PROView - May 2008 - (Page 10) Brokerage design Click Closely, We Are Turning the Corner on Internet Marketing by Jeremy Conaway, President, RECON Intelligence Services This is a classic Cinderella story. Eighteen months into a down market cycle that is generally having a cataclysmic impact upon the American residential real estate industry we are seeing the birth and growth of several new and exciting trends and directions. New company benchmarks, new broker/agent relationships, new management models and, at last, a new and serious approach to real estate Internet marketing. After over ten years of ignoring the growing marketing potential of the Internet, companies representing an impressive range of industries are finally moving resources, innovation, and creativity into Internet marketing initiatives. By way of example consider the fact that General Motors, the country’s third largest advertiser, will be shifting half of its three billion dollar ad budget into “online” or “one to one” programs within the next 30 months. Companies like Proctor and Gamble and Coca-Cola are right behind GM. “The web is not a selling medium, it is a buying medium. It is user controlled, so the user controls the user experiences.” Much of this activity is being driven by the fact that the business community is finally beginning to understand what the average fourteen year old has known for the past five years. The web is not about selling. It is about buying. Jakob Nielsen, a top web marketing consultant, pointed out a number of years ago, that: “the web is not a selling medium, it is a buying medium. It is user controlled, so the user controls the user experiences.” In plain English today’s consumer goes to the Internet to accomplish a specific task (e.g. searching for a home) and they don’t want to be interrupted along the way even when that interruption has some distant relationship to the task at hand (an advertiser offering products or services relating to the transaction). This simple concept is one of the basic rules of “consumer centricity” a concept that is now working its way across all aspects of the North American business model. The real estate industry is also beginning to align with this very important distinction. A number of new real 10 PINELLAS REALTOR® ORGANIZATION estate related websites have been launched recently that more than adequately demonstrate this concept. If your marketing is not moving the consumer directly and efficiently towards the completion of their task, then get out of the way. Worth noting are the newly engineered Houston Association of REALTORS® consumer facing website (www.har.com) and the recently introduced V-4 platform websites for Century 21 Canada (www. century21.ca) and Coldwell Banker Schmidt Real Estate (www.cbgreatlakes.com). These sites, imaginative products of the minds of industry visionaries Bob Hale, Don Lawby and Ken Schmidt, precisely demonstrate the points of consumer centricity. All three sites offer advanced functionality that allows the consumer to move through entire searches without leaving the initial screen and with an absolute minimum of clicks. All are designed to deliver a very simple marketing message, “if we can make the search process this effortless, imagine what we can do with the rest of the transaction.” As more and more real estate firms increase their level of web engagement, management is encountering a number of basic questions. One such question is how to allocate web-marketing budgets. Mark Renshaw, an executive with the Leo Burnet/ARC Worldwide marketing firm and a recognized expert in web marketing, suggests using the 70/20/10 rule. He advocates dividing the firm’s Internet marketing budget into three accounts. • 70% of your budget should be expended in the basics including website development and search engine optimization techniques such as Google Ad Words. • 20% of your Internet budget should be expended in areas and techniques that represent the “leading edge” (not bleeding edge) of your web marketing experience. This approach is critical because, in a medium that is growing and expanding as fast as May 2008 http://www.har.com http://www.century21.ca http://www.century21.ca http://www.cbgreatlakes.com
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