Advertising online is a no-brainer. But what sites? That's tricky -- but a fun question to answer. Here are a few ideas.

(Note: Sitegeist has invited Rob Armstrong, owner of Matador Creative, to be a regular contributor to the blog. Rob does most of the writing at Splat Productions and, additionally, takes on clients of his own, under the Matador name.)

Not long ago, my friend David Hitt brought up an interesting aspect of online advertising. Specifically, just how does one determine where to do it? Once you’ve created banner ads, what websites should you post them on? Not being a media specialist, I can only hypothesize based on my experience as the guy who writes the ads that find their way into the daily papers, monthly glossies and yes, the Internet.

I won’t waste time discussing real estate sites. Nobody needs me to tell them to post ads on their local paper’s website, local Realtors’ websites and national sites like wallstreetjournal.com or REALTOR.com. And despite how unglamorous it is, the good ol’ MLS should be on a must-post list as well. Those are easy choices. It’s obvious they get scanned by people actively looking for homes—that is, when those people are actually making the effort to look.

Hit them when they're NOT really looking.

Homebuyers don’t just comb real estate sites all day looking at pictures of pretty condominiums. They’re real people with busy lives. They’re checking their bank balances, shopping on eBay, searching for the meaning of life on Google… People in homebuying mode will go a lot of places online. The trick is to figure out where. You have to start thinking like a grocer. It’s no accident they put the raisins in the same aisle as the oatmeal and the peanut butter with the jelly and bread.

One place to start might be sites about home-related stuff. Furniture, interior design and even home improvement websites. “Hey, why fix that roof again? Buy a new condo already!” Then there are the more esoteric choices. Think about music sites like rhapsody.com or the iTunes section of apple.com. I mean, why not listen to that new Alicia Keys mp3 file (or the latest from Paul McCartney for you Boomers) in the comfort of the living room in your brand new home? Liberty Mutual and Logitech were hitting customers there on my recent visit.

Think about what your prospects enjoy doing.

If you advertise where homebuyers are buying music, why not where they’re buying food—or at least getting recipes and tips on entertaining like marthastewart.com? By advertising on specialty sites, you can customize the message and make the connection between your new condo high-rise and, say, those freshly baked sticky buns from Williams-Sonoma—they’ll taste even more delicious in your new home’s designer kitchen.
More food for thought—newlyweds! They’re part of many developers’ target demographic. Young, and some not-so-young, professional couples seeking digs that suit their lifestyles. How interesting then that on theknot.com, a wedding planning site, I found a link to thenest.com, its sibling site all about setting up house together. And smack dab in the upper right, a prominently placed banner ad for the Dodge Journey crossover, PERFECT for small or growing families. Just like your new building in Center City.

Another way to show you “get” your target audience’s needs and interests—YouTube. One of the most popular sites on the Internet. Why not put your two-or-three-minute virtual tour or “commercial” on YouTube and send a link to your whole e-mail distribution list? Then link them from YouTube to your site. You could continue adding videos like footage of the building in progress there, or shorts on the neighborhood, the lifestyle… Most developers limit their distribution to the property’s website. The whole world could be seeing them! And you won’t spend one extra dime to do it.

Go green—if you’ve got the guts.

My last idea (for now) would be on a site related to environmentally conscious products and services, like green.msn.com. Chevrolet is doing it with their hybrid vehicles. You can do it, too—provided you are a genuinely green company building a genuinely green residential destination with earth-friendly products and building practices.

I’m working with such a client here in Naples, Florida. Still in the planning stages, São Grato promises to be a Brazilian-inspired mixed-use destination with eco-sensitive features in place. Beyond building materials and practices, the community will have recycling programs as well as incentives to donate towards rain forest conservation. Be warned—going the green route is like running for public office. Absolutely everything about your company will be scrutinized for its innate greenness, and if any fatal flaws are exposed, you’ll be vilified by the media and granola-crunching tree-huggers alike. This is not one for the faint of heart.

The best thing about advertising on the Internet is that you can change your mind on a whim, adapt your placement almost immediately and adjust your strategy based on the results you get in a very cost-effective way. So just do it—experiment. Put your property out there where few, if any, competitors are. You’ll be the sharpest developer on your block if you get it right.

