective public out there? The choice you make will probably have a bigger impact on your business’s Social Marker - and consequently on your business itself - than you could ever imagine!
Feb
6
Marketing your business through a recession
Filed Under General Stuff, Pay Per Click | Leave a Comment
Andrew de Gabriele over at Pay Per Click Management has just published a great post on how to market your business through a recession.Â
“When times are tough, it is more important than ever - absolutely vital - to figure out how you can spend your money wisely to attract as many clients as possible …”
Feb
5
What is the position 6 penalty?
It’s no fun at all when your hard-earned Google search rankings drop overnight! But that’s what happened in recent weeks to many webmasters who found their top-ranked websites suddenly drop to position six.
Strangely enough, it emerged that the websites affected by Google’s so-called ‘position 6 penalty’ were established ones with a long history of ranking in the first or second place for the search terms in question. It goes without saying that theories abounded of why this was happening and many feared that Google was clamping down on ‘overenthusiastic’ SEO that it considered manipulative and in breach of the Laws of Googleland.
Website owners breathe a sigh of relief
Well, the good news is that if your website has been affected by the position 6 penalty, you can sleep easy now. Google’s own Matt Cutts clarified last week that the position 6 penalty was the result of an error that Google was in the process of rectifying. Matt said:
When Barry asked me about “position 6″ in late December, I said that I didn’t know of anything that would cause that. But about a week or so after that, my attention was brought to something that could exhibit that behavior. We’re in the process of changing the behavior; I think the change is live at some datacenters already and will be live at most data centers in the next few weeks.
In general if you think a site might have a penalty (perhaps from past behavior) and you think the site is clean presently, you can do a reconsideration request in our webmaster console to ask Google to take another look at the site.
So what caused position 6?
It’s no secret that Google is constantly tweaking its search ranking rules and algorithms. Several theories have been proposed to account for the position 6 penalty, including that Google may be taking into account how often particular search results are clicked as part However, this seems an unlikely cause.
Most probably this phenomenon is simply a case of a rule or two applied too stringently. On the other hand, (if the conspiracy theorists are to be believed) it could be a portent of something up Google’s sleeve. But what exactly caused ‘position six’ is destined to remain hidden behind the secretive walls of Googledom no matter how much speculation there is.
Boost your website’s search engine rankings
If you were totally oblivious to the position 6 problem because your website rankings have never been anywhere close to the top ten, you might want to give our SEO team at Sorted sites a shout. We are available to discuss the best way to make your business stand out online by getting your website the search engine rankings it deserves. Get in touch!
Feb
2
Most people I’ve spoken with about starting a blog for their business have said they unsure what to write about or how to get started. I would sugest that before you start a blog read up on your compeitiors blogs and others in your market. You can test your blog voice by leaving comments on other blogs.
When you feel you are ready to start blogging make sure your blog address is yourwebsitedomain.com/blog or youblogdomain.com try and avoid signing up for a free blog as offered by blogger, wordpress or typepad. We use wordpress to set up a blog on your own domain, this ensures that your blog always remains yours.
Usefull links:
Our website to create a business blog
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