10 Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Agencies and Suppliers. 10 tips to grow your real estate agency with digital marketing.

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1 10 Digital Marketing Tips for Travel Agencies and Suppliers 10 tips to grow your real estate agency with digital marketing page 1

2 INTROduction Quentin, onq & the ebook About Quentin Quentin is the Chief Enthusiast at OnQ Marketing. His background includes an education of public relations and mathematics, whilst accumulating more than five years marketing experience. But by his own admission, it s his enthusiasm for digital marketing and the constant desire to learn that has formed his understanding of the digital landscape. Like a father wouldn t admit his favourite child, he would not tell you his favourite discipline but it s clear he loves the convergence of local, social, SEO and mobile. Quentin is often working in the background on client strategy ensuring his enthusiasm and understanding of the landscape benefits even the smallest of our clients. page 2

3 About ONQ Marketing OnQ Marketing is a digital marketing agency providing a range of marketing services to engage and interact with your audience. We re web design gurus, SEO nerds and social media freaks. Put simply; each member of our team has a specific skill set to support your digital strategy. We offer access to a suite of digital marketing services without the commitment of a full-time digital guru. We eat digital marketing for breakfast and lunch and dinner (and the occasional snack in between). About the ebook This ebook has been compiled for the real estate industry. With often large advertising budgets, real estate agencies are often soft-targets for cowboys in the digital realm, therefore we wanted to arm you with an understanding of what you should be looking at and what can potentially be done in-house. Whilst we ve nominated 10 tips, please understand that they should ideally, all be used to generate a platform of engagement and brand building. page 3

4 contents Quality and Professionalism 5 Tip 1: Optimise Your Website for Mobile 6 Tip 2: User Experiences and Conversions 7 Tip 3: Develop a Social Media Strategy 8 Tip 4: Search Engine Optimisation 9 Tip 5: Create Content 10 Tip 6: Create an Newsletter 11 Tip 7: Find a Great Copywriter 12 Tip 8: Principal Branding 13 Tip 9: Online Advertising 14 Tip 10: Great Video and Photography 15 BONUS: Investigate Mobile Opportunities 16 page 4

5 Quality and Professionalism Real estate is one of the most competitive industries in the world, so a professional approach is everything The most important rule to remember when using a digital approach to real estate marketing is: quality in everything you produce. Absolutely everything. This means high quality photos supported by easy to read content, a user-friendly website and more effective advertising. If your competitor is producing videos to get results, you should be doing the same. Every aspect of your online presence should project the same level of professionalism you would display in a face-to-face meeting. page 5

6 TIP # 1 Optimise you website for mobile If your website is not optimised for all devices, specifically tablet and mobile, you are already one step behind the competition. According to data released by REA Media earlier this year, realestate. com.au is Australia s fourth most visted moblie site, and has experienced a 41% growth in the last twelve months, attracting over 2 million downloads. There are a few strategies you can employ to provide users with an optimal mobile viewing experience. Google recommends a responsive website... The alternative is a separate version of your website tailored to mobile devices. This may work better for real estate agencies, given the huge amounts of data required to list multiple properties. Making the right decision will affect the user experience. page 6

7 TIP # 2 user experience and conversions Ensuring an optimal user experience requires more than simply providing a great mobile browsing experience. Each agency should have a list of objectives in mind when building a website, based upon attracting properties to sell and attracting buyers for those properties. But to achieve your objectives, your users must first achieve theirs. Identify opportunities to improve your users experience. You might find that not enough visitors are heading to the property listings from your home page, and hypothesise 2-3 different home page designs. Or you might include a more prominent call to action button, a stronger message or a photo of a featured property instead of your agents. With conversion testing you can use these hypotheticals to design a test to run on some of the more popular software such as Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely. This testing will allow you to serve your original design with 3-4 alternatives to visitors, then track their behaviour. This will help you to decide whether or not a change in home page design will deliver better results. This process can then be adapted to all pages and functions within your site. You will find it s far more cost effective to optimise conversions from your existing website traffic than to acquire new traffic. page 7

8 TIP # 3 Develop a social media strategy Like many businesses, you have a Facebook page, but are not sure what else you require. Take the time to identify your audience and where they spend their time. Take note of where your competitors are and where they choose to engage their customers. Examine the online presence of industry bodies; where are your potential customers sourcing information about the property market? The real estate market is well-placed to capitalise on a number of social platforms. Buying a house is one of the biggest decisions in a person s life, and we want as much information as possible before making such a commitment. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube enable you to post relevant information in a way that will engage and sustain the interest of potential customers. Your social media strategy should be more than just identifying who and what; it should also be about how. Identify your objectives with each platform, and adopt a different conversation style for each one. Post different items with varying regularity, and optimise all of them. Don t forget that every profile is another chance to make an impression; every photo you post, every tweet that you send is a reflection of your brand. Be professional. page 8

9 TIP # 4 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION No doubt, you have received countless s from SEO companies promising you a high Google ranking with a certain number of keywords. Unfortunately, the real estate industry is a great target for dodgy SEOs. Google s success is based on the fact that when I type North Melbourne properties for sale on my keyboard, its search engine delivers search results relevant to me, and this takes more than a few strategically placed keywords on your site. Search engine optimisation can be expensive and time consuming, but if executed properly can mean the difference between a potential customer clicking on your website or missing it completely. You may choose to advertise in search, which is most effective when combined with an SEO strategy. We will discuss this later. page 9

