Real Estate Marketing Tools Blog: July 2011

Five Steps to Smart Social Media Marketing

Everybody's on the Social Media trying to make their mark. Social Media experts are everywhere telling you what to do. Are you feeling a little lost among all this commotion? Then, this five step plan is just for you. It will help you indulge in Smart Social Media Marketing allowing you to utilize your time and Social Media Marketing efforts more effectively.

Don't spread yourself too thin: While it may be tempting sign up at every other social networking site, you should select two or three top Social Networking sites and focus on creating a strong network there.

Interact: Communicate with the members in your network. Answer questions; offer to help whenever you can and stay active in discussion threads and forums.

Be concise and clear: Social networking is not only about you. No one would be interested in your long status updates and posts. Instead, have short clear posts that tell your followers what you’re up to. A short link or an interesting video is fine, but long paragraphs are a 'No-no'.

Reuse content: Optimize your content utilization by posting the content you create across the various Social Media sites. For example, you can extract the key pieces of a blog and make a presentation to be put up on SlideShare.

Use technology: Smart use of technology will help you save time. Using technology allows you to focus on more important things like content creation, while the mundane tasks such as posting updates and tweets are taken care of by technology.

Personalization—an Overview

Marketing today has evolved into something much more than creating advertising collaterals and sending them to everyone in the company database. Marketers can no longer survive with a blindfolded approach to prospecting. In fact, leading companies are looking to create superior customer experience through personalization. In today’s internet age, prospects are more informed than ever before. They also have a lot of choice when it comes to selecting the right vendor. In order to strike a chord with the prospects in such environment, the marketing team has to focus on establishing a personal, one to one relationship with the prospect. Only building this relationship and cementing it over a period of time will enable the business to gain an edge over competition. In this scenario, Personalization becomes an indispensable tool as it helps you connect better with your audience. In this write-up, we provide you a few tips that you can put into action when looking to introduce personalization into your marketing strategy. This is because the prospect profiles have changed radically.

Get data—you cannot create a personalized experience for your prospects unless you understand them. And you can understand your prospects only when you have meaningful prospect data. So the first step towards personalization is to capture prospect data.

Rope in technology—Prospects today don’t have the time to answer too many questions. You should use technology to automatically capture prospect preferences and profile them, so that you don’t rely too much on the prospect to provide the information. There are various marketing automation platforms that track prospect behavior and provide you with detailed prospect information.

Be customer centric—adopt a customer-centric approach to business, which extends beyond marketing and sales. Think from the customer’s perspective as to how you can help them have a experience with your company that is truly unique and personalized.

Centralize data—bring all your functions on a common platform that facilitates easy data exchange. That means, sales team should know about every complaint or suggestion that the customer service team receives, and the marketing should know about every feedback the sales team gets. Easy information exchange will help you approach the customer with more relevant offerings.

Use next generation marketing tools—Earlier print advertising was probably the most common method to reach out to prospects. Today, a prospect is everywhere, thanks to Web 2.0. You need to be present at all these various avenues, and build a relationship with them. Be it Social Media Networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs or sites that promote data sharing like YouTube, SlideShare—you need to follow the prospect in a bid to understand their needs.

Personalization can help connect better with your prospects by creating a one-on-one relationship between you and the prospects. Individualizing prospect experience helps you build a more transparent, direct and value adding relationship with your prospects and can help drive sales and generate revenue.

Tracking your Leads

Identifying your leads and capturing information about them that will help you to qualify your leads and close sales is very important for any business. Tracking the leads that come in is as important as lead generation. But do you know nearly 80% of leads are never followed up?

Newplans.com's built in IP Tracking functionality is way beyond other analytical tools. While other systems only tell you where the lead came from, Newplans.com goes a step beyond the standard webmaster tools and provide a detailed analysis of your web traffic--including tracking the name of the company that accessed your marketing material or your personal/company website---using the advanced IP tracking system.

By providing you detailed information about the lead such as company name, exact location, and their online activity, Newplans.com helps you engage in well targeted marketing that helps you reach out to your ideal audience and market your listings better.

Give your prospects an interactive experience

Flyers, brochures, postcards, though tried and tested successful marketing tools, are not enough to have everlasting impact on your prospects. Time constraint along with the availability of multiple choices makes it difficult for buyers to make a buying decision. Effective marketing collateral are great at helping people understand and remember what you’re trying to sell them.

Newplans has integrated various interactive technologies to help you focus on the key selling points of your listing by making them more interesting to your prospects. Using Newplans.com, you can offer an interactive experience for your prospects by creating hotspots on floor plans, pictures, site plans, or stacking plans.

Using Newplans you can also link a hotspot to an image, add a note, attach a document, video or any web-link. Newplans comes with a library of icons to accurately represent content behind each hotspot. Hotspots can be created freehand or using icons.

Crack the Social Media Code

Buyers today are web smart. Their buying decision is hugely depended on the kind of research they undertake on the net. Hence, it is vital that your listings should be on the web where your prospects can find you easily.

Newplans.com offers Social Media Content Syndication at the click of a button! That means you can publish your presentations, videos, brochures, flyers, e-mail templates and other high-impact marketing materials, or their links, on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Slide Share. By publishing your marketing collateral on social media and other classified sites, you are making it available to millions of prospects on the web.