While plenty of real estate professionals start a blog with the simple aim of generating more website traffic, many quickly find that the day to day realty of blogging is tougher than they first thought.

Coming up with ideas in the first place can be difficult enough, but what about when your readers decide to take you to task on what you’ve written? How do you confront negative feedback without the conversation degenerating into a mud-slinging match?

For a few tips, let’s take a look at a recent example of negative blog feedback from New Zealand. Market leading portal realestate.co.nz recently unveiled a complete redesign, prompting a swift backlash on the portal’s blog.

realestate.co.nz CEO Alistair Helm did a couple of things right in responding to the criticism in the blog comments:

To begin with, he responded personally to as many commenters as possible, addressing many by name.

Helm also kept his answers polite and comprehensible, even though the situation was, he admitted, “personally disappointing.”

Finally, he thanked each commenter for their contribution, despite that fact that most were critical of the new-look website.

Helm has a major real estate portal’s reputation to consider, so there’s little chance his responses were going to be anything different. That said, there’s no reason real estate agents shouldn’t take the same approach when negative comments pop up on their blogs.

When you think about it, there’s a lot more at stake than winning an argument with a commenter. If you can respond to a negative comment with some forethought and poise, you’re also presenting yourself, and therefore your business, in the best possible light. And that has to be a positive.

[Image: thesituationist.wordpress.com]

You’ve done the deal – sold the house, signed the papers, collected the cash and shaken hands. So what’s next? Goodbye and thanks for coming?

Not so fast. It’s now time to switch into post-sale mode and begin communications that will keep your name present in the minds of both buyers and sellers.

To begin with, you’ll need a good contact management system that allows you to find, sort and manage every person you’ve worked with. This doesn’t need to be overly complex. As long as your system is easy to use and accessible – preferably from your mobile phone or PDA as well as from your office – you’re on the right track.

To create this system, you should record as much information about every potential customer as possible. Name, phone number, address, and email are a given, and as you work more closely with people and find out more about them, notes on birthdays and spouse’s/children’s details are great to have as well.

Ideally, you should get into the habit of filling your contact management system with this information as soon as you have it. If it stays scribbled on the back of a business card, that potentially vital information won’t be useful to anyone.

Once you’ve got as much information on past customers as possible, you’ll have a better chance of sending out your communications at the right time. For example, sending out a Christmas email to every contact in your database is fine, but wouldn’t it be even better to send a modified email to those contacts who don’t celebrate Christmas?

Email newsletters including local news or new listings are similar. If you can target those contacts that are most likely to be interested, i.e those that live in or near the area you’re writing about, or who you think might be looking for the kind of property you’re advertising, you’ll be less likely to lose contacts to the “unsubscribe” button.

Of course, most people who give out their email address are aware that not every email they receive will be written for them. But the power of a well-maintained customer database is that you don’t have to rely on people’s patience for the one email out of ten that’s relevant. In other words, with targeted post-sale communications, you can keep in touch with past customers further into the future.

Your website’s looking great, so why isn’t it generating any leads? Perhaps it’s your “call to action” – the section of your website that prompts browsers to subscribe, follow, or contact you. Let’s take a look at some examples to find out what the options are.

Recently we checked out nestrealtygroup.com, the winner of Inman’s Innovator Award for 2009. They’ve taken a subtle approach to their calls to action, placing the suggestions to “get email alerts” and “contact us” in tiny print in the top right of the website. Scroll down to the bottom of the homepage and you’ll find a miniature RSS feed subscription button, along with small versions of the Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube icons under the words “find us on”.

Over in Australia, we can see two very different examples. cbrealestate.com.au hasn’t decided to engage with its customers via social media just yet, but they do know plenty of people want to contact them by phone. So their number is displayed in large print in that all-important top right corner.

Meanwhile, firstnational.com.au seem very comfortable with social media, presenting home hunters with large links to its Facebook and Twitter accounts halfway down its homepage.

In the UK, we have London agents Foxtons. Like cbrealestate.com.au, their homepage reserves the top right corner for large text with their phone number. Beyond that, Foxtons has not just one, but four calls to action for their home valuation service.

What these examples show is that there’s certainly more than one way to prompt website visitors to act. Now that you’re thinking about what constitutes an effective call to action, and what changes – if any – you need to make back at your website, consider these points:

Highlight it: Make sure users don’t have to go hunting if they want to sign up for alerts or find your contact details. As a general rule, the top right corner is where people go looking when they want to get in touch.

