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.

This article was originally posted on onlinerealestate101.com.

Establishing yourself as a successful real estate professional in 2010 can easily be a daunting task. The real estate market is unrecognisable when compared to just a few short years ago. In 1994 the first online real estate listing was published in an email by Eric Hilding of Coldwell Banker in Morgan Hill, CA which changed real estate forever. Within 1 year ERA launched the first listing portal with over 50,000 listings. Today we have Zillow, Trulia, Twitter, Facebook, iPhones, and thousands of other tools and technologies which power the new real estate economy.

Because of this, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and impossible to stay ahead of the technology curve. I thought I’d put together a shortlist of critical components to your online real estate foundation. These are the building-blocks of any real estate business and most aren’t sustainable without them.

The 4 Building-Blocks:

1. You must find a Specific Niche. The new real estate economy is simply too vast to compete if you don’t have a niche. Your niche will be your area of expertise which you can leverage online and offline for your future marketing, blogging, and web optimisation efforts. Ask yourself this question: Can I really compete for terms on Google, Twitter, and more such as, “LA realtor, Chicago real estate, etc”? I hope you get the picture. You don’t need to find your niche overnight but it is a requisite to competing in an online world successfully.

How do you find your niche? Look for something you feel highly confident about, which you also love. Maybe it’s Miami Beach condos or something similar. By looking around and searching in your area, you’ll find that the smaller the niche the more the person behind the niche seems like a true expert. I’d be hesitant to spend much money on your marketing until you’ve truly defined your niche.

2. A Defined Sales Process is essential for building your business the right way from the ground up. This sales process is going to make or break you in the long run once you start generating leads. Most real estate professionals never plan this out correctly leading to low conversion rates, frustration, and ultimately lost dollars.

When defining your sales process keep in mind 3 things: Recency (how quickly you follow up), and Frequency (how often you follow up), and Consistency (following up at regular intervals). Considerations for defining this strategy include, online replies, Facebook strategy, Linkedin, emails, phone calls, thank you notes, etc.

A good book worth reading to give you some ideas on these is  “Selling the Invisible”.

I didn’t take having a defined sales process seriously until I lost a client to someone who said the only reason he chose my competitor, was they called him back first!

3. A Customer Relationship Management or CRM tool is a must. This is not optional.  The  Dunbar Number is a theoretical number that says the average human can only manage 150 relationships mentally at a time. The average Facebook user has slightly more than this number of friends so how will you suddenly manager hundreds of customers? CRM tools help you manage your customers by setting reminders, sending out auto-replies, and creating follow up communication for you with regards to your clients.

There are many to choose from in the marketplace, both free and paid. I’ve used, in the past 37 Signals Highrise(recommend), Leads on Rails (wouldn’t recommend), Sugar CRM, and most recently SalesForce (highly recommend, but a bit more costly).

Also Josh is running a CRM for Real Estate experiment with Heap on onlinerealestate101.com. I look forward to seeing his feedback.

4.  In-House Lead Gen and your Online Presence go hand-in-hand. These are where you’ll put most of your intellectual capital, personal expression, writing, and branding.  In fact, the online space has been so cluttered that by you having your properties on all the classifieds like Craigslist, Backpage, Oodle, etc. is going to give you little if any competitive advantage at all. Why?  Because there is no longer a barrier of entry into these spaces and everyone, including your competitors, are already using them. That’s not to say you avoid these, but these need to become automated functions of your business.

Your website can provide you residual efforts from much front-loaded efforts. Your web presence should be unique and offer strong call-to-actions which are visually appealing and clear in message. Use WordPress to get started if you don’t have a big budget for a custom site. Offer something of value. The 2 year old report that all of your competitors are giving away too is not something of value. Create original content, build a guide to people relocating, a dining guide, or comprehensive data on a specific neighbourhood. By creating something original you can offer a unique value proposition which will likely usurp what your competitors are offering.

