by Mark Goren | Sep 10, 2020 | Blog, Small Business Marketing
We’ve pulled together our top four tips for realtors to ensure you have a successful, well-rounded online marketing strategy.
Why? Because the marketing landscape in real estate has changed dramatically in the past ten years or so. Door knocking and print advertisements aren’t quite a thing of the past, but as more and more people – your target demographic among them – move online, it’s important your marketing strategy does, too.
Top Marketing Tip for Realtors #1: A Landing Page
Nothing you do online matters if you don’t have a strong landing page. A landing page is a single webpage that opens when a person clicks a link that appears in your content. This content could be an ad, a social media platform, newsletter, or any other content part of your strategy.
Once they’ve shown interest in your services by clicking the link, the landing page should then clearly direct them to take further action:
- Schedule a viewing.
- Book an initial meeting with you.
- Sign up for your market insights.
- Or another act that you decide.
The landing page not only gives those interested a way to contact you but also allows you to collect email addresses. Doing so will enable you to contact them directly with targeted emails.
Top Marketing Tip for Realtors #2: A Solid Organic Social Media Strategy
Because of its visual nature, social media is one of the best performing marketing channels for realtors. Social media, as a whole, encompasses several platforms. You can choose one or two that you enjoy most to focus on and use to drive traffic to your landing page.
Why is it essential to enjoy the platforms you choose? Because social media relies heavily on personality and brand connection. That’s why it’s so important to show up consistently and build relationships with your audience. Only posting occasionally won’t do the trick.
Some tips for a successful organic social media strategy include:
● Optimizing your bio or profile can make it very clear who you work with and how you help them. For example, do you specialize in assisting people in purchasing investment properties? Or working with first-time homebuyers?
● Be consistent posting to your feed, appearing on Instagram Stories, sharing video to your youtube channel, or doing whatever it is you choose to focus on.
● Show up with purpose. Of course, you’ll want to share the homes you have for sale, but don’t forget to share value for those who may be planning for the future. Market Insights, buying and selling tips, and neighbourhood stories are all ideas that share value and build trust with your prospective clients.
● Use high-quality images. Whether you’re posting a single static post, a carousel (multiple images on one post), a 360 photo, or Instant Experiences (Facebook’s new ad format), it’s important your images are professional and draw in your audience.
Top Marketing Tip for Realtors #3: An Ads Strategy
Instead of posting organically to your feed, you can create an ad within Facebook that appears on Facebook and Instagram. In particular, Carousel Ads have a high click-through rate, and you can either target new audiences or retarget those who have been to your website before for much cheaper – pennies a day. To do this, you’ll need to add a Facebook Pixel to your website to track visitors.
You can also set up a Google AdWords strategy to improve your chances of appearing in search results when someone searches for specific keywords related to your niche.
Top Marketing Tip for Realtors #4: Optimize Your Google My Business Listing
Claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing will help you appear in more Google searches and drive more traffic to your website or landing page. A properly set-up listing makes it easier for future clients to call you, find your office, visit your website, and share your location with others.
10|20 Marketing can help you set up your Google My Business listing and make sure it’s working for you. We will ensure that people find your listing by making sure that your contact information is readily available. Our team can also help you with your review strategy or make sure there are valuable content and images that teach your audience about your business.
If you have questions about Google My Business or other aspects of your online marketing strategy, send us a message and let’s chat. We’re always happy to help.
by Mark Goren | Apr 3, 2020 | Blog, Small Business Marketing
It seems a little bit wrong to be writing about geofencing when nobody is supposed to be running around or going out. This being said, when we think about a post-coronavirus world, business owners are going to want to have every advantage working for them. And one of them can be having the ability to reach desired audiences easily, effectively and with measurable results.
What exactly is geofencing and what it can do for local businesses
Geofencing technology uses GPS or RFID technology to create a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a display ad when a mobile device enters or leaves a particular area. By setting up precise virtual fences around strategic locations (like your competitors or other locations where your ideal clients frequent) , business owners can benefit from building a custom audience and advertise their positioning, an offer or products directly to this audience. This allows for the elimination of many wasted impressions and dollars spent advertising to people that will never shop at their location.
