Bad Marketing Candy from RSS Pieces

by Sean Purcell

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Mary McKnight wrote an article last Friday called Real Estate Blogs are Stores, Not Websites – So Blog Like You are Selling Houses, Not Writing For Your Local Paper and it made the short list for the Odysseus Medal Sunday.  It is well written and provocative.  Mary McKnight is recognized as one of the premier web site designers and SEO experts in Real Estate.  I have a great deal of respect for her knowledge as it pertains to web sites and SEO.   If you have not read it, please do;  and then answer this question for me: How is it possible that someone so good at creating real estate web sites, can be so wrong when it comes to real estate marketing?

The Sugar Coating
Let me preface this by saying that I have a great deal of respect for Mary McKnight.  Add to which a lot of people for whom I also hold a great deal of respect use her services and listen to her advice.  But when she says Your real estate blog is a store, not a newspaper, I find myself asking the obvious question: If it is a store, what do you sell?  If you answer “homes” I am going to assume you work at a mobile home dealership.  Otherwise you clearly do not understand your product.  Here’s a hint: you see your product every day in the mirror.  You no more sell homes than you stock them… which is why you are not a store.  You are a service and your product is your expertise.

The Creamy Middle 
The point of her article is …to get you to understand that if your business is about real estate and you want to attract customers that have a real estate need you MUST write about real estate, not skateboards and restaurants.  This is true on a very grand scale:  most of your articles and certainly your “look and feel” must tell the reader that you can and will be the best agent they have ever had.  But does that mean you should only write about real estate?  When Mary says it

is inconceivable to (her) that by driving people into your blog with an article about local skate parks, you will snag a home buyer…

she misses the point.  One article about anything will rarely generate a home buyer.  And a lot of articles about skate parks will probably do no better.  But many articles of interest to your demographic (skateboarding is a bit disingenuous here, but let’s give her one), all written with an eye toward real estate, will contribute to one very important source of business and referrals: it will raise your perceived level of expertise.

In Mary’s world the buyers and sellers come to you from a key word search and you have either 15 seconds (in the case of buyers) or 2 minutes (in the case of sellers) before they make a decision.  As an agent, on the other hand, we should try to build a community of raving fans.  Mary is keyword searching for eyeballs and hoping they will stick around long enough to use our services.  We hope to recruit eyeballs too, but over a greater range of topics; and we do not expect to help them buy or sell their home from that initial search.  Instead, we expect to move them, over time, into our community of raving fans.  We will happily accept people that came to our web site because they Googled skate parks, but we know the majority of our business is coming from people who can already find us; people that know us to be experts in their area.

The Delicious Center
There is that word again: Expert.  The goal of almost all real estate marketing has been, and continues to be, relating your expertise in the community.  The question you want to put in their head is: who better to help them sell their home than you?  You know the neighborhood inside and out.  More important still is the conversation they will have with a family member, friend or co-worker.  It begins with the future client saying: “I have been thinking about moving to your neighborhood.  I hear the schools are great, the homes are beautiful and everyone turns out for the 4^th of July parade.”  The raving fan we have created responds: “That is all true.  I love living here.  Let me hook you up with this agent.  He knows almost everything about our community.  He has a booth at every festival, his Sold signs are everywhere and his web site is THE source for what is happening.  If a house is being bought or sold in my neighborhood, this is the guy that knows about it.  As a matter of fact, we call him the unofficial Mayor.”  Ah yes, Mayoral Marketing at its best.    While over 80 % of buyers start their search online, I do not know too many yet that buy online.  You are still after the referral business and you are still after the repeat business.  You can expect to get some key word business too, but, unlike Mary, do not base your marketing strategy on such an ephemeral crowd.

Here is the other important point when considering a blog consisting of dry market reports and local listings versus one overflowing with articles of interest to the entire community.  Most marketing, in the end, tries to own one of two places: the consumer at the point of sale or a place in the consumer’s mind.  I would rather not spend my career in competition with hundreds of other local agents in a fight over those people who have signaled that they are in a buying or selling heat.  I would much rather get to them when they are not being bombarded.  I want to own a piece of their mind.  (This is but one of 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing – a book that should be on every agents’ desk.)  I want them to be my client before they even know they are clients.  Winning is easier if the competition does not show up until there are only two minutes left in the game.

The Craving 
I end right back at the beginning.  Mary compares shoppers looking for a skateboard to shoppers for homes and points out that someone looking for a skateboard and landing on your site is not likely to buy a home.  To which I say “duh.”  She declares (correctly I might add) it’s going to (be) one hell of a sell to get the skateboard guy to buy a house.  This is a specious analogy at best.  But, we can make this more applicable.  What if there were skateboards that cost $50,000 because they were so “tricked out”?  These boards would only be of interest to a select group of riders (let’s call them the professional trick riders) who would, in many ways, constitute a community.  What if you wanted to sell your trick boards to these trick riders?  You would have to capture their interest wouldn’t you?  What if there was a magazine that catered to these trick riders?  The articles in this magazine covered issues of particular interest to trick riders: the newest ceramic ball bearings, the hottest half-pipes, which local politicians were voting for legislation to make trick riding in public a misdemeanor and what energy drink the best of the best use before and after a grueling exhibition.  Do you think, as a vendor of trick boards, you might like to advertise in that magazine?  What if I could offer you more?  What if you could not only advertise but establish your expertise, your “street cred,” as a contributing writer?  What if you were given the position of publisher?  How awesome would it be to write and publish a magazine aimed at and read by the majority of trick riders – the very group that buys your expensive boards?  I think that might do wonders for your business.  Now how is that different from writing and publishing a magazine aimed at and read by the majority of home buyers and sellers in your farm – the very group that buys your expensive homes?  Of course, with a blog site you do not incur the tremendous expense of a magazine.  But you reap the same rewards.

The Nutritional Information
It has been a while since I was a full time, active real estate agent.  Most recently my time has been spent helping agents and originators find success, use Social Media Marketing and get balanced.  Also, I do not know any more about skateboards than I do about creating web sites.  But I am, as many of you are aware, starting a hyper-local blog site or, by my definition, a hyper local cat blog.  Others have already done it with varying degrees of success, Mary’s concerns notwithstanding.  Some of best are right here at BHB.  Yet when my blog site dictates the need, can you guess who will be on top of a very short list I will look to in order to take my site to the next level?  Buy skateboards from skateboard shops and web sites from Mary McKnight, but when it comes to success as a real estate agent, be passionately you.