by threshold | Oct 16, 2022 | Design, Digital Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
Angel Roa
Now more than ever, people are accessing the internet through their mobile devices and tablets. Long gone are the days of desktop-only users! According to StatCounter, a web traffic analysis website, a whopping 59.25% of global online traffic came from mobile users alone, followed by 38.53% desktop users, and just 2.22% tablet users.
This displays the importance of where we must start our design, and where we should be focusing our efforts in making an effective and dynamic real estate website that drives leads. Designing mobile first, and then expanding to a desktop friendly site, is the most user-centric and accommodating to most target audiences.
What is mobile first design?
A philosophy which aims to create better user experiences by starting the design process with prioritizing the smallest screens first. This strategy is often referred to as the concept of progressive advancement. Once a mobile design is in place, designing for larger screens becomes easier and we have the core elements of the design established. Starting a design with mobile also enforces aspects such as bandwidth, screen size, and multitasking capabilities. As you progress onto larger devices, it’s easier to expand the functionality with supplemental elements and features. Remember: it’s always easier to add than to take away!
We’ve put together a few design principles to get us started in our mobile first design stage.
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Users should be at the forefront of your design
- The design of your real estate website must help users solve a problem or complete a task quickly and effectively. Users should easily be able to view floor plans, virtual tours, check availability, call or contact your community, and ultimately, apply and sign a lease. Keep in mind user flow – convenience is key to generating more leads!
- Look at your competitors’ mobile websites and check out what they do and don’t offer. How can you improve your user’s experience compared to your competitors? Maybe it’s adding a floor plan filter to make it easier for prospects to find exactly what they’re looking for. Or maybe you notice that a competitor doesn’t have virtual tours on the website. As crazy as it may sound, over 80% of renters apply and secure a lease without ever visiting the property, thanks to online marketing. Adding virtual tours to your website can increase website engagement and provide a convenient option for people who prefer to tour virtually as opposed to in-person.
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Keep it simple
- Improve content clarity on your mobile site while helping the user focus on what content is most important. This can be done by reducing links in your navigation menu, reducing the number of pages, and keeping borders wide and lines clean.
- Use white space to your advantage to make the layout less cluttered and more readable, which will also improve your SEO and increase organic traffic.
- Prioritize the content you want displayed on the website: Ex: Floor plans, Location, Gallery, Amenities, Blog, etc.
- Prioritize the hierarchy of that content. Understand what the user flow is and how to display the most important content. For example, we recommend prioritizing floor plans because data confirms that people spend the most time looking at floor plans on the website, and it’s usually the first stop after visiting the homepage.
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Incorporate bold and consistent CTAs
- A call-to-action needs to be easily located by users throughout your website. Not doing so can lead to a loss of leads and decreased conversions.
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Adhere to mobile friendly practices
- Choose fonts that are web safe and keep font styles to a minimum.
- Select contrasting colors and make text legible according to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
In Conclusion
Now that you know what a mobile-first design is and its importance moving forward, we hope you will incorporate this new knowledge into your real estate website to generate more leads. By remembering to put users at the forefront of your website design, improving content clarity, and incorporating consistent CTAs, maximizing your lead generation should be a walk in the park.
For more tips and information about digital and real estate marketing, take a look at the rest of our blogs, right here on our website! You can also subscribe to our email newsletter, or follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter!
by threshold | Sep 19, 2022 | Digital Marketing, Thought Leadership
 Ava Page
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It’s no secret that real estate has become a predominantly online industry in recent years. The convenience and accessibility of online listings, tours, applications, and leases is unmatched. In knowing all of this, why not take your real estate marketing to the next level by taking advantage of the holy grail of online marketing that is social media?
Before we get too ahead of ourselves, it’s significant to point out that based on a recent PEW Institute research study, over ⅓ of US adults get their daily news from social media platforms, with Facebook again taking the lead. No matter your opinions on this fact, it’s no secret that with the majority of people using 1 or more social media platforms daily – and with over 30% of people getting their daily news from social media platforms – you could reach a significantly higher audience in your marketing campaign by taking advantage of social media.
By creating a strong social media presence, you will soon be capitalizing on an audience that you would otherwise be missing out on. It’s also worth noting that the use of social media grows rapidly each and every year, so the sooner you can get started on your campaign, the better.
