Getting the Most From Your Advertising in a Challenging Marketplace

(Note from Dave: This is the outline of a presentation I was invited to give to a number of realtors, at a seminar sponsored by Friendly Mortgage, here in Philadelphia...)

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Advertising real estate in a down market reveals a set of contradictions which make the job of a marketing professional doubly challenging. At the same time that there are fewer interested buyers for your properties, there are often restrictions placed on marketing budgets, owing to shortages in cash flow. In a recession, marketers are asked to work harder, often with lower budgets.

With those concerns in mind, we usually advise our clients to step back and do some “big picture” auditing of their product and brand. Get them back to basics.

We begin by asking the question, “How much of our slow sales are due to the economy, weaknesses in our product or brand, or shortcomings in our advertising strategy?” A thorough audit addressing all aspects of your product and marketing strategy often yields results which can bring a clearer marketing message, with fewer financial outlays. We’ll talk about the economy later; for now let’s address the latter two topics...

Analyze Your Brand’s Strength

Back in the heady years of 2004 and 2005, real estate inventory was flying off the shelf. On top of the availability of easy money and a speculative spirit, Center City real estate was impacted by a genuine demographic shift which had more and more suburbanites taking a renewed interest in downtown living. Product at this time sold easily, owing almost exclusively to market conditions.

In a more challenging real estate sales environment, only superior product draws the smaller pool of buyers to your doorstep. In this climate, marketers and developers must ask themselves, “Is my real estate distinctly branded and does this brand have a unique voice in the marketplace?” Specific points to assess include:

• What are the real advantages my property has in the marketplace? Is it location? Price? Features and amenities?
• Is my brand making empty promises? Beware of the hollow, overly adjectivized copy that most real estate advertising uses. You should be especially mindful of tossing around words like “luxury” and “exclusive” unless you’re sure your product walks the walk. We’re not always sure what luxury is in the new construction real estate market, but sheet goods, Formica and wall-to-wall carpeting don’t qualify.
• Are these distinct selling virtues expressed in thematically consistent ways in all your advertising, i.e., does your brand speak in a consistent voice?
• Have you acknowledged the value of “lifestyle marketing” in your advertising, i.e., does your advertising tell a consistent narrative of the benefits of your product, rather than just listing a matrix of features? Concentrate on creating the image of a lifestyle which is greater than the sum of a list of features.

If, after analyzing your product, you determine there is a lack of distinction in the product itself, this needs to be corrected in one of two ways. Either the product itself needs changing or pricing needs to give...

Analyze the State of Your Marketing and Advertising

One good thing a recession does is that it forces you to reconsider spending decisions you’ve probably taken for granted for years. As part of the “wholistic audit” I earlier alluded to, we ask our clients to make a list of all their marketing expenditures. By figuring out how you’re spending your current marketing, you might think of cheaper, nearly-as-effective alternatives...

Below are some customary “big ticket” items developers spend money on, with some suggestions for increasing ROI and decreasing overall cost...

Print Advertising. Probably still the most expensive advertising developers do (unless they’re doing broadcast or radio,) print advertising is essential but pricey. Only you can know how well your print is performing but there are things you can do to either enhance the value of your print ads or validate their worth. Constantly scrutinizing for the basics is one way to do a quick “audit” on your print ads. Is there a call to action? Is it clear and obvious where the project is located? Is a central “value proposition” communicated in the ad? Finally, is there a lifestyle narrative or message? Finally, are you developing messaging which speaks to the unique circumstances (increased choices and lower pricing) which a recession presents?
Project Web Site. The central task of your project’s web site is to get the phone to ring and for prospects to make appointments to see your offering. As a sales tool, it has the unique ability to satisfy both the left and right brain goals of your advertising, namely, communicating specifics and details related to your project, as well as communicating -- through layout, photos and renderings, sound and animation -- the mood and lifestyle your project evokes. From a critical standpoint, the web site can be evaluated from the criteria offered earlier in my presentation. Over the long haul, your project’s web site is actually one of the least expensive of your marketing costs (exclusive of any search engine marketing you might undertake...)
Online Marketing and Communications. One thing we find our clients are increasingly interested in is leveraging the power of their web site and internet communications. Email blasts are inexpensive and can offer alternatives to a heavy reliance on print advertising. Develop a mailing list of every broker in the area in which your project is located. Hire us to design templates for you, so you can speak to this audience on a regular basis. Watch the value of your broker communications go up and your expenses go down.... Another tool our clients use increasingly is by using their web site or a special micro-site we design to augment your print advertising. Running a promotion in the paper this week? Direct your customers to a sub-page within your web site. That way, all traffic from the ad will be logged, giving you immediate feedback on your advertising return-on-investment...

