I was inspired by new real estate ads campaign which RE/MAX announced Jan 24 to roll out nationally focusing on “all the things that move you.”

As what they released to the press, All the Things That Move You(SM) includes a full schedule of TV, radio, Internet, print and outdoor ads that will run throughout 2012. Designed to identify with the personal moments that drive decisions by homebuyers and sellers – having a baby, getting married, landing a new job or downsizing – the campaign reinforces the notion that experienced RE/MAX agents know how to help.

I thought, Hmm that really is a good marketing approach. Real estate agent is there to help potential home buyers and sellers to fulfil their dreams, not just sell or buy some properties. Because otherwise it would make no difference to hire anyone to do the job.

I think Re/Max’s new ads campaign is trying to let people connect Re/Max the brand with some personal feelings, so it might be helpful in building its brand. Here is why, if those ads could really touch people’s feelings, it could “plant a seed” into people’s subconscious mind. Therefore Re/Max the name could easily be triggered when those feelings come to the surface or when such moments come.

Well, would their campaigns help individual Re/Max real estate agent’s business directly?

Not too much I think. Like I always talk to my local real estate agent friends, your success depends on how successfully you could build your own brand as an individual real estate agent. It doesn’t matter what agency you are with today, what matters is what makes your potential clients believe you can help them to fulfil their dream.

But how? Since you don’t have so big amount of money to run your own ads campaigns on TV or radio as Re/Max did, you can still have some real estate marketing company to design a marketing plan to fit your budget. I am not talking about having property virtual tours posted to YouTube, because really those virtual tours won’t trigger any emotion and won’t help in building your own brand. Let’s do something differently amazing and make people remember you and like you.

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Online real estate listing promotion is hot. It gets more eyeballs. It is the preferred source of information for most home buyers surpassing old sources like the print ads, yard signs, magazines, billboards and television.

What makes online real estate marketing so popular? There are several reasons that make web promotion of listings effective and popular. Here we list five of them.

Cost Effective

Millions of internet users are using the internet for browsing through listings. The crowd can only grow bigger with increasing use of the Internet day by day. The costs compared to reaching a huge audience and visibility is quite low giving a fillip to internet listings. The affordability combined with convenience makes web promotion a killer. Emails and online chats are means of low cost fast interaction tool for the marketer to stay in touch with clients.

Time Saving

Internet searches effectively shorten home search for homebuyers. How? Well the homebuyer can sift through the information and zero in on the most suitable listings of their preference, in the process saving on physical searches. In turn they are more likely to close deals sooner than can be achieved through traditional methods.

Average Home Buyer is getting Younger

The average age of the homebuyer is reducing with better employment and available loans. What does it mean? You would agree that the young generation is more tech savvy. They spend more and more time tweeting, social networking and of course searching. The latest generation is virtually growing up on the Internet. Would not anyone promoting real estate want to get their attention constantly?

It is also observed that internet clients of real estate are wealthier and more knowledgeable. Why would not someone selling a property want  to miss fat pocket clients?

Blogging

With the popularity of blogging sites like Twitter the space for online promotion of real estate has got a new dimension. MicroBlogging sites like Twittter, social networking sites Facebook are the latest tools in the hands of web marketers for real estate listing promotion.

Visual Impact

A virtual tour, Realtor’s real estate video channel, photos – all go a long way to make a deep impact on the homebuyer. All these tools are being used more and more on web portals. The best of brochures would fail to make an impression when compared to these new age tools.

However it is important to adhere to certain real estate marketing tips while promoting real estate listings on portals.

• Use a professional domain with a good name
• Creating dedicated accounts in blogging sites
• Maintain a good database of the leads coming from internet promotion
• Use the right keywords with matching headlines on the web pages
• Have pictures, videos or downloadable brochures in the website
• Technical tools for promoting web ranking of the site including SEO
• Most importantly have professionals follow up the leads

The Internet is getting bigger and so is the real estate listing promotions on it. If you are not online then you are ‘offline’ in real estate promotion!

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In the simplest of terms, mobile marketing is all about communicating and engaging with the consumer through mobile devices such as mobile phones. Some examples of mobile marketing vehicles are short message services (SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), unstructured supplementary service data (USSD), mobile internet, and mobile applications.

Short Message Service (SMS)

SMS, also known as text messaging, which first came out in the early 90s, continues to be one of the most popular mobile marketing vehicles. There are forecasts indicating that it will remain to be so for many more years into the future.

Although the majority of text messages are transmitted person-to-person, more and more Americans are using SMS to interact with brands. We see a growing number of people using SMS to interact with TV shows (like voting on “American Idol”, joining trivia contests about program content, and getting program alerts). We also see people participating in on-pack promotions (e.g., texting codes found on product packages for a chance to win an instant prize). There are also the mobile coupons which drive buyers to retail outlets (like discount vouchers for Dunkin Donuts Lattes and EA games) and so on.