First, let’s take a look at the top social media platforms of 2022 based on active monthly users.
As you can see, Facebook has the heaviest active user platform with nearly 3 billion active monthly users worldwide. Youtube and Instagram are both close behind, each with over 2 billion monthly active users, and TikTok is the final platform which reaches over 1 billion active users each month. It is worth noting, however, that even though LinkedIn has a smaller reach – about 750 million active users per month – it is still a great business-based platform to take advantage of when tackling real estate digital marketing strategies, especially in the corporate marketing world.
Now that you have a better idea at which platforms are the best options to use, let’s now look at some of the top corporate social media accounts across multiple platforms to analyze what makes them so successful in their marketing campaigns and how you can replicate their success for your real estate marketing campaigns.
Nike
With over 150 million Instagram followers, Nike is getting our top spot for this list. The main reason that Nike has been able to reach so many people across platforms is because they inspire people. Whether it be through their inspirational stories of athletes around the world, their support for causes like BLM and women’s equality, or even just their interaction with users surrounding their new products, Nike has cracked the code on corporate social media branding.
Starbucks
Starbucks’ corporate social media accounts are wildly successful across multiple platforms due to their positive outlook exemplified in each and every post, their support of important social causes, and their inclusive content campaigns. It’s not uncommon to see Starbucks reply to dozens of users each day, and that’s because their interactions with users makes them feel more connected to the brand. Knowing that there are real people behind the screen who truly want to connect with their users is a great tool to implement in your real estate digital marketing campaign.
Shopify
Shopify has mastered the importance of being able to target every entrepreneur in search of a service like their own. They appeal to their target audiences by using bright, colorful, and inspiring designs for their posts. Additionally, they often voice their support for important social and environmental causes, showing that they too are standing up for the things that their consumers believe in, and will benefit from.
Square
Square’s social media campaign is simple: clients first. While they have different campaign focuses for each social media platform, each of their campaigns offer modern, clean, and user-focused content that expresses how much their clients mean to them. After all, where would a business be without their clients? Another reason the brand remains so popular is as a result of their outspokenness on important social issues.
GoPro
Not only does GoPro highlight a range of adventures from users of their products, but they also follow a similar pattern to aforementioned Square, in the fact that they will focus each platform to a certain campaign, rather than mimic the same content across multiple platforms. Their company Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube all highlight different areas of their services, while always following the same content pattern and brand voice.
So, a few key takeaways from this list:
- Keep content positive
- Bright colors and clean, modern designs are IN
- Show your support for important social and environmental issues
- Don’t be afraid to shift your focus across multiple platforms
- Discover your brand voice and be consistent
Now that we’ve covered the most popular platforms and keys to success, let’s shift our focus to specific tools that you can use to get your campaign started, or improve on what you’ve already got.
Set goals for your business
A rule of thumb for setting goals for yourself or your business’ real estate digital marketing campaign is to follow the SMART plan, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Based goals. While goals are important, it’s even more important to decipher the difference between an achievable goal, and an unachievable goal. Setting goals that are unachievable will not result in any growth for your brand. In fact, it will more than likely result in a regression of your brand’s campaign success.
Keeping your goal specific can prevent your goal from becoming too broad, which can cause harder measurability. Measurability means being able to see an actual figure, whether it is a growth in active users, engagement, clicks, you name it – just make sure there is a specific, measurable figure to be obtained. Attainable and realistic often come hand in hand, as there is rarely a realistic goal to be had that is unattainable. For example: if your current social media accounts have under 1,000 followers, it’s unrealistic to create a goal of reaching 500,000 active users by the end of the month. However, through trend and insight data, you can gather your current growth data and discover a number that is more realistic for your brand.
Finally, time-based is one of the most important milestones in this goal setting process. If there is no end date in sight, how will you know when you have reached your goals? If it takes 5 years to reach a small goal that could have been completed in 6 months, what are you gaining? Similarly, don’t pinch yourself into an unrealistic time frame of a project that needs 1 year to hit its target, but try to push it all to get done in 6 months. Now, will there be times that you hit goals early? Absolutely. Will there be goals that maybe take a few extra days, weeks, months to complete? Definitely. Yet, knowing that you have a goal in place that is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based are going to result in the most growth, and target goals for your brand.
