Months ago, I noted for my readers that traditional internet marketing was dead. In August 2008, MySpace, the leading social network online, actually beat Yahoo, the second-leading search portal, for the top spot in advertising impressions for the month.
This means more people saw more pages — and more ads – on a social network than they did by searching the “trusty” search engine. The story went largely unnoticed – except by me – while the search engine and pay-per-click marketing industry tried to ignore it off as a fluke. Today, that fluke has become a daily trend, and the stage has been set for social networking knockout traditional search engine marketing as the main source of lead generation for the real estate industry.
After spending millions polishing their Web sites, most real estate brokers spent the last five years struggling for victory within the arcane and unclear rules of search engine superiority. Ostensibly, the goal was to reach the “top ranks” of the search engines, because higher ranking was equated with lead-generation. In an ironic twist of fate, brokers found themselves on the receiving end of an industry that practiced their trade “in secret.”
Most were left staring across the table with search engine specialists who spoke in acronyms like SEO, PPC, hits, metatags, and other uncertainties that left brokers with nothing more than trust to write a check. For the promise of pushing the broker’s Web site higher in the search engine results, these techno-Barnums also promised more leads.
Open Communications
The good news is that, in the same way the internet lifted the veil from real estate’s secret society, the search engine crowd today finds themselves standing naked as the tide goes out. The Internet has done it again. First it destroyed the Sacred Real Estate Comparables Book, and now it’s burning the All Holy Search Engine Superstitions. Not even Google will be able to stop it, either.
Like most significant changes to our industry, this one should take everyone by “surprise” very soon. But the signs of the changes are already there: even the traffic numbers on our company’s Web site are showing how social networks are referring more visitors than pay-per-clicks – almost 300 percent more every day.
By participating in social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, companies of all sizes can directly communicate to their spheres of influence – past and future clients – with blog entries, short announcements and helpful links. Of course, the helpful links should direct their friends back to their Web site – the key to replacing random traffic with targeted traffic. This is the heart of the challenge for search engines – and the opportunity for real estate brokers.
Certainly, the Yahoo and Google’s of the world will always remain a central destination for anyone “looking” for something. But the “search and buy” phenomenon has reached its limits, especially with younger real estate consumers. And that’s exactly where social networks will step in to become the new sources of lead generation for real estate of the future.
People prefer to get advice from other people, not machines. The mechanism doesn’t matter, as long as there’s a person on the other end. Initially, this positioned e-mail as the best connector of people online. Today, however, new networking platforms combine the human-on-the-other-end-interaction with the younger generation’s expectations of “faster-than-e-mail” interactions. And that means online presence – full time – in a social network.
Web site traffic has always been largely meaningless for selling homes anyway. Web site traffic per se works beautifully for sales of widgets that consumers can research on their own and purchase for delivery. Yet even in widget industries like books, travel and computers, social networking forces are at work, because people still prefer to ask their friends for advice on reading lists, vacation spots and computer specs.
Complex Transactions
Real estate remains a far more complex transaction than widgets. It requires serious human knowledge to conduct a correctly. Placing inventory online is only the start of a very complex process, in which 85 percent of consumers still engage a real estate professional. Even those who try to do it themselves end up listing with a Realtor 88 percent of the time. Most importantly, when it comes to generating new business, the transaction’s complexity is also why the majority of sellers still select their agent by referral, and only a fraction (under 4 percent) select an agent by “searching and viewing” their Web site.
People continue to trump data, even on the Internet. Word-of-mouth advertising remains the most powerful form of business growth.
Sorry search engines.
The growth of social networks as a new source of leads could rescue the industry from recession, too. For starters, social networking is free. Unlike the vastly useless postcard and classified marketing that saps the budgets of brokerages, social networking can be deployed and maintained with virtually no cash, making cash flow available for more useful investments such as training and smartphones. Internet marketing strategies will shift away from paying for clicks and towards quality content, such as more photography and video.
Besides cost savings, the shift in strategies would have a qualitative impact on industry growth. Rather than chasing e-mails, agents would focus on fundamental sales practices: relationship management. Social networks are not merely alternate platforms for posting advertising. They are the ultimate customer-for-life platforms. They help salespeople develop and maintain relationships with their sphere of influence.
It’s called sales.
Finding Friends
The irony here is enormous. For decades, brokers have taught agents to organize their lists of friends and family, to generate their sales and referrals. Sphere of influence sales strategies work. Every top agent knows it, practices it, consistently. Then along came the web and an inflation-fueled market boom, both of which distracted brokers from the fundamentals of running a sales business. The boom made it possible for agents to “sell” listings without building a relationships. And now they are paying for it.
So the recession and social networks – both new market forces — will help brokers clear up misconceptions and return to practices that support their missions as sales companies. Social networking will be a very powerful corrective force for the industry.
Social networking offers an opportunity for great salespeople to be just that: focused on relationship-building not mass-marketing and listing distribution. Social networking puts professionals back into the center of the process, leveraging their reputation and knowledge, not drip marketing tools, to build trust with customers, to get referrals.
Social networking may be the best thing to happen to an industry that has focused too much for too long on simply “implementing” the latest technology and not enough on “using it” to make sales. It will get brokers back to thinking like sales people and not like they are search-engine partners.â–
