While the principles of marketing are the same across disciplines, the dynamics of residential real estate require some out-of-the-box thinking. Few markets are as competitive as residential real estate. Everyone needs a place to live, right?  There are loads of Realtors with the time and creativity to leverage the great tools of the Internet for marketing. Finally, there is a perception of standardization of realty professionals, or commoditization, that make people think one Realtor is as good as another.

After 18-months of working with one of the most successful realty companies in the Phoenix Valley, I continue to learn that the basics work, if executed well.

A bit about the residential real estate market. There are several ways to segment the market. First and most common is by the product – the home. Homes are grouped primarily by type, price, location, then by style and other secondary aspects. Next is by type of seller. There are three primary seller segments – owner-occupant (either standard sale or short-sale), bank-owner (foreclosed homes) and investor. Finally, the buyers are also grouped by owner-occupant, investor (either fix-and-flip or landlord), and others such as home-care services which are basically commercial type buyers that are buying residential property.

Some some thought most be given to each segment, in each price range, and a mix of strategies need to be implemented for maximum profitability and cash flow.

At Toma Partners, we concentrate on working with buyers and sellers that understand that value of a good Realtor – one that understands the market but as importantly, one that understands how to negotiate with homeowners, with bank for short sales, and with banks owning foreclosed property.

For more about how Toma Partners differentiates itself from the many competitors, give a call to Mike Garland, COO of Toma Partners, a Phoenix Real Estate company.

Five Hidden Reasons to Announce New Customers

Sure, Press Releases tell the world about your organization’s great achievements. And your SEO master waxes enthusiastic about their benefits to your web marketing plan. But for smaller companies who don’t have a full court PR program and whose business future doesn’t depend on successful SEO, there are other palpable benefits for creating and issuing Press Releases that announce new customers or client. Sensible marketing pros will understand the subtle wisdom of working with new customers to craft releases at every opportunity.

1.    Demonstrate your successes to new prospects – people feel comfortable joining when others are doing the same. Over time an ongoing track record of new customers can build trust and confidence.
2.    Reassure recent new customers that they made a good choice – see #1 above
3.    Issuing press releases gives you another reason to broadcast to the world that you are ‘in the game’ and to stress your strong points. This opens opportunities with writers and with people researching the market, including prospects.
4.    Yes, social media programs will benefit from well executed press releases in several ways
–    the releases offer new, fresh content for the community
–    the new content also helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aspects
5.   Interestingly, issuing a press release is a ‘bonding experience’ with the new customer.
–    The act of assembling the release and getting customers testimonials helps them think through their buying decision and makes them feel part your team
–    Once the release is issued, the customer has a vested interest in validating their good decision to go with your organization
–    Often the customer organization re-publishes that release through their internal channels which gives us added positive publicity

There is also a case to be made that announcing new customers gives lets your competition see what you are up to and gives them insight into your client list. True, but you have to balance the likelihood of a new, happy customer jumping ship to a competitor. If that’s a concern, you may have bigger issues to address.

Chattel – an old name for personal property, basically anything that isn’t real estate could fall under this heading. I associate it to stories about slaves being included as chattel, not a pleasant concept.

Emblements – these are crops that a tenant farm would grow on leased land – even is the land is taken back by the owner (for failure of the tenant to pay, for example) the emblements are the property of the tenant.

Escheat – an appropriately sounding word for the government appropriating property when a person dies without a will and with no heirs.

Hypothecate – when a borrower puts their property up as collateral for a loan – so I guess that means most home owners are hypothecators? That doesn’t sound legal, does it?

Livery of Seizin – this Middle Age expression is the antiquated way of saying ‘delivery of possession and title to a buyer. This is a new one for me.

Short sale – this term is actually not in the study material for the AZ real estate licensing exam but seems to be the term with the most cache in today’s market!

To be honest, the breadth of information covered in this class has kept me interested most of the time. It’s a great combination of law, history, geography, finance, taxes and social culture. And, yes, I’ll be ecstatic to be finished!

(Geeks will already know this) You can’t just make a web site anymore and hope people will come. You can’t even blog anymore and hope people will come, although good blogging software like Wordpress has built-in SEO (search engine optimization).

