Category: Online Marketing

Spring Cleaning for Your Electronic Life

Most of us are online a remarkable amount of time.  Thanks to SmartPhones, Smart TVs, always on PCs and so on, often we are online and don’t even know it!  In casual Internet browsing, it is so easy to grant permission to various services and entities to access to your online account information.  It goes like this;  you really want to:

  • Read this article
  • See this video
  • Enter this contest
  • Get this discount code
  • See what your friend posted
  • And so on

But in order to do it, you have to grant some entity ‘permission’ to access your Google/Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn account.   When you grant that permission, it’s not a one time deal; you are granting permission forever.  That’s why it’s important to periodically review your various lists of permissions and clean them out; and what better time than now? Call it Spring Cleaning!  You can probably accomplish this clean-up in 15 minutes or less and as a result,  you will be just a little bit more in control of your online life.

Start with Facebook.  Log on and go to your NewsFeed (click the ‘Home’ button at the top-right of your screen).  Hover your mouse over ‘Apps’ in the left column and click ‘More’ when it appears to the right.  These are all the apps you have granted permission to access your personal account information and your friend list!  Click the pencil icon to the left of each app you don’t recognize and/or don’t use, and click ‘Edit Settings’  then ‘Remove App.’  If you are like me, it’s gonna take awhile because each app has to be handled individually and there are probably many you don’t recognize!

Next, deal with Google.  Go to google.com and look at the top-right of your screen.  If you see yourself, you’re logged in and ready to proceed.  If you see a Sign In button, do so using your Gmail address and password.  Click on your little picture (or avatar) and select ‘Account.’  Then choose ‘Security,’ and under ‘Account Permissions,’ click ‘View All.’  These are all of the online services to which you’ve granted access to your Google account information, which can be huge.  After all, your Google account includes Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google+, Calendar and on and on.  Select each service you want to eliminate and click ‘Revoke Access.’

On to Twitter.   Sign in and then click on the gear icon near the top-right of your screen.  Click ‘Settings’ and then select ‘Apps’ from the menu on the left.  See what’s there and ‘Revoke Access’ to any you don’t recognize or don’t use.

Finally, LinkedIn.  Log in to your account and hover over your picture at the top-right of the screen, come down to ‘Privacy and Settings’ and click ‘Review.’  On the left, click on ‘Groups, Companies & Applications’ and then on ‘View Your Applications.’  Select any you want to eliminate and click ‘Remove.’

These are the Big Four most of us use on a regular basis, but there may be other websites and social portals you want to take a look at.  Usually these kinds of permissions are located under the Privacy or Security settings in your account.  If you get excited by cleaning up your online act and want to do more, why not take charge of who sees what on Facebook?  Here’s a post about that.  

 

Lead Generation with Facebook

I get asked all the time:  ‘What kinds of things should I post on Facebook to generate leads?’

The answer is:  ‘I don’t care.’

OK.  That’s a little over the top.  My answer is supposed to unfreeze the questioner, to get them off the notion that posting on Facebook will somehow magically generate leads.  It won’t.

If you are a Realtor, you can use your personal Facebook page and/or your Facebook business page to keep in touch with people who know you – at least a little – and to remind them that you are in the business.  Of course this is important!  We want everyone who knows us – even those who know us just a little – to know we sell real estate, are active and successful.  That’s why we post our new listings on Facebook, our photos of happy clients after closing, our open houses and relevant articles about the market.

But the audience here is people who know us.  It’s not strangers.  Leads – which are the things everyone wants to generate with Facebook – are strangers who call us to help with their home buying or selling process.

If you want to generate LEADS with Facebook, you’re going to have to go about it the old fashioned way:  you’re going to have to market on Facebook.

Marketing is the careful planning, creating, executing and monetizing of a strategy aimed at reaching a specific target audience with potential for needing your services.  With Facebook, your tool for accomplishing this is Pay-Per-Click advertising.

When you open your Facebook page, you’ll see a column to the left of your Newsfeed that contains Pay-Per-Click ads that have been targeted to you based on your profile and Facebook behavior.  That’s where you want your ad to be.  The small teaser ads lead to a Landing Page of some kind that gives the clicker the information hinted at in the teaser.  Sounds simple . . . and it would be if we were in the giving information business.  But we are not.  We are in the real estate sales and marketing business, so that simple process of Facebook Teaser ad and Landing Page becomes a little more complex.

At Help-U-Sell, we market for one thing:  Sellers.  So your teaser ad needs to appeal to home owners who are thinking of selling.  That part really is easy.  The logo, all by itself, speaks to them.  But so do phrases like:  ‘Never pay 6% to sell your home again!’, ‘You paid HOW MUCH to sell your home?’ , ‘How to save thousands selling your home,’ ‘Sell your home for $4,950!’ and so on.

