Posts Tagged ‘Resort Real Estate Sales and Marketing’

The sales management paradox in a recession is that projects can simply no longer afford the high costs of on-site sales management by a senior sales leader, and yet now is precisely the time they cannot afford to do without it.

Sales teams are perpetually in either a virtuous circle or a vicious spiral. Success breeds more success, but lack of momentum is also self-reinforcing.   Sales teams today are working harder to make fewer sales and in some cases sales momentum is at a snails pace.  Add to that shrinking team sizes requiring longer hours to provide 24/7 coverage, drastically reduced earnings and little prospect of a quick bounce-back… and even seasoned real estate sales professionals are questioning their life choices right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Marketing reporting and performance tracking seems like it would be the foundation for any marketing program.  But as we talked with clients, prospects, and attendees at many conferences this fall, we find that with all of the marketing options today, many people stand there like a deer in the headlights when asked how they are tracking results.

Not tracking marketing performance is like being on the PGA Tour and not keeping score.  You just can’t compete and win without doing it.

Here is a list of six tools for your consideration. Let me preface by saying we define what tools we will use at the beginning of each campaign and these only represent a few that we leverage most often.  Also, not everything is easily tracked in one solution, so we often take reports from various formats and pull up our old-school friend, Microsoft Excel, to build custom dashboards based on the client’s specific data views.
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Good thing inbound marketing and social media have no selling season.

As the holiday season approaches, the prime selling season for real estate and many other industries is winding down. Now that your Fall marketing push is coming to a close, it seems natural to take it easy in December and January with your traditional outbound marketing efforts. But what about your inbound marketing efforts?  Fewer prospects may be showing up at your sales office during the winter months, but it doesn’t mean they are not doing their homework online. If a prospect visits your Website, you’d better look alive if you want to be on their short list for consideration.

Here are some things you can do to “Winterize” your website and maximize your opportunities online to be in good shape when the selling season rolls back around next Spring. Read the rest of this entry »

In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, I remember the days of cold calling companies to offer Web site design.  The question was “do you have a Web site?” Many small businesses did not. Even if they did, many had no clue how to get to their site. If they could actually give me their Web address, I would often find their “site” was a directory listing page they shared with all their local competitors. True story. The call often ended with them telling me they didn’t need a Web site. And maybe they didn’t. Then, anyway.

These days, everybody knows they need a Web site and most companies have one. But they don’t always know how to get the most out of it. In other words they may have a Web site, but it may not work very well. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that marketing budgets fall into two camps these days: I cut my budget because why throw good money after bad. Or, I am spending a lot less but I still getting no immediate results. It has been said that we create the worst of habits in the best of times and I think the “good ole’ days” of the early 2000’s have given us a microscope instead of a telescope. What I mean by this is marketing, like wise investing, should be done with the long-term in mind, not the short-term. Placing every marketing decision under a microscope when we know times are tough is like watching your 401k bounce around everyday. In the end, you create a lot of anxiety and are so short-term focused that we often begin to make emotional decisions because we need some instant gratification.  And if the dollar did not move the needle in 30 days, then it was a dollar wasted.
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After 13 years of involvement with all aspects of marketing and web development, it seems the three-legged stool of Web development is getting a lot less wobbly and consumer habits, client needs and agency services seem to be far more in sync.  Until the last 12-18 months, it always seemed that getting all three of these constituents aligned was difficult because everyone had competing agendas. Agencies wanted portfolio work, consumer habits were still segmented by demographics, and clients were confused.  Enter social media.

Not that social media has fundamentally changed everything but it is a pink elephant in the room that got all three parties staring at the same thing. And if you look at what it has done, it has created two expectations from consumers that have forced the hands of clients and their agencies: transparency and real-time content.

So with the tighter budgets that most marketing managers are facing today, it seems that every call we get leads to a discussion on improving the user functionality, management capability, and ROI of their online efforts.

Here are 5 things that we are doing that clients seem to be responding great to these days. Read the rest of this entry »

I have seen a trend in our discussions in the past few months with many people in many industries, especially resort real estate.  It usually starts with a conversation about marketing on a shoestring budget or how to market to be ahead of the curve as things begin to turn.  I think regardless of industry, you need to pay close attention to the relationships that you have at hand and stay in front of them as much as possible.  It is far more economical to turn prospects into customers than it is to create new prospects, so your existing database should be a primary focus during these slower times.  And while you’re at it, why not take the time to review your processes and make sure that your data has the utmost integrity and can be fully leveraged as things begin to turn.  After all, we create the worst habits during the best of times so now may be time to hunker down and really get your processes refined and your data cleaned up.

Regardless of the strength of your CRM system, it is critical to understand that the people involved in the process will be the key factor in the integrity and accuracy of the data the system provides.  We ask our clients to make sure that all parties involved hold the integrity of the data to the highest priority.  Without accurate data, the accuracy of our system is flawed.

So here are six easy buckets of information that you need to be collecting. Read the rest of this entry »

The only guarantee we have about marketing in today’s resort real estate climate is change. The market has changed. The buyer has changed. Will it ever change back and if so will we market the same way?  I am not sure and do not intend to make any grand projections other than the pendulum swings in both directions and God is not making any more dirt. So my assumption is like most cycles, these tough times will change. And marketing has and will continue to change with it. Read the rest of this entry »

We have a client that has had great success in 2008 selling resort real estate in Boone, NC.  Usually people are suspect of the numbers and think that Echota must be doing something like huge discounts or some secret incentive program.  The reality is that their secret is staying positive, having a good product for the right market and continuing to spend marketing dollars.  And when I asked Mark Harrill, the developer of Echota, how he became the most successful community in North Carolina in 2008 he told me “2008 success started in 2001 by listening to what the market wanted.”  You see Mark never Read the rest of this entry »