Real Marketing Takes Real Work

We see (and hear) a lot of real estate agents who say that their marketing is primarily “internet driven”, but then they go to talk about the fact that their listings are placed on websites like Realtor.com, Trulia, and Zillow. This “marketing” is absolutely free. So is placing your listing on the websites below:

Every Multiple Listing Service in Hawaii (of which all Realtors are members of at least one), utilizes free services to display their listings on dozens of websites, all at no additional cost to the agent. So, is this really what a seller should expect when they pay thousands of dollars for their property to be “marketed”?

Anyone can do automatic.

At Hawaii Life, we closely study the traffic and the exposure we receive from any website. The traffic to our listings from ALL of the above websites combined is still far less than what we generate to Hawaiilife.com

For the larger, more popular websites like Trulia and Zillow, we discovered that the free version of listing syndication (arranged through the local MLS providers) only displayed some of our listings, and only at random. So, we built a custom xml feed for each of them, so they can now display all of our listings, all the time.

In the case of Realtor.com, Hawaii Life utilizes their Company Showcase product, which optimizes the presentation of our listings on Realtor.com to insure maximum exposure and, more importantly, maximum inquiries. It also allows us to track the page views for our listings, so we can see the return on our investment, and factor that information into our marketing budget.

Without metrics, and real numbers to measure the return on our investment, it’s not possible to know if our marketing is effective. Exposure (and a lot of it) is the first step. But we can’t settle for free services. Without proactive, aggressive steps to drive traffic to your listings, we can hardly say we’re “marketing”. That’s why Hawaii Life’s Smart Marketing focuses so intently on top placement in internet search engines, our increasingly large contact database (of over 31,000 people) and powerful usage statistics. We track and source every inquiry, and maintain relationships with customers and clients for as long as required before they’re ready to purchase.