Simplify it: Keep the word count down and the message clear. Confusing a potential customer is an extremely effective way to make sure they don’t do business with you.

Monitor it: Any change you make should prompt you to track whether it’s turning visitors off or bringing in more leads. This doesn’t have to be a tiresome process – a simple count before the change, and a check a month or so later, should tell you whether you’re on the right track.

If you’re still stuck for ideas on how to make the most of your calls to action, spend a few minutes revisiting websites you subscribed to. What did they do right to capture your email address?

Twitter is arguably the most hyped – and therefore the most divisive – of all the online social networking tools. Plenty of agents have tried it out, and the results seem to be anything but uniform. Visit any real estate blog and you’ll find just as many people with tales of Twitter boosting their business as you will people who’ve seen no returns from Twitter whatsoever. So what’s the defining factor here?

Clearly, the agents using Twitter to boost their business are doing something different. As far as we can see, those Twitter users are employing at least one, if not more, of these tactics:

Offer something. Just like any other communication tool – email campaigns, letterbox flyers – you have to give people a reason to pay attention. So before you hit that “tweet” button, ask yourself how valuable this information is.

Don’t just talk, listen. There’s a reason the word “engagement” is thrown around so much when it comes to social media – it works best when there are similar amounts of give and take.

Understand the “tricks”. Get into the habit of using hash tags to link your tweets into ongoing conversations, and use the search function to find people you can engage with. Is someone looking for information on your area, or an insight into your market? Answer their questions and you might just be the agent they choose when the time is right.

Use separate accounts. Not everyone agrees on the idea of separating out personal and professional accounts, but how many times have you followed someone you thought could help you wit hour business, only to unfollow them as soon as they start tweeting about their breakfast?

Don’t buy into the “silver bullet” mentality. Because Twitter is the subject of so much hype, it’s easy to start thinking of it as a “magic” marketing tool. Of course, in the end it’s simply another way to communicate online, and as such demands time and perseverance for an eventual pay-off.

It goes without saying that before you can measure your success with Twitter, you’ll need to define what “success” will look like. For more on how to do that, and a closer look at social media ROI, check out our article here.

If you are a busy agent with lots of clients, the thought of gathering statistics for all of your properties might seem daunting. You’d need to find out how many people visited each property and what number of enquiry emails you had, then look at comparable properties and combine it all to make a meaningful report.

This could take some time and may seem tedious, however each of your clients deserves the individual attention and feedback, particularly if they are paying for the advertising. But for the sake of your sanity, it’s best to look to an automated system to do the work for you.

One easy way to gather this information is through your advertising portal. Most of the large players will provide you with the raw statistics on each of the properties you have listed. Some of the more advanced portals will even package this information in a useful report that you can then forward on to your vendors.

If your portal does not provide such a service, you may need to do the grunt work yourself. No doubt you receive reports of some sort from all the different portals you advertise on as well as your own website. You should collate as much of this information as possible so you can provide your customers with a well-rounded picture of how their marketing is tracking.

Vendor reports are also a fantastic tool for you to compare properties and see which portals are producing better results than others, along with which properties are performing better and why. This knowledge is great for advising customers on how to achieve better results from their advertising.

Above all, remember to keep your vendor reports simple and only include the facts. Ultimately, vendor reports should provide a springboard for considered conversation between you and your vendor about what’s best for their listing.

Interested in starting an email marketing campaign? Not quite sure how to go about it? Then the latest free ebook from campaigner.com might be the place to start.

The free ebook covers topics including creating an email marketing strategy, what to say, how to present it, how to build a subscriber list, and how to evaluate your campaign’s effectiveness. Of course, campaigner.com is promoting its own service via the ebook, but there is still plenty of information useful to those who aren’t interested in signing up.

And if you’re looking for more on how to use email in your business, check out these Property Ad Guru articles:

Email Newsletters: Awareness, Loyalty, Leads

Top 10 Tips for Email Etiquette

Top 10 Tips for Email Newsletters

It has been said that criticism is the schoolbook from which we learn. Many businesses however avoid encouraging customer feedback on the off chance it may be negative.

But the fact is, it’s the negative feedback that will be of most benefit to you if you are committed to growing your business based on outstanding service.