Text messaging is to the mobile world as the email is to the Internet—just without the graphics. It is a great potential for local business also to promote own brand and to build relationship with clients in limited budget.

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)

MMS, also known as picture messaging, which functions quite similar to SMS. The nice thing about MMS is that it supports images, animation, video, and audio, and that enables marketers to push rich media ads to consumers. Additionally, MMS is interactive in a way similar to SMS that it enables recipients to respond to messages and engage with brands.

While MMS has a smaller reach than what SMS has, promotional MMS is more capable in terms of activating consumers. The ROI (return of investment) on MMS is quite compelling–five percent is actually considered a low response rate to an MMS campaign. There are evidences of conversion rates of over 20 percent on well targeted MMS programs.

Mobile Internet

Just like the banner ads in many web pages, marketers are placing banner ads on mobile contents. There is a big trend for mobile internet usage although it only took about 7% usage rate for Canadian mobile users in 2008 (according to Canada Mobile Association), and there were 54.5 million mobile internet users in the US in early 2009, representing 25% of online users.

One of the greatest benefits of mobile display advertising is that it provides a richer palette for brand advertising (albeit a smaller one), while avoiding the need for opt-ins or consumer-initiated reply messages.

Mobile App

The popularity of mobile application is up since the mobile app download is expected to exceed 4.5 billion in 2010, and will grow to 21 billion by 2013. Many free applications derive their revenue from advertising. This is typically done with banners as well as full page advertising (e.g., between game levels).

Cellular phones have evolved over recent years to the point where they perform a wide variety of functions that were traditionally only available though stand-alone devices or services, such as digital camera, MP3 player, video camera and so on. People could go everywhere with just a mobile phone to do things they now do with computers. The future online marketing success will largely rely on how successful the mobile marketing will be.

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There are two steps to do Email marketing for any type of local business: the first one is list building and the second is to run email campaigns.

For local restaurant businesses, there are many ways of building your email list. Here are just some examples:

1. Include an email sign up on the comment card and bring them with the check to the clients in person when they finish the meal.

2. Insert a card promoting your email campaigns with your take-out and delivery orders. Simply put your site URL in it and tell people to go there to sign up for a special deal or something.

3. Sign people up for your email newsletter when they make the reservation. If you can have a reservation form on your site, it’ll be even better because people already become your email subscribers before they become your clients.

Now comes the email campaigns. What you should include in your email newsletters. Here are some ideas:

1. Menu. It could be your seasonal menu, menu change, or ingredients in your dishes;

2. Coupons. A small discount, exclusive to your email subscribers, will keep customers coming back;

3. Directions. Provide a link to driving routes, tips on parking, and public transportation information;

4. Gift cards. If you have them, speak it out. People are always looking for great gift ideas;

5. Pictures. Colorful pictures of food are the best enticement;

6. And don’t forget to mention your reservation phone number and best of all online reservation form.

For additional information on online marketing for local restaurant, please contact your local online marketing expert.

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Since many marketers haven’t realized all the benefits of video marketing, or they haven’t started to do that. It leaves enough room for you if you decide to do video marketing even from Today!

There are three benefits to do video marketing:

1. It has SEO benefit. Because you can put your site link in the video profile. The link which is also a backlink to your site will pass on some SEO value from those high rank video sites to your site;

2. Video is eye catching. Humans are likely to click to view a 2-3 minutes video from the beginning to the end, while rarely finish reading a 300 or more words article. So video marketing is one of the most efficient ways to deliver your message.

3. The more people view it, the higher your video will get ranked on video sites and. At the end Google will most probably rank your video on top of its search result page.

Since many marketers haven’t realized all the benefits of video marketing, or they haven’t started to do that. It leaves enough room for you if you decide to do video marketing even from Today!

There are three benefits to do video marketing:

1. It has SEO benefit. Because you can put your site link in the video profile. The link which is also a backlink to your site will pass on some SEO value from those high rank video sites to your site;

2. Video is eye catching. Humans are likely to click to view a 2-3 minutes video from the beginning to the end, while rarely finish reading a 300 or more words article. So video marketing is one of the most efficient ways to deliver your message.

3. The more people view it, the higher your video will get ranked on video sites and. At the end Google will most probably rank your video on top of its search result page.

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It was inspired by one of the report in Walt Street Journal. The headline goes: Dentists Step Up Marketing as Patients Skip Their Visits.

