The results of a recent survey by globaledge.co.uk reveal some interesting disparities between the marketing channels agents see as effective and the channels they actually use.

The survey looked at the marketing habits of over 200 agents and developers, asking them to rate the effectiveness of strategies like search engine optimisation, email marketing, and banner advertising, and to detail the strategies they use.

The top five most effective marketing strategies were seen to be the following:

1. Customer referral programs
2. Search engine optimisation
3. Listing properties with portals
4. Agent and IFA networks
5. Email marketing

The top five marketing strategies the respondents actually used were slightly different:

1. Listing properties with portals
2. Email marketing
3. Search engine optimisation
4. Agent and IFA networks
5. Magazine advertising

Like the recent HomeGain survey of US agents, these results suggest certain habits, like the use of print media, are difficult to break even when agents know they aren’t as effective as other marketing strategies.

If you’re trying to make the shift towards some of those top five most effective marketing strategies, make sure you check out our guest series and Top 10 Tips on SEO, our series on making the most of your portal listings, and our email marketing tips.

Is print dead? It’s a question marketers of all persuasions ask themselves from time to time, whether they believe in the power of the printed word or choose to funnel all their advertising dollars into online options.

Here at propertyadguru.com, we’ve argued the case for online advertising over print a few times now. But the question is, do the stats really show that online advertising is the future? Or have the reports of print’s death been greatly exaggerated?

A few days ago, marketing analytics company Outsell published new US-based figures that sent a chill through the print industry. Vice president and lead analyst Chuck Richard summed up the results: “For the first time, advertisers plan to spend more on digital and online marketing and advertising (in 2010), 32.5 percent of the total, than on print, 30.3 percent, an industry milestone crossover event.”

As the Financial Times explains, Outsell surveyed 1,000 advertisers to predict that online spending will rise 9.6 percent to US$119.6 billion, while print spending will fall 3 percent to $111.5 billion.

“Advertisers are directing dollars toward the channels which generate the most qualified leads and most effective branding,” Richard explains. ”As they emerge from the recession, they need more accountability, and they’re spreading their spending over a widening set of options.”

In an interview with wired.com, Ad Age digital lead editor Michael Learmonth argued that Outsell was simply putting a date on something that was always on the cards. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s 2010, 2011 — it’s going to happen,” he said.

In fact, the trend away from print advertising has already gathered speed in both Australia and the UK. digital-media.net.au reported back in October that the Australian online ad industry is set to take away over a billion dollars from traditional media over the next four years. In the UK, the Internet Advertising Bureau saw online taking over from TV in terms of ad spend as early as September.

So, if everyone is moving their advertising dollars online, does print media have a future? The magazine industry thinks so, and has just released a new print-based campaign of its own to prove it. The ad, complete with a picture of olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, compares the print experience to swimming while maintaining we can only ever “surf” online:

It’s a lovely analogy, but the problem for real estate advertisers is that a print property listing offers an experience less like swimming and more like skimming stones. These days, property hunters are getting used to all the extra information they can find online: neighbourhood facts, Street View photos, mortgage broker contact details – the list goes on. At most, a print listing alerts people to the fact that a property is on the market, or was a few days ago.

Despite all this, the latest HomeGain survey shows some real estate agents are still keen to put money into print advertising in 2010. Does this mean agents are still seeing return-on-investment from print options? Or simply that vendors don’t feel comfortable unless their property is in the paper? Whatever the reason, our advice is always to track where your advertising dollars are going and what effect they’re having, so you can fine-tune your advertising strategy to get the best possible results.

The US National Association of Realtors recently released its 2009 Profile of Homebuyers and Sellers and the results show an even heavier reliance on the Internet to find homes than in 2008.

The often-quoted statistic from the 2008 NAR report had 87 percent of US home buyers looking online for their next home. According to the new NAR figures posted by Sara Bonert, zillow.com’s director of broker relations, that figure has now risen to 90 percent.

Bonert’s blog post also shows that looking online for properties was the first step taken by both first time and repeat buyers, rather than contacting an agent. Buyers spent an average of two weeks on this initial property search before they decided to find an agent to help them with the buying process.

So how did buyers go about finding an agent once they were ready to buy? This is where reliance on the Internet drops off dramatically: according to figures quoted by Leading RE, 44 percent of buyers were referred to their agent by a friend, neighbour or relative. 10 percent went with the agent who previously bought or sold their home, and 10 percent went online to find a new agent.

If buyers are more likely to rely on referrals to choose their agent than to go looking online, are agents wasting valuable time creating a strong web presence? Not so, says Bonert, who points out that agents have a big opportunity to connect with buyers who haven’t yet chosen representation during their initial two week research period.

And before you delete your social networking accounts and cancel your website hosting contract, consider the NAR’s finding that eight out of 10 home buyers who used the Internet to search for a home purchased their house through a real estate agent, while non-Internet users were more likely to purchase directly through a builder or via a private transaction.