How geofencing works
It’s actually quite cool. Refer to the infographic to get your bearings.
- Someone enters a targeted geofenced zone. (Competitors, a specific neighbourhood, etc..)
- Our technology identifies them as a potential prospect
- An algorithm targets the best profile people with your ads
- Technology tracks if they walk into your store within 30 days
So what is a “targeted geofenced zone”?
This could be many things depending on what your business is, who you cater to, your price point, where you’re located and other factors. Imagine you run a high-end restaurant, your targeted geofenced zones could include:
- Other restaurants in the same category as yours
- Restaurants that match your price point but don’t specialize in the same menu as you
- Stores and retailers that cater to the same clientele that match your ideal clientele
- Office buildings in your neighbourhood
What if you run a neighbourhood store? Well, your targeted geofenced zones may include:
- Other stores in your neighbourhood
- Office buildings in your neighbourhood
- Competitors near you
- Competitors outside of your neighbourhood
When you decide to move forward with a geofencing campaign, it’s important to map out your strategy beforehand so you can identify these zones in advance and develop ads that speak to the people you’re trying to reach.
Why is geofencing an excellent form of advertising to consider?
Geofencing campaigns are an excellent way to reach people and provide advertisers with concrete metrics they can’t get with other forms of advertising.
Print ads? Print is in decline and the metrics are imprecise. Billboards? How do you know for sure a precise number of people that are driving by and absorbing the ad on the board? Radio advertising? There is no precise way of knowing who is focussed on the ads or if the listener changes the station. TV spots? Again, channel surfing, DVR technology and on-demand content make it impossible to know exactly how big an audience you’re reaching.
With geofencing, you get the benefit of real metrics that prove a real return on investment. How so? When someone enters a target zone, they become tagged. This automatically creates a test group and a control group to be compared. One group will see the ad, while the other does not. But because both groups are tagged, it is known when an individual walks into your location whether they’ve seen the ad or not.
This gives you two conversion rates (with your location being the “conversion zone”). The first is the natural conversion rate, which is the percentage of the people who enter your location without seeing an ad. The second is the campaign conversion rate, which is the percentage of people who enter your location after being exposed to your ad. We can then compare the two rates and understand how the ads have impacted conversion. All these metrics are available to advertisers and they’re much more precise than the numbers you would get from the other forms of advertising mentioned earlier.
Calculating ROI
Building on this, the business owner can then work out exactly what the camping return on investment is. All they would need to know is the following:
- The number of people who enter their location because of the ad, which would be provided on a regular basis by the provider
- The percentage of people they’re able to convert to sale once they’re at the location
- The average sale in dollars
So your formula will look like this:
(Number of walk-ins * conversion rate) * average sale = ROI
Using an actual example, let say a very good restaurant converts 90% of everyone who enters the shop to a sale and the average sale is $130. That formula would be:
(50 * 90%)* $130 = $5,850
In a typical campaign, the business owner would pay about $100 for about 10,000 impressions. In the example above with real numbers, that business owner is paying for 50K impressions, so his real return is $5,850 – $500 = $5,350. Not bad for a monthly campaign.
Where to go from here
10|20 Marketing is now running geofencing campaigns. This kind of advertising is an excellent companion to our Local Listings Management package as they are both measurable from a foot traffic generation perspective. When the time is right, if you would like more information about our process, successes and other opportunities, just reach out for a free small business marketing consultation.
In the meanwhile, you may be interested in two posts we’ve written about getting through this health crisis:
In addition, we’ve recently launched a series to spotlight hard-working business owners we know. If you’d like to be featured, please email mark@10-twenty.com with the subject line: “Spotlight Series Request” and we’ll be happy to accommodate you.
by Mark Goren | Mar 18, 2020 | Blog, Small Business Support
Saying times are weird right now might be the understatement of 2020, but it really is new, uncharted waters out there thanks to the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19. A lot of cities – and some entire countries – are on some form of lock-down, and while that might seem scary, it’s a pro-active measure to keep as many people safe as possible.
