Category: Marketing (page 59 of 191)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote about the back side of that card last week. It’s the Open House invitation for 56 West Willetta Street in Downtown Phoenix, a home we listed for sale yesterday. This is a full-bore Bloodhound launch, but the card itself is kinda boring, wouldn’t you say?

That’s not an accident. I could wish I were more talented as a graphic designer, but I’m a firm believer that, if something is so cool looking that no one knows what it is, you’ve wasted your money. As radical as our real estate signs are, they still look like real estate signs. And the most profoundly valuable graphic element on our signs was suggested by marketing-provocateur Richard Riccelli: The snipe in the upper left hand corner that says “For sale.” In the uncivil war between obvious and obtuse, obtuse wins all the glamorous awards and obvious wins all the money.

Which brings us to our directionals. I’ve been writing about custom directional signs for more than a year. In that time, we’ve gone through many designs, and we’ve never done the same thing twice. For this house, I think I’ve finally hit on something I like and will use again:

Could not possibly be more obvious, yes?

That “Buy me” call to action is swiped from Redfin.com. Their signs do nothing for me otherwise, but those two words are the essence of good copywriting, in my opinion.

In our own small way, we launch a house in the same we someone else might launch a new car or a new kind of dishwasher or a new magazine. Those business-card-sized Open House cards will be distributed to 6,000 homes. We’ll get a 1% or at most 2% response on that effort — extremely direct mail — but the chances are excellent that the ultimate buyer will be among the parties who come to the first open house.

And: The signs, the directionals, the web site, everything else we do to market our listings — these techniques sell houses. This is not rocket science. Drawing more attention — and more-positive attention — to a house will make it sell faster and Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written about our breadcrumbs philosophy before. Cliff’s Notes: If we build a single property web site for a listing — or a previewing site for buyers featuring dozens of houses — we never delete worthwhile work product from our file server:

We leave the pages and sites on our file server forever. If there were anything confidential in the pages, we would excise it. But there never is — because the web is not secure. So the pages live on forever, each one a detailed chronicle of a particular house at a particular moment in time.

This Sunday just past, a potential buyer was sitting outside 14179 West Shaw Butte Drive in Surprise, AZ. From her phone, she Googled the address. Guess who she found?

I’m not the lister on that house — and it had sold before she called me. But I stand a fair chance of selling her something else, with my client-acquisition cost being pretty close to $0.00.

Leaving breadcrumbs on the trail is not a strategy, not even a tactic. It’s a side-effect. We’re building the content for other purposes. But we sometimes get extra business simply by not killing those pages. This has always been good for us, going back years, but it promises to get better and better. First, we’re always building new pages, which increases our long-tail exposure. And second, there are more and more web-enabled mobile phones out there every day.

There’s more: I think it’s important to “triangulate” on pages like this from a weblog, this so Google finds the new content in a sprightly fashion. I talked about triangulation at Unchained in Phoenix, and I’ll be addressing it again in Orlando. (And if you buttonhole Brian Brady, he might reveal to you what I’m doing in this post as a side-effect of having written it.)

Bur even though this is all just a side-effect of other efforts, we still have a complicated, scientific name for this phenomenon: We call it free money.

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Richard Riccelli doesn’t write here very much, but, when he does, it’s pure gold. I’ve been writing in BloodhoundBlog about Richard since the blog was young, as have others, and Richard has been writing with us for as long as we’ve been a group blog. I can’t sing his praises enough. I’m sure I can’t even see nine-tenths of his genius, but I am forevermore enthralled by what I can see.

A peculiar aspect of Richard’s brilliance is his uncanny ability to identify and excise the deal-killing objection. In his own marketing business, his fees can run dauntingly high. Don’t want to pay? No problem. If he loves the project, Richard will work for a cut of the take instead. This is unheard of in direct marketing, and the shear audacity of it can silence every other objection he might hear from his clients. How can you argue with free?

For months now I’ve been playing with Riccelli-style direct marketing ideas at ABetterListing.com. The site’s not done yet. Taking account of testing, it will never be done. But it takes on its first big market test tomorrow.

This is the back of an open house invitation card for a house we’ll be listing next Friday:

Cathleen and her crew of energetic teenagers will be distributing 2,500 of those cards this weekend, with another 2,500 going out next weekend. The whole launch is a Very Big Deal since the house we’re listing falls into the Jumbo Zone — where desire is unlimited and loans are unavailable.

But ABetterListing.com was built for this kind of door-to-door direct marketing promotion, and the promotion itself is built around a Riccelli bet: We’re betting that we’re better than anyone else you’ll talk to, and we’ll pay off on the bet if you don’t agree.

An even better Riccelli bet would be this: “If we don’t get you a contract within 30 days, we’ll sell it for free!” Unfortunately, in the neighborhood we’re working in, homes are selling in 267 days — on average — when they sell at all. We’ll save that offer for a better market.

I’ll talk more about ABetterListing.com another Read more