Is the New York Luxury Real Estate Market Recession Proof?

As real estate markets around the country reel from the bursting of the housing bubble and mortgage crisis, local pockets of strength still remain. Residential housing in New York City, for example, has weathered the storm better than most and, particularly, the luxury residential sector has appeared surprisingly robust. This article from The Real Deal, looks at the factors responsible for this resilience but, simultaneously, questions how much longer the party can last. Noting that luxury units were up 28.4% at the end of 2007 from the previous year, the authors go on to note some cautionary conditions that might signal a slowdown, namely:

1. The predicted national recession will result in fewer Wall Street bonuses and, probably, layoffs.
2. Current market strength is somewhat dependent on the weakness of the dollar and the resulting influx of foreign money. Foreign investment money, though, often represents discretionary spending. (Buyers don't HAVE to purchase a residential unit. They're simply acting on what they think might be a wise investment.) This places these buyers in a privileged position, allowing them greater negotiating strength.

Again, the entire article is here.

How Healthy is Your Brand...

The Branding Strategy Insider, a well-written Branding Blog I read on occasion, has put together a "Top Ten" list for determining the relative state of your company's brand. While I'm not usually a huge fan of Top Ten lists, this one has some solid, basic advice for nurturing your brand's health. I especially liked the multi-part section on loyalty (number six on the list), which touches upon the importance of keeping clients or consumers coming back. The author writes:

"6. Loyalty – The lifetime value of loyal customers is often not fully appreciated. The rule of thumb is that it is 7 to 10 times more costly to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one. The primary measures of this are:

a. Actual loyalty as measured by ‘share of requirements’ or ‘share of purchases’ and the following attitudinal measures:

b. Willingness to recommend the brand to a friend,

c. Repurchase intent (willingness to repurchase the brand considering all of the experiences the customer has had with the brand), and

d. Switching propensity given different competitive price discount scenarios or brand out-of-stock situations."

The entire article can be found here.

Online advertising is more than just Pay-Per-Clicks and SEO tricks...

As the world of internet marketing evolves, clients and their ad consultants are getting savvier in the strategies they develop to drive traffic to their web sites and increase brand awareness. As recently as two years ago, we were frequently called upon to design new sites for clients, without any real corresponding discussion about how the new site would fit into the client's online advertising strategy. The relationship would begin something like "We really like what you did for Client XYZ, can we get something similar?" Only later would the client begin to ponder precisely how they were actually going to get noticed on the web.

Shame on our clients for their shortsightedness and shame on us for not advising them better.

As things progressed, the stock-in-trade solutions for an online ad plan relied on organic search optimization and Google pay-per-click. As a firm which frequently builds websites for new construction real estate projects, the concept of organic optimization is a thorny one for us. Most larger scale developers desire -- and the market benchmarks these days demand -- the enhanced entertainment platform that only Flash websites can deliver. The problem with this is that, as web developers know, Flash websites are tough to make "search engine friendly."

After having worked with scores of real estate developers, though, we've become skeptical that optimization is really critical for the average new construction housing development. Buying a new condo or house is a very intentional act and the traditional portals people use to survey the market are still viable. If I'm shopping for a new hard drive for my computer, I might very well start my search and buy from a vendor that floats to the top of a Google search. However, if I'm searching for a new condominium in Philadelphia, it's highly unlikely that I am going to be swayed by the first listing that comes up through an organic search. There are many local
and national portals on the web people can use to begin surveying properties on the market and, frankly, most folks still rely on the "call a well-known realtor" approach to getting the lay of the local real estate landscape.

Beyond organic search optimization, Google Adwords or "pay-per-click" was the next ad strategy frequently mentioned by our clients as being attractive. Pay-per-click works well in partnership with Flash web sites, as it allows the client to compensate for their "optimization-challenged" natures, by allowing paid advertisements for their projects to show up when predefined search criteria are entered into Google. So, for instance, our clients can choose a search string in Google ("Philadelphia Skyscraper Living," for example) and an ad and link will float to the first page of the resulting search page.