Here are some great places to start with creating new goals for social media growth:
- Increase your brand awareness: if no one knows who you are, how do you expect to push your brand’s information?
- Grow your audience: how many people do you want to reach? What is a realistic time frame and measurement to track this?
- Boost your engagement: respond to followers, answer inquiries, and increase your posts.
- Increase traffic: track your conversions, clicks, bounce rates, and other measurable data to see where you are most successful, and where you need to improve.
Research your target audience
First thing’s first, nail down the demographic you want to target the most with your campaigns. If you’re trying to appeal to millennials, you will have to use much different tactics than if you are working to appeal to boomers, and vice versa. Once you’ve got your demographic down, then you can move forward with your campaign.
Once you’ve reached your demographic, it’s important to research what platforms are going to be the most successful for your target audience.
- Gen Z and Millennials: Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube
- Boomers: Facebook
- Industry Specific: LinkedIn
- Women: Pinterest
- Men: Facebook
While this is not an end-all be-all list, it is a general outline to start with when determining your base’s highest used platforms to create the most effective content. The key to all of this is actually conducting this research. Every brand and every target audience is different, so if there’s anything you remember, it should be this: don’t assume anything.
Decide what metrics are most important to your brand
There is no one metric that is superior to all others when it comes to real estate digital marketing, and this is because all brands and marketing campaigns are different. What you must decide when creating your campaign is what metrics are the most important to the success of your brand.
Here are a few thought starters on what metrics could be right for you:
- Clicks across various sites and platforms
- Reach
- Traffic: both paid and organic
- Bounce rates
- Site and platform engagement
- Hashtag performance
Regardless of which metrics you find to be most important in your campaign, it is important to recognize it early on, and set SMART goals to continue enhancing your metrics over time. Stagnation, while not all bad, should not be your end goal, but rather a healthy growth increase over time. Remember what we said earlier: social media use continues to grow steadily every year, which means yours should too!
Content creation
Now that you’ve got a better idea of what goals should be in place for your brand’s social media and real estate digital marketing campaign, you can focus on the content theme you’d like to follow. Looking back at some of the top social media brands above, one of the most common themes across each brand were optimism, inspiration, and showing support for important social and environmental issues.
Once you discover your brand voice, you can begin to incorporate it into each of your social media posts across various platforms. Whether you decide to mirror your posts across all platforms like Starbucks or Nike, or take a similar approach to Square and GoPro and give each platform a specific purpose, you want to make sure all of your posts are consistent, cohesive, and aesthetically pleasing.
Starbucks
Starbucks loves to keep their focus piece front and center, and includes bright, colorful backgrounds that revolve around their themed drink or personal focus.
Nike
Nike allows their photos to speak for themselves, keeping a strong focus on the main element in their content, with a simple or blurred background so as not to distract from the content focus.
GoPro
GoPro is known for their adventurous spirit through their products, and they make sure to capitalize on it through their social media posts. Simple, straightforward images enhanced to keep up that bright aesthetic and maintain the centered focus of their content choices.
Establishing this cohesiveness expresses a level of professionalism and organization for your brand that social media users love to follow. No matter your brand’s aesthetic, be sure to get started on it early!
Moving on from appearances, it’s important to discuss what your content should actually contain. This goes hand in hand with our earlier portion about researching your target audience, and here’s why: your target audience is a “target” for a reason. There are certain things about your brand that are drawing them in, and the more you capitalize on those areas, the more successful your campaign will be. However, without researching what your target audience cares the most about, your campaign will flounder.
Hashtag research is one of the most important areas to nail down for real estate digital marketing, especially with a new or young social media campaign. Hashtags are one of the most effective ways to associate your brand with the topics that your target audience cares most about. Learn what your followers – and prospective followers – want to hear about, and capitalize on it. Inflict and HashTagsForLikes are two examples of tools you can use to expand on your hashtag research, and expand your social media reach all at once.
Engaging content should be the goal of any social media campaign, but what does that term really mean? For content to be engaging, it not only needs to be interesting and relevant to your audience, but it needs to give your audience the chance for some type of interaction. Whether it’s likes, clicks, tags, comments, or any other interaction, encouraging your audience to do more than just read your post is a great way to nudge them in the right direction, as well as expanding your reach.