But while we’re doing our best social distancing, there are still local shops and businesses that are open, even if it’s at a reduced capacity. The Canadian economy as a whole has and will definitely take a hit, but it’s the independently-owned local businesses and their staff who are struggling the most. Many of the gyms, yoga studios, bars, restaurants, and wellness centres (like spas or massage therapy clinics) have all but shut their doors indefinitely.
10 Ways to Continue to Support Local Businesses Today
Fortunately, there are still ways to practice social distancing and support local businesses. Here are our top 10:
-
Order Take-Out or Delivery
Many restaurants, bars, and cafes have had to close their dining sections, but are still open for take-out or delivery options. Using an app to order and pay ahead of time can help minimize risks even more by eliminating the need for money to exchange hands.
-
Purchase a Gift Card
Birthdays, holidays, and special occasions will still happen this year. Why not order that gift card for that special someone now? Many shops are set-up to allow the purchase of gift cards online, so there’s no need to leave home.
-
Book in Advance
Though not mandated to close (yet), many spas, clinics, and treatment centres are experiencing cancellations left, right, and centre. If you cancel an appointment, why not reschedule it for next month? If you don’t have one booked, go ahead and treat yourself to a service – many online booking calendars are still open and taking bookings after we get through the next few weeks.
-
Order Artwork
What better time than now to order that painting you’ve been wanting for the living room wall? Many local artists have paintings, sculptures, or other pieces available for purchase, or take commissions. Reach out to your favourite local artist to see if they have what you’ve been looking for.
-
Sign-up for Online Classes
Many gyms, yoga studios, and fitness centers are offering live-streamed workouts you can do at home. If there is a paid option available and you have the means, opting for this service versus a free video can make all the difference in helping them keep their doors open.
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Purchase Services Still Being Offered
Online service-based businesses are often still operating Business as Usual! Take advantage of the services they offer now while you have some downtime. If you’ve been wanting to learn more about a topic, now’s a great opportunity to go ahead and sign-up for that online course!
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Leave Google and Facebook Reviews
Today’s consumer puts a lot of weight into online reviews from previous customers when deciding whether or not to make a purchase. If you’ve visited or purchased from a local business and were happy with the service, leave them a review! It really does go a long way to support local businesses.
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Buy Groceries from Local Shops
One of the few things we’re leaving home for is to stock up on groceries. Instead of buying from chain stores, consider heading to a small mom + pop shop if there is one in your neighbourhood.
-
Do Your Birthday Shopping Now
Many product-based businesses offer online shopping already! Why not spend some time browsing through their online stores and check off all of the birthdays you have coming up in the next few months. If you’re really ambitious, you could even get your Christmas shopping started!
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Share on Social Media
When you’re scrolling through Instagram or Facebook later, hit that Like button and share their posts. It’s a small act that builds awareness about your favourite local shops, and will help everything return to a sense of normalcy when this all passes.
What are some of your favourite ways to support local businesses? Is there a tip we missed? Share it with us in the comments! And in the meantime, stay safe and healthy out there, friends! And salute small businesses in your own way too!
by Mark Goren | May 23, 2019 | Blog, Case Study, Listings Management, Online Reviews
One of our clients is a relatively new custom jewellery wholesaler with a family tradition of over 70 years behind it. They were referred to 10|20 Marketing by another one of our clients – they wanted help with organizing and optimizing their existing Google My Business listing and getting on other online directories. Though the reputation of the owners was well known in the community, the new business name and location were not.
The following is a Local Listing Case Study about a jewellery business that shows how adding posts and online reviews to your Google My Business listing can have a significant impact on the number of times Google presents your listing in search results. With more views comes more website visits and other purchase intent-based actions.
BACKGROUND
Maison Goldberg Bijouterie has worked with 10|20 Marketing since November 2018. When we first met, the client explained that their website was changing, notably with the addition of an e-commerce platform. Also, they were starting to establish a following on Instagram and Facebook, but relying solely on organic growth.