You have to do something to get your content out to where the people are. Even large corporations are often disappointed by the amount of traffic to their corporate sites — people just don’t go to sites. In the early days, people “surfed” the net. Now we all know it’s too big to find things randomly. Rather, we take advice from friends, follow links from Twitter and Facebook, or take whatever result comes up on Google or Yahoo searches. So do your visitors.

The marketplace is full of companies that supposedly help your site get attention. While some are good, some resort to methods you might not want to be associated with if you care about your corporate image. So don’t just hire a company and entrust it with the responsibility of carrying your image out on the internets. Take the time to learn a little about the most important marketing tool you have — your web site. Develop it correctly and it will be found even without outside help.

There are several simple web site development tools that are almost free or support themselves through hosting services that I use when I want to turn a site over to a client who will be able to maintain it him/herself in the future. Use one of them if you are doing a site yourself. (Weebly , WordPress , Squarespace )

Or ask your web developer to abide by these simple rules, and your content will get out into the world at large. Search engines work on complicated algorithms that usually involve changes, links in to your site, and good keywords. So here are seven simple ways to get people to look at your site.

1) Create quality. Forget brochureware and product sheets, unless they already contain the keywords your customers and clients will be looking for. No one is looking for a “complete real-time solution.” Make your terms crystal clear, without jargon, and repeat them naturally in your copy. Hyperlink terms to other places on your site. If you were buying, searching, comparing in your own category, what would you be typing into a search engine?

2) Add a feed to your site. This allows someone who comes to your site to subscribe to your content. At the very least, create a Twitter feed that will automatically make your site changes or blog posts come up as links in your Twitter posts, where your followers can click on the
links.

3) Change the content often. Search engines look for changes. This is why blogs work. And don’t accept a web site that can’t be updated and managed by you without having to call the web developer. It’s called a “content management system,” and you want one. Static web sites don’t get found.

4) Make your site social. Put a Share this button on your site, so if someone wants to send
your content to a friend or a social site, it’s easy for them to do. There are many different widgets that allow your readers to share your content; just choose one. I’ve got nothing invested in ShareThis, other than its ease of use.

5) Use anchor text wisely. Search engines crawl it. So every time you write “click here,” you are missing an opportunity. Instead, hyperlink keywords you think your readers are looking for, or you wish they were searching for to find your site.

6) Find out what the most important keywords in your sector or business area are. There’s a service called Hitwise you can use to get this data, or you can get it from Google itself. Believe me, Google’s Adsense program knows. Use them in your copy.

7) Stay away from Flash animations on your landing page. Flash looks good, but search engines don’t search it, so if you want to be found, you can forget about it.

None of these tricks is complicated, nor will they get you in trouble with the search engine gods. I’ve learned them all through hard experience.

Like many small business owners, Ely works hard, six days a week, to build a business that supports himself and his family. Yet Ely has the knack, the ‘je ne sais quoi‘ that allows him to excel where others flounder. Born in Russia, Ely traveled through Israel to get to the US by the age of thirty. He learned the language and he learned the craft of barbering. He also learned to cut hair to the demanding standards of his Long Island clientele. He soon had his own shop, Ely’s Barber Shop then then another, in the Long Island area.

In search of a better life, he moved from the city to Arizona. Once here, he rebuilt the Ely’s Barber Shop of New York fame. And like many of his new neighbors, he invested in real estate. Yes, you know the rest of that story.

Undaunted, Ely has undertaken to rebuild his business in a small shopping center in Glendale, AZ. Surrounded by budget hair cutting chains and a community that is feeling the effects of the down economy, Ely offers high quality cuts that are rare on in the West Valley. He has a disarming, pleasant smile and the ability to converse on almost any topic. Instead of the sports and sex motifs common in many barbershops, Ely plays quality music videos of a variety of international musicians to add a charm seldom seen in Arizona.