Do Some Thinking About Economic Issues

We’re not financial guys, but we do have some thoughts about pricing and incentives strategies you might develop, in direct response to the overall sluggishness of the economy. Some of these are:

• Pricing. If your brand is all about luxury, be very careful about responding to market conditions by dropping pricing, and, if you do it, do it quietly. Part of the mystique of luxury brands is that they don’t go on sale. Besides compromising brand integrity, sales on luxury properties make buyers suspicious and cynical. “If the developer can cut his pricing 35% on this 2.5 million dollar condo, what does that say about the profits he was making prior to his sale?”

• Try upgrades over price reductions. Nobody likes to know their neighbor just paid twenty percent less than they did for the same condo. Rather than taking money right off the top of a new construction sale, try sweetening the deal with more amenities or incentivized financing.

The Franklin Institute, De-Institutionalized

Love it or hate it, The Franklin Institute has a new public face, even a new (shorter name): The Franklin. Founded in 1824, the Philadelphia science museum has been a popular tourist attraction, despite its on-again-off-again reputation as a dusty and dated destination for reluctant field-trippers. Hoping to attract larger audiences and improve its public appearance, the museum has booked blockbuster traveling exhibits, including the recent King Tut, Titanic and Body Worlds exhibits, which in my opinion are more spectacle than science.

The re-branding of the museum underlies the shift in The Franklin's public programming. What was once a dated and dusty science museum is now a major touring venue of glitzy 'edutainment.' Removing "Institute" from its name, The Franklin now positions itself as a contemporary, hip, and accessible attraction. Karen Heller of the Philadelphia Inquirer considers this shift to be a "dumbing down of science," which I think is a harsh judgment. Having worked for years at a competing museum in the Philadelphia area, I think their intentions are admirable; it's difficult to convince hundreds of people to take a risk, especially when everyone in the room is a PhD expert of something.

The execution of the rebranding, however, is a bit disappointing. Swayed by viral marketing trends (read: "cheap," in the non-profit world), The Franklin chose to spread the word about its facelift via Flash mobs bearing signs that say "curious?" accompanied by a cryptic URL. The URL, is pure fluff: random video clips with no explanation, all positioned beneath The Franklin's logo. I'm all for non-traditional advertising and innovating methods of communication, but only if there's some actual substance being conveyed. Go to http://www.curioustf.org/ and judge for yourself.

The lesson to be learned here is that content is key. You've got their attention now, but what do you do with it?

Sure, start a blog, put your company on Facebook, post low-budget videos on YouTube, but do it with a clear intention, not simpy for novelty's sake. Say something (something relevant), give your audience a reason to come back, initiate an dialogue with your audience. Don't do it just because everyone else, and don't do it because your competitor ISN'T. Do it because you have something to say that is said best via non-traditional methods.

Pumping Up Housing Hysteria in the Press

I’m sometimes not sympathetic when homebuilders complain to the press that they unfair press coverage, but consider this:

Yesterday, MSNBC ran a story that new home sales were down 2.6 percent in the month of June. Today’s front page headline story about housing is entitled “Still slumping: New-home Sales Drop Again.” If you actually read that article, you’ll discover that the figures quoted yesterday were actually revised significantly downward, from 2.6% to .6%! Yet, still the article depicts an environment of gloom and doom. Finally, if you read the last paragraph of the article, they break the figures down by geography and, lo and behold, the Northeast actually experienced a 5.3% new sales increase. (Good news for those of us in Philadelphia...)

