Affordable Online Marketing Solutions - Part 1

No matter the industry, finding innovative ways to help expand your presence in the marketplace is always vital to a business’ continued growth. Unfortunately “innovative” doesn’t always translate into “affordable”. Hiring a professional search engine optimization company is a great way to increase website traffic, but it can consume a large portion (or even all) of your marketing budget to do it right. Maybe you plan to contract a ghost writer to write posts on your blog and social media networks.  You may appear to be more involved but, when someone asks about your latest post – if you didn’t actually write it, or worse, haven’t even read it – you stand to lose significant credibility.

However if you’re willing to invest some of your own time, instead of outsourcing your online marketing (and save yourself some money while you’re at it), there are some inexpensive, do-it-yourself methods you can leverage. You’ll likely find a new method or two that can be added to compliment your existing marketing portfolio.

3 of 10 Online Marketing Solutions

• Single Property Websites
  Register a domain and point it directly to a property’s Listing Details page. This facilitates direct access to that listing.  Your visitors will not have to go to your home page and find the listing through several clicks.  So, for example, if someone goes to www.123AnyAvenue.com, it can take them directly to the listing at 123 Any Avenue rather than to www.YourDomain.com, from where they would have to find your listing.  By making the listing more accessible to the public, you have a better chance of your listing being found.  As an added benefit, you will impress your sellers by giving with www.TheirAddress.com.
• Visual Tours (available on all personal RWS listings)
  Looking for a way to provide a slideshow of images that doesn’t cost extra? Use the Visual Tour option provided for each of your personal listings. This way, if the advertising budget for a particular listing doesn’t include the cost of a full-scale virtual tour, you can still offer a no-cost alternative. As the tour is “unbranded”, the slideshow link can also be added to your MLS board listing, making it available anywhere the listing is found.
• Social Media Networks
  If managed correctly, social media networks can be helpful to your marketing. It may take significant trial-and-error to successfully build a presence on one site, let alone ALL the major networks. Instead of splitting your focus and trying to master Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube all at once – choose the network that you’re most comfortable with and build a base on it. Once you’ve built an active following, it is considerably easier to have those same people cross over and stick with you on other platforms.

Be sure to check back next week for Part 2, which will address Online Reviews, Video Blogging, E-mail Drip Campaigns and E-books.

Authored by: Bryan Coughlin, Client Relations