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Online Marketing: e-strategy.com's
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Online Marketinge-strategy.com's Current Newsletter09.30.03 Industry Focus: Real EstateThe Real Estate Search Market
Both consumers and the real estate industry are into the Internet big time. One-third of all Internet users have used the Internet to find information about a place to live and, on average, more than three million people are searching online for a new place to live on any given day. Pay-for- performance search engine Overture recorded 1.1 million monthly searches for the phrase "real estate," and Google expects to have 500 million real estate-related searches over the next year. Real estate-related advertisers are one of Google's fastest-growing advertiser segments. A Threat To Real Estate Agents?The real estate industry has embraced the Internet as enthusiastically as have consumers. Real estate agents consider Internet home buyers an Internet-savvy group who are more knowledgeable of their financing options, and better prepared for the financing process than their offline peers. Agents believe that having a Web site and using the Internet has changed the way they do business: More real estate agents are using computers, email, digital cameras, and cell phones or pagers than ever before. Real estate agents have a reason to be optimistic about the Internet: Internet house hunters are more likely to use them to complete the home search and close the transaction. Internet home buyers spend two weeks working with a realtor, one-third the time it takes for traditional home buyers. Finally, Internet users bought more expensive homes than their offline peers. The Online Home BuyerReal estate Web site visitors are an audience that is primed for a purchase, with more than 50% saying they will either move or buy a new residence within the next year. The online house hunter is more likely to be younger, unmarried suburbanites, with a college or graduate degree. They are Internet veterans who are online a lot. Thirty-six percent of Internet house hunters are in professional or managerial occupations. The top reasons for searching online for a new property were convenience and researching prior to talking to a realtor. More than 90% of all consumers consider property photos extremely or very important. Two thirds of home buyers believe using the Internet saved them time in their home search. Internet house hunters rely extensively on their online research. But not all of those using the Internet for real estate research are active buyers, sellers, and renters: Many are searching for housing information in order to check out prices in their neighborhood or to keep abreast of the housing market. What Are People Searching For?An e-strategy.com analysis of 1,936 real estate- related search terms compiled from the search term database WordTracker shows that during the past sixty days, the top ten realty search terms were:
Searches with a geographic intent (i.e. "twin cities home for sale") are very popular, making up 53% of all realty-related search terms we analyzed. Silly Search Terms: 25 searches were performed for "feng shui buying a home" and "feng shui tips for buying a home".
DoNotSpam.gov?It should come as little surprise that Internet users consider spam the scourge of the Internet. Yet still some people are tempted to use the technique in their online marketing efforts. It's hard to understand why, especially if you've watched the news during the past week. The federal government's efforts to provide a "do- not-call" list that consumers can join to prevent telemarketers from soliciting them ran into a snag recently when a federal judge in Oklahoma ruled that the FTC lacked the authority to administer the do-not- call list. The do-not-call list is extraordinarily popular among the public. On September 7, Yahoo!'s Buzz Index listed "Donotcall.gov" at number 13 on their list of popular search terms. During the week ending September 1, "do not call list" was number six on Google ZeitGeist's Top 10 Gaining Queries. During the past two months there have been 12,542 do-not-call- related searches. It was, perhaps, then poetic justice when U.S. District Judge Lee West, the judge who ruled against the do- not-call list, was flooded with, you guessed it, phone calls! The Associated Press quoted Rick Wade, the operations manager at the district clerk's office, saying "They are just calling to tie up our lines...They just keep calling to harass us, like the telemarketers harass them, I guess." Uh, yeah. Congress moved with uncharacteristic lightning speed to pass a bill giving the FTC the authority to administer the list and yesterday, President Bush signed the legislation into law. So that tells you how popular the idea is. So what does this all have to do with spam? Like telemarketing calls, spam is annoying consumers to no end. According to a 2002 Jupiter Media Metrix study, Spam received per email user in the U.S. increased from 451 in 2000 to 927 in 2003 and is expected to grow to 1671 in 2006. A July 2003 BURST Proprietary Research study found that more than 50% of U.S. Internet users consider spam a major nuisance, across all income groups. In May 2003, a RoperASW/Bigfoot Interactive study found that nearly 40% of U.S. home Net users were considering anti-spam software or services and nearly 90% would like their ISPs to to unsubscribe them from unwanted email lists. Finally, a June 2003 InsightExpress study found that 83% of consumers think a government do-not-spam list should be created. Email marketing can be very effective. An August 2003 DoubleClick study found that the email open rate for the 2nd quarter of 2003 was 38.8% and that click- through rates increased by 10.7%. But the bottom line is--as demonstrated by the negative feelings consumers have about spam--opt-in email marketing is the only way to go. Personality MarketingI recently received a direct-mail piece from my hometown newspaper asking me to subscribe to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Nothing extraordinary about that, in and of itself. I was struck, though, by their approach. The front cover of the piece featured a picture of one of their most popular columnists, Nick Coleman. The fold-out featured photos of their other popular columnists. Smart idea. Think about it: Columnists are popular because they are allowed to let their personality shine through their writing. They each have their own devoted following who read their columns regularly and each columnists' audience probably has a very distinct demographic. And with the Web, consumers are more likely than ever to know these columnists even if they don't subscribe to the actual newspaper. So, essentially, the Pioneer Press is marketing personalities. The piece reminded me of a story from the excellent book about eBay, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay. Author Adam Cohen tells of an early eBay user--back when it was known as AuctionWeb--named Jim Griffith. Griffith became a regular on eBay's famed bulletin boards, helping new users and answering questions (all on his own time) and became a popular character among that community by force of his personality. He adopted a cross-dressing dairy farmer persona and called himself Uncle Griff. Everyone loved him. When his posts to the bulletin board dropped off, Uncle Griff got a call from eBay's Jeff Skoll, who offered him a job as eBay's first customer service representative. Both instances are examples of personality marketing. The Pioneer Press is simply harnessing the power of their in-house personalities to sell papers. eBay recognized a valuable asset in Jim Giffith--and his persona Uncle Griff--and took action to ensure the preservation of that personality as a company asset. It occurs to me that companies may be overlooking some potentially extremely valuable existing assets that can be harnessed for online marketing efforts. Do you have employees who participate in online forums as part of their job and have they developed an online celebrity as a result? Does your company Web site have an online forum that you can mine for personalities to put to work? You may just find that you've got some hidden marketing tools that are not being used. David Erickson
David Erickson is the president of e-strategy.com. He has been an online marketing professional since 1995. You can hear Mr. Erickson discuss online marketing in the Twin Cities every Friday night at 6 p.m. on Twin Cities Business Radio on KCCO 950 AM. David is the Co-Publisher of the popular Web site MNPolitics.com and an Associate Publisher of the popular political directory, Politic s in Minnesota: The Directory.. Mr. Erickson has a political talk radio showand his political analysis and commentary has been featured on MSNBC, Slate, Congressional Quarterly, Campaign & Elections, Orvetti.com, Minnesota Public Radio, and the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press. Erickson is a former Hubert H. Humphrey Policy Forum Fellow and he is a contributing editor to NetPulse, the must-read newsletter for the online politics community. |
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