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Showing posts from June, 2011

3 easy marketing tactics realtors could use to differentiate themselves

Right now I am in the process of wrapping up both buying and selling a house.  As most people who have gone through this process can attest, it’s not easy and you often feel pretty helpless.  For me, it was even harder as a new age marketer who can’t stop thinking about things like inbound strategies, calls to action, and real-time insights.   Here are three relatively simple things that realtors could do to make the process easier and more effective for themselves and their clients. Narrow the Calls to Action.   As marketers, we know that too many choices are a bad thing.  As are calls to action that don’t have a reason to act attached. Yet every day I walked outside of my front door to a “For Sale” sign with five calls to action and no reason to choose one or the other.  A phone number for my realtor.  A phone number and a web site for my realtor’s office.  A phone number for my realtor’s partner. And finally the URL for a dedicated website for my property.  Five calls to action fo

The Trouble with "Respondents"

One of my big pet peeves is when men and women who work within a company insist on using terms that de-humanize the people on the other end of the product or service they offer. I'm not saying that they use demeaning terms, but they choose words that make it okay to treat your best customers as abstract numbers or demographics. In the world of market research, the term most often applied to people like you and I who take surveys is "respondents." It's okay to give respondents a 30 minute questionnaire to complete. It's okay to ask respondents to go though numerous and repetitive choice sets. It's okay to speak to respondents in formal, stilted language. But would you do any of that to your college roommate? Your grandmother? Your child? Your neighbor? Probably not. In fact, most researchers cringe at the idea of even testing their own questionnaires. So before you put a new research study or product implementation or marketing campaign into the world