Trends in Online Marketing and Lead Generation
Online marketing and lead generation is a constantly evolving science. In the early days of the internet, simply putting a property online with text was a big chore that required agents (or their development partners) to have HTML programming skills. The next big evolution happened around 1999 when the industry launched the first Internet Display program called IDX. This allowed agents and brokers to publish all of the listings from the multiple listing service on their websites and enable consumers to search. This was quickly followed by the emergence of national property advertising portals like Realtor.com, MSN, Yahoo! and others. IDX and listing portals delivered a great savings to the real estate industry, which was focused on newspaper and magazine advertising at the time. It was not uncommon for listing agents or brokerages to spend between as little as $300 or well over $1,500 in the marketing of a property. Online home search grew in popularity among homebuyers as access to internet connected computers grew. The next huge growth in this category came along with the consumer adoption of internet connected mobile phones and tablets. Today, more than 50 percent of all property searches happens on a mobile device. Nearly concurrent with the adoption of mobile, popular social media sites have became conduits for accessing real estate information including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and now Instagram and Snapchat. The options consumers have today for looking at property is almost absurd. There are millions of agent websites, hundreds of thousands of brokerage websites, and hundreds of property portals. The abundance of these options has created some interesting consolidation. It is estimated that the top 10 real estate portals in America are visited more than 500 million times a month. Given that there are only about 5.5 million transactions a year in America, it makes you wonder what all of those people are doing. Agents and brokerages are recognizing that digital marketing and advertising is changing from "spray and pray" to highly focused and localized marketing. To accomplish this, solutions have emerged that support real estate marketers with geotargeting to a particular house, neighborhood, polygon, or Zip Code. Within those geographies, real estate marketers can tune their marketing for attributes like age, renter vs. homeowner, or any number of filters that narrow the audience. Another major development is the connection between customer management solutions and online marketing. There is an appreciation that one goal of online marketing is to help build a database of potential customers. This famous sales strategy of collecting contacts and staying in touch was famously dramatized in The Wolf of Wall Street where Leonardo DiCaprio encourages his sales team to stay in touch with the customer until they buy or die. Some research has emerged that provides some good guidelines for real estate agents who hope to develop a digital marketing farm. A good target is to focus your efforts on a group of 2,000 to 2,500 households. With a steady focus of targeted digital marketing, agents should be able to develop a sales funnel that will yield about two trades a month. The important ingredient to developing this volume of units from this number of transactions is the frequency and quality of your marketing and lead conversion efforts. Always remember that digital marketing only works if you respond inside of five minutes to an inquiry—or ideally inside of one minute. Consumers expect you to be ready to serve them right away. Want to learn more about online marketing and lead generation? Download our latest Success Guide today!    

This Thursday: Learn How to Serve the New Generation of Home Buyers
Don't miss the final installment of our October webinar series this Thursday! In "Is Your Website Designed to Meet the Needs of Tomorrow's First-Time Homebuyers?" we'll be learning more about IDX tools to help you and your agents serve the incoming generation of new buyers. Every generation faces their own set of homebuying challenges. For Millennials, these challenges are often financial, thanks to a sluggish job market and a massive increase in student loan debt. These factors mean that this generation of first time buyers often can't overcome the biggest obstacle to homeownership--saving enough for the down payment. Thankfully, there's a tool you can add to your IDX website that can remove this common homeownership hurdle. It's called Down Payment Resource (DPR), and it aggregates data on all active assistance programs in your area and flags eligible listings in your website's IDX search. At a glance, buyers are able to see if a home qualifies for down payment assistance. A full two-thirds of agents say that with DPR they are able to convert sidelined prospects into qualified homebuyers! To learn more about leveraging this tool on your IDX website, join us for a free webinar this Thursday. We'll be interviewing real brokers and agents who are taking a proactive approach in educating first-time homebuyers by adding valuable information and tools such as Down Payment Resource to their sites. Leading IDX vendor WolfNet will highlight ways they are helping serve their agent and broker customers to prepare for this emerging first-time homebuyer market. Join us Thursday, October 24 at 2pm EDT/11am PDT to learn more!

Friday Freebie: Online Lead Conversion Guide from realtor.com
In this week's Friday Freebie, the good people from realtor.com® are sharing their expertise and helping agents and brokers solve the problems of lost leads. The company administers thousands of buyer and seller lead generation programs and, as a result, spends hours each day on the phone listening to the stories – both good and bad – of agents and brokers. They've discovered some techniques that crack the code on lead conversion, and are sharing them in a free online guide. Free Online Lead Conversion Guide from realtor.com It seems obvious that picking up the phone, answering the email or text, and being timely in replying to consumers should be the easiest step in lead conversion. But there are circumstances like being occupied with another customer, or having to reserve at least some time for the family that make it impossible to be 100% responsive. Realtor.com®'s newly updated guide to internet lead conversion deals with this problem and shares ideas real agents have put in place to get around this issue and several more. The guide provides answers on how to re-open a conversation with a non-responsive customer, how to add personality to autoresponders, and many more ideas that actually helped agents close more of their leads. The guide runs the gamut of technology solutions, good dialogue and simple common sense and is available for free from realtor.com® Learn how to get a copy of realtor.com®'s FREE Lead Conversion Plan!