LeadingRE points out another significant finding from the report: 66 percent of buyers and 64 percent of sellers contacted just one agent before agreeing to work with them. Eric Bryn, LeadingRE’s vice president of strategic development and intellectual property counsel, sums up this finding best:

“What this tells me is that responsiveness, already a key point in selecting an agent, is likely a key factor in gaining business too. The first agent to pick up the phone, answer an email, respond to a chat, reply to a Tweet, comment on a status update, etc, increases their odds of gaining a new client or retaining an existing one.”

Finally, Denver property website Mile High Urban Living quotes another finding from the report that won’t surprise regular propertyadguru.com readers: The most valued features for real estate websites were property photos, detailed property information, virtual tours, real estate agent contact information, and interactive maps.

propertyadguru.com occasionally receives requests for information on how to list a property online. While this may sound like a strange question to some, we think the fact that this question is still being asked in 2009 might reflect reluctance amongst some agents to make the jump to online advertising.

The reason we think online advertising is worthwhile is simple: it’s the fastest growing source of enquiry.

It’s a statistic that’s often quoted, but one worth repeating: the US National Association of Realtors states that 87 percent of buyers begin their home search on the Internet. In the UK, the amount spent on online advertising has outstripped even that spent on TV, and in Australia, traditional media is facing a loss of over a billion dollars over the next four years as ad spending moves to the Internet.

The fact is, many estate agencies look at how new media can be utilised in their business rather than looking at how they should perhaps re-structure their business and change to better suit this rapidly expanding online market.

To begin with, let’s look at property portals. Portals are more than just a place to list property. Most provide a number of additional advertising and branding products that allow you to profile your agency and drive leads to your business.

Investing in premium classified subscriptions and display advertising, and utilising tools like electronic brochures, can set your agency apart from the pack and position you as forerunner in your area when it comes to the growing online property audience. All at a fraction of the often quite exorbitant cost of print media.

Another great advantage of advertising online is that you can dominate your area, even if you are not the most well known agent around.

In theory, you could be a one-person operator working out of a back office, or even from home, and the online audience won’t know. In fact, they probably don’t care as long as you get the results. Let’s face it: the newspaper is perceived as profiling your agency rather than driving enquiry, and profiling it to a diminishing audience.

Would it not be better to try to own your online market – a market that is significant and continuing to grow at an astonishing rate?

Cutting your print costs can allow you to re-invest in online products and in your own website through better web design and functionality along with search engine optimisation (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and social media optimisation (SMO) opportunities.

In upcoming articles we will be having a closer look at some of the products offered by many of the property portals and how you can leverage them to build your brand, list property and increase enquiry.

If you are in a market where your competitors are not embracing new media to the extent they should, work it to your advantage.

What changes are you going to make to your business?

[Image: toosoo.co.il]

A recent article on propertyadguru.com by Simon Baker argued that print advertising is obselete, and has been replaced by online advertising.

It seems that many agents agree, including Tom Tognoli, founder and COO of Intero Real Estate Services in the US.

Intero Real Estate Services has cut its spending on advertising from $3.2 million a year in 2004 to just $500,000 this year, a massive reduction achieved mostly by switching to online forms of advertising including portals and exploiting blogging and social media. The company also invested heavily in its website.

At Inman’s Real Estate Connect Conference in San Francisco last week, Tom spoke of the company’s approach to advertising, saying that before pulling the plug on print advertising, it’s important to have a new marketing plan in place.

Tom said that Intero was amongst the first to syndicate listings to trulia.com, and everyone was up in arms when they started. Intero then began expanded this approach, syndicating listings to other sites and spending money on online banner ads and featured listings. Today the company spends less on banner ads and featured listings, with Tom arging that if a brokerage has a dominant share of its market, it can achieve a big enough footprint online through listing syndication, with ads of limited value.

VP of sales for trulia.com, Sean Black, was quoted by Inman as saying that agents and brokers should ask themselves four questions about any online marketing technique they are considering employing:

• Where do I get traffic and leads from, and can it scale?
• Where can I reach the most new-home shoppers?
• Where can I get the best targeting?
• Where can I get tracking by agent and listing?

Read propertyadguru.com’s article Print Advertising is Obsolete – The Case for On-Line by clicking here.

Over my nearly eight years there, visitors to realestate.com.au increased from 230,000 a month to 4.5 million a month and total on-line spend for agents grew from around $7 million a year to over $180 million a year. That’s explosive growth in anyone’s books. I expect the internet will continue to grow, although obviously not at the same rate.

In the real estate market today, the internet has taken almost 100% market share away from print in advertising of rental properties, share accommodation and low-end properties for sale. The only real estate segments that continue to be advertised in print in any great volume are developments and the upper end of the market, driven by vendor-paid advertising.

