Importance Of A Web Presence For Investors ~ MD Internet Marketing Solutions

Importance Of A Web Presence For Investors

For Real Estate Investors the internet is a great tool in getting new leads for motivated sellers as well as buyers for your properties. If you haven’t already tapped into this source for buyers, sellers as well as finding individuals as private money lenders, you are really missing the boat.

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Many of the top investors in Real Estate agree with us. After all, our parent company, R.R.E. Inc is a real estate investment firm and the internet is the ONLY place they use to harvest sellers and buyers. Another top investor that agrees is Scott Yancey, who has a TV show on A&E. Now whether you buy into all the hoopla in the show or not, he does make some great points about the use of the internet on a post he made in the Huffington Post:

Real Estate Investment Marketing 3.0

The Internet has changed so much in the business world. Just ask some travel agents, if you can find one. Whether you think the Web has helped or hurt your business or the company you work for, it definitely is doing something.

Nowhere is this more visible than in marketing and sales. Whole business models have developed around helping people and small business to market in today’s high tech and mobile world. Real estate investors for the most part are small businesses, individuals buying rental homes, or multi-family units. It’s a great business with many benefits that all come to us at out kitchen table without office and staff overhead.

It doesn’t matter which strategy niche you work in; wholesaling, fix & flip, or long term rental investing. They all will only grow and be highly profitable unless you market and advertise. The great news in today’s high tech world is that you can reach millions of people without spending a dime if you want to.

The Internet dies allow you to achieve worldwide reach, but real estate is local, so you have another consideration when marketing and advertising online. Knowing how to better target your audience and reach the best prospects will deliver the best results. You’re advertising for:

• Distressed or motivated sellers.
• Buyers to add to your buyer list.
• Others working in real estate related industries who can send you business.

I’m going to share some of the most effective and least expensive (mostly free) ways for the average real estate investor to attract buyer and seller leads using online solutions.

A Website

This one is totally up to you, as you may not want to write the content that will make it work best. Going to WordPress.com, you can set up a totally free site that’s easy to use and post articles a lot like using a word processor. You can get a domain name and point it to the site and link to it in the other marketing I’ll talk about here. If you don’t want to do this, you can still effectively market using other things I’ll talk about here. Continue Reading Scott’s Article Here…

Scott covers some of our favorite tools to use online in his article, but left out one that we absolutely love – Video.

At the very least, you must have a website, and your website should be doing a few things for you. Your website is pretty much where it all starts. However, if you don’t have the money for a website and getting it properly optimized to rank in the search engines, then Video, Twitter, Craigslist might be easier on your budget to get you started.

Brian Kline wrote on realtybiznews.com about what your website should be doing to grow your Real Estate Investment Business:

Your Real Estate Investment Business Online Presence

If you are in the real estate investment business, you must have a strong internet presence. If you don’t have a website, you will not succeed as a real estate investor. If you don’t have a strong presence, you will not go to the head of the class.

Here is some of what your website needs to be doing for you:

Promoting your business to create credibility
Automating your ability to gather quality leads
Using an opt-in form to increase your contacts
Marketing your own properties
Attracting more money partners to finance your deals
Advertising for renters

Image Credit

Here are a few compelling facts to back this up. When buyers begin looking for a home, 87% begin their search online. In comparison, only 47% look at newspaper real estate ads. That’s less than half of your potential audience.

As a result of online searches, 77% drive by a home to look at it and 63% walk through a home only after first viewing it online. If you’re not online, the vast majority of the traffic is passing you by.

Unfortunately, there are no statistics about motivated sellers but I think the statistics speak for themselves when it comes to the importance of having a strong online presence for everyone in the real estate investment business.

With every investor and realtor online, the real question you should be asking yourself is how are you going to pull in highly targeted traffic? It’s not easy but let me show you two of the most important things you can do to improve the results.

First, you need to search engine optimize (SEO) your site down to the locality that you serve. If you invest both locally and nationally, you should have two distinct websites attracting two different targeted groups of visitors. Finish Reading Brian’s Story Here…

Brian does a great job of explaining what your site should be doing for you as an investor.

One thing that we would also advise is that you have separate websites for buyers and sellers. Our parent company also does this. We find that this helps sellers trust you more when you only target them and have only information on your site that pertains to how you and your company can help them in selling their house and helping them with their problem.