It just goes to show that trusting national news outlets to gain a snapshot of regional real estate markets is risky business…

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25848138/

More Thoughts on Online Marketing

(I've been reading alot about online marketing strategies lately. Turns out it is really complicated stuff! I can say that with authority because, after all, I'm an industry professional...)

Seriously, though. We've been advising our clients for quite some time that getting noticed on the web takes a trifle more than hiring us to design a site for you and calling it a day. Bearing this in mind here is (yet another) two item list of important dos and don'ts fer gettin' yourself noticed on the web.

1. Don't ask us to design a web site for you all in Flash and then, months later, ask us to optimize it for SEO.

This seems like a simple one for folks in the industry, but the scenario has recurred so many times in our client histories that we can't seem to mention it often enough. Many times we're asked to design a site for a project where a real-world example that the client likes is referenced. Often that site is a beautifully executed Flash web site with soundtracks, animation, video, etc. At this point, we usually sit down with our clients and explain that the site they're in love with was entirely authored in Flash. Flash is a web authoring application which can create visually lavish work but which, historically, has not allowed the site to index well on Google's search engines. (All this, however, is changing, as Google recently announced that it has started to index Flash content. See this post...)

Now -- don't get me wrong -- we LOVE Flash in our office. Most of our sexiest sites were designed in Flash. However, they do have their drawbacks from an SEO perspective. Despite our best efforts at apprising our clients of these drawbacks, though, it has happened three times in the last year that we've been asked, after the fact, to offer SEO advice on web sites we've designed entirely in Flash. If SEO is a principal concern of a client's, then that client is probably best to stay away from an all-Flash web site.

So, again, before you hire us to design your site, think about what your SEO goals might be for the site, not just now but several months from now....

2. Do understand that designing a site is only the first step in getting noticed online. And SEO is great, too, but it's only part of an online web presence strategy...

I've talked about this in previous posts, but again, these are such critical issues for our clients these days, that I'll harp on a few issues again. First, let me begin by saying that we believe in SEO at Splat Productions. And, although we leave hardcore SEO services to the experts we partner with, we do offer an "SEO Pre-Flight" package for all our web clients, which ensures that your site has been prepared, submitted and cataloged according to Google's protocol for webmasters. (Ask us about this and we'll tell you more...)

Having said all this, though, we think SEO is only part of the solution to getting your site noticed on the web. As mentioned in previous posts, site owners really need to be thinking of a comprehensive marketing strategy, in order to increase the chances of more (and better) prospects getting to their site. Remember, the ultimate goal is to push people to your site from as many places as possible. So, then, besides hiring an SEO guy, web clients should also consider the following:

• Increase traffic through reciprocal linking. Suppose you have a document transcription service for lawyers. And suppose you use a courier service to pick those documents up from your clients. Get that professional associate to link to your site from theirs and you do the same for them. Got a business blog? The blogosphere is built on the concept of reciprocal linking. Just look along the lefthand side of this or many other blogs.
• Develop an opt-in email list and blast to it. Regularly. Direct marketing on the web isn't so different from print. Developing an electronic mailing list and reaching out to your customers and prospects with well-written news and promotions is a surefire way to increase hits to your site.
• Make a video and post it on YouTube. Get a MySpace page. Social networking sites like MySpace offer cheap ways to publicize your business without spending much cashola. As always, though, content is king. People won't talk about your business if you don't have something interesting to say...
• Do some cheap PR. Or hire a pro to do PR for you... Did you know that there are PR services which businesses can employ to distribute web-based press releases really inexpensively? We've written a couple in-house and, whenever we do it, we see our site traffic go up. Pricing for online press release distribution is quite reasonable. We've used PrimeZone in the past...

So, there you have it: a short list of dos and don'ts for internet publicity hounds. I'm sure we'll be talking about these issues some more in future posts...

Our monthly sweepstakes is paying big bucks...

