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How to Measure Brand Awareness: A Guide for Real Estate Marketers

by Elizabeth Hines | May 8, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, Social Media | 0 comments

If you want to measure brand awareness for your property, use these 4 metrics, which indicate if prospective buyers or renters know about it.

When it comes to selling property — particularly luxury properties — growing brand awareness is an important goal. Prospective buyers need to know that your property exists and that it can provide the kind of lifestyle they’re looking for.

Measuring how well you’re doing at getting the word out about your brand and property/properties is critical to optimizing your marketing strategy. But measuring brand awareness can be tricky.

To help you quantify the results of your efforts, here are 4 metrics that indicate that you’re building brand awareness.

4 metrics to measure brand awareness

1) Social media reach

The reach of your social content has a direct impact on your brand awareness. As your social media reach grows, so does your potential brand audience.

SharedCount is a free online tool that allows you to track the number of times a piece of content has been shared on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. It’s an easy way to get basic information about your social reach, so you can spend less time tracking tweets and more time producing your content.

2) Brand mentions

There’s a great deal of value to be gained from monitoring discussions about your brand and properties online. Tracking brand mentions can lead to honest feedback and objective insight from potential buyers.

There are several options you can use to track brand mentions. We prefer the convenience of Google Alerts, which allows you to easily set up a custom alert.
Or Hootsuite can track brand mentions, as well as specific keywords and phrases, (like individual properties or neighborhoods) across all of your social media feeds.

3) Blog shares

By adding a share bar to your blog posts, you make it easy for readers to share your blog content on social networks, spreading awareness about your content and your properties through the amplifying effect of social media.

These share bars are easy to set up and even easier to monitor. By measuring your average number of shares per blog, you can track what content your users are drawn to and what pieces fall flat.

4) Search volume

One of the main sources of traffic for most websites is through simple searches. If people are searching for your company or properties, that’s a pretty solid indication that they are aware of your brand.

Using online tools, such as Google AdWords or Moz, you can track the searches for your listings, blogs, social media platforms, and any other variation that you find useful. These tools are free, easy to use, and perfect for determining if your brand is popping up when potential buyers are searching.

How do you measure brand awareness?

Related posts:

• 10 Quick Ways to Grow Brand Awareness
• Social Media Trends for 2018 Real Estate Marketers Need to Know
• Social Media Can Be a Strategic Weapon in Real Estate Marketing

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How to Use Guest Posting as Part of Your Content Strategy

by Elizabeth Hines | Oct 9, 2018 | Blog, Content Marketing, Real Estate Marketing | 0 comments

Guest posting can help you build your reputation as a thought leader, grow your online reader base, improve your SEO, and expose your content to new audiences.  

At Fronetics Real Estate, we use guest posting as a part of our own — and many of our clients’ — content strategies. Essentially, we partner with a relevant influencer or company, and swap content to post on each other’s blogs. It can be a really effective way to reach new, relevant audiences and provide interesting perspectives and voices to keep your core audience engaged.   

What’s so great about guest posting?

Guest posting has all kinds of benefits. If you’ve identified a list of relevant influencers and companies with similar (and ideally wider) audiences, every time you post as a guest, your content and properties are exposed to a whole new segment of your target audience. We talk about this all the time when it comes to content marketing — your biggest asset isn’t your properties, it’s your expertise. Guest posting helps you establish your brand as a thought leader. 

In addition to posting with real estate industry influencers and peer brands, guest posting for larger publications can be hugely beneficial, for obvious reasons. Not only are you introducing your brand and content to a broad audience, you’re associating yourself with an established authoritative source. 

By the same token, having other brands author guest posts on your own blog is a great idea as well. When key influencers write for your blog, they bring their audience directly to you, allowing you to tap into a new and relevant set of prospects. Not only that, by inviting peers to contribute to your content, you’re forging and strengthening relationships within the industry. 

Guest posting is great for SEO 

Here’s a fact that’s often overlooked: Guest posting can significantly improve your search engine rankings (We’re always talking about how to improve your SEO.). Search engines use backlinks from other websites, particularly popular ones, as part of their algorithm for how search results are ranked. According to online business expert Sarah Peterson, in a guest article for the Huffington Post, “you can use the opportunity of your guest post to include 1-2 backlinks to strong pieces of content you want to rank for.” 

Grow your email list 

We all know that email marketing is hugely effective and profitable, if your email list is strong, and effectively segmented. Another often overlooked benefit of guest posting is that it has the potential to strengthen and enrich your email marketing efforts.  

