Just like real estate photography, video in real estate varies widely in terms of quality. There are plenty of videos out there that could make even the most settled of home owners wonder whether they should consider moving, and plenty more that probably have even the most dedicated home hunter reaching for the pause button.

So which factors make the difference between a video that enhances a listing and one that does it no favours? Is it the vast amount of money spent on a professional video service? Not if you follow these easy tips:

1. Stabilise the camera if at all possible. Even if you don’t have a tripod available, using something to steady your arm as you pan through each room will go a long way towards reducing that seasick feeling in your audience.

2. Practice filming as often as you can and learn from the results. Are you standing too close to your subject? Are you moving the camera around too quickly? Of course, constructive criticism from others is another excellent way to get the answers to these questions.

3. Edit if at all possible. In the interest of getting a video online quickly, many agents forgo the editing process and simply upload as soon as they finish filming. The problem is that these videos would almost always have looked more professional with even a few dissolves between shots or a quick fade-to-black at the end.

4. Explain what we’re looking at. Another trend in real estate videos are those silent videos that simply show the exterior or interior of a property without any explanation. There’s no need to chat the whole way through, but a few details here and there will go a long way towards connecting your viewers with the property.

5. Enhance where you can. Music is an obvious but extremely effective addition to any real estate video as long as it’s kept subtle and unobtrusive. On the topic of sound, if you’re not keen on having your own voice in the video, try highlighting the property’s features by adding subtitles at appropriate points.

For Mac users, a simple program to edit and enhance your videos is iMovie, while PC users can get started with Movie Maker.

Once you’ve mastered the art of the perfect video listing, your next challenge will be video SEO, which you can read more about here.

Real estate clients’ expectations of online marketing are continuing to grow, so it’s vital that we give them access to a wide range of advertising options, particularly on property portals.

Having a basic listing on a property portal can only provide limited exposure. It’s vital that portals have product provisions that give agents the ability to not only maximise the exposure of their listings on behalf of their customers, but also to expose their own brand.

At the same time, part of any agents marketing presentation should be focused on how their sellers can obtain the best possible result online. Agents spend a great deal of time doing this around offline marketing, but too few really put the emphasis on new media. Yet a rapidly growing percentage of their potential customers are extremely Internet savvy.

So what are the main areas of product that property portals are (or should be) providing to assist an agent’s business?

• Listing Placement: products that provide prominence to individual listings.
• Push marketing products: electronic brochures, email alerts distributed to targeted portal databases.
• Display advertising: banners, skyscrapers, advertorial, pop-ups and other items designed to promote estate agency brands and drive traffic to agent sites.
• Web design: Agency websites, individual property mini-sites.
• Back-office tools: Online products designed to increase agency effectiveness.

It’s my view that the “depth-of-product” available to agents from a property portal should be one of the considerations for agents selecting which portal to advertise on and how much of their marketing budget to allocate to each.

Depth-of-product has the ability to increase the average leads received from a portal quite substantially by providing relevant and effective advertising products. But an agent needs to think strategically about how they can utilise and leverage these products.

If an agent approaches this seriously it could also be a key factor in a prospective customer choosing that agent over their competitor (see our related article: Selling Online Advertising to Vendors).

Along with these products, support should also be available to enable agents to on-sell them to their customers, and to provide agents with the conviction to develop an effective online marketing plan.

To sum up, some of the points agents should consider when choosing a portal include:

Promoting their brand and business:
1. What products are available and what are the benefits?
2. What is my approach and budget?
3. What do I want to achieve?

How can I better promote my customers’ properties?
1. What products are available?
2. Do my sales people understand the benefits?
3. How do I sell and leverage these products?
4. Do I charge the customer? If so, how much?

John Hart spent over six years with REA Group, operator of leading Australian property portal realestate.com.au. Prior to REA, John was with one of Australia’s largest real estate networks, First National, for 12 years, with more than seven as their national marketing manager.

[Image: flickr/aussiegall]

Google uses digital cameras as their example in this video, but the same principles can be applied to text-based campaigns for real estate. This is what Google’s advice boils down to:

- Imagine what your audience is searching for, then use those words in your ad text. It helps to be more specific than “real estate [location]“. Even using the words “Buying a home in [location]?”, for example, tells people more about what you’re offering.

- What makes you stand out? Do you focus on a particular area, or have detailed knowledge of the local market? Mention your unique value proposition to give users a reason to click.

- Include a strong call to action in your text. Click here for a closer look at how calls to action work.

