Pump Up Your Digital Marketing

Part III of a IV part series

                                      Think Big and Play BIGGER!

Blissfield, MI, February, 2011 – Hal Holubik, owner of Tours D’ Force, a Southern Michigan Virtual Tour provider says; “What good is getting a virtual tour from anyone if it is not seen by the largest audience possible?  The bottom line with real estate as with many other kinds of sales, it’s a numbers game, the more people that see it the higher the ability of it being sold quickly.” Business Professionals in every field are in need of more exposure and a better way to capture and maintain the interest of online shoppers especially on the web; they must be aware and possess the flexibility to market their virtual tours in many places.

In part II of this IV part series (see part II here:  http://halholubik.blogspot.com/2011/02/pump-up-your-digital-marketing_17.html) we talked about virtual tour websites and some of the attributes that you need to be looking for. 
How you as a realtor can involve your client in the process as much as they want to be involved. 

So now let’s tie this into something called SEO, Search Engine Optimization.  What people often don’t realize is that pretty pictures, pretty pictures don’t mean anything when you’re going out there in the Google bots of the world and their trying to deciding where you belong on the different pages of Google.  So, pretty pictures don’t mean a whole lot, however with the virtual tours that we have, we have text behind the virtual tour so the virtual tour is search engine optimized.  So that way when the Google bots goes out there able to find header information very readily about who is the realtor, the contact information, city information, their able to go out and detect the address off of that header, and oh, by the way, every virtual tour that we do, we go ahead and include the public comment that you have in MLS, and the reason why we do that is we want something for those Google bots to be able to sink their teeth into, so that way as a part of our virtual tour there is text behind everyone of them.

So it’s not just pictures but it is information about the property, information about the realtor, and then some real meat to help you get higher in your ranking in the search engine optimization.  Another thing that we are able to do for you, is we’re able to utilize something called a tour gallery (snip above). Every virtual tour that you have with us as a real estate agent, you can have in this tour gallery.  And we also identify and include those homes that have sold.  So not only are we sending the message that Amy Wilson associates sells houses, lists houses, but they sell them, they are indeed sold.  So we purposely keep the sold properties on here and clearly mark them as sold, so that way people have that little message that says, hey, this realtor on the ball, they sell property as well as list property.  We also encourage our client, and this is something that we do very inexpensively or you as a client can do. It’s, $15 bucks a hit from us, we create a custom domain name so that way you can easily pull up this whole gallery of tours.  So in this case www.AnyVirtualTours.com bring you to all of Amy Wilson virtual tours, it nice and easy for her to remember, I’ve got another client of mine, named Sherry, does www.SherryVirtualTours.com and by golly she’s got a bumper sticker on her car that says so. So bottom line is she out there marketing herself and her virtual tours she just does say Postline Properties on the side of her car, but she even has a very nicely in-scripted sticker on the back of the car that tells anyone driving behind her, hey go to www.SherryVirtualTours.com and see her listing.  But here we go with www.AmyVirtualTours.com really inexpensive, you can put sign riders on the property if you’d like to advertise that as well, but one single spot for people to go and see all of your listings and click on anyone of the virtual tours.     

All of this stuff is great to talk about, but now let’s talk about the results.  One of the things that always bothered me the most as a home list-err, was that time period from, you sign the agreement, pictures are taken, and you are told to remove bunches of stuff from your house and hide it in a, you know, storage bend somewhere. Now the papers are signed and then you never see or hear from the realtor, and weeks drag by, and trust me as a client, weeks dragged by, and you really wonder if there’s any action going on out there.  Well one of the byproducts of having a good high quality virtual tour and having it out there where people can see it is that you’re provided a weekly virtual tour report that you can share with your client, in fact many of our clients do share.

