Bernice Ross
How would the real estate industry change if its online paid advertising models no longer worked? There’s a tremendous transformation taking place that will fundamentally alter how you will do business in the very near future. What can you do to be prepared?
There’s no question that consumers are unhappy about slow load times on their devices, being constantly bombarded with unwelcome website ads and having hundreds of tracking cookies invading their privacy and mucking up their online experience. This situation will only be made worse if the dire predictions about the effect of eliminating net neutrality become a reality.
Three primary forces that are hastening this huge shakeup include browser-level ad blocking, chatbots, and an increasing need to have more “analog” experiences.
Blocking at the browser level, not just the ad level. I’m absolutely head-over-heels-in-love with Brave. Do you have any idea how great it is to surf the net and to at last be free of slow loads, annoying ads, tracking cookies and being taken to unencrypted sites (HTTP vs. HTTPS) that can expose you to malware and phishing schemes? I’ve been using Brave as my browser for one week and here are my stats for my laptop: 2,928 trackers blocked; 1,333 ads blocked and 2,048 HTTPS upgrades.
Multiplying those numbers by three (for my laptop, iPhone and iPad), Brave has blocked almost 9,000 trackers and 4,000 unwanted ads for me in a single week.
Chatbots will soon make your website and your apps obsolete. In early 2017, Facebook outlined its massive commitment to partnering with outside developers to create chatbots for Facebook messenger. A “chatbot” is a computer program that simulates conversation with human users over the Internet using a chat interface. Alexa and Siri are probably the most well-known examples.
Facebook’s vision is that chatbots will become so ubiquitous that you will use them to share information about an upcoming elementary school soccer game, curate news that you find to be interesting, as well as in hundreds of other places every day.
Three real estate chatbots have already stepped beyond what Facebook is offering. “Aisa Holmes” (Structurely.com’s “artificial intelligence Inside Sales Agent”), Automabots (automabots.com), and roof.ai actually convert the lead for you on the spot.
Matt Schlicht, the CEO of Octane AI, says that if “messaging apps become the number one way people communicate, then every business is going to need a way to engage on these platforms. This means that every business will eventually need to have a bot.”
Because bots load instantaneously, they are faster than websites and mobile apps. More importantly, chatbots will be the easiest technology to use because all you will have to do is talk to the bot. The result will be websites and mobile apps will become obsolete and, in the process, will eventually kill off today’s advertising models.
A New World Needs New Ideas
What can you do to get an edge in this rapidly changing environment where digital advertising may no longer be as effective? Here are four suggestions.
Integrate digital and analog: Real estate is still a face-to-face business, however, the new tech tools can greatly enhance your ability to convert leads and provide better customer service. As Rich Barton, co-founder and executive chairman of Zillow, observed at Real Estate Connect in January, “For years, real estate practitioners have worried that technology will replace them. It hasn’t happened: ALL AI is an enhancement, not a replacement for the agent.”
The chatbots described above are only the first wave of what’s coming – be an early adopter.
Ditch impressions and other outbound marketing strategies: Getting your name out there doesn’t work very well when people are being bombarded with thousands of ads every day. Instead, double down on collecting testimonials and growing your sphere through inbound marketing – i.e. referrals. Capture these on video and share them across the social media. To market your business, create fun videos about your listings, the neighborhood or anything else that makes people laugh that could go viral.
Be ruthless about tracking your online advertising ROI: Look at your digital and your print marketing ad spend each month. If you are not seeing conversions into closed transactions, spend your money elsewhere!
Stop worrying about the robot apocalypse: According to The Wall Street Journal, you don’t need to worry about the robot apocalypse eliminating your job any time soon. Instead, all you need to do is to “close the door – it seems robots are unable to open an unlocked door, much less a locked one.
Bernice Ross, CEO of RealEstateCoach.com, is a national speaker, trainer and author. She may be reached at Bernice@RealEstateCoach.com.
