| February 5, 2001 |
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Everywhere you go, you are being told you have to start marketing yourself on the Internet. These statistics tell you why: Fifty percent of home buyers are visiting the Internet to look at listings and get home buying information before contacting a Realtor, says independent research firm Juniper Research. Yet less than a third of Realtors nationwide have a Web presence for these buyers to find them. Even fewer use a genuine business e-mail. That means there is a great opportunity for Realtors who want to use the Internet to have a real marketing advantage. However, the Internet is a different medium that any other because you can communicate in real time with your consumer. That makes the Internet an ideal communication and information delivery tool. If you want to be one of the Realtors found on Internet listings, in directories, or through school and neighborhood reports, you have to buy the appropriate Web tools such as Web sites and sponsorships of lead generation tools. These can be costly, but they can also be effective if you track your results. Consumers can find you from your Realtor.com listing by navigating to your I-LEAD page, and emailing you. But how are you going to communicate with the client once they have contacted you? That's where the Internet separates the agents from the superagents. Internet-savvy agents use the Internet as a communication and information delivery tool. This is first and foremost over using it as a marketing tool. You have to be able to communicate with consumers, or all the marketing in the world does you no good. Your job is to entice the consumer off of Realtor.com and offer to send the consumer more detailed and fresher information than they can get for themselves. You can use e-mail to send documents, listings from your MLS, news and other information. Otherwise, the consumer has no reason to use you over any of the other agents that they can find on the Web. Give them a reason to choose you over other agents. Demonstrate that you know how to save them time, money and frustration by using the Internet to communicate and deliver information. |
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