This can be done through promotions, contests, hashtag campaigns, and even just asking questions through your posts, and giving them an opportunity to share their thoughts and ideas. Even if not all of your audience goes through with that extra engagement, it will cause them to think a little deeper about your brand, regardless – even if they don’t realize it.
Learn the best times to post for active engagement across different platforms. Some scheduling tools like Hootsuite will recommend you the most popular times for each platform on any given day when scheduling ahead, but it’s still worth researching for yourself to get that upper hand over your competitors. After all, what’s the point in posting at a time when half of your intended audience won’t see your message?
Never stop improving. We can all agree that just because something works, doesn’t mean it can’t be better. This must be your constant mindset when creating, updating, and maintaining a social media marketing campaign. Trends fade in and out nearly every day. The world changes every day. Even your own business can change its message at the drop of a hat. Always being prepared for any one of these scenarios is the key to maintaining a successful social media presence, and continuing to grow at a healthy rate.
Choose your content form
From platform to platform, there are certain content types that will always succeed. However, it is important to recognize a couple of specific content types that work best for certain social media platforms.
Stories
- Stories are a great time-sensitive method of posting that will inadvertently activate your followers’ FOMO complex, increasing your interaction and engagement. This is a great tool for adding in some personalized content, behind-the-scenes projects, and can be posted far more often than regular posts without feeling too overwhelming.
Best Platforms
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- Instagram
- Facebook
- Snapchat
Reels
- Short-form videos are quickly becoming the most popular method of social media marketing, and overall content posting. Getting ahead of the competition and stepping up your reel-game early is a great resource for setting yourself apart from competitors.
Best Platforms
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- Instagram
- TikTok
- Facebook
Remind your audience that you’re relatable
There is a time and place for corporate and business-based writing voice, but social media is not that place! Keeping things casual with your followers lets them know that you are real, relatable, and reachable.
Followers are 10x more likely to engage with a brand that they feel is personable, friendly, and relatable, so be sure and capitalize on that! Both regular posts and stories/reels are great ways to tackle this, and can boost your engagement, which is what we all want, right?
Be sure to ask questions, and include times and spaces to give your audience a chance at regular interaction. This can not only increase engagement, but can also result in your brand being featured on pages and platforms that it otherwise would not, and can increase traffic as well.
To conclude
Starting or improving your social media marketing campaigns doesn’t have to be scary or overwhelming, contrary to popular belief. In fact, you can even reach out to one of our awesome Threshold employees and see how we can grow your social media presence.
Remember, the place to start a new campaign is by creating a SMART goal for your brand and your real estate digital marketing campaign. How are you going to start yours? Let us know in the comments, or on our Threshold Instagram or Facebook page!
If you want to continue receiving this type of content, be sure and subscribe to our monthly email and newsletter!
by threshold | Aug 12, 2022 | Design, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
Anooj Francis
How does website development impact lead generation?
Did you know that in today’s digital age, over 90% of prospective renters and homeowners begin their search for a new home online? Miles before most people decide to contact a realtor, online searches are the most common way to discover available properties. How are these properties found so easily? Strong website design and development.
When building a real estate website, there are two significant aspects to consider: your customers and search engines. When prospective customers search for properties, you need a well-optimized website to show up on Google or other search engines. Though, you can’t just leave it at that; you also need a well-designed and user-friendly website so customers can find their desired future home quickly and efficiently.
Additionally, websites are able to do the work when humans are not. Unlike landlords, property managers, and real estate agents, websites don’t have office hours. A prospective renter or homeowner could visit your website at any time, of any day, of any week. Let’s not forget, websites allow you the chance to brand your company as well as your properties. First impressions can be tough, but when it comes to having a well-developed website, the first impression of your property will always be a positive one.
Don’t forget, your website is a way for you to not only showcase your real estate properties but also your organization. Include a section that can showcase all of your accomplishments, and show why you and your properties should be chosen over the competition. Any awards, client testimonials, and other ways to (tastefully) brag on your success is a great way to subtly set you aside from the crowd.
Why is optimized web design important during website development?
