If you want to pound a nail into a piece of wood, you don't reach for a pair of pliers. You choose a hammer, which is designed, weighted and balanced to strike the nail and drive it home with a minimum of exertion on your part. If you want to reach more than 50 percent of homebuying consumers, you choose the Web.

Choosing the right marketing tool on the Internet makes the job just as easy. The right tool will deliver results while the wrong tool will only waste your time and money. Understanding which Web tools are most effective for which marketing purposes will help you control your Web spending and help you get the results you want.

Marketing tools in general fall into only two categories - active and passive. Active means that you take the initiative to interact with your prospects. When you send out a mailer to your farm, cold call your neighbors, or e-mail prospects your latest listings, you are taking the initiative to actively contact people.

Passive means that customers find you and take the initiative to contact you. When you advertise your services with an ad in the newspaper, or by renting a billboard, or by subscribing to a personal Web site, the customer makes the call or writes the e-mail. Passive marketing tools can and should be actively marketed by the Realtor, but they are still passive in nature as long as it is incumbent upon the customer to act.

Expecting a passive tool to do the job of an active tool is a sure way to be disappointed. Web sites don't contact and nurture customers while they get their situations together to buy a home. By the same token, contact tools that immediately ask for a close might be too aggressive for some consumers' tastes. The right tool has to be used at the right point in the developing relationship with the customer. Understanding which tools on the Internet are most effective for which purpose will help you choose your marketing tools by what your needs are.

Basically there are three categories of marketing tools:

• contact (active)
• lead generation (passive)
• lead capture (passive)

Contact/capture tools

Contact tools are about communicating with customers. On the Internet, contact means using e-mail to greet and inform your prospects. Unless you have purchased a list, that means that you will be contacting people with whom you are already acquainted, or who have found you through your passive marketing tools.

You can use e-mail to nurture the customer in a number of ways. You can contact the customer, you can send information and you can provide updates. Useful contact tools would be electronic prospecting tools such as Just Listed, Just Sold e-cards or a monthly newsletter.

Lead generation tools

Because lead generation tools are passive (requiring action on the customer's part,) it stands to reason that you will need more marketing tools in different places on the Internet in order to attract as many customers into contacting you as possible. This can be done through banner ads, sponsoring school and neighborhood reports and buying Web sites that are either hosted by a large portal like HomeSeekers or Realtor.com, or custom Web sites that are hosted by the Web site designer.

Without question, the most popular lead generation tool on the Internet is the personal Web site. Agents flocked to the Internet in the past several years to buy Web site subscriptions, but many were disappointed in the results. They just didn't seem to get many if any leads. What they didn't know is that Web sites are passive. They have to be found and the content on the Web sites has to be engaging enough to provoke a contact from the consumer. Lots of agents found that people visited their Web sites without taking any action. Further, agents didn't know to track their leads so that they could examine the results and plan their future marketing more efficiently.

Lead generation at best is an inexact science that is difficult to track and that is because most leads are the result of cross-promotion. A customer may spot your ad in the newspaper, drive by your listing, visit your Web site and e-mail you with a request for more information. Is the Web site or the newspaper ad responsible for triggering the e-mail? Would the customer have contacted you without the Web site or did the Web site provide enough additional information to help trigger the call? These are unknowns until you ask the customer and start keeping tabs on the answers. You'll soon know the answer to these which-came-first, chicken-or-egg questions.

Lead capture tools

Capture tools are the flip side of contact tools. They aggressively require the customer to contact the agent or to give some sort of qualifying information about themselves in order to get more information. Effective capture tools may be a teaser such as a virtual tour that only allows the customer restricted views of the home. If the customer wants to see additional views, he or she must offer their e-mail address and some qualifying information such as how long they have looked for a home and what their search perimeters are. Another lead capture tool that is gaining in popularity are school and neighborhood reports in which customers visit a portal, click on specific homes, and are invited to receive in-depth reports about the neighborhood. If the customer wants the report and it is sponsored by a Realtor, the Realtor gets to capture the lead.

All marketing tools can have a success rate if used effectively, and few work well alone. If you are going to sponsor an online school report, you want to be able to give more information about yourself to the consumer. You can do that actively or passively by e-mailing a newsletter or by inviting your new prospect to visit your Web site, respectively. Do what's comfortable for you.

Your experience and personal style will dictate how you use online marketing tools and whether they are effective for you, but using them will require a change of habit. You will have to monitor your online marketing carefully because you are adding a new medium to the mix. For example, it has already been proven that your chances of closing an Internet lead are closely related to how quickly you answer your e-mail. If you are only in the habit of checking your e-mail every few days, any leads you may have received will be cold.

Where once you relied on newspaper ads and yard signs to bring new customers, now you have the Internet, too. As you know how to capture leads from your offline advertising, you'll have to learn how customers behave online. And that can be the most effective tool in your internet marketing tool box.

Part I - Web Marketing: All About Subscriptions