Last thoughts:

Don’t be overwhelmed in your mission to be successful as an online agent. Focus on the essentials which will give you a long term benefit. These building-blocks will give you a basis for which you can add new tools you test out to your business. Otherwise you’ll be chasing a never-ending rush to find the newest, quickest, sexiest real estate tool or trend.

Late last month, InstantInfo Corp launched their real estate application for smart phone users: efastinfo.com. This subscription based service allows house hunters to receive information about a property on their mobile phone, and also establishes a database of lead information agents can use to communicate with potential clients.

“It gives the agent or broker the ability to track, manage and profile leads,” InstantInfo Corp founder Jeff Partridge told the Dallas Business Journal. “It lets agents know who has expressed interest in their property listings.”

The company already have one brokerage on board – Briggs Freeman Real Estate Brokerage, which has over 140 agents. efastinfo.com quotes the brokerage’s Robbie Briggs as saying:

“We believe that with efastinfo.com we can deliver comprehensive data in a user friendly format while giving the consumers what they want, when and where they want it…which is right now on their phones and computers.”

cellsigns.com’s New Partnership

Another website focused on providing listing information via mobile phones is cellsigns.com. Like efastinfo.com, cellsigns.com provides a mobile based service that send property information to interested house hunters.

The website has just announced a new partnership with Carolina based real estate company Allen Tate Company. Allen Tate Company president and chief operating officer Pat Riley had this to say about the benefits of using cellsigns.com’s technology:

“Today’s consumers are looking for information instantly. They can now receive information about a home, the number of bedrooms and baths, approximate square footage, and even view photos of the inside, all while standing on the front lawn holding their cell phone. And, if they want more information, they can contact the listing agent via text message to schedule an appointment.”

Goomzee’s Realty Connect

US based startup Goomzee is behind Realty Connect, a product they describe as “an interactive mobile advertising and lead generation platform for real estate professionals”. After sending out a text message, prospective buyers receive information about a property and can also access virtual tours, while the agent receives a lead alert.

According to inman.com, Goomzee are now testing iPhone and BlackBerry applications aimed at agents who want to manage their business on the go. The applications will apparently allow users to manage listings, campaigns, leads and follow-ups, and will soon be released to select clients.

It is vital for every real estate office to have processes in place to effectively monitor enquiry, ascertain the source and ensure leads are followed up.

But for the moment let’s look at the source of enquiry and why knowing where your leads are coming from is important.

Source enquiry monitoring provides:

• An understanding of what and where marketing and advertising is working.
• Information that will assist in allocating marketing and advertising funds more effectively.
• The opportunity to ensure all enquiry is being followed up and with what success.
• Information on the success of enquiry into real business can allow you to analyse not only the quantity but the quality.
• An important statistical tool for presenting to clients when suggesting certain methods of promotion and particularly where you are seeking advertising funds from the client.

Property portals in the main offer an excellent range of statistical tools and reports with some even providing designated telephone numbers allowing you to track telephone enquiry off the Internet.

This allows you to monitor effectively which portals are working for you and providing leads, but once again you need to follow through and track progress to ensure you are recording the quality of the lead. At the end of the day, the source that provides you with the greater number of leads that actually turn into revenue for your business is the most successful.

But not all enquiry will be so clear cut, you need to ascertain from each contact where they first saw the property or your brand. Property research may have been undertaken on the Internet but first contact with you may be by way of telephone or walk-in.

Steps in effectively utilising enquiry monitors:

• The point of contact should be where the enquiry is recorded, whether it be at the reception area for walk-ins, answering the telephone or perhaps at an “open for inspection”.
• All sources of enquiry should be recorded not just the general medium, so under “Internet” the source portal should be recorded.
• You may wish to establish a code for every marketing or media source.
• Many offices may have CRM or back-office systems that record or follow enquiry and leads right through the process.
• If you don’t have such a system, a simple excel/word sheet can be quite adequate.
• Your enquiry monitor should also include email enquiries coming from property portals.

The more you record and analyse where your enquiry is coming from, the more effective your advertising dollar will be in the future.