- Give people what they’re looking for after they click. If your ad is for homes for sale in a certain neighbourhood, link it to a section of your website that covers that neighbourhood. Similarly, if the ad is about you as an agent, link to a page that describes you and includes your contact details.

If you’ve never used AdWords before, spend some time on Google searching as if you were looking for real estate in your area. You’ll soon have plenty more ideas about which ads are enticing, and how you can make yours stand out from the competition.

The question of which portal to advertise on – and how many – is one that real estate companies will always struggle with. Trying to get the best return on your investment along with maximum coverage is tricky.

Adding to the issue is the fact that real estate portals have a tendency to appear like weeds in many markets. So how do you make the right choice and not waste your marketing dollars?

It goes without saying that you need to research your own market carefully to start with. What’s right for one agency might not be right for yours, even if you do operate in a similar area or are part of the same franchise.

You will most likely know who the biggest player is in your area, and you should have an awareness of some of the second tier portals as well. What you may not know are the actual success factors of those portals versus the marketing hype. It can be helpful to have a representative from a number of portals visit your office to present their case, and to ask them for specific, recent statistics.

Here’s some points to consider when choosing a portal:

- Look at where your competitors are advertising and decide whether you want to join them or try another tactic (and portal) to beat them.
- Listen to your customers. If they are continuously asking to have their properties advertised on particular sites, don’t ignore them.
- Consider the best value proposition from each portal in terms of cost of subscription versus the package you’re offered. This includes the number of visitors to the site, the amount of consumer promotion the site does, the reports and analytics the site gives its subscribers, and the extra advertising options available to you on each site that could help you trump your competitors. The most expensive subscription might be expensive because it offers far more than the others, but it may not.
- Think about your market carefully and consider whether a niche portal might actually suit your business better, for example if you specialise in executive leasings or holiday properties. Smaller, niche portals can offer better customer targeting.
- Take a trial run on a number of portals over the same period of time, advertising the same properties, and compare the results. This will give you a real apples-with-apples comparison.
- A good rule of thumb is that you advertise on the dominant player in your market, if only because you can’t afford not to be there. They’re usually dominant for a reason. You should, however, consider how you advertise on this site, possibly choosing a premium listing package to ensure you stand out from your competitors.

The next step is to evaluate all the other potential sites in the mix and probably choose one or two others that suit your needs. It may be a niche site or a key second-tier site that your customers keep asking for. Whilst breadth of coverage is important, it’s also necessary to consider depth of advertising – with only a limited amount of funds available, you’re often better off as a premium subscriber on two or three sites than a standard subscriber, getting lost amongst the rabble, on four or five.

As with any form of advertising, it’s important to be where people are looking and ensure your choices continue to make sense – what worked last year may not be as effective this year. So make sure you choose sites that are attracting the sort of buyers and sellers you want and can demonstrate success in your area with similar types of businesses to your own.

Once you are up and running on a portal, you should continuously monitor how you are tracking, reviewing your statistics on a weekly basis. You might be surprised at how well your properties are going on a small niche site versus the larger ones, or you may well be equally annoyed at how few results you are getting from a particular site that you invested a lot of money in. With market fluctuations and results from other forms of advertising in mind, you should be able to assess whether a site is working for you over a reasonable period of time.

Don’t be content to just do what your competitors are doing and advertise where they are. Analyse your marketplace and the portals within it and consider the best match for your business and your customers. The beauty of online advertising is the statistics and monitoring that can be done, so use these tools to make good choices up front and continue to make good choices down the track.

Finally, don’t be afraid to ask for case studies and comparative statistics, but be mindful of how they’re presented – some portals are good at twisting the stats to suit their needs! Better still, run trials with your own properties and let the results do the talking.

There’s plenty agents can do to make their listings stand out, but of course not everyone has the time to create a dazzling showcase for every single property. If you’re resources are stretched, aim to hit these five basic targets to ensure your listing isn’t overlooked:

1. Accurate details. You might not know everything there is to know about a particular property, but even still you can make sure the information you do include is correct.

2. Photos. Both trulia.com and zillow.com have shown that one photo, at least, goes a very long way in terms of attracting viewers.

3. A catchy headline. What’s special about this property? A great view? A quiet street? A drop in price? Rather than simply writing “new listing”, grab home hunters’ attention with your headline.

4. Contact details. It’s surprising how often important agent contact details are left out of listings. If you’re keen for leads, make it easy for people to get in touch.