Because you’re being exposed to new audiences, both as a guest blogger and when guests write for your blog, you have the opportunity to target and cultivate new leads from relevant sources. Use guest posts as an opportunity to usher prospects to lead generation campaigns on your own website. Says Peterson, “if you’re not using this marketing strategy, you could be leaving a ton of email subscribers on the table.” 

Involve your readers 

As with any blogging efforts, you won’t get much bang for your buck if you simply author a guest article and do nothing to promote it. “You have to promote the article on your social media and through your own blog,” writes Tyler Zey of Easy Agent Pro. It’s also a good idea to solicit and reply to reader comments on your guest piece. 

Are you a real estate professional who has authored a guest blog? Have you invited others to write for your own blog? Tell us about your experiences in the comments! 

Related posts:

• 10 Quick Ways to Grow Brand Awareness
• 4 Types of Content You Need to Sell Real Estate (Besides Listings)
• A Visual Guide to Social Media Posting Frequency for Real Estate

 

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6 Marketing Tasks Real Estate Marketers Can Outsource

by Elizabeth Hines | Sep 26, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Real Estate Marketing | 0 comments

Outsourcing doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Consider parsing off these marketing tasks based on internal resources and expertise.

Everyone needs a little help sometimes. That’s particularly true when it comes to real estate marketing. Real estate companies often find themselves stagnating in their marketing efforts as a result of having insufficient time, resources, and creative input to devote to marketing programs.

Outsourcing marketing allows you to focus on insourcing your core competencies, while delegating specialized tasks to external experts. And it’s important to note that you don’t have to outsource ALL of your marketing. Choosing several areas beyond your staff’s expertise or that are particularly time-consuming can help you improve your marketing efforts and take stress off an overworked internal marketing team.

So, here are 6 areas where you might consider outsourcing.

6 real estate marketing tasks to outsource

1) Website development and design

Sure, you could build a perfectly functional website from a template, or have your colleague’s techy niece put something together while interning with your company over summer break from college. But this is one area we feel strongly is best left to the pros.

A sleek, modern website that’s easy to navigate makes a big statement about your property. Potential buyers and tenants will visit property websites while researching and making purchasing decisions. The experiences they have while browsing contribute to their overall perception of the places. Imagine how poor site organization, outdated functionality, or technical problems reflects on your brand.

In addition to creating a well-functioning site, the right developer/designer brings niche specializations to the table as well, such as usability engineering, search engine optimization, and more. Capitalizing on a professional’s knowledge in these areas can make a big difference in web traffic, visitor engagement, and, ultimately, lead generation and increased revenue.

2) Social media management

Social media management sounds like it would be easy and fun. But if this task has ever fallen on your plate, you know the exact opposite is true. It can be one of the most time-consuming, frustrating tasks your business faces — and that’s before you realize you have to keep up with all the latest trends and platforms to be effective.

Outsourcing social media management to a knowledgeable partner can free up hours of your day and improve your social engagement and reach. These firms know what works and what doesn’t because they’re active every day on multiple platforms managing accounts for multiple clients.

And it’s not just posting every now and then. A good social media partner will craft and publish original content, but they’ll also curate great content from relevant sources. Outsourcing these tasks to the pros helps build a strong following and brand awareness for your company and properties.

3) Content creation

Blog posts, emails, case studies, white papers, ebooks, webinars, marketing collateral, newsletters — how much content is your staff responsible for creating on a weekly, even daily, basis? Is it the kind of informed, quality material you’re proud of?

Content creation is one of the easiest marketing tasks to outsource. It will immediately give your staff back hours into their days. And the right outsource partner will produce high-quality, SEO-optimized content that will drive traffic, generate buzz, and persuade buyers.

4) Videography, photography, and imagery

Video is the hottest content format right now. And it’s a huge opportunity for real estate marketers to show off properties to potential buyers across the globe. But shooting a professional-looking video or taking top-quality photographs of spaces is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive.

There are many firms and individuals that specialize in videography, and you’d be surprised how affordable and quick they can be. Or, some content creation partners also do video or can find a third-party videographer and manage the process for you.

A good content creation partner might also expand offerings to include photography, drone photography, and any other visual creative assets that might showcase your properties to prospective buyers or tenants.

5) Graphic design

This is one area where you really can’t fake it. Professional designers are worth their weight in gold, particularly when you need a professional document or graphic in a crunch. They can turn your documents into beautiful, easy-to-read brochures, or make dry, technical data into eye-catching infographics. You may be savvy with Word templates, but they’ve got nothing on the pro designers.