But once a potential seller sees your ad and clicks on it, where do they go?  To you Help-U-Sell website?  I don’t think so.  Your website is geared toward buyers (and it should be).  Your website is a place where we connect with them via home search and other tools.  Instead, you need to send people who click on your teaser ad to a very specific Landing Page, absolutely focused on your offer to home sellers, sizzling with just enough information to motivate the clicker to contact the office.

That’s really important, so I’ll repeat it:  You need to send people who click on your teaser ad to a very specific Landing Page, absolutely focused on your offer to home sellers, sizzling with just enough information to motivate the clicker to contact the office.  

Your landing page should say nothing aimed at buyers, mortgages, credit repair, or any other aspect of the business.  It should be short, simple and razor focused on what you do for home sellers and how much they can save.  It should also be packed with Help-U-Sell credibility boosters:  Sold and Saveds and Testimonials.  In other words, your Landing Page should look like an ETM . . . because that’s what it is:  an electronic ETM, delivered via Facebook as opposed to the old fashioned one delivered in the mailbox. It should have the same structure and encourage the same event:  a call to the office to find out more about your program for home sellers. Click HERE for an example.

I love Facebook pay-per-click for Help-U-Sell brokers for several reasons:

  • It is highly targeted advertising and fits perfectly well with our own geographical targeting strategy.
  • It is surprisingly inexpensive.  And effective campaign can be mounted for $200 a month, more or less.
  • It is wonderfully flexible.  You can change up your campaign in mid stream, start and stop it at will.
  • It is trackable.  Facebook keeps track of the clicks so if you install office systems to track resulting inquiries, you’ll know what the program produces.

I have created Facebook pay-per-click campaigns for my Blogging clients (you know, I create, manage and feed blogs for a handful of Help-U-Sell Brokers).  This past week I offered the same service – which includes creation of the Landing Page, the Teaser Ad and managing the setup process – to Help-U-Sell brokers in general.  I’d be happy to help you jump into this exciting process, too.  Just send me an email (jamesdingman@gmail.com) and we’ll explore the possibilities.

We know that today’s consumer of real estate services is online.  We know he or she is into Facebook almost daily.  THIS is how you find that person.  THIS is the next step in the evolution of Help-U-Sell marketing and I urge you to get on board.

 

A Reminder for Help-U-Sell Brokers

Back to Basics:

Help-U-Sell is a marketing driven company.  Everything begins with marketing.  Marketing is how we gain market share, how we grow, how we increase profitability.  Contrast that with what the Ordinary Broker does;  he attempts to accomplish those things through recruiting.

We market to SELLERS.  Because our seller offer is so far superior to what Ordinary Brokers have, our biggest marketing challenge is to simply inform home owners that we are here and can save them money.

We love buyers – really, LOVE buyers – but we find them through our listings, not through our marketing.  Every new listing creates a dozen opportunities for buyers to connect with us and the more listings we have the more buyers we connect with.  (I know, ending a sentence with a preposition . . . but we are communicating here, not teaching grammar).

Which is not to say we don’t market our listings to buyers; of course we do.  But this is mostly a process of plugging our listings into established channels like the Internet, the MLS, our ongoing marketing and so on.  Our strategic marketing, our aggressive, proactive marketing is to SELLERS.

There are four messages we want to communicate to potential sellers in all of our marketing:

We are HERE

People use us

It works

They save money

We use three tools to communicate those four messages:

The Easy Way

(or the Smarter Way – though as a Help-U-Sell purist, I prefer the Easy Way)

Sold & Saveds

Testimonials

If you have marketing pieces out there (i.e. websites, Facebook pages, EDDMs, brag cards, newspaper ads (what’s a newspaper?), etc.) that do not use those three tools to communicate those four specific seller messages, you’re doing it wrong and missing the boat.

Help-U-Sell is a wonderful business model that produces outstanding results IF you do it right and do it with consistency.  It is so simple that it’s easy to second guess it and start making changes.  Most of the changes I see make the model look more like what Ordinary Brokers do . . . and that’s certainly madness.  I mean:  who in their right mind would want that? 

Get back to basics!  Start marketing . . . to SELLERS.

 

The Real Estate Tech Report You Need To Read

You know Stefan Swanepoel?  He is a real estate visionary and tech guru who for years has written extensively about real estate, trends and the impact of technology on the industry.   He was also a fan of Help-U-Sell during our last growth spurt and though he’s been rather silent about us since, I have no reason to believe his opinion has changed.

