Quality Content Counts in Social Media Marketing
David Camp, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Real Estate Digital
When it comes to social media, nobody has the silver bullet, social media expert David Camp, Senior Vice President of Business Development for Real Estate Digital, told the Georgia Association of Business Brokers this week. Getting to the ready, willing and able client online is not easy.
But in a 45-minute presentation on May 26, Camp gave the state’s top business brokers a snapshot of social media strategies that work, social medial reality, market relevance, automation and how business people can focus on where you can win.
GABB is the state’s only professional association for brokers and others who help business owners buy and sell businesses and franchises.
Hear Camp’s entire presentation.
Marketing That Works David Camp
Camp says he constantly hears from clients who complain that their rate of return, their ROI, hasn’t been great marketing online, but with traditional newsletters, postcards, and a referral network. But he cautions against depending on any one strategy.
Activity online is significant. Within a minute, 204 million emails are sent, 277,000 users log on, and 639 GB of global IP data is transferred.
“Individuals are going online, and that’s not going away,” Camp said. Businesses must decide upon a strategy to reach the individuals or the companies they want to do business with, and the best place to leverage any one of these opportunities. For real estate agents, that’s Facebook, but even there, a tactic must be developed to avoid annoying online marketing that bombards users with the property of the day.
Commercial agents should consider Linked In to connect with investors who are looking for commercial properties.
“Someone has to understand your business to leverage opportunities online,” Camp said. Sometimes if you try to do too much, you may become ineffective at what you truly need to accomplish.
Assess all opportunities against audiences you are trying to reach, and understand their needs. “The strategy to best reach that audience may be online, it may be newsletter, it may be referral network,” Camp said.
The internet and all of its things has become a form of entertainment. In 2005, there were 3-5 million visits to U.S. real estate sites monthly, with roughly 450-500,000 transactions per month. In 2015, there were 94 million visits to real estate sites, but the number of transactions hasn’t changed. Most visits are by people who are checking out what is selling, and are “not really individuals who are ready, willing and able buyers.”
Think out of the box. So, how do you find the needle in the haystack, the individual who is ready to do business with you? Surprisingly, Camp said that may not be an online initiative. For example, few people communicate by letter or handwritten note, so his company’s sales team got some nice printed letterhead and wrote to one target every month. They got more ROI from handwritten letters than we have on $1,000 on other marketing strategies. Camp said.
Businesses also should focus on local content and expertise, becoming the local subject or market authority. Search engines constantly modify their algorithms to return results that they believe have the highest relevance to the consumer searching.
To do that requires information integrity, presenting information that is updated and relevant. Most online information is dated. Camp recommended honing in on developing content that is updated and consistent to the needs of your audience. “Content that is old, stale, never read, is not of any value to you and not of any value to your audience,” he said.
Millenials check out online reviews and like personal referrals. They “want to see that you have positive reviews that reflect that you deliver a service and a product that they can depend upon.”
“What defines you as relevant? What defines you as the expert? What defines you as a trusted brand?
Avoid “template” content. If you write one article and that is unique, keep it unique. Google considers template content as not unique content, that’s going to hurt SEO. Hire college kids to write 12 articles about your business and post one a month, Camp suggested. Invest in unique content.
Camp advised GABB members to set up separate personal and business pages on social media sites. He also suggested businesses check Google Places and claim their business sites, or risk having a competitor claim your business name.