Mobile marketing in real estate

What are you reading this article on right now? If you answered your smart phone, you are not alone.

Nearly everyone has and uses a smart phone today, and if you haven’t tapped into this technology to market, then you’re lagging behind. Scott MacFarland, digital marketer and brand strategist, offers seven tips to heat up your mobile marketing.

1. Irrelevant Content: Put your consumer hat on. Do you like it when you get spammed from companies that are sending you irrelevant communications? Make sure you are producing content that is perfectly aligned with your clients’ needs. If you don’t, your competition will, and that will be revenue lost.
2. Poor Timing Of Communication: Marketers tend to pay attention to the timing of emails, social posts and believe it or not, even their direct mail. That also means we must think about the customer, their habits, desires and needs, and serve them the perfect offer at the perfect time with the right message. If a text-based offer for a lunch special comes at dinnertime, guess what? We’ve missed the opportunity.
3. Continued Communication That’s Not Relevant: The key here is “continued” communication. As a brand, it is considered a cardinal sin to continually send communication and marketing messages to prospective customers and even existing customers if the message is not relevant. This will annoy them and soon they may unsubscribe from your communication channel – then you’ve lost them. You invested time and money to get them, now you need to spend the extra time to figure out what they want, when they want it. This increases engagement, website traffic, customer lifetime value and ultimately increases revenue.
4. Don’t Forget About Location: Mobile marketing is not just about connecting with the customer. It’s also about understanding their location as well. The retail market is a perfect business model to leverage the power of mobile, especially when they take advantage of location data. This data helps the marketer have a more complete data set, which allows them to craft strategies more effectively – thus increasing engagement, retention and store traffic. According to Google research, “Four in five people use search to find local information. Collectively, these searches provide a view into consumer interest and intent in a given place. Today, we can use that intent to offer the most relevant ads, but that’s only half the picture. Location data can also provide rich consumer insights that inform strategy from the start, before there’s even an ad to distribute,” said Lisa Gevelber, VP, Americas, Google
5. Overall Value To The Customer: Marketing 101 says, if the brand is not offering value for the customer, a transaction won’t occur. When mobile marketing is not offering value to each and every customer, the brand in essence is communicating to them that they just want your name, mobile phone number and of course your money, not your respect and trust.
6. Find The Right Mobile Partner: The tip here is to find a mobile company that knows mobile marketing strategy and technology better than anyone else. You don’t want a company that’s just a reseller of another knock-off service. Additionally, make sure the mobile partner has a robust customer centric service team to help when you need it. When you do find a company that can do all of these, you will soon realize they are the smartest firms and you want them to be on your side because mobile technology is moving at warp spend and your agency partner must be able to move with it successfully.
7. Think Like A Customer – Act Like An Intelligent Brand: Don’t allow your mobile marketing to negatively impact your sales. Make sure you take full advantage of the data sets that are available. This will help you not only understand your customer, but communicate with them on their mobile device in a precise manner and location that truly excites and engages them to want to make the effort to purchase. Take advantage of all your customer data sets and think like a customer, but act like an intelligent brand.