Nearly 80% of prospective renters will sign a lease without ever visiting the property. You read that right – without visiting the property. What makes them so sure about making such a commitment? Having all of the information they need right at their fingertips. High resolution photos, videos, and offering virtual tours are more often than not the deciding factors for prospective renters when it comes to committing to a lease. None of this could be done, however, without an optimized website design.
When we talk about optimized site design, we’re referring to the design process that is used during development which allows the site access to prime optimization for search engines such as Google and Bing. It also covers the on-page SEO best practices designers and developers must follow when building websites.
Think about it: how can you expect to generate leads online without a website strong enough to rank on the first page of the SERP (search engine results page)?
Any traffic to your website that is not the result of paid advertising is referred to as organic traffic. These are customers who landed on your site after performing a Google search based on its suggested results. Referencing an article from Smart Insights, the top ranked search result receives nearly 40% of all organic traffic clicks, followed by the second result at only 18.4% – less than half of what the first listed website receives. The third search result? Only 10% of clicks.
Ask yourself: when you’re conducting your own Google search, where do you start?
Because there are an astronomical amount of real estate websites out there to choose from, the challenge for many website owners and developers alike is finding a balance between user-friendly and SEO-friendly websites. Many organizations have independent teams for web development and digital marketing, which – while often formed with good intentions – can sometimes further complicate matters if not handled properly.
While the goal of the digital marketing team is to ensure the site has enough content for Google to rank it effectively for user search queries, the development team focuses on keeping the visual and user aspects of the site as simple as can be. Collaboration is only possible in companies that know the importance of digital marketing even before the site is designed. At companies like Threshold, the marketing team and the development team work hand in hand to give valid inputs to be considered at the time of creation.
How does Threshold Agency develop well-optimized websites?
If someone is searching for a specific floor plan in your area, how can you ensure that your listing will populate first in the Google search results? There are a few ways we can help with that. At Threshold, we know high-intent organic traffic is more valuable than any other traffic form, which is why we develop highly optimized websites to increase search engine rankings leading to more high-quality leads.
During the discovery phase, the marketing and creative teams ensure that we are creating websites that work well and are easy for visitors to navigate so they can find the information they’re looking for.
The designers will then take that information and design the website based on the ideas evolved from the discovery phase. Included in this second phase, a writer from our creative team will develop the website copy, which focuses on the target audience and a high-intent, high-quality organic keyword strategy.
Once completed with the second phase of development, the designers pass on their design to the developers. In this stage, the developers ensure everything the designers envisioned is working effectively with the site’s optimization so as not to cross the search engine boundaries.
To give you more of a focus, here are a few areas that our developers make sure to optimize during the early stages of development that impact the final rankings of a website in a search engine.
Website Speed
One of the most critical factors of Google page ranking is website speed, simply due to the fact that no one likes a website that takes an extended period of time to load. Anything past a couple of seconds and most users will bounce to a new site. To help decrease load time, our developers optimize the file sizes (images, videos, scripts), only use trusted plugins, and use an advanced caching system from the host site.
Mobile Responsive Design
Based on an article from CNBC, in the next three years, 3/4 of the world will use mobile devices to access the internet. A responsive website ensures your target audience has a seamless experience whether they are browsing your site from a computer or mobile device. This also helps to boost your search engine ranking, seeing as Google promotes mobile-friendly websites above those that are only desktop friendly. With 3/4 of the world moving to only using mobile devices, can you blame them?
As the website is created, run data scans and collect metrics through each phase of the development process. This allows for any changes to the website’s design or coding to remain monitored.
Sitemaps
Even though search engine bots are brilliant, it’s a good idea for us to point them in the right direction, and we do this through sitemaps. Sitemaps include all of the indexable web pages and links on a website. If we have a sitemap declared in the robots.txt, the search engine bots will first crawl through those pages. Simply said, if search engines are not finding your pages, this means means that organic traffic won’t find your pages. And as we said earlier, organic traffic is the most important traffic you want reaching your website.
Accessibility
While getting customers to the website is the main focus of an optimized site, many forget that the website needs to be accessible by everyone. At Threshold, we use Google Tools and User Way to ensure the website meets all the accessibility standards. This means your site is easily ready and accessible for people with physical and situational disabilities, as well as socioeconomic restrictions on bandwidth and website speed.