When you combine your website with all of the social media platforms that are out there, you also help reinforce your brand. Brand is important because it does help reinforce who your business is as well as lends credibiltiy to your company as well. Too may people have been jerked around by other investors and have horror stories, so the more places they can find you online the better. Branding will also help you rank in the search engines as well.

Is your brand ready for 2016? Tom Silva wrote a post about this on rejournals.com that you can get some good information from:

Is your brand ready for 2016? The three signs that it might not be

My top three

Over the course of my career, I have consulted with firms that encompass every facet of real estate — from developers to construction firms to architects to brokerage multinationals. As I have analyzed their brands, looked at their competitors and talked to their clients to link their enterprise goals to their brand messaging, I keep seeing a number of the same mistakes. For this article, I’ve distilled them to my top-three signs that your real estate brand isn’t ready for 2016.

Not Being a Thought Leader

In an age when CRE services are commodities being offered by multinational, regional and local players, one of the only ways to pry yourself apart from the competition is by rewarding people who visit your website, social media channels or who read your collateral with truly meaningful content. The best way to do this is by distributing market reports, white papers or even reprints of news article that offer readers cogent information about the market.

According to Bruce Rogers, Forbes’ Chief Insights Officer, one of the foremost authorities in the field, and author of Profitable Brilliance: How Professional Services Firms Become Thought Leaders, “Being a recognized authority in your area of expertise is increasingly essential if you want to get attention.”

The large multinational firms like CBRE and JLL have invested millions in data capture that power their quarterly market reports. But today, local firms can procure data from third-party sources and create much more in-depth studies that reveal their deep knowledge of a narrow submarket. In my brand practice, we’ve helped clients author studies about specific product categories like logistics or build-to-suits and even launched a podcast series of interviews with industry experts. It is a minimal investment and yet always generates enormous goodwill, trust and stature within your industry segment.

Strategist Daniel Rasmus, writing in Fast Company, describes it this way: “Thought leadership should intrigue, challenge, and inspire even people already familiar with a company. It should help start a relationship where none exists, and it should enhance existing relationships.”

While good content is critical to this (you have a contract with the audience with every thought leadership piece not to waste their time and, even more importantly, not to try to sell them), how you disseminate that content is equally important. “The distribution of information is usually just as important as producing cutting-edge knowledge,” explains Rogers.

The large brokerage firms do a nice job of releasing their findings first to industry trades and business publications and then offering it as a value-added to clients by emailing them a pdf. The report is then posted to their website and SEO-optimized so that it shows up in web searches. We advise going further and eblasting your audience a link to your thought leadership pieces, driving them through social media and even producing 60-second videos that summate the major findings as a teaser to the full publication. All incredibly inexpensive and utterly effective.

Unresponsive design

We’ve all had the experience of clicking on a website on our iPhone and being greeted with text and pictures that are microscopic. So we turn the screen and expand the font in order to read it. But in doing so, we lose all the navigation, so we don’t know where we are without continually shrinking, panning and scrolling the screen. This is deeply frustrating to visitors and, worse, signals to them that you are antiquated in terms of technology.

So what’s the answer? Get responsive. Responsive web design simply means that your site automatically responds to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation (all accomplished through a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries). As you move from iPhone to iPad to your office, the website knows to adjust its content to fit the window. But it’s not just technical; it also needs concise copywriting, a vertical stacked design, and an economy in the user experience that avoids too many moves. This is no longer a nice luxury upgrade; it should be a standard feature of your website given that mobile traffic is now more than half of total Internet traffic, so much so that Google now boosts the ratings of sites that are mobile friendly. Continue Reading The Article here…

We really like that Tom touched on your website being Responsive as well as the importance of using video later on in the article.

Mobile Friendly Website

We also want to add that if your website is not responsive or “Mobile Friendly”, your website will not rank as well in the Mobile searches. How do we know that? Google came out with and made public about the Mobile Friendly update in April of 2015 and said just that, not Mobile Friendly, your mobile search rankings won’t be as high.

Think that’s not important? Well it is. Over half of all searches are now done on Mobile Devices!

So if you still think your RE Investment business doesn’t need a presence on the web, then more than likely your competition is doing more deals than you.

We love it for motivated sellers. With post cards, yellow letters and other forms of advertising for motivated sellers, you have to hope that you are getting in front of the seller at the right time. With the internet and being ranked in the search engines, you are there when they turn to the internet to find a buyer for their property and help them with their problem.

If you want to improve your web presence with SEO for your Real Estate Investment business, click here to learn more about how we can help!