A number of years ago, I consulted to an estate agency which had at the time one of the leading property management departments in its region and probably one of the best property managers in the business. Yet they were reticent to survey their landlords. I finally talked them in to doing it and the results were great – not because the feedback was predominantly positive, but more for the reason it wasn’t all “pats on the back”.

They learnt of issues that they would never have thought of otherwise, and were able to make improvements to their systems and processes that provided even greater service to their customers.

Customer feedback is an important part of your marketing

The process itself indicates you are genuinely focused on providing excellence in service and continually improving your customers’ experience. It also provides a road map for business improvement and growth through optimising customer centred service provision.

The message that you not only provide great service but are committed to continually improving it, tends to find its way to prospective customers.

Undertake customer feedback programs only on the following basis:

- You genuinely encourage both positive AND negative feedback,
- You’re prepared to act on the feedback not find excuses for it,
- You can provide outcomes and plans for change to all those who gave you feedback.

Ensuring great outcomes

1. First and foremost, quickly identify any vital issues that could cost you a particular customer or customers and do the following:
- Short term: Identify what you need to do now to fix the situation (and particularly make peace with any aggrieved customers).
- Long term: Fix it forever. What do you need to change or introduce in your processes to ensure this issue does not reoccur?
2. You should take up any particular issues with specific customers personally. Don’t hide behind other staff or emails.
3. Share feedback with your entire team – the good, the bad and the ugly.
4. Where segment-specific issues arise, prioritise and identify individuals or teams to suggest actions to rectify the concerns.
5. Identify any important improvements arising from the survey and communicate the outcomes to your entire customer base. Remember some of your customers may have had similar experiences and issues but did not bother to complete the survey. At least now they are aware that you have improved that area.

At the very least your customers will know that you are a company willing to act.

The above relates mainly to annual surveys of your entire customer base, however there are other intermittent surveys you should run:

- Vendor surveys two weeks into the listing to ask what they thought about your listing process, advertising, etc.
- Post sale vendor and purchaser surveys (if they are positive make sure you ask for a testimonial).
- Tenant surveys: you can obtain feedback on the service you provide, but also try to ascertain if they are considering buying in the future. In normal circumstances, tenants tend to make the managing agent the last person they go to to buy a property, but if you encourage them to come to you it enables you to not only get a possible sale but manage the changeover of tenants more easily.

How do I implement surveys?

Carefully. A team of people should develop the questions, ensuring they are open and encouraging of constructive criticism. The survey should be kept as tight as possible at around 10 to15 questions. They can be multiple choice, but make sure there is also the opportunity for free responses to explain thoughts and raise issues you may not have thought of.

The shorter the survey, the greater percentage of response you will receive. Having said that, make sure it’s comprehensive enough to cover the important issues and has the ability to return significant information. At the end there should be an opportunity for customers to raise any other concerns or make random comments. Some of these unsolicited remarks are the most telling!

Ensure your team understands that this is about improving your service.

Small sample surveys may be run on paper, but there are some excellent web-based products that can be used for large-scale surveys. One example is surveymonkey.com. There is a limited free version, but for a relatively small amount of money (around US$200 per year) you can get a full version that offers greater functionality response time, a greater number of responses and questions that can be included.

There are of course a number of other products available. The advantage of these online products is that they are quick, easy and professional to implement and response time can be almost immediate dependent upon completion rates.

Of course, if you are really serious and have a large customer base, you can engage external firms that will independently develop, implement the survey and analyse the results for you.

Quick Idea

Survey prospective vendors who did not give you their business. Ask: “What was it that made you select another agent over us?” You can obtain great information on how to improve your presentations and service offering.

Clearly articulate in the covering letter/email that you are committed to continually improving your service and wish them the best results from their sale. This is a great activity, particularly if they end up being dissatisfied with the agent they chose. The the door is open for you!

Final word

Engaging customers in surveys can be one of the most useful communications you have with them if you are committed to real customer service. You cannot provide that service until you really know what they think. Most people will not complain to you – they will just find someone else. Make sure you take control.

As a real estate agent, you’re probably all too aware that you’re one of many people offering a similar service. Chances are, there are a number of agents working in or near your area with whom you need to compete. So how do you make sure you stand out?

In any marketplace, the idea of the “unique value proposition“, or UVP, is key. UVP might sound like a hazy marketing term, but all it refers to is the thing you do differently to your competitors. Identifying your UVP can help you focus your business and ensure you don’t waste too much energy covering the same bases as everyone else.