5. Proofread. Spelling errors and typos are all too easy to spot on property portals. If possible, get someone who hasn’t seen your listing before to look over it and pick out any problems before it goes online.

Looking for more advice on how to make your listings the best they can be? Check out our series on maximising leads from portal sites, along with our advice on what makes a good property ad.

We’re all aware that a well-executed Facebook presence can pay dividends, and that a tool like Twitter can be just the thing to drive online engagement with potential customers. But there is another, less-hyped cousin of these two popular social networks: Flickr. Done right, your Flickr presence could become yet another social source of leads.

So where do you begin with this photo-based social network? The good news is that once you sign up, adding photos is a simple three-step process of choosing, uploading, and describing them. This last step is important for real estate agents – be as detailed as you can in your title, description and tags so the maximum number of people can find your photos.

If you’re still wondering what on earth a photo sharing website could have to do with real estate search, consider Flickr’s groups feature. This is where you can add your photos to subject-specific collections made by a number of users. For example, the Grand Rapids Michigan group, the Northern Beaches Sydney group, and the Manchester UK group are all full of photos showing off a particular area. The question is, who’s photographing the part of town you represent?

1000Watt Consulting’s Marc Davison summed up the argument for agents using Flickr in a recent blog post:

“Go to Flickr. Search your city. How many images here are yours? If the answer isn’t more than anyone else… change that. Who better than you to document every street, neighborhood, hiking, jogging and biking trail, sunset and sunrise vantage point, vista, mesa, valley and alley in the area?”

Davison hits the nail on the head here. At first glance, Flickr may look like a collection of arty photos, but plenty of people do use it to get an idea of what a new town or suburb is really like. All you need to do is be online to meet them.

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.

Floor plans are often the missing piece of the puzzle for listings. Great photos and an informative description are covered by a lot of agents, but not all are in the habit of adding a floor plan to the mix.

This is a shame because a floor plan is an important part of maximising the number of leads agents receive from property portals. In fact, research from Dutch company Heliview found 53 percent of house hunters were more likely to spend time looking at a listing if a floor plan was included. (For an in-depth look at how to maximise your portal leads, check out Simon Baker’s articles here.)

One floor plan provider, floorplanner.com, has just been upgraded to offer a new layout for its “plus” and “pro” users, who pay upwards of US$29 per month.

The new layout allows users to add more relevant information to their floor plans like photos, videos, and 360 virtual tours. They can also show the exact location of a property on Google Maps, and see its surroundings on Google Street View.

floorplanner.com is also aiming to give premium users more branding opportunities, allowing them to choose a custom background that visitors will see when they load the plan. On top of that image, they can also place a custom preloader image that can link to their website.

To get a better idea of floorplanner.com’s capabilities, check out the video below:

Once you’ve thought about what you want to advertise and you’ve created an eye-catching banner that best represents it, where and how do you place the ad to get the best response?

Banner advertising is a really effective means of promoting estate agent’s services, especially when used on portal websites. “Advertise where the people are looking” is exactly what’s at play in this scenario. The ad becomes even more effective when placed at a granular rather than generic level such as the home page.

Placing banners on the search results pages of neighbourhoods where you operate is a key way to attract potential buyers and sellers in your market. Your message should speak directly to the people looking for property in your area and should resonate loudly with those looking to sell. So how do you get your ads up there?

There are three ways of posting banner ads on a site:

1. Work with other advertisers in an “exchange program“ where you agree to display their ad on your site if they display yours;
2. Pay a publisher site directly to display your ad; or
3. Pay an organisation, usually a banner network, to display the banner on a number of publisher’s sites.

These three arrangements take many forms and will suit particular advertisers at different times. If you don’t have a whole lot of money to launch a traditional ad campaign, you may opt for the “exchange” idea. You might choose to form your own network of sites with whom you share a particular affinity (perhaps location) and then agree to swap banner ads. This can be a very effective and cheap way of advertising to a localised market – perfect for real estate agents trying to win listings.

If you want to get your ad out there on a lot of sites and for little money you might join a formal exchange program. Typically you’ll be asked to post two ads on your site for every one ad of yours placed elsewhere in the network. This option can get you great coverage for no money but you do give up a lot of control over exactly where your ad is displayed. Most programs will say they try and match advertisers to sites intelligently but occasionally advertisers are unhappy with where their banners end up.

If you’re happy to pay to have your banner published, you can either approach the particular website you’re interested in directly, or you may employ an advertising agenct to handle it for you. If you have a very niche product you may like to go direct to a website to get a better deal. You will typically buy an advertising package on a CPM basis – paying per thousand impressions. This is how most property portals operate their banner advertising packages for member agents.

