Getting Social Media Marketing
I am convinced that you’ve got to want to see the big picture in order to be able to see the big picture. Some business owners miss the big picture with their overall marketing success because they refuse to think out of the box.
I start this post out of frustration because I failed to creatively and mentally reach one of my clients. He is a 15 year local residential realtor, who sells on average between 15 to 24 houses per year. His bread and butter market has been new home buyers, however, due to a changing market he has wanted to sell more short sales and to a more affluent market. In this current economy he wants to recreate his marketing and brand.
His initial comments to us were that he didn’t have time for social media. He understood that it was a necessary evil, however he didn’t see the value in Twitter, Facebook and others. I agreed that social media was time consuming, however it was necessary. I gave him numerous examples of how he could integrate social media into his current marketing.
His current “real estate” website is parked on an obscure domain name which brings very little SEO value. He also had recently subscribed to a “business in a box” complete short sale website system that he was paying $90 per month and has pointed to another domain. His goal was to create a new “real estate” website and I suggested that instead of a new website that he change his current template color and use better images and more professional graphics.
I shared with him that the problem that I see with traditional local real estate websites is they’re boring and they don’t reach new markets. Most tell about the company, showcase some homes and change infrequently. Some realtors have tried to add blogs, however they find it challenging creating interesting optimized content. Most realtors understand that they have to advertise their business and/or advertise individual homes to bring attention. Traditional real estate advertising tries to reach people who are looking to purchase now. But how does a real estate company reach and develop new markets who may have other real estate needs and/or know people who they can refer? Social media is one answer.
My client and I started talking early this year about social media marketing. He admitted that he didn’t get social media and surely didn’t have time to tweet and sit on facebook. I shared with him some of the success that we have had by automating many of our social media tasks. I explained to him how social media is about developing relationships and using social tools for various SEO functions. Automating many of these functions would save him time and money in the long term. I wanted to set his expectation levels.
I put a proposal together, spelled out what we were going to provide. We threw in developing of several social profiles. He decided to move forward and we built him an automated social media platform. We started by grabbing a key word rich domain name. We made sure that his city name and real estate was used too. We optimized the WordPress site with a great theme that allowed us to monetize the site with various links and banners. We used various real estate related rss feeds to provide content. We couldn’t get too real estate specific because most of that content was being posted by competitors. We used local community content with information for schools, dining and points and places of interest. We automated the posts for 4 times a day to this site, which also posts directly to 3 Twitter profiles and my client’s Facebook Fanpage.
We helped monetize the site with books from Amazon for subjects like: Home Repair, Decks, Appliances, Kitchen gadgets. We used feeds from Home Depot and other informational sites to add a variety of content. Why? As we explained to our client, we want to attract all sorts of people to our content and bring them back to your new info site and share “real estate” information, pictures, links etc. You get a chance to brand your company on a cool information website that doesn’t smell like a real estate website.
Part of our proposal called for the client to advertise his banners on other news sites as well as print. Images are everything online and we recommended improving the images on all of his media.
Since we started in September, the WordPress site reached the top 100K on Alexa for US websites. It averages 6 unique visitors per day organically. It has posted over 974 posts and broadcast many of these posts directly to our client’s Twitter and Facebook pages. This was supposed to give my client an opportunity to Tweet about his own content and give him topics of interest for his personal comments on his Facebook page.
Success? Recently, a local upscale hotel, thanked my client on Twitter for helping spread the word about one of their events that we retweeted and posted. A local news website sent a Tweet that they wanted to feature my client’s houses. Here’s another company finding my client on social media to form an alliance. Wow! In a follow up email, that I sent for my client, this other company is now interested in doing a banner exchange with my client. This all happened because of the client’s social media automated platform.
Now granted this was not a home sale, however this news site saw value in what my client was doing. Obviously, they had visited my client’s website to even know that he had homes to showcase. This could be the beginning of something great, if nothing else additional free advertising which adds to my client’s ROI.
Needless to say, after all of this, my client called a few days ago and said he didn’t like his new platform. It wasn’t what he expected. He said he didn’t get it, our posts were all over the place and he didn’t want to put any additional money into it. The additional money was $10 to $20 a month in maintenance to pay someone to add special real estate content and answer emails. He needed to spend $100 in some banner ads and a new header for his main website. But he doesn’t see the value in his automated platform. As far as the content, this could be adjusted.
He has always been concerned with ROI. How many houses am I going to sell? I tried to get him to understand that this is not something that he can measure immediately. I asked him how much would he have paid someone to find various content, post 970+ articles, post daily links on 3 Twitter profiles, then log in and post also to Facebook a few times per day? $5/day, $10 per day? So to pay someone from September to December at $10/day for 7 days per week is over $1000 already. How about that ROI?
I take his decision personally, his answers during our conversation were short. Maybe he was having a bad day. His closing words to me were that he only knew how to sell homes and that’s what he wanted to do. I told him that I could help him sell the platform. I told him that I could call several realtors in his area who would instantly see value in his platform and domain name. I told him that we could flip the website for atleast 4K as is. Of course, he declined.
When it comes to your business, either you get social media or you don’t. You have know that Twitter and Facebook for business is more than just posting comments. Social media is a lot like fishing. You just have to get it!
