Digital Marketing | Digital Strategy | This Digital World

Redfin, Real Estate Marketing and iPhone Apps

If you are looking to buy or sell a house in the US then you should be looking at Redfin. A Seattle based start up that was founded in 2006, Redfin describes itself as 'the industry's first online brokerage for buying and selling homes, half Century 21 and half E-Trade.'

The website is a great user experience - rich with both listing information and local information, an intuitive search engine and a home buyers/sellers service into the bargain, offering savings on traditional buying and selling methods.

We can all learn a lot from their iphone app. It's a perfect fit for the home searcher on the go.  A simple, intuitive design, content rich (the photos of the houses look great) and well thought out search.  From a practical perspective, an iphone app for a real estate aggregrator makes so much sense.

It's not an app for the sake of having an app. It actually adds value to the user.  How many times have you been driving or walking by a house for sale and wanted more information on it? Or in a neighbourhood that you like and wondering what property prices are like? I find it useful.  It adds value to my house search experience and makes me think good things about Redfin.

I have also downloaded apps that really do nothing other than extend the brand to the device.  Trust me, those dollars are wasted.  Find a reason why downloading an app makes sense for your customer and then go build it.  Don't waste money building an app just because that's the latest 'thing' to do.  You don't want people uninstalling your app because that little icon has just become a waste of space on their cluttered phone's display.

Add Share to your Email Marketing for Improved Response Rates

A study out today by GetResponse, an email marketing firm, shows that adding 'share' links to your emails will increase click through rate by at least 30%.

 

The study tracked 500 million emails sent and compared those that included sharing on Facebook and Twitter to those that did not.  When emails included 3 links to share the content, click through rates climbed to more than 50%, but only 11% of emails sent actually included three or more sharing options.

The conclusion?  Add Facebook and Twitter share links to any emails that you send out to your customers and you will increase engagement.  If you don't know how to do that, email me and I can tell you how.

The Importance of Bloggers to your Business

Mashable, the online bible for social media developments, published an article today entitled 'why food bloggers are here to stay'.  As a food blogger myself and long time reviewer of restaurants online (I founded The London Restaurant Review in 1995 when user submitted reviews of anything were a rarity), I know how even 'unknown' bloggers can help a restaurant.

With London Appetizer I set about creating a blog focused on new London restaurant openings and quickly built up a database of restaurant owners and their PR agencies, eager to send me the latest news on the restaurants they represented.

Blogs written using platforms such as Typepad and Wordpress generally get indexed very well on search engines and so getting a mention of your restaurant on a blog (and ideally a link) does wonders for your own website visibility (one of the things Google looks for when deciding how high to place a website in the search listings is how many quality links that website has back into it).

Any business owner should be aware of the bloggers related to his/her business sector and actively reach out to them.  Send them information (bloggers always need good content), invite them to review your restaurant, hotel, golf course, dry cleaners, hair dressers etc), build a relationship with them.  Bloggers tend to be good marketers and are usually members of larger networks (UrbanSpoon is a good example of this in the restaurant world).

Being part of the 'blogosphere' means more visibility for your business and hopefully more customers. 

Groupon and why it matters to your business

Groupon is a website that presents a local, daily offer to thousands of willing consumers.  The offer is only good for that day and is dependent upon a minimum number of people buying it.  The offers are usually significant - 50% off your dry cleaning, 30% off a meal at your local restaurant etc.
 

 

The local element is extremely important since it creates relevancy.  The fact that the offer is only available that day creates urgency and for the business making the offer, Groupon creates new customers.

Groupon makes its money by taking a slice of the action - but a small enough slice to make this new form of advertising extremely lucrative to small businesses, that otherwise would never be able to afford the kind of exposure Groupon can give them.  In fact more that 95% of businesses that advertised once on the site came back for more.

Here is a simple comparison of how Groupon compares to traditional advertising (click to enlarge):

With over 6.5 million users, Groupon is a very cost effective way to market your business.

Groupon uses very simple ways to get the offer to the user.  I might not be in the mood to check the Groupon website every day for an offer that suits me, but I get an email every day (opt in) that tells me what it is.  If I'm on the go, I can download the Groupon iphone app and sign up that way.

As a local business owner, there really is very little downside in using Groupon as a way to market yourself.  It's free advertising and as long as you do your maths and figure out what discount you can afford to give without going bankrupt, you are sure to benefit from the increased business.

There is a great set of FAQs on the website, explaining the service in more detail and if you are a business owner you can watch a video and submit your business here.

Keeping up with the Joneses

We have a saying in the UK - Keeping up with the Joneses.  It means that people are constantly worried about whether their neighbours are doing better than them, have better gadgets, climbing the social and economic ladders faster etc.  It's always been a material world and the way technology is progressing, keeping up is hard to do.

It's difficult to avoid reading stories of the latest social media phenomenons, since they have breached traditional media.  Seemingly every day there is a new story appearing about Facebook, Twitter or some other popular website or application.  Filtering what's important and what's hype is tough.

No doubt about it, knowing the basics of social media and keeping up with technology trends will definitely help your business.  The old ways of marketing your business are quickly being replaced with much easier, cheaper and targeted ways, so knowing about these methods will not only save you money, but make you money.

There are also plenty of money pits.  In the late 90's I founded a company focused on helping small businesses drive traffic to their websites.  Back then, many businesses had been sold a fancy looking website costing tens of thousands of dollars and were perplexed when no-one visited it.  The website designers knew nothing about online marketing.  I helped bridge the gap, using SEO (search engine optimization), affiliate marketing (using other websites to promote your products) and paid search (buying keywords on search engines).  Back then, it was the wild west (and there were a lot of cowboys).  Now these online marketing methods are well established and making companies like Google, billions of dollars every year.

ThisDigitalWorld helps filter the important from the not so important, enabling businesses of any size to benefit from the way the technology world is changing.