Because of high unemployment rate (9.1% in BC), as more patients lose jobs and employer-sponsored insurance, fewer come in for major treatments or even routine cleanings. A lot of dental practices here in BC already experienced big appointment lost as what happens to the whole dental industry in North America.

That means more dentists see the need to step up the marketing of their services. Most of them increase their spending in traditional marketing, for example ads on yellow pages, newspapers, direct mails. Since it gets lower and lower response rate by traditional marketing. Some of the dental practices have started to take advantage of online marketing to push their businesses and brands through internet.

Canadian and American Dental Association

Many small dental private practices are still preferring doing dental surgery as well as marketing by themselves. But the problem is, in dental school, most dentists learn that good location and personal service will earn referrals to new patients. But these days, the old ways alone aren’t enough to cut it and dentists with slumping business want to know what to do differently.

The lack of time and experience in marketing could make all the marketing money and work in vain. Dentists have to outsource the marketing jobs to the experts, who will make huge return to their dental businesses.

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Do you know what’s the most popular dental services your potential dental customers are searching for?

Do we guess or study the true stats and trends? Of course we have to look at what Google has showed us. Because over 70% of people in Canada are using Google to do online research, Google results are more likely showing a bigger picture.

Below is a chart showing all the hottest dental services I found through Google Insight:

That lovely chart clearly shows us that dental industry here in British Columbia Canada is somewhat a seasonal market. Because people are searching much less about any dental service from the beginning of November to the beginning of January. And the hot season for dental services (especially implant or implants) is from May to September.

So if you are thinking of launching your biggest dental marketing campaign, you’d be avoiding the whole Winter. When market is picking up in Spring, that’s the time for massive dental marketing until the end of Summer.

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Every business tend to brand its uniqueness against many other competitors who provide same or similar products or services. For the purpose of SEM (Search Engine Marketing), branding sometimes may go conflict with all the marketing effort to get traffic with high relevancy.

For example, a video conferencing company spends all its marketing efforts to brand themselves as a “video communications” company, just because their competitors do conferencing. But the problem is their customers do not see them as a “video communications” company. Their clients want video conferencing, and that’s what they see them as.

Keyword Search SEM

So when they put “video communications” as their main keyword to SEO their pages and hyperlinks, they got problem: their prospects couldn’t find them easily on search engines. That is a big mistake. A severe marketing mistake!

The correct way to both brand their business and to better SEM, they should add keyword modifier to their main keyword “video conferencing”. One way of doing that is to put location, i.e. county, zip code, into the main keyword.  “video conferencing Vancouver”  is a good keyword modifier sample. To add words which describing your quality is another great idea. For example, they can use “best video conferencing” or a combination of two as “best video conferencing Vancouver”.

Overall, it’s not an easy job to find those keyword modifiers which are both relevent to your services and attracting as many highly targeted traffics as possible to your site. It takes time and efforts in investigating and splitting test.

To employ a SEM expert to do the job for you will save you huge amount of time and money, if you don’t know how to do them yourself.

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Globally, the most trusted information source was friends, with 42% of those surveyed saying that they trusted word-of-mouth recommendations. About an equal number trusted TV news (41%), online news (40%) and newspapers (39%).

Naturally, there were variations in media trust from country to country, but several patterns emerged.

Internet users in the US and Canada held similar attitudes toward the media, with the largest differences in the US’s comparative lack of trust in newspapers and TV news.

Most trusted media news

Surprisingly to me that, Wikipedia, despite being among the most highly visited Websites worldwide, was less trusted among the countries surveyed than industry magazines, industry Websites and product comparison sites.

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Social media marketing consists of campaigns of multiple online marketing methods. Sometimes it is called web 3.0 marketing technology, which is more about a personal dialogue with offers that are so relevant that users feel special. Web 3.0 is about using all the Web 2.0 data, messages, chatter etc. to make business run smarter (=more personal and relevant). Companies that will achieve this will get to a deeper level of communication with their relations, a domain where you’re found before you’re searched for.

social media marketing diagram

To achieve this another model needs to be created, one that is aimed at long durable social relationships instead of one that is focused on conversion. However conversion or sale will happen simply because people like to do business with people they know, like and trust.

But you have to understand what social media can and can’t do.

Social media can engage your audience, encourage online conversations that are user-generated, increase your web presence, expand brand awareness, generate publicity (both good & bad) and provide SEO benefits.

For most marketers, social media has no ROI  but is great for:

• Brand building
• Relationship management
• Product development
• Reputation management
• Customer interaction
• Customer feedback
• Customer support
• Community building

In some cases, social media can convert – usually if you own the community, and have the power to strategically capture leads. Contact your local social media expert.

Original contents from DelphineZhu.com - real estate marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, app marketing, SEO and more