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Do you have your real estate marketing plans for 2012 ready?
With SO MANY alternatives for real estate marketing plans, are you confused on what to do in 2012?
So as you develop your 2012 real estate marketing plans, here is some great food for thought:
ActiveRain, the largest blogging platform and professional social network in real estate, conducted a survey of 1,910 real estate professionals asking the simple question of "what is the most effective real estate marketing or advertising that you do?"
The results:
Referrals (including word of mouth and sphere of influence) were overwhelming the most preferred marketing with 26% of responses.
Blogging was #2 with 13% of responses. (Keep in mind that the survey was conducted on ActiveRain, so these results may naturally be skewed to blogging).
Direct Mail continues to be incredibly popular. Direct Mail includes post cards, mailers, and newsletters. Direct Mail also received 13% of responses.
Internet Marketing as a general category received 12% of responses. Our assumption is that Internet marketing is generally speaking pay per click marketing on Google, Yahoo or Bing or lead generation from a number of different sources.
Networking Networking includes partner referrals and face-to-face meetings. Face-to-face networking received 8% of the responses.
As you can see based on 2011 real estate marketing plans, real estate professionals continue to favor more traditional offline, "tried & true" hand to hand real estate marketing techniques. Though the general bucket of Internet marketing & blogging are equivalent to direct mail, the top marketing techniques tend to be more offline - referrals, direct mail, networking, working with past clients, open houses, door knocking and cold calling. Hard to know if ActiveRain is the same as blogging and if Zillow or Google are the same as Internet marketing, but interesting to see that from a response perspective, that Open Houses are more popular than any one web site AND Door Knocking is more preferred than CraigsList and FaceBook.
When real estate professionals were asked, "What is the most effective real estate marketing or advertising that you do?" only a small number of real estate web sites were mentioned in reasonable frequency: ActiveRain, CraigsList, FaceBook, Zillow and Google. Of course, blogging and Internet marketing are large categories with a lot of different companies. But there were very few mentions of Wordpress or other ways to market online. Noticeably absent were Trulia and Realtor.com Though we believe ActiveRain is a very powerful blogging platform, fans of ActiveRain are likely over-represented in the survey. Kudos to Zillow to have name recognition equivalent to Google in the real estate industry.
For 2012, here are the key questions to ask:
How important is developing your REFERRAL BASE? How are you going to do it?
Are Blogging and SEO part of your 2012? If so, what to do - ActiveRain, Wordpress, Blogger, or other?
Direct Mail continues to be an important part of the real estate professional's marketing mix. It is amazing, but true. Direct Mail allow neighborhood targeting unlike online marketing. What kinds of direct mail campaigns will you be using?
Internet Marketing needs to be part of your 2012 marketing mix, but there are a lot of options from pay-per-click advertising to lead generation to Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com
ActiveRain is great place to start the learning process to figure out the best Internet marketing strategies to achieve your personal and financial goals in 2012!
Hi George, that is easy for me. I prospect expireds and FSBOS, internet market all the free sites, and blog. Except for admin labor my marketing cost is zero.
Eric and Bob, Thanks for your comments. By the way, did you know that Google picks up a new post here within a few minutes? In this case, about 90 seconds:
I like the fact that blogging is #2 behind referrals. That's one of the reasons I'm on here so often. I've seen direct mail work and in fact, have used Corefact for direct mail campaigns and gotten good results.
Hi George, Thank you for re-blogging the results of the survey and leaving a link in the comments section of the contest post. I had missed the results!
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
Connect. Share. Learn.Welcome to ActiveRain, the #1 social community for real estate professionals.
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6 Comments on Real Estate Marketing Plans: Most Effective Marketing of 2011
There are so many things that could lead to more business. You named a lot of them in your blog. Thanks.
Hi George, that is easy for me. I prospect expireds and FSBOS, internet market all the free sites, and blog. Except for admin labor my marketing cost is zero.
Eric and Bob, Thanks for your comments. By the way, did you know that Google picks up a new post here within a few minutes? In this case, about 90 seconds:
This is Google's cache of http://activerain.com/blogsview/2848758/real-estate-marketing-plans-most-effective-marketing-of-2011. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Feb 15, 2012 21:26:32 GMT.
I like the fact that blogging is #2 behind referrals. That's one of the reasons I'm on here so often. I've seen direct mail work and in fact, have used Corefact for direct mail campaigns and gotten good results.
Hi George, Thank you for re-blogging the results of the survey and leaving a link in the comments section of the contest post. I had missed the results!
Yes, be sure to check the comments on the original post:
http://activerain.com/blogsview/2641172/real-estate-marketing-plans-most-effective-marketing-of-2011