After meeting with us, the client decided to move forward with three of our services:
SERVICES DESCRIPTIONS
Our local listings management offer helps clients own, organize and optimize their listing on Google My Business and the web’s other most relevant directories, such as Facebook, Yelp, Bing, Foursquare and Apple Maps. We make sure that all the information in these listings is consistent from one directory to the next by monitoring them for changes from directory users. The more consistency you build across the web, the more Google rewards your business with views of your listing.
Review marketing helps clients monitor their online reviews and respond to them from a single platform. Also, our clients can send email or SMS invitations to their clients, asking them for Google reviews. The best reviews can then act as marketing content, sent automatically from our platform to the client’s Facebook or Twitter account as a post or tweet. Google appreciates these authentic reviews and will again reward businesses with more views as new reviews come in. Gaining new positive reviews also helps businesses solidify their credibility with people searching for what they offer.
To understand Google My Business posts, you’ll have to think of a Google My Business listing as a social media channel. As part of your listing, you’re able to add business updates or product descriptions with photos and links. Google My Business posts are powerful because they allow you to add more written content to your listing. The more content, the more terms you feed into Google to index for your listing. For Maison Goldberg Bijouterie, we post content at least twice a week.
RESULTS
Maison Goldberg Bijouterie’s goal is to build awareness of their business, establish credibility and build online sales. After accessing data from the Google My Business platform, we have a year’s worth of data from before the client started working with us and five months of data since being placed on our Local Listings Management and Review Marketing platforms.
Here are the monthly averages for views and action clicks, as well as the total number of reviews before subscribing to our service and after:
|
Before
|
After |
Difference |
% Increase |
| GMB Views Per Month |
871
|
1,917
|
+1,047
|
+120%
|
| GMB Actions Per Month |
26
|
65
|
+39
|
+150%
|
| GMB Reviews |
2 |
17 |
+15 |
+750%
|
While these numbers are impressive to us, our client is even happier.
“We’re thrilled with the way we’ve been able to increase the visibility of our business with the help of 10|20 Marketing,” says Keely Goldberg, owner of Maison Goldberg Bijouterie. “More specifically, though, we’ve listened to their advice on how to approach building a deeper bank of reviews on our Google listing and we’ve received authentic reviews from our clients about their experience working with us – all in a very short time. This helps us establish immediate credibility with people who are looking for our services and helps us create more business.”
The proof is in the charts as well. Have a look at the 18 months of data we’ve collected.
We believe that this is the beginning of the first new plateau, as we discussed in our optometry case study. Also, by helping the client generate reviews, they’ve been able to maintain a stellar 4.9 average rating on Google. This is a reflection of their excellent personalized service and their ability to drive the right reviewers to their profile. While we can’t help with the former, we do help with the latter!
MOVING FORWARD
We monitor metrics on an ongoing basis to help our clients understand the impact of our optimizations on their Google My Business listing. In the coming months, we will continue to collect and trend the client’s metrics, digging out insights and suggestions to continue to improve their results. Of course, we’ll work with the client to generate more reviews, post new content to their Google My Business listing and continue to build consistency with their listings.
We’ll leave the last word to our client. “10|20 Marketing has helped us understand and utilize all the tools that Google has to offer,” says Keely. “Our business wouldn’t be where it is today without their help.”
Thank you, Keely! We’ll update this case study in the fall to see where these metrics stand.
10|20 Marketing Case Studies
We invite you to read our other case studies to learn how our services have brought tangible value to other clients in different industries.
Get educated on local!
Take advantage of our advice, tips and handy how-to content to help your business get noticed online. Visit our blog today to see what’s new!
by Mark Goren | May 16, 2019 | Blog, Case Study, Listings Management
One of our clients is a very well rated pizza restaurant located in mid-town Montreal. Reviewers have often cited that their pizza is the best in town, with one reviewer even claiming that it’s the best pizza in Canada. Like every restaurant owner, though, our client is always looking for ways to increase the number of orders that come in. They want their phone to ring more, online orders to increase and they can never have enough walk-in clients.
The following is a Local Listing Case Study about a pizza restaurant that showcases how getting your local listings organized, consistent and error-free can help increase your sales through Google My Business.