Indexable Content
Nowadays, in the web industry, we say content is king. Search engines use more AI technologies to crawl through the entire content of websites. If it can’t be crawled, it is not an SEO-friendly site. It means the likelihood of that page appearing in the search engine results is very low. At Threshold, creative writers write content for the targeted audience, and developers use the WordPress editor to apply the content where the content is in HTML and is easily indexable by search engines like Google.
The key to creating a well-optimized site is to bridge the gap between web development and search engine optimization. The collaboration between various teams from the start ensures that your website is fully optimized for SEO and usability. Providing value for customers is the key to impressing search engines. Where there is high-quality content, strong on-page SEO and excellent user experience, you will improve your presence on the internet and increase qualified leads.
In Conclusion
As the need for strong digital marketing in real estate increases seemingly by the day, so does the need for having a well-developed website. Today, real estate website optimization is so much more than metrics on a chart, it translates directly into potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of new leads.
So, ask yourself: are you confident in your real estate website?
by threshold | Jul 15, 2022 | Creative, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Thought Leadership
Mai Mongelous
We often think of a brand as just a logo and the name of a business. However, while a name and a logo are important visual elements for brand recognition and customer loyalty, it only scratches the surface of what branding can really involve. A brand strategy must be integrated in all aspects of marketing and development in order to create brand awareness, and to stand out from competitors.
The following are the 3 main brand components that are essential to address when building out your brand, and what types of strategies can be put in place to further develop these components.
A Strong Brand Identity
Create a meaningful visual identity: This consists of your overall brand image including logo, brand colors, website, and any other visual marketing materials. It represents the “look and feel” of your brand. This is the visual representation of what your clients will remember.
Consider your colors carefully – different colors have different meanings, and the colors you choose can speak to a specific target audience, resulting in various psychological impacts. As an example, many fast-food restaurants use red and yellow, because that combination of colors is thought to stimulate the appetite. Once chosen, ensure that you use consistency throughout all materials. (Always use the same typefaces, colors, brand patterns, etc.)
Questions to consider:
- Is this unique enough to stand out from competitors?
- Is it just a current trend, or will the design be timeless?
- What is the meaning of the logo (icon, font, color)?
- How will this resonate with the target audience?
Identify your mission: What is the business goal, and how does it reflect who you are?
Establish a Unique Value Proposition (UVP): This is a statement of how you will benefit your customers, how you will meet their needs, and why your offer is unique.
Increase your brand recognition: Think about different marketing methods such as building on different platforms and creating content that is optimized for SEO. Be sure to consistently add and improve upon new, fresh content under your brand guideline.
A Strong Brand Image
A brand image is similar to your brand identity. The key difference is, rather than how you want your brand to be perceived, your brand image is how your brand is actually perceived. Your brand image is like the reputation you have with the public.
Ways to build and maintain a positive brand image:
Establish a consistent social presence: Use social media platforms to engage with your customers, and keep them up to date on the latest news and product launches or programs. Engagement on a personal level can lead to increased overall customer service satisfaction.
Create innovative and high quality content: Content helps increase brand awareness by bringing in more web traffic while building your brand authority. You will become a trustworthy source of information, which will result in improving your reputation and increase brand trust.
A Strong Brand Culture + Brand Personality
Brand culture refers to your company’s core values and what you do everyday to live by those values. To establish a strong brand culture, consider the following:
- Define your values: What exactly are those values?
- Spread awareness of your values: Let your clients know what they are by promoting them
- Ensure that your company is always reflecting those values (Always practice what you preach!)
In order to have a strong brand culture, your brand personality is an important factor in connecting with your audience on an emotional level as well as making your brand relatable to your customers.
In order to keep a consistent brand personality, consider these questions:
- Learn who your audience is exactly; what is their age and location?
- Be consistent in your tone; is it playful and bold, or mature and sophisticated?
To wrap up, a strong brand requires a strong brand identity, a strong brand image, and a strong brand culture and personality. By implementing these in your brand strategy, it will increase loyalty, trust, and awareness, and your brand will always continue to grow. In real estate, it is crucial to building a brand that will differentiate you from your competitors.