As to why it’s happened, the answer is pretty obvious – the internet is where the eyeballs are. Buyers prefer to use the internet for their research; they can filter results in any way they want and make electronic shortlists, they can see multiple photos and floor plans, they can check the location of the property on Google maps, and perhaps most importantly, they can do it wherever they want, whenever they want.

The real estate portals have been great news for agents and vendors too, because when you compare the two modes of advertising, the internet is ridiculously cheap and easy to use. Uploading a property onto on-line portals is a lot less time consuming than organising a print ad – buyers can see the property as soon as the listing is uploaded and the agent can update details whenever they want. It will even be emailed direct to interested buyer’s in-box overnight via email alerts – how much more targeted could marketing be?

The pro-print corner will try to convince you that internet advertising loses steam after that initial upload and if you don’t get a sale straightaway you might as well have the property hidden under a rock. This, of course, is fear mongering in a rear guard action to protect the ancient rivers of gold. If you look at the viewing patterns of any property, you will not only see an initial spike, you will also see a long tail of continual viewing of an online listing. Ask any pro-print person how many people actually looked at each print add and the best they can do is quote some out of date circulation figure for the paper.

To maximise the value from any online advertising, the agent needs to do more than just upload the listing. They need to actively manage that listing on the portal sites and on their own sites.

To maximise the number of leads generated by an on-line ad, there are two key things to consider. The first is the quality of the advertisement, focusing on the same features that draw consumers to the web – lots of information:

- High quality photos and lots of them – 8 to 10 is the most effective number.
- Floor plans – a clear layout will help the buyer visualise the property.
- Informative text – the copy should include as much factual information as possible and be straight to the point. Savvy internet consumers are turned off by flowery descriptions.
- The location of the property so it can be mapped.
- Even videos of the property can help create more high quality leads.

The second key thing which will determine the effectiveness of the ad is positioning on the site:

- Adopt premium products – use options like the guaranteed top spot or the e-brochure feature which sends the property in a separate email to interested buyers.
- Advertise on multiple sites – cast the net as broadly as possible.
- Promote the real estate brand separately to listings – unlike print, on-line can disaggregate the brand from the listing, so use options like banner ads in the suburb search.
- If a property is languishing in an on-line campaign, it is most likely due to the advertisement not ticking these boxes rather than the medium of on-line itself.

The other argument for print is that print advertisements are a branding tool for the agent and therefore great for sourcing sellers. This may well be true, but if it is, why isn’t the agent paying for the ad out of their commission as they would in other countries? Getting a vendor to spend thousands on print ads that are unlikely to make any difference to the sale of their property just doesn’t seem right to me. The question to ask is, if it were your money you were spending, would the branding benefit be worth it?

I believe your brand will be promoted far more effectively if you do the right thing by your vendors and save them money on their marketing campaign by using the most effective tool in the market place – on-line advertising. The best driver of leads you can ever create is through word of mouth recommendations.

Going forward, I believe print advertising will become even less relevant. Print advocates say that there is a whole segment of society that doesn’t use the internet, particularly those buyers in the older age group who are looking for premium properties. I don’t necessarily agree with that argument; 70%+ of the total population is now on-line and that includes many older people. But even if it were true now, in time the younger generations who are only using the internet will become the older generation who only use the internet.

My advice to any agent considering the marketing campaign for a property today would be; think carefully of the buyers you are targeting. Anyone under the age of 40-50 is almost certainly using the internet, and in many areas, people in older age brackets are too. I personally wouldn’t waste my time advertising anything in print – the time and effort required is just not worth it.

Don’t hang onto the past, on-line is here to stay and is the most effective forum for real estate marketing. Embrace the future and run like mad – your audience is already there.

[image: flickr/inju]

The drop in the number of print issues comes as REALTOR Magazine looks to expand its online presence. In a blog post from April this year, REALTOR Magazine editor-in-chief Stacey Moncrieff discussed the sustainability of the print version, writing: “We remain committed to being ‘the business tool for real estate professionals,’ but in what form and at what cost is in your hands.”

In discussing her post with readers, Moncrieff added:

“Even as we cut back on print, we’re moving down a number of avenues to expand our reach online. We’re in the process of choosing a digital edition vendor; that’ll enable us to deliver a PDF version of the magazine to you via e-mail. We’re also working on a mobile version of select content — first for the iPhone and then for the Blackberry and Treo.

We already offer RSS feeds of our daily news and blogs, and our sister site, realtor.org, is working with a vendor on a ratings and comments function, which will enable our Web pages to accept comments. Finally, we’re moving into direct reader education, hosting free monthly Webinars. Our first two program have attracted a total of more than 10,000 registrants.”

Sami Inkinen, trulia.com co-founder and COO, said in a press release: “The real estate section of the weekend newspaper is no longer the go-to resource for open houses.”

Interestingly, a post on the trulia.com blog also states that the use of open house filters on the website has grown by 39 percent since the start of 2009.