I'm not sure if all our Sitegeist readers have joined our mailing list but, in case you haven't, I urge you to check out www.splatworld.tv and sign up. Every month, we draw a new list member's name at random and give away a $75 gift certificate to Amazon. If you're not on our list already, now is the time to join us. Frankly, the odds have been pretty decent you'll win, as the promotion just began running a couple of months back and we haven't promoted it enough. June's winner, by the way, was Michelle Galindez, of the engineering firm Flack + Kurtz in New York. Congratulations, Michelle.

Another Architectural Illustration...

We're very proud of the architectural rendering we do for our clients at Splat Productions. A couple of months back, we added a very talented artist to our staff. Mike Johnson is completely self-taught as a visualization artist. When he first applied to work with us, his work was so stunning and his professional preparation so untraditional that we wondered whether he had actually produced some of the great work he showed us. Within days of interning for us, though, we came to realize that he's the real deal. Mike produced both the image above and the previously blogged skyscraper image.

You can see a larger sized version of this image here...

If you build it, they probably won’t come… (Unless you tell them about it...)

An interesting client meeting of a few weeks back got me thinking about the differences between web site design services, interactive strategy and the confusion both clients and firms have about where one stops and one begins.

This particular client is a web-based business start up. Their business model involves gathering timely information from around the world about issues relating to consumer products. This information is then distributed in articles and RSS feeds and is accompanied by a significant amount of original editorial content. The web site has a serious, but conversational “magazine” style format.

Several months into their venture, the client is faced with readership levels which were not as high as originally hoped for. As a result, they’re having difficulty attracting paid sponsors and advertisers. We sat down with the client to review the site and we both agreed that a few content and functionality tweaks should be made to the site. However, both parties also agreed that the site did have valuable content and its overall functionality made sense. In other words, the web site "works."

Why, then, was the site not attracting more visitors?

These days, the interactive marketing world is abuzz with “Web 2.0” tools. The idea behind Web 2.0 is that, if you build interactive features such as blogs or social networking components into your web site, the web site is more likely to grow organically. Blog entries will spawn page references on search engines. Word of mouth marketing will result from the social networking components. Your web site will be a fabulous success, without having to spend a dime on traditional advertising.

There are, however, factors at work here which don’t ensure the instant success. There are also fundamental shortcomings to this approach which can only be overcome by using some very un-Web 2.0 strategies.

Some of the shortcomings relate directly to content. Businesses these days are being talked into blogs by every marketing consultant on the block. However, Blogs take work. They really only succeed when the content is fresh and updated continually. It’s one thing to advise your clients to start a blog. But the rubber hits the road when that same client must muster the resources to maintain the dialogue which blogs necessarily begin.

The larger issues at work relate back to the design vs. strategy discussion I mentioned in the beginning of the post.

It used to be that, when a product was introduced to the consumer public, a raft of activities accompanied the roll out. PR consultants were retained to get press placement and generate press releases. Ad agencies were hired to create campaigns designed to introduce the product and its brand. In short, there was a coordinated effort intended to generate awareness of the new product and get people to buy.

The rise of the internet also gave rise to the myth that traditional strategies have no place in this web-driven world. Somehow or another, we’ve been duped into believing that a well-designed web site will draw its own audience. The world has changed. Build a good web site and the customers will come.

But, really, the internet hasn’t changed the fundamentals of advertising and PR much at all. Effective advertising and PR had always been about getting your message out to as many folks as possible and trying to get them to listen to it. When the web site (in our client’s case) is the product, that product still needs a launch. Old School methods like strategic PR, ad campaigns and direct (electronic, maybe) mail, still give a new product the necessary boosts it needs to generate an initial critical mass of users. Once this critical mass is reached, then all the other bells and whistles you’ve built into the web site – the blogs, the RSS feeds, the editorial content, etc – can help sustain the site and make it vibrant.

Sure, the methods we advertisers have to get the word out about our clients’ products do change. But the idea that anything about the internet has changed the essential need to publicize a new product or to do many of the same tasks advertisers and PR firms have been doing for decades is, well, silly…