So the question is – how will you create a strong and impactful brand?
by threshold | Jun 27, 2022 | Digital Marketing, Marketing, Tech/Web, Thought Leadership
For some, real estate marketing can feel like a shot in the dark; throwing money at separate tactics, crossing your fingers, and praying to whatever deity you believe in that people see your ads and there will be a line of a thousand future tenants at your leasing office’s doorstep the next morning.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. A Business intelligence (BI) tool leverages technology to allow your team to collect, prepare, visualize, analyze, and present your performance data across all marketing channels. These insights help inform several types of business decisions, allows you to optimize your budget in the most efficient way possible, and improves marketing processes and outcomes.
So why should your business invest in a BI tool? Let’s go over the main benefits a little more in detail:
Identify trends and recognize opportunities
With a BI tool, you have the ability to splice, drill down and analyze large amounts of data at the few clicks of a button. This gives you full visibility into your marketing campaigns as well as allows you to derive external insights such as current events and the economy that may be affecting performance.
With regular analysis of both campaign performance and external factors, your team essentially creates a self-optimizing feedback loop that continually improves your campaigns over time.
Determine how to allocate spend
It’s hard to know how to allocate marketing spend when your current view of your data is limited by factors such as time, metrics, attribution, or visualization features that prohibit you from extracting valuable insights. When using BI for marketing, you can assess which tactics drove leads—both in quality and quantity—and which tactics didn’t.
When you assess which strategies were effective and which weren’t, you can optimize your investment by shifting your budget towards the most effective methods and away from those that underperformed.
Understand your audience
As you begin to collect more data and create more robust dashboards and reports, you will begin to get to really know the types of future tenants to go after with your marketing efforts. Using BI, you can begin to understand your audience’s demographic characteristics, their interests, the technologies and platforms they use, and so much more.
This will give you a better idea of what messaging and imagery to incorporate into your ads that will resonate with your target audience.
Improve internal efficiencies
Not only can you use business intelligence to make your marketing spend more efficient, but you can also use it to detect inefficiencies within your internal processes. Project management tools often provide limited insights into how your company is spending its time and what it’s spending it on. Once you pipe the data from your project management tool into your BI dashboard or report, you will be able to extract custom insights around inefficiencies within your internal processes. As you uncover and address more of these insights, your marketing processes will become more efficient, improving your overall return on marketing investment (ROMI).
An advantage over competitors
There’s a good chance that some of your competitors are already leveraging business intelligence to identify and target the same potential tenants that you are. Investing in BI will not only level the playing field but potentially surpass them as well as any competitors who haven’t yet made that investment.
Revenue growth
Ultimately, leveraging a BI tool helps you drive revenue and reach your leasing goals faster. As you make better decisions and continually improve your processes, you’ll see improved results from your marketing.
Now that you understand the benefits, it’s time to go out and implement your tool of choice. Looker, Tableau, PowerBI, and Domo are all tried and true options. No matter what the tool, you’ll want to identify your goals in using it, set up processes for collecting your data from various sources, and begin organizing it into dashboards and reports for your team to analyze. Business intelligence is an ongoing process. As you extract more interesting and valuable insights, your reporting and visualization needs may change and you will continue working through these steps and refining your techniques.
Congratulations, your team can now begin to make truly data-driven decisions. The insights that were once difficult, impossible, and/or time-consuming to gain are now readily available at your fingertips. Your team is now able to take action much much faster on valuable insights, increasing your ROMI and leasing up your property in a much faster and more efficient manner.
by threshold | May 17, 2022 | Creative, Design, Marketing, Thought Leadership
Written by Mike Krankota, Art Director
We’ve all been there: You have this magnificent idea, but you can’t get it out of your head and onto paper. Or perhaps you have grand hopes for a goal but are having trouble plotting out the concrete path to get there. Whether your project is visual, conceptual, or written, we all struggle with this process from time to time.
For clients working with agency partners, this creative block often manifests itself through statements like, “I’m not sure what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it,” a strategy that often leads to extensive trial and error that introduces added frustration for all involved. On the agency side, it can manifest in the form of hours spent staring at a screen until the imposter syndrome fully takes over and every idea feels equally terrible. In other words, creative blocks are no fun for anyone and often contribute to outcomes no one is satisfied with. So how do we combat them and break on through to the other side?