BACKGROUND
10|20 Marketing has been working with Pizza Prima since May 2018. When we first met the owners, they explained how they really see an increase in orders when they send out flyers. We shared the benefits of optimizing their Google My Business listing and, for $100 per month, they decided to try our service.
For the 12 months prior to working with us, their Google My Business account delivered monthly averages of:
- 160 calls;
- 138 clicks for directions;
- 264 website visits.
We set out to increase those numbers. And we have – big time!
OPTIMIZING GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
When a client chooses to work with us, we collect all of their pertinent business information, including their address, phone number, business hours, business description, photos, links to their online properties and more. We then syndicate this information across the 15 to 35 most important online directories. This extends their web presence and creates consistency across the web that’s difficult and time-consuming to maintain manually.
The best part? Google rewards this consistency and, as a result, places more value on the information you’ve given to them. While we have clients who opt-in for services to further optimize their listing, Pizza Prima does not. They wanted to see how our starter package would impact their sales.
RESULTS
Fast forward 12 months and we now have a full year’s worth of data to evaluate. We can definitively say that there’s been a real increase in the number of action clicks on the restaurant’s listing. What’s an action click? That’s the total when adding up all the clicks on the call, directions and website buttons from within a Google My Business listing.
Here are the monthly averages on these action clicks before subscribing to our service and after:
|
Before
|
After |
Difference |
% Increase |
| Calls per month |
160
|
235
|
+75
|
+47%
|
| Directions per month |
138
|
207
|
+69
|
+50%
|
|
Website clicks per month
|
264 |
330 |
+66 |
+25%
|
CALCULATING RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Now here’s where the increase in action clicks becomes really interesting. When Pizza Prima assigns a value to these improved metrics, it’s easier to understand what they’re getting for their $100 monthly fee. This means answering two questions:
- How does each of these different actions convert to an order?
- What is the average value of a sale?
First, let’s look at how each of these actions converts to a sale:
| Metric |
Increase
|
Conversation Rate
|
New Sales Created
|
| Calls |
+75
|
90%
|
67.5
|
| Directions |
+69
|
90%
|
62.1
|
| Website clicks |
+66
|
20%
|
13.2
|
|
|
TOTAL
|
142.8
|
Adding up the “Sales Created” totals, we see that Pizza Prima is getting about 143 new orders a month. That’s almost 5 more orders a day than they were getting before working with 10|20 Marketing.
While our client told us what his average sale is, we’re not at liberty to disclose it. A quick Google search suggests that a fair industry average is $20 per order. The results are tangible:
143 new orders per month * $20 average value of an order = $2,860
From the optimization of their Google My Business listings, Pizza Prima has generated approximately $3K in new business a month. Put another way, that’s about $36,000 a year.
For a small business with one location, that is a significant difference.
MOVING FORWARD
Pizza Prima has nowhere to go but up. What can they do next to further optimize their Google My Business listing? So many things:
If they choose to move forward with any of these ideas, with or without the help of 10|20 Marketing, they’ll bring more attention to their Google My Business listing. And with the increase in views will come an increase in the total number of actions generated. So, more phone calls, website visits and map clicks. The math is easy from there.
CONCLUSION
10|20 Marketing was able to help Pizza Prima increase their sales by about $3,000 per month. Without any further optimizations, building consistency and cleaning up errors in their most basic business information across the web has increased Google’s trust in the restaurant’s Google My Business listing. As a result, Google has presented this listing in search more often, which helps Pizza Prima get more calls, clicks and walk-in visits.
Today, we continue to monitor this client’s listings through our local listings management platform, and we provide monthly reporting to the client so the impact is transparent. This ensures that the consistency they’ve built across 15 directories is maintained, which in turn helps Google continue to trust the information we’ve provided to them. We expect that new plateaus will be hit in the coming months, furthering the benefit for our client.
10|20 Marketing Case Studies
We invite you to read our other case studies to learn how our services have brought tangible value to other clients in different industries.
Get educated on local!
Take advantage of our advice, tips and handy how-to content to help your business get noticed online. Visit our blog today to see what’s new!