In terms of online marketing, your UVP could be the fact that:

- Your website gives people the best information about a certain area;
- Your website is somewhere people can find trustworthy advice about the buying and selling process;
- You’re an active, helpful member of an online social network who strives to help home hunters;
- Your portal listings are the most detailed of any agent in your market, complete with good photos and great copy;
- You send out a well-written, informative email newsletter once a week that people really want to read.

In defining your UVP, infomarketerszone.com points out that you don’t need to limit your thinking to your own industry. “Study successful companies of all types,” they advise. “Seek to understand their unique value proposition. How are they different in the market?”

One last tip: your UVP should be based on something you’re good at, and ideally enjoy doing. You could aim to be your market’s best real estate photographer, but if that’s not where your strength lies, you’re much better off emphasising areas where you know you can deliver.

No matter what your online marketing strategy involves, there’s one goal you should always have in mind: audience engagement.

It might sound like a high-flown concept, but all engagement really refers to is people spending time with your brand. Obviously, the longer your potential clients are engaged, the better. After all, online advertising can keep people engaged far longer than the time they spend looking at a television commercial, and it offers many more ways to keep people interested than newspaper ad copy.

An engaged website user, for example, might land on an agent’s homepage after a Google search, only to be enticed by a widget that shows home value fluctuations in their area. Once they’ve done that, they might start looking for contact details, and then come across a blog post on a topic that interests them. By this stage, they will have been engaged with the agent’s brand for a good few minutes – a relatively big investment for someone online.

The goal of audience engagement is the reason good content matters so much. As we recently discussed, everything from your website’s tagline to your Twitter updates is an opportunity to draw a potential client in.

So how do you get an idea of how engaged your audience is? A good place to start is your website’s bounce rate, which we’ve looked at in detail here. If visitors to your website are not engaged, they will simply “bounce” away again after just a few seconds.

Your website’s click stream – the series of links a person clicks on while moving around your website – can also give you an idea of what’s engaging users. Is there something most users are drawn to? Is there a section they routinely ignore?

Bounce rate and click stream are just two aspects of web analytics that it pays to become familiar with. Understand what your audience is doing, and you’ll be able to tweak things to maximise their engagement.

Creating valuable engagement with your potential customers isn’t just a matter of being the loudest or most visible online – it’s a matter of quality over quantity. It’s getting your audience in the door, and getting them to stick around long enough to remember you.

The word “content” is used so often these days that it’s easy to let it wash over you without thinking about it what it really means. But the fact is, quality content is central to any successful online marketing strategy. In other words, good content can transform your message from general advertising noise into something people really want to find out more about.

So what exactly do we mean by “content”? The short answer is: everything you create. Everything from your company’s “about us” page to the snippets of information you publish on Twitter contributes to the way you are perceived online. Over time, the content you create builds up your brand’s individual personality, which in turn creates understanding and expectation in your audience.

The question is, does that personality engage people? Are you offering potential customers something that will entice them back again and again?

One example of a company that has content production down to a fine art is computer giant Apple. While not everyone is a convert, Apple has such a devoted fan-base that they even have their own consumer-run forum. Their content is clear, simple, and friendly without becoming too informal. It’s also seemingly endless. Everything from how-to video tutorials for their software to information on how their products impact on the environment is available to their customers.

Another aspect of Apple’s marketing strategy to consider is that the company doesn’t currently have a presence on social media. Many would argue that this is because Apple simply doesn’t need to drum up more support, but we would add that the brand often benefits from consumers not knowing what’s happening – its secrecy drives the buzz for upcoming releases to fever pitch.

As we all know, any real estate agency that tried to operate using that strategy would soon have to shut its doors. Agents benefit from being as visible as possible. But don’t make the mistake of thinking anything that puts your brand in front of potential clients is worthwhile. If the content isn’t up to scratch, you could easily be sending leads straight to your competitors.

Think about it: you might have a killer business model, a dedicated team of staff, and all the latest tech tools meant to make your everyday tasks streamlined and simple. But what is it that you’re offering people when they find you online? Is it clear? Does it offer something worthwhile? Is it part of an overall marketing plan? Ask yourself these questions before you publish something online, and you’ll be on your way to establishing a brand that’s recognised, respected, and maybe even enjoyed.