Weekly Activity Reports says how many hit they’ve had on the particular property, where was it from, so did it come from MLS, did it come from a realtors site, did it come from a competitors site, did it come from realtor.com, where are people looking at this property, and how many times have they looked, and oh by the way, it keeps a thirteen week history so that way people can see over time that indeed as your going out and marketing the property their able to find and see hits.  Once again, it’s a numbers game, the more hits you have the greater opportunity of this property selling.  Share this information! Most of our clients frankly, take this report they put a sentence or two on top of it that says, Hi Jean, just wanted you to know that we’ve had three showings of your home this week, traffic looks really good coming off of the realtor.com and craigslist ads we placed for you.  Here’s to having another good week, and boom, they just sent that e-mail out to their clients.  So, what a communications tools, what opportunity to see that you the realtor are doing something, that it’s not that you took the contract and quite.  So absolutely use these activity reports that come off of the virtual tours, use it as part of a selling technique as well as reinforcing with your clients that hey, something’s going on.  And by the way, side note, this is great for your clients and it’s great for you too, because over time if you keep these reports now look at that thirteen week history, you’re going to see certain times of the year you’re going to have a lot of traffic, it help you know when you might want to step up some of your other advertising campaigns. 

It helps you know when you might want to have open houses because people are looking.  This is also a leading indicator, what we have found historically is that people start seeing hits on their tour traffic report usually about a week or so before they see more people knocking on the door and asking to see the home.  It’s a leading indicator, it help you know when you want to make sure that home is spruced up as people come and see it.  So treat it that way, read historical information for you the realtor, great for your clients, and what a tool you have for over time to be able to help you determine, what is the best opportunity and bang for your buck and when you should have open houses and so forth.  So that’s your hit report, demand it for every virtual tour that you have.

Virtual Tour Syndication, when we talk about going out there and grabbing a broader net.  Being able to cast your net to more prospects, we really need to make sure that you’re listing, and frankly, your virtual tour is cast out there for people to find.  Now, historically, if we were having this conversation, even a couple of year ago we would primarily be talking about your local MLS and Realtor.com, because those were the two sights that people would look at.  And Realtor.com, by the way has done a great job, you know, you look on American Online, MSN all these different service locations all drive back to Realtor.com as the engine that they use, so Realtor.com to some degrees, Homes.com and certainly local MLS have been historically strong areas for us to market property.  Now, there’s one additional area that we need to talk about and that is the path, a little lest taken and a little bit main stream, but now there’s generation X and Y folks, the immediate, I want it now, those folks are looking at other sites besides AOL, MSN, and Realtor.com., their looking at sites like Craigslist, their looking at YouTube, and to some degree, the others that I have listed here.  Let’s talk about Craigslist and YouTube.  Craigslist is an interesting phenomenon, there are people who religiously go out and look at Craigslist everyday rather it be to look for a car, people go online and buy car’s, they look at buying  sports tickets, whatever, they go out to Craigslist.  There’s a whole section in Craigslist for homes and we really want to make sure that your listings out there on Craigslist.
 
What we have found, especially with the low and medium priced homes, is that we can get as many hits off of Craigslist as we do on places like Realtor.com, and I actually have some clients today who aren’t showcased so they don’t do Realtor.com lists but they do put it out on Craigslist because they see the value, they see the hits.  Two years ago we didn’t advertise on Craigslist.  The way we got started on Craigslist was we had realtors coming back to us saying, hey, my client wants to know how we can get this on Craigslist.  So this is a grassroots effort for people who are using the tool and saying, hey, how can I get my listing out there.  YouTube, YouTube is a phenomenon into itself.  YouTube is a great opportunity for something called SEO and helping people reach their quest for being on page number one of Google and a lot of that is through YouTube.

Stay tuned for part IV.

Related Posts:
Building a Bigger Tomorrow!
Pump Up Your Digital Marketing Part I
Pump Up Your Digital Marketing Part II

Hal Holubik
Owner/Organizer
Tours D’ Force
Order a Virtual Tour: 517-486-4209
mailto:hal@toursdforce.com

http://www.toursdforce.com

Virtual Tours are here!! More people choose http://www.realtourvision.com/virtual tour company than any other virtual tour provider on the market. We encourage you to research the 360 virtual tour industry before making a decision. We are by far the most established virtual tour company in the industry. Our virtual tour customers and their clients get only the best and most experienced advice and help from our staff. Thank you and enjoy our virtual tours.

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