As the internet matures, though, much more sophisticated marketing strategies are being developed. In the recently published, "Online Advertising Playbook," authors, Plummer, Rappaport, Hall and Barocci discuss some of these. Many borrow traditional strategies and apply them to the interactive realm. For instance, Google now places their "sponsored links" (which are essentially Adwords messages) on contextually relevant sites for a given demographic. So, for example, if I'm on an automobile site, there's a good chance that I'll see auto-related Google adwords somewhere within the site. Besides, Google Adwords, though, similar strategies are being employed to place all manners of ads on sites deemed contextually relevant. Other strategies, many borrowed from the world of broadcast advertising, are being employed successfully on the web. For instance, the authors cite Kentucky Fried Chicken's successful rollout of their "popcorn chicken" product, which was promoted through the use of "daypart advertising" on popular general interest web sites, such as msn.com. Daypart advertising
basically relies on the idea that you run an ad at a particular time of the day when either your target market is expected to be online and/or is in a buying mood for your product. In the case of KFC, the ad was run between the hours of 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM, when a large percentage of the online audience is contemplating their lunch choices.

For those of you interested in learning more about the strategies shared in "The Online Advertising Playbook," I urge you to click here...

More Nifty Web Tools...

Now this story from Inman News... There is truly a dizzying array of online tools available to real estate marketers. From Zillow to Trulia, the internet is awash with companies trying to capitalize on "Web 2.0" technologies to create a more instantaneous and interactive real estate sales environment. In the following video, shot recently at the New York event, "Real Estate Connect: New York City," panelists share some (lengthy) thoughts about what Web 2.0 tools are and how they can be employed within the context of real estate marketing. The linke is here...

Tenets of Online Ad Design

Falling into the "from the vaults" category, I happened upon an interesting blog entry written by Alex Kirtland, an information architect who writes about web-related design issues.

One of the issues we find ourselves increasingly concerned with is moving beyond thinking of ourselves simply as website designers and broadening our scope of expertise to create "complete" online presences for our clients. For instance, our clients usually want to market or advertise on the web and, as a result, we've created online newsletters, email blasts, designed online ads and, generally, tried to develop the expertise necessary to counsel them about the best use of their marketing dollars.

In the following blog article, Alex addressed the issue of the design of online ads. Always a challenge for designers, we must constantly balance the level of intrusion which any online ad places on the content of the reader versus the advertisers need to "be heard." In the article, Alex offers several summary design suggestions for artists, including: wrapping ads in borders to distinguish them from their surrounding content, clustering the ads in one location, and using "leaderboards" (full width ads running at the top of the web space) to best effect. In the end, the win - win proposition for advertisers to both be heard but also to not intrude on the reader's experience of web content. At any rate, the article's worthy of a peek...

Some Belated Holiday Cheer

The holidays have come and gone but, in the spirit of holiday cheer and in an effort to begin the New Year on an optimistic note, I thought I'd share some "let's put some things in perspective" news I found in the December issue of The Real Deal.

True, housing starts are down nationally and, in fact, many regions of the country have experienced price declines over the last several months. However, Ken Harney, notes several reasons for optimism in his December Real Deal column. Consider, for example:

• Despite the recent fall in both prices and sales, (in some markets) the overall upside of five years' worth of boom has been a positive one for the American homeowner. Harney, notes that, overall, the total equity owned by American homeowners is still at near-record levels, topping out at almost $11 trillion. (Total equity holdings, he notes, refers to the difference between the market value of the entire residential market, which is $21 trillion and outstanding mortgage debt, which is approximately $10 trillion.) So, then, American homeowners have more money tied up in their homes than (almost) ever before.
• Even in hard hit areas such as South Florida, most homeowners and homebuyers through most of the boom are still way ahead of the game. In South Florida alone, for instance, home values increased a whopping 130 percent between 2001 and 2006. Thus, even accounting for the double digit drops in prices over the last year, the net out for most homeowners in the region remains robust.

The sub-prime lending crisis is, of course, throwing the emergency brake on a train that was already slowing down, but, with the exception of those that bought late in the cycle, Harney counsels American homeowners to look at the bust within the light of the overall (significant) gains which were made in the first part of the decade.

And if that news doesn't perk you up, there's always that leftover egg nog in the fridge...