6) Strategy and execution

Did you know you can leave marketing strategy to the experts? The right partner will work closely with you to develop a strategy that closely aligns with your business and marketing goals. They can even execute the strategy for you, as well, and then provide you with regular updates on how it’s working. This kind of results-driven approach will ensure you’re stretching your marketing dollars to the fullest extent and getting the kind of results that will grow your bottom line.

Related posts:

• Good Real Estate Marketing Gets Personal

• Social Media Can Be a Strategic Weapon in Real Estate Marketing

• 6 Signs It’s Time to Consider Outsourcing Your Real Estate Marketing

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Our Services

by Kate Lee | Oct 30, 2014

Our Services We help developers, marketing firms, and property management companies modernize their real estate marketing. In short, we can manage everything from strategy development to execution — or whichever pieces you need off your plate so that you can focus on...

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6 Simple Tools for Creating Animated Real Estate Marketing Videos

by Katie Russell | Feb 12, 2019 | Blog, Content Marketing, Real Estate Marketing | 0 comments

When it comes to real estate marketing, video is not just the future — it’s now. These 6 tools will give you a leg up on creating animated images, GIFs, and videos that will elevate your marketing presence.

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Highlights:

• Savvy real estate marketers are making video a central part of their strategy.
• Animated videos can be surprisingly easy and affordable to create, with the right tools.
• These are our 6 favorite tools for creating GIFs, animated images, and videos

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We’ve written a lot about video marketing as a trend that isn’t going anywhere and how it’s a natural fit for real estate marketers. It can be one of the best and most cost-effective ways to grow your social media audience and generate leads. And the numbers are backing us up — research from Social Media Examiner has shown that nearly two-thirds (63%) of marketers use video content in their social media marketing.

Savvy real estate marketers are jumping on the video bandwagon, but the process can still be intimidating. Creating an animated image, GIF, or video can sound impossibly difficult —particularly if you’re over the age of 15! But in reality, there are plenty of tools that make creating these items not only simple but cost effective as well.

Here are our 6 favorite tools for creating animated real estate marketing videos.

1)     WhatFix

This free tool is incredibly handy for creating animated flows, such as how-to videos (“How to search for your first apartment,” for example). WhatFix allows you to create easy flows showing the steps your audience should take. All you need is WhatFix’s extension for Firefox or Chrome to build widgets that you can imbed on your website or send “live” to your audience. The website will guide you through the simple process of creating a flow.

2)     Gyazo

When it comes to creating GIFs, this free tool will make it as simple as it gets. Technically, Gyazo is a screen-capture tool, which now lets you capture and save GIFs and videos. The platform is straight forward, and while it doesn’t necessarily have advanced tools, it’s ideal for taking a screen capture from a video and turning it into an eye-catching GIF.

3)     Make a GIF

Make a GIF is a more extensive tool than Gyazo, which allows you to choose from multiple options to create your GIF. It lets you use screenshots, YouTube videos, uploaded videos, or pre-made GIFs. It has the added benefit of being a free image hosting site, which means that once you’ve created your GIF, you can link directly to it from the website’s gallery. Make a GIF is free, and lets you create an account to store your creations, or request that they be deleted any time.

4)     PowToon

For $59 a month (or $19 a month if you buy for at least a year), PowToon lets you create animated video and presentations, and export them to YouTube. All you have to do is “pick a look you like” from one of five animation themes. Then you can put together characters, objects, layouts, backgrounds, and anything else you need to tell your story.

5)     VideoScribe

VideoScribe offers a free trial, and pricing ranging from $29 a month to a one-time purchase of $665. This tool specializes in whiteboard videos, giving you the potential to create clean, engaging video animations. It’s not a web tool, but a downloadable software, that you can even take offline if you purchase the Pro plan.

6)     Moovly

For $24.92 a month (though it does offer a free trial period), Moovly is a “drag, drop, and animate” tool that lets you create quick animated real estate marketing videos in your web browser. It can create explainer videos, whiteboard animations, advertisements, and more. Not only that, it gives you 750,000 free video clips to work from.

Creating videos is one of the best ways out there to boost your real estate marketing game. These 6 tools go a long way towards making the process affordable and easy. If you try one, let us know in the comments how it turned out!

Related posts:

• 3 Ways to Boost Your Real Estate Marketing with Video
• How Inbound Marketing for Real Estate Works to Improve Sales
• 4 Real Estate Marketing Trends 2018