Holiday Deal: Merge for Brokers and MLSs
We've unearthed large scale savings for our latest Holiday Deal. Seller servicing tool Merge is discounted to $1,000 per month for any size brokerage or MLS that signs up by Christmas. Normally $2,500 per month, this seasonal special saves big players 60 percent. If you're not familiar with Merge, take a moment to read our product review. Merge is an easy way for real estate agents to share the work they've done with their clients. Fashioned like Facebook's "timeline" layout with each listing having its own timeline, Merge aggregates activity from email, software, apps, and more into one easy to understand location. Agents can share timelines with clients to show them the progress being made on their listing. Each timeline posting presents an opportunity to start a conversation with a client by giving them the chance to review and comment on their agent's hard work. While easy to use, Merge offers live support 24 hours a day as part of their Concierge service in case you or your agent have questions or need help getting started. Merge's interface is simple and easy to understand. It's viewable on any device, too, thanks to its responsive layout. Click through to the next page to view a sample timeline, or visit Merge's website to learn more.

The Easiest Guide EVER To Open House Announcements (Seriously!)
Karli Larson of ePropertySites.com says: Although some agents debate whether holding an open house can have an impact on selling a listing, there's no denying that if you do choose to hold an open house it's a huge disappointment if no one shows up! To make sure you're covering your bases when announcing your upcoming open house, we've taken our handy little Open House Guide and turned it into an acronym that will help you remember where to advertise. Just think OPEN: Online, Print, Email, and Newsletters Online Use your social channels to generate interest for your open house. Tweet about it, post on Facebook and LinkedIn, even blog it. Make sure to use a great "hook" that will entice your audience, such as: "Free Starbucks gift cards for the first 10 visitors this Sunday at my Laguna Beach open house!" You also need to post to your local online classifieds. Craigslist and most newspapers offer highly-trafficked online announcement boards that are perfect for getting the word out about your open houses.

Looking to Reduce Your Number of Lost Online Leads?
  1CAVO states that of the 55 million online real estate leads received each year, 48% are never responded to.  If you would like to look into one way to reduce that number for your office or brokerage, check out this video with the CEO of 1CAVO, Brad Miller.

Looking for a Lead Generation Tool for 50% Off?
RETechnology.com subscribers have an opportunity to purchase ReachFactor at a 50% discount this month! This is a great opportunity to start 2011 off with a new solution offered at a low cost. Haven’t heard of ReachFactor? ReachFactor helps real estate professionals reach more buyers and sellers. It is a lead generation and online marketing tool designed to help real estate professionals reach prospects in search engines and social media who are looking specifically for a real estate agent. ReachFactor's core features include a Web Survey technology that allows agents to automatically survey past clients and collect feedback, and an online syndication engine that helps the agent spread their reviews and listings across search engines, real estate portals, Craig's List, Facebook, and Twitter with just a few clicks. A search engine optimized online profile at ReachFactor.com displays all of the agent's assets and sends new customer inquiries directly to the agent. Agents using ReachFactor require no technical expertise and spend as little as 20 minutes to set up a profile.   Google Eliminates Real Estate How to Create a Facebook Fan Page Missed the Boat: Six Sad Reasons Most Agents Fail

Looking for Easy Ways to Get More Eyeballs on Your Listings?
Trying to send a listing? Looking for a way to get more people engaged in looking at the fine details of the property? Virtual tours are a great way to accomplish these goals. Virtual tours can be a great way to break through and get attention to the properties you are trying to sell while standing out from your competition. Virtual tours are a very popular tool for real estate consumers. They believe virtual tours can give them a much better feel for a home. Studies have proven that listings with virtual tours are viewed more often and for a longer period of time. Interestingly, though, studies have shown that only 2 to 5% listings include virtual tours currently. There’s a large opportunity to increase the attention to a listing by featuring virtual tours. So if virtual tours are so popular with consumers, why don’t more agents offer them? In interviews we’ve conducted with agents, they tell us they understand the marketing value of virtual tours, but they don’t have the time or budget to deploy these valuable tools. The common perception is that most virtual tour companies burden the agent with the heavy lifting of taking the photos, uploading them and then creating a time-consuming end product. Fortunately, there are several virtual tour companies that have recognized this concern and are finding ways to make it easier and more affordable to feature a virtual tour on every property.

Home Closings Made Easy
DotLoop CEO and co-founder, Austin Allison appeared on FOX Business Network's "America's Nightly Scoreboard" on the Small Business Spotlight segment. This video details a new software solution for real estate agents to use to speed up the closing process, and join the digital movement. DotLoop is  a company that offers a transaction and closing management solution; they "connect the dots and bring people into the loop," hense, the name of the company, DotLoop. In this video, Austin Alison expains how the company began, what it does for agents, how much it costs and the overall benefit of using it. To see the video, click to continue....

Previsite Launches a New Product for Brokers!
Previsite has been delivering products and services to real estate agents for over 10 years. As a result of the strong business relationship they have with the residential real estate community, they have recently launched a 2010 Broker Service Offering – the Previsite Ultimate Marketing Solution with integrated Virtual Tours and syndication to Social Media portals. Previsite introduced substantial enhancements designed to help Brokers shape and complement their 2010 marketing strategy, especially as it relates to having a Social Media presence. Previsite’s Broker Service Offering is a cost effective and effortless marketing solution for Brokers and their agents. A. Bradley Nelson, director of marketing at New Broad Street Realty in Orlando, is quoted as saying: "Time devoted to social networking is worth the effort. Our social networking generates 40 unique visitors to our website each day. It's quantifiable."