To increase traffic, Ely has mixed traditional and web marketing. To leverage his location on a high traffic street, he invested in a bright yellow sign off the main road. Using Market Like a Millionaire tactics, he set up a Merchant Circle free website, and purchased elysbarbershop.com from Go-Daddy. Through building several inbound links from local search engines such as Google Local, He now ranks #2 in a Google search for “barber shop 85302″ in his area. He also ranks #1 in a search for ‘Ely’s Barber Shop” among the dozen or so shops of a similar name in the US.

Ely’s next move is to ask his patrons to go to his website to post testimonials. This not only helps his ranking and online reputation, it also positions him with his customers as a barber who’s ‘with it’. His customers have a chance to experience a sense of involvement in Ely’s success, further connecting them with him.

A diamond in a rough economy, Ely will soon be featured in local newspaper profiles of how to persist and thrive while other complain about their stupid haircuts. Stay tuned for his other sensible marketing strategies. And stop by to let Ely give you the best haircut in the Valley.

Professional marketers are typically aware that any messaging, print or web, can come back to haunt you. They know that with the easy expressiveness and transparency of blogging or Twitter, there can be serious consequences of poor or inappropriate content.

The FaceBook issue applies to all the social media technologies. Once something is on the Internet, there is may be little you can do to take it back. Inappropriate pictures, associations, expressions, etc, can be used against you now and far into the future.

There are some relevent lessons in the recent article in the Daily Chronicle titled Tattoo Regret.
“Derick also removes a lot of tattoos people got in their teens that don’t define them as adults, she said. “I think people, when they’re younger, want to identify with something. But ultimately, when you get older, you don’t want to be defined by that content,” she said.”

Sensible marketing planning includes thinking through messaging, themes and appropriate content for all communications, then planning before publishing. The saying goes, Think before you speak applies completely here.

Like many defining moments, this year brought out the true colors of many of my compatriots. The strong became stronger and more resolute, if not necessarily more financially successful. And those who were looking for some excuse to blame for their lack of success found a handy scapegoat with the poor economy.

My prediction for 2009 and beyond? Only one:
Those that use this time of slow economic growth to sharpen their axe and lay the groundwork for long term sensible marketing and business development will look back at 2008 as the catalyst that drove them to new levels of success.

Be the economic engine of your own success. Sharpen your axe.

Happy New Year

Over the years the telemarketing profession has taken it’s share of hits and in many circles the telemarketer is regarded with the same disdain as, well, other professions that not well regarded. Yet the secret is that successful companies large and small continue to invest their marketing and sales dollars into telemarketing programs for one good reason – they bring results when executed intelligently and with respect for the customer.

I’m prompted to write this blog after seeing a friend fail miserably with a telemarketing campaign. A small business owner, he hired a local call-from-home ‘telemarketer’ to try to sell his service to local dentists. The methodology was for the telemarketer, who had no particular experience with dentists, call a list of dentist offices to offer to sell the service. The script was a basic hello, this is who I am, do you want to buy my service, offer. As one might predict, the telemarketer spoke mainly to office assistants who had neither authority to buy nor understanding of the need for the service to the dentist office. Since the telemarketer had little to send for supporting collateral, the calls were often short with little value added to either the dentist or the telemarketer. After a short week or two, the program was ended with the saying, “Telemarketing doesn’t work!”

But telemarketing does work. Two examples of using the telephone for sensible marketing and business building are shown below.

Bill Gluth has operated Creating Words that Sell and related businesses successfully for a number of years. Always an innovator, Bill is current on the latest in web and social media marketing as well as old world strategies of print and telemarketing. Just over a year ago, Bill implemented a very simple telemarketing program to generate attendees to his business seminars in the local Phoenix area. Using a simple script and a free white paper that would help a small business owner build sales, he was able to hire a telemarketer to call small business owners and offer the free white paper. While on the call, if the telemarketer detected a need, there was an offer for a follow through appointment to discuss any potential for a further relationship. By keeping the offer simple and free, small business owners with a need responded immediately. For those business owners who only accepted the white paper, Bill’s brand was built and seeds were sown for later business. For those business owners who were open to a follow through call, Bill was able to add them to his pipeline of qualified leads. With only one telemarketer working, there was no need for expensive and time-consuming CRM systems, just something simple such as FreeCRM. Through telemarketing, Bill was able to garner immediate feedback on the calling list, the response of the target, and pick up other market information that would have been difficult to learn through web or direct mail methods. Further, ROI on the investment was clear, as measured in terms of businesses contacted, appointments set, and business booked.

