Scared to Buy? Step Right Up!

Think about the main types of sites and their goal. The main ones that typically come to mind are driving to an online sale or lead generation.  If you take a look at these two types and then dive a little deeper you might find an area where sites are marketing products or services that people are “Scared to Buy.”  What would that mean?  Good question.  I’ll tell ya.

For me that means Real Estate. In the current Real Estate market that we are in people are scared to buy, if they are in the market at all.  Real Estate, online, is typically a lead gen activity, with the few exceptions of companies like RedFin.  Take a moment to think about how you would drive people that are scared to look at your product to take the next step.

Why are they scared? Well, to start with its the media, those that love to watch and talk about a car crash and those that believe that there are other outside forces controlling the market.  If you want to see a great example try watching Good Morning America in the mornings.  They have the recurring story of how many people are out of work and how bad the recession is, how much real estate prices have declined on average.  Well if you didn’t feel depressed already you will once you are done.  You’ll also notice that you want to stop spending and save every penny that you have and that if you do have to spend anything it must be on some cost saving craft.

When we start to see the media change their tune the behavior of the real estate buyer will also change.

What can you do to move real estate buyer down the purchase funnel? Take care of them.  Here is a quick check list.

  1. Make sure that your site is fast.
  2. The information the visitor is looking for is on the site.*
  3. The information is in an easy format to take in.
  4. Respond quickly to every contact.  This means personal.  Not an auto-esponse.
  5. Treat them in a friendly manner.
  6. Provide ALLinformation when they ask a question and make sure to present all available options or paths that the potential buyer could go down in reagards to choices.**

*Note: It is also common for many in the real estate industry to want to hold back some information from their website.  This is a huge mistake as most online visitors will become frustrated and move on to those that do provide the information.

**Note:  Many people disagree with providing all choices due to the fact that people can’t focus on that many options at once but if you have organized your information well this can be done successfully.

Oh You’re Selling – What – is the ROI?

I need to start counting the number of people that contact me selling something. The count over time would amaze me.  That might not amaze you but the amount of people that have to call me back with the conversion rates or ROI for the investment is truly amazing.

I guess this is a guide on how to sell to me.

I don’t care about:

  1. Your company history.
  2. Who your CEO is and what other companies they have started and sold.
  3. How long you have been in business.
  4. How many employees you have.
  5. The number of years of combined experience.
  6. the amount of time that you have spent in R&D on the product.

What I care about:

  1. How the product works.
  2. How it applies to my business.
  3. Who else is using it.
  4. Average past results of others.  Conversion rate, etc.
  5. Parallel industries that are using the product.
  6. Cost.

That’s about all. If you can put aside the first list and give me the stats we’ll forgo the point of me starting to look at email, out the window, cutting you off to ask the second list or writing a blog post about this during a conference call at which point you’ll realize I’m not paying attention to you when you ask me a question.

Pownce Update – Pownce Export Tool

Late Monday Six Apart Sent out the following message to Pownce Users on the end of the Pownce service and the content export tool.

We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15, 2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new
pro accounts.

To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.
Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not be accessible after this date.

Please visit our new home to find out more:
http://www.sixapart.com/pownce

Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,

The Pownce Crew

Rogue Marketers – Everyone Thinks They Are In Marketing

Do you have Rogue Marketers in your organization?

Without sounding like an evil tyrant that wants to crush anything outside the corporate standards it is important to know if you have people speaking for the company or coming across as if they are speaking for the company online. If you take a look at your webstats you might be able to uncover some of these people as they drive traffic to your corporate site while others are hiding out.

Corporate standards are important whether dealing with on or offline marketing. When someone is out there on their Myspace page telling people that they work for your company while putting unprofessional pics of themselves on the page containing info on your company it can hurt your brand. I recently took a look at the stats for a company and realized that one of the larger referrers to the site was someones Myspace page. This caused me to take a look at the page and it looked fine but others that I found after this were not so flattering.

How to handle Rogue Marketers.

Before you begin to deal with these individuals it is important to make sure that you have your plan together. Begin by approaching the overall issue of why they are taking the actions that they are taking. Why are they creating their Myspace page(For Example)? Is there something that the company’s corporate online presence isn’t doing for them as an employee or the customer? Are their actions online more related to their personal activity that just happens to coincide with some mentions of their professional life?

Once you have established why they are doing what they are doing you know how to formulate your plan. If you found that something is lacking in your corporate presence then you know what to do. No matter what it is time to lay down the rules of engagement for employees.

Pownce Closing – Sold to Six Apart

After reading the Six Apart site and seeing that they are “welcoming the Pownce team” and that the site would be shut down it was time to remove my Pownce link from my signature. I wonder what else is going down.

I know that the economy is down and the government announced today that the U.S. is officially in a recession and has been since Dec. 2007 but does that really slow that amount of traffic to microblogging sites? Does the ability to generate revenue change for this type of organization? I would think not. What does that mean for sites that have more traffic and activity than Pownce?

I love Twitter and am not suggesting that there is something wrong with Twitter and other micorblogging platforms but is there a business formula or path to a formula for success that they are following that others can’t find?

I believe it is more of a first mover advantage along with the Tweeting to be seen scene. You know you tweet just to be seen on the scene sometimes.