If you use an agency, they will do most of the work for you and offer many advantages over doing it yourself. From creating the banner to selecting the appropriate sites and negotiating the best price and position for your ad, they will usually get a better deal than you can by yourself because they buy impressions in bulk. One drawback though is that agencies often only deal with accounts of particular size, so if you are a small business you may need to shop around to find an appropriate agency to work with.

Paying a banner ad network is a great way to get your ad onto multiple sites quickly without having to spend time negotiating with each publisher. A banner ad network is basically a broker between the advertiser and the publisher and takes care of all the placement and tracking of your ads. They either work on an impression basis (such as Doubleclick) or on click-throughs (such as BannerSpace). As with banner exchange programs, however, the advertiser relinquishes control over where the ad is placed.

Having great banner creative with a clear message is very important, but it’s no good if noone sees it. Targeted placement is imperative to your banner advertising success. If you wish to place banner ads on a portal website you should contact the site directly and find out about their advertising packages.

Banners are small rectangular ads that appear on all different sorts of websites and contain endless messages, but all have the same basic function: to get users to click on them so they are transported to the advertiser’s website. They are a fantastic way of promoting your business, product or service to a targeted audience and are a comparatively cheap form of advertising to add to your mix. So how do you use banners effectively to promote your services?

First let’s look first at the different types of banner ads and what makes a good one.
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has produced universal Ad Unit Guidelines for marketers, agencies and media companies for use in planning and creating Internet ads. The IAB has stipulated eight banner ad sizes, the most common of which is 468×60 pixels and looks like this:



There is no universal file size constraint, however most websites will ask advertisers to keep the ads quite small, say about 18k, because they add to the time it takes a user to load a page and therefore should not be too large. It is wise to ensure you stay within the designated limits when producing your ad so browsers aren’t turned off before they even see your message.

The content of banner ads varies enormously depending on what you’re advertising and where the ad is placed. You may choose to have a simple static ad with limited graphics, or you may use an animated .gif which means there’ll be some movement in your ad via the use of a succession of images or text. The fanciest banner ads of all are the rich media ads which use very creative graphics and may contain video, audio or specialist programming. These ads will have larger file sizes and may contain interaction beyond a simple click-through.

Whilst banner ads are not difficult to construct, there are some key factors that your designer should take into account. The difference between a good (and effective) ad and a bad one can be subtle and sometimes difficult to pinpoint, but here are some basic guidelines to consider:

• Use simple messages rather than long complicated ones
• Advertise one product or service – not your entire business – and have the ad link through to the relevant page on your website
• Animation and movement attract attention better than static ads
• Your graphics should be interesting and suggestive but not too obscure
• Keep file size small
• Place the ad on a page with relevant content so you are more likely to reach your target audience

Before you get too excited about having the fanciest ad on the web, you need to ensure you have a clear objective laid out for your advertising. Just as in newspaper or radio advertising, you need to be clear about the message you want to convey and the success factors you’ll use to measure the effectiveness of the ad.

Typically you’ll want your ad to achieve click-throughs and brand awareness. Publishers hope that the user will click-through to their website and ultimately buy the product/service on offer. A click-through means the banner ad has delivered the advertiser a visitor that they may otherwise not have had and is a truly measurable success factor. Brand awareness, where a visitor recalls the brand down the track and possibly makes a decision to purchase then, is harder to measure but is still considered a success factor.

Whilst there are several ways a banner ad can be successful, the typical measures advertisers will look at are:

1. Page Views (Page Impressions) – this is how many times a particular page is called from the server, which is important to advertisers who place a banner on that page because it indicates how many visitors have possibly seen their ad. This is a measure of exposure rather than brand awareness and is a typical way of selling ad space – cost-per-thousand impressions, or CPM.
2. Click-throughs – the number of people who click on the ad linking through to the advertiser’s website. Ad space is often sold on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.
3. Click-through rate (CTR) – this is the ratio of page views to clicks and is expressed as the percentage of total visitors to a page who clicked on the ad. CTR is often very low, say one to two percent.
4. Cost-per-sale – how much advertising money is spent on making one sale. This calculation will vary depending on the type of service or product.

Obviously some measures are more important than others to different advertisers, but all of these elements should be considered at some point in the ad buying and measurement process. They will affect the price that you pay for the ad space and will be the process by which you can evaluate your advertising campaign and possibly tweak it for better success.