| Rambo/Xena
Warfare in Your City; Ubiquity or Not to Be?
By Bill Koelzer
View the web as a war between online agents. You’d
better fast, or you’ll lose your share of the ever-increasing eyeballs of thousands
more buyers daily who hunt both homes and agents online.
You need to get G.I.-tough. To develop a Rambo- or Xena-esque
"killer instinct" in your online marketing. Your goal, then, is to crush your
Realtor® competitors in the big city (or several small cities) that you serve.
How do you do that? Simple. You win by spotting your troops
where there’s "high ground." High ground is where you can best shoot down
your competitors and, happily, where consumers can see YOU best. You need to capture and
keep ALL the high ground on the web that’s RELATED TO YOUR LOCAL CITY. Why?
Because people hunt for homes and agents "by city." Always!
Forget search engine prominence for now. Paid vendors can get
you THAT. But as portal sites grow, thousands more consumers today just lazily click on
some portal link called "Find a Home (by city)" or "Find an Agent (by
city)," And why not? It’s far easier than cranking up some search engine and
typing in a bunch of suspect key words.
Note: (Portal sites are big "entry" sites having
links to the most popular web topics. They include sites like Netscape.com,
Mindspring.com, Msn.com, Excite.com, Infoseek.com, etc.),
Now, at last, here’s where the weird word
"Ubiquity" in the above headline comes in. Webster’s says it’s "the
state, fact or capacity of being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time;
omnipresence.
Want to know where you should start dominating? Just start
clicking on those portal links that say "Find a Home," or "Find an
Agent" and see where they lead to. Wherever they lead is where YOU want to be.
Most such links go to either Realtor.com, Homeseekers.com,
CyberHomes.com, HomeAdvisor, iown.com, etc. And THERE is where you should buy an ENHANCED
presence. In fact, ubiquity dictates that you get an enhanced presence in EVERY
major MLS search site that lets people find agents BY CITY. While you’re at it, note
in each one how many of the "enemy’s troops" are ALREADY there before you.
But you can STILL conquer them.
For around $1,000 you can buy enhancements in ALL the major
MLS search sites. With IRED.com thrown in, too. Most agents won’t. But doing so puts
YOU on the "highest ground" of the battlefield; enjoying tremendous geographical
advantage over your less warfare-savvy (web savvy?) enemies.
After setting yourself up on the other end of portal links,
the NEXT battleground to dominate is your local community’s single, or several, sites
that sport distinct Realtor® sections (Most do). Go see how many enemy troops got there
before you. THEY got the higher ground in that case. But here’s how you can STILL
dominate.
If they bought a mere text link, you buy an ENHANCED (more
visible or topmost) link. If THEY already did that, then YOU buy a MORE visible tile
(graphic) ad; and if they did THAT, YOU buy a banner (bigger graphic ad); and if they did
THAT, YOU buy an AMIMATED, or even BIGGER banner, or banners in TWO places in that site.
You get the point. See, it’s all about grabbing higher ground so that YOU appear not
only prominent, but ubiquitous as well.
When online consumers see YOU EVERYWHERE that they look, in
checking out their relocation city (YOUR city), who will they suspect is the most powerful
Realtor® to help them wage THEIR upcoming battle to get the best possible property price?
Yegads! What about all the cost? Forget that. Web ads are
incredibly cheap for the value they give you of being right in the very FACE of thousands
of monthly relocating buyers (and CMA-hunting sellers). Online buyers, for example, will
ALWAYS check out a city online long before moving there. And what do YOU
care about price anyway? You’re likely buying local newspaper ads annually by the
score. Sadly, they appear only ONE day---then disappear. Conversely, a WEB ad (notice the
higher ground here, again?) in your city web site stays put for years for just dollars a
month.
Over time, which ads zero in on ("zero in on"---I
love these war metaphors) the consumer market the best?
There’s more ways to conquer competing online Realtors®
in your city, but that’s yet another column. Doing what I suggest here, however, is
more than what 99.7% of all Realtors® have done so far. Thus if YOU seize this high
ground FIRST, you ARE the online Rambo or Warrior Princess in YOUR city.
June 16, 1999
© 1999, William Koelzer
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