10 TIP # 5 CREATE CONTENT Content is king. This is especially true in the real estate market. But it is not enough to simply post as much as you can; your content must be quality, it must be relevant and it must be useful. A real estate agency is well-placed to publish blogs on its website, create infographics when property data is released, produce online videos summarising the property market, or post property updates specific to particular suburbs. If this information is well presented, relevant and useful to the user, they will return to your site. If you post content simply for the sake of it, you are wasting both yours and your users time. page 10

11 TIP # 6 Create an newsletter Not everyone who visits your website is ready to purchase or sell a property. But instead of letting them leave your site with nothing, ask for their address and promise to keep them up to date with an newsletter. This is a great way to build a database and maintain regular communication with a potential customer. Be smart about it; ask for a user s postcode when they subscribe and segment your newsletters to provide tailored content and featured listings. Expand on your website conversion testing and test your newsletters to maximise the number of people who open and click on them. Use it to share your website s content and acquire new social followers. page 11

12 TIP # 7 FIND A GREAT COPYWRITER Great copy can evoke emotions and influence behaviour. When you have so much money invested in your ability to convert a website visit into a sale, the easiest way to make more money is to improve the conversion rate. Copy is one of the key elements which will influence your ability to convert. Real estate copy should be short and to the point- but a great copywriter can create a story out of each listing. A great copywriter knows how to turn a few facts about a property such as number of rooms, distance to schools and the size of the kitchen into your potential customer s dream home. You want your users to leave your site thinking about the back yard s potential, rather than the spelling mistakes. If you cannot be bothered to check your ad for grammatical errors, or copy and paste the same old real estate cliches, (architecturally designed renovator s delight, anyone?) how much effort will you put into the customer s needs when they approach you about an inspection? page 12

13 TIP # 8 PRINCIPAL BRANDING We ve touched on the fact that a user must achieve their objectives before you can achieve yours. Sometimes, the user s objective is to establish trust in an agency or those leading the agency. This is where you have an opportunity to establish a personal brand for those representing your business. The principal would be the ideal candidate to establish a personal brand, and this can be achieved through blogging, guest blogging and social media. As part of a content marketing strategy, your real estate agency should have a blog to assist clients. This can be used for the principal to highlight his or her knowledge of the industry. Beyond publishing posts on your agency s website, look for opportunities to contribute articles to other popular websites in your local area. Are you familiar with HARO or SourceBottle? They re great online services connecting journalists with sources to assist them when writing articles. Subscribe to their notices and when a media publication is after a quote regarding the real estate industry, help them out and get your name and agency credited for free publicity. LinkedIn, Twitter and Quora also provide great opportunities for the principal to establish their own brand. All allow you to share your thoughts and opinions on the industry and in turn establish your authority on the subject. page 13

14 TIP # 9 ONLINE ADVERTISING Print advertising is a huge investment for real estate agencies and can be as much about brand perception as sales generation. The biggest problem with this is trying to establish a return on investment. Let s talk about search advertising - Google Adwords specifically. How much do you spend on local print advertising? How many people are seeing your listings? How many of those people are actually in the market for a new house? While print advertising is relatively cheaper than Google Adwords, you cannot measure real intent with your local print publication. People will flick through the real estate section of their local paper over breakfast, but when they type properties for sale in northern suburbs they are looking for exactly that, therefore you pay more. But it s the data that we can mine from Google that makes this truly special. You can track your ads; the number of clicks they receive as well as who is clicking, where they re from and which keywords and ads are converting. This helps you to better manage the sales process. With help, you should be able to identify your conversion rates at every step of the funnel so that you can identify the real cost and return on investment on each of the keywords. From this point it s just a matter of managing the conversions to continue to reap the benefits of truly effective advertising. Google Adwords will actually reduce your cost per click the better your ads are. Where else does that happen? You should also investigate Site Retargeting; the practice of identifying when a visitor leaves your site without reaching a particular objective and placing a cookie on their computer so you can follow them up later. This is all aboveboard. The fact that the visitor has checked out your website indicates some level of interest. With this knowledge, you can expect higher click-through rates if you follow them up with tailored banner advertisements when they visit other websites on the network of publishers (depending on which platform you advertise with). page 14

15 TIP # 10 Great Video & Photography A picture tells a thousand words. You saw that one coming, didn t you? The fact is, photos and videos are powerful. They provide more detail about the property you re selling and help to create an emotional connection with the potential buyer. Bear in mind, however, that there is a huge difference between good photography and video and GREAT photography and video. If you re concerned about the difference in cost then go back to conversion testing and see what the real actionable results are when you serve up the pics and videos you re taking from your iphone and those that you have done professionally. page 15

16 BONUS Investigate Mobile opportunities Mobile is huge. In fact it s often best practice now to design a website for a mobile device first and then expand to suit larger devices. With so many people using their mobile phones for more than just texting, there is a real opportunity to demonstrate ingenuity when engaging with your audience. For the larger franchise real estate agencies, a mobile application could be a great exercise but for now we want to introduce you to Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality, although still in its infancy, presents a terrific opportunity for the real estate industry. An AR app enables users to take a photo of a property with their mobile device and access useful information such as materials used to build the house, dimensions, proximity to shops and schools and even sales and rental history. It may also allow a potential buyer to inspect the property without entering the house; taking a virtual tour of the premises on their phone or tablet. You can wait for the rest of the market to adopt AR, but I suggest you investigate the opportunities now. Being one of the first in your industry to take advantage of this new technology will give you credit in the marketplace. It s a great branding exercise as well. page 16

17 DIGITAL MARKETING SUPPORT Learn how we can provide you with the strategy and support to your digital marketing activities and ultimately make the customer your superhero. marketing Conversion rate optimisation Mobile marketing Pay per click advertising Social Media Search engine optimisation web design page 17