As an Art Director with many years of experience, I’d love to walk you through my process for dealing with creative blocks on the path to better real estate marketing (using a bit of good humor along the way).
Write Your Way Out of the Problem
The best advice I have ever received in my career—and one I pass on to my team—is that sometimes the messaging should steer the design and not the other way around. If you’re feeling like the idea isn’t quite there, often a great copywriter can pull it out of the trash with a magnificent tagline or bite-sized messaging idea that gets things going. Don’t be afraid to reach out for written inspiration to help get the gears moving again on your project. In lieu of external copywriting help, creating a word cloud of simple bulleted list of the big ideas you want to convey can also be a great place to start. You can also reach out to Threshold for help with your creative process! Our writers specialize in writing their way out of the problem and helping inspire messaging-driven content.
Walk Away For a Minute
A wonderful mentor advised me once to sometimes go walk a dog. Take care of your plants. If you must, mess about on social media or something. Just take that little break. Keep the thing in the back of your mind, let the ideas happen organically, and just see what comes up. It can be easier said than done (there is a certain inertia to overcome before getting away from your desk), but brains are excellent at working through challenges in the background and sometimes that’s the best path forward.
Personally, I rely on my garden and dogs for help with this. I didn’t acquire these things specifically for this purpose but they certainly don’t hurt. For others on the creative team, it might be pestering a cat, taking the trash out to the dumpster, or doing a crossword. Whatever your strategy, walking away from the desk is a fantastic way to consider, find, and explore new ideas.
Flip It Upside Down
So you’re looking at a possible idea. Say it’s a name. A logo. A website. But something isn’t quite right. What if you flip it all the way over to find new ideas? What is the opposite? And when you consider it, does it resonate? Is there a place to find a new perspective from flipping the idea and seeing the other side of it? Why or why not?
Often, our internal creative discussions start with “what if…” and that is why we succeed. Asking that question always leads to big ideas.
Sleep On It
This tactic is like “Walk Away For A Minute” taken up a notch. It works best when you’re partway through your creative process or have reached the end of a certain stage and can’t decide how to proceed to the next. In these cases, sometimes, the answer is to just muse for a moment. Again, your brain is great at working through things in the background, so sleeping on it (literally or figuratively) can really help you wrap your mind around a complex project or elusive strategy.
For example, at Threshold, we always encourage clients to give immediate ‘gut reaction’ feedback but also to think about it for a few days and offer additional thoughts after they’ve had time to sit with it. Sometimes, the presentation is what draws you. Or a color. Or a feeling. But ultimately, you need to make sure this is the right call for you and your company/property/startup/etc. and giving it some time can sometimes be the best way to get there.
That said, make sure the time you take is intentional and structure. Give yourself a deadline and think about the questions you need to answer in order to proceed. If you wake up the next morning and still like everything you saw, consider why. What appealed? Why did it resonate? How can we turn this into something that sells?
At Threshold, we are experts in this process, so we try to guide feedback based on our levels of experience. It’s a fun process, especially when timelines allow the opportunity to involve multiple stakeholders in the creative process to ensure the end result is something everyone feels invested in.
Phone a Friend
Sometimes, a single creative can do this. Often, it’s a group effort. “Hey, I have this idea, any thoughts,” is all it takes. Creative teams are naturally collaborative. We are stronger than each individual part, and the sum of a true team is far greater than you can imagine.
This is a strategy we use constantly as an agency team, but it applies to client teams too. If you can’t come to a consensus among those you collaborate with, it’s often wise to ask someone who understands the larger goals of the project. Their feedback, whether positive, negative, or neutral can help push past the half-baked concept and illuminate actionable steps toward a more perfect execution.
Threshold has a collaborative environment that demands that the best idea wins, regardless of who came up with it. At the same time, we pride ourselves on being a client partner who can work with everyone to make sure it’s a win all around. After all, if you can’t successfully champion the ‘why’ behind a particular strategy, there’s likely a better idea out there and working together is the best way to find it.
In Conclusion
Creative blocks and “I’ll know it when I see it” attitudes are a pain for both agency creatives and client-side stakeholders. But a holistic thought process and a willingness to collaborate can turn something that seems impossible into some of the biggest wins of your real estate marketing plan.