Among his various ventures is T3 Experts, which delivers powerful information about real estate tech via webinars and consulting.  T3 had just published a great guide to tech for real estate agents and brokers.  It goes into everything from what kind of phone you should buy, whcih laptop and tablet, contact management and lead follow-up  programs as well as strategies for maximizing your web presence.  It’s great information!

And here’s (non) catch:  it’s FREE.

Just trot on over to THIS LINK, provide your email address and download your copy.  I’m not kidding:  this is great stuff, and knowing Swanepoel, I am sure the other offerings from T3 Experts are also just as good.

Search Smarter? Quack Quack Quack

My name is James . . . and . . . I am a Google-holic.

There.  I’ve said it.  That’s supposed to be first step in getting better, isn’t it?  I am sure there is a 12 step program for people like me located right next to the one for the Apple-obsessed!

My symptoms:  I own a Google Chromebook (love it!), a Google Phone (Nexus 4 – love it!), have Google as my home page and use almost all Google products including Google Drive which not only has provided me with safe online storage, but also has enabled me to end my addiction to Microsoft Office (the apps on Drive are completely adequate).  I even own Google tee shirts (several).  The only leap I have not made is to Google+.  Facebook still has more of my users, but the day will come . . .

HOWEVER, as we all know there is a ugly underside to Google.  They are in the target marketing business.  Their revenue comes from selling highly targeted online advertising to companies big and small.

Target marketing becomes more valuable the more refined the target.  For example, a company trying to reach pregnant women in the Northeast who are between 25 and 30 years old might pay $4 parceks to a marketing company who could refine the target down to just ‘women.’  They might pay $6 parceks to a company that could further refine it down to women in the northeast and $10 parceks to one that could ad the age and pregnancy factor in.  (What’s a pracek?  I don’t know:  just a monetary unit I made up).

So to make their marketing more valuable, Google is on a constant quest to gather more and more data about their marketing targets:  you and me.  That’s why all of those wonderful Google products (that I love) function under one account:  they all feed data back to Mother Google about everything you do on each one.  Watch a video on YouTube?  The topic and keywords become part of your targeting profile.  Use Google to search for ‘Two-headed Llamas in Peru’ and suddenly you may see an online add for genuine Peruvian llama wool sweaters.  That’s how this works.

And none of that bothers me.  I’m an adult.  I know how to recognize advertising and I am comfortable with my own response to it.  I don’t consider any of this to be an invasion of my privacy.  I always assume I have none while online.

HOWEVER, there is one bit of Google data gathering that does bug me, and it has to do with search results.  You realize that when you search with Google, the results you get are tailored to the information in the target marketing profile they have created for you, don’t you?  I could search for ‘Two-headed llamas’ at the same moment my friend in Arkansas does and we’d get different results, ordered to appeal to our own individual online behaviors.

The end result of this kind of filtering is that our search results tend to reinforce what we already believe.  If we hate Obama, every search we do is going to further reinforce that.  If we think Ted Cruz is a modern patriot, every search we do will reinforce that.  If we think The Affordable Care Act is the greatest thing since sliced bread, our search results will reflect that.

I don’t believe Google is the cause or even the main cause of our current political polarization, but you do have to wonder about the effect all of this reinforcement is having!

I went to high school back when they taught us how to question, research and THINK.  I learned that it’s usually best to really listen to both sides of an argument before making up my mind.   As we get more and more of our information from online sources served up to us by the likes of Google, we are only hearing one side of an argument: the side we already favor.  It’s a little disturbing, don’t you think?

That’s why today, in a fit of Google-filtered frustration I tried something new.  I am in Mexico and it has been so frustrating to have that location filter added to my search results.  I can search for ‘Two-headed llamas in Peru’ and all of my results will be in Spanish because I am in a Spanish speaking country.  They will also rank from Mexico first and then from other places . . . .when all I really wanted was an article or two from Smithsonian or Nat Geo and a photo.

I did some digging and came up with something called ‘DuckDuckGo.com’ It’s a search engine that does not track online behavior and does not filter results based on past behavior.  DDG makes money by selling premium placement – just like Google – and also by receiving a commission on items purchased through online marketing affiliates like Amazon when the purchase originated with a DDG search.

I tried DuckDuckGo this morning and was pretty pleased with the results – high praise from an admitted Google-holic.  If you’re interested in getting the whole story on any topic, why not give it a try and let me know what you think.  Next time you want to do a search, just type ‘Duckduckgo.com’ in your address bar and search away.  Here’s a short video describing the service:  https://duckduckgo.com/about .

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