Where are your marketing dollars going?

Dinah:

Do you use a professional photographer to shoot your listings?

The quality of the photos you use online can make a huge difference in the number of responses you receive.

Michael

www.mkyphotography.com

Dinah- The one site I pay for is lakehouse.com.  it's a great tool for me.   I have a state banner ad and a lake banner ad and 40 listings per year for less than $1,000.  I have gotten great results from this site and the banner ad.  Lakehouse sells only a limited # of banner ads per lake.  I think it's 6 on my lake and with over 300 agents it's good to be one of only 6 with banner ads for a specific lake.

I think it all depends on who and what you are targeting as well as the area you market and your specific goal.  You have to have all that in focus and research to see where your "target" is "shopping" on the internet.  Good luck!

Dinah, we have gone away from print as well. I'll be interested to see some of the other responses because we all have to be careful of where we spend our marketing dollars.

dan

Dinah:  I don't know if you caught Randy Fox's blog last week, but he was telling everyone about a free site that hosts websites - www.alamode.com.  The agent xsite is free and we've begun building one.  Not sure quite yet how it's going to work out, but it seems pretty nice, especially for the price!

If you mean print ads like newspaper listings and even the local real estate book magazine ads, then I'd say that yes, they're dead.  However, you may want to look into your local magazine's web presence before deciding to do away with them altogether.  While the print advertising is a waste, they may get alot of web traffic, which would be a plus.

Also, you can run target print ads in the right papers and get alot of bang for the buck, too.  The secret is using an ad that drives them to your website rather than just a listing.

As far as advertising $$$ goes via the Internet, if you can find a good niche site, like Tammy mentioned above, that gets good traffic, that may be a way to go.  Otherwise, I'd probably focus my dollars on getting a good website (or 2) with good SEO and promoting the heck out of it.

The key is what does it cost to get a face to face contact.  We are experimenting with strong internet marketing againstno internet marketing against against newspaper and other marketing.   This is us and not you; but, we are having more closing success for the dollar by doing neighborhood events than anything....multiple times over.  Why?  Face to face contact wins everytime...

You need to diversify your marketing efforts.  A strong web presence for your market is also critical to survival.  It cannot be all Blogging.

I recieved 4 calls this week and ALL came from print ads.  I can tell by the key words I put in the ad.  Last week I recieved 6 calls and 5 were from print!   I know where my money is!

Hi Dinah - We still use print ads as well as cyber marketing.  I do find a number of people who attend my open houses pick up the information from the local newspaper while some have indicated that they have seen the yard signs.  I have had a number of calls, as well, from people who have done Internet searches and have found me on-line.  I have a pending contract as a buyer's agent on a home right now that came from an Internet search.

Dinah we use internet only and have noticed a huge increase once we concentrated our efforts. AR is of little help really. We use a bunch and never pay. We want control.