On the other end of the spectrum of business size, Televerde is one of the nation’s premier providers of phone based market intelligence and customer acquisition solutions. Using the latest backend technology for CRM, quality control and other data management, Televerde continues to build an ever expanding base of Fortune 100 clients precisely because it provides that same result that Bill Gluth’s simple method provides, ROI. Televerde has the resources and know-how to strategically blanket a given market in several continents, provide instant feedback from the field, and adapt to changes relatively quickly. Yes, it’s prospect interaction relies on integrated electronic marketing including websites, online demos and email. But the power of the business is based in its proven use of the telephone for B-2-B marketing. It the business is thriving because Fortune 100 businesses realize a clear ROI.

Two extremes of B-2-B marketing, very small local businesses and international Fortune 100 companies, yet both see results with telemarketing when used sensibly.

About a year ago, another Sensible Marketing firm, (Sensible Marketing Inc. for Startups and Small Businesses) showed up on Google searches. This one is based out of LA and is run by another guy named Michael. Over the past year Michael Williams has done a very respectable job of building his web presence using social media, primary as a web-based and electronic expert. And it seems that Michael Williams has a full time job in addition to his marketing company, a situation similar to mine at this point.

Recently a third Sensible Marketing firm has appeared on scene. Sensible Marketing Services out of Knoxville, TN touts itself as more of a full service marketing agency though most of its case studies reflect website and graphic work. Like Sensible Marketing Inc, the owner, Jesse Olive, has invested a significant amount of time in building out his website and blog. Nice job.

One of the first Market Like a Millionaire lessons I learned was from a military commander on the simulated battlefields of the cold war in Germany. He said, “When you see a good idea, steal it.” Of course, done within the boundaries of ethics and law, this is good advice. So long live the Sensible Marketing name, may it build a strong reputation among marketing professionals across the nation, and the world.

Recap:

Sensible Marketing, LLC – the first, based in Arizona
Website: www.sensiblemarketing.net
Blog: Sensible Marketing Blog

Sensible Marketing for Startups – based in Los Angeles
Blog: http://blog.sensiblemarketing.biz/

Sensible Marketing Services – based Knoxville, TN
Website: www.sensiblemarketingservices.com

The motivated owner of a national insurance franchise, we’ll call him Steve, agreed to purchase a vehicle wrap from one of his customers. The decision made sense for several reasons. First, Steve markets heavily in the local area, including attending many networking events. Having a wrap could increase awareness and build his brand with that audience. Second, the vehicle wrap vendor was the source of several profitable leads to Steve, helping justify the purchase.

For the design of the wrap, the vendor talked to Steve, found a design that Steve liked, and proceeded to put in several hours finalizing the design of the wrap. As happens too often, the design was created based on the best guess of the designer and the preferences of the business owner. No real thought was given to the best messaging for the target market, and no input was solicited from them.

Steve ran the design by me to see what I thought of it.

My first question was, who is the target audience? Does it include a relatively conservative baby boomer like me, or are you targeting a 20-28 year old Gen Y audience with a penchant for high risk?

When it became clear that I wasn’t the target audience, I suggested that Steve show the design to some of his best customers in his target to get input. Not only would he get valuable insight into the effectiveness of the design, it is safe to assume that Steve’s customers would appreciate being asked for their opinion, further build up their relationship with Steve.

Steve was initially concerned that if he showed it to others, he might have to change it, racking up a few additional hours of design time. Yet by neglecting the input of the target audience, Steve was risking wasting his whole investment, or worse. It is possible that the image of the wrap would go counter to the desired brand he wanted to convey, alienating customers and prospects instead of attracting them.

So will Steve now invest in a few more hours of design time to insure that the wrap resonates with his target? Or will he scrimp and risk having his vehicle wrap be an expensive paint job and a tax write-off?

Stay tuned.