In this episode we discuss 5 things that impact your marketing 2019. This isn’t a New Year Resolution list. It is great advice on things to update and do in 2019.
Podcast Takeaways
- SSL – More important than ever!
- MOBILE FIRST – Sites must take into account how they work with mobile devices.
- PODCAST – An easy and upcoming marketing medium.
- VIDEO – Done right can be very powerful.
- GOOGLE MY BUSINESS – If you’re local you need it!
2019 Real Estate Marketing Trends Podcast Transcript
Adam Small: Hello, and welcome to The Real Estate Marketing Minute. I’m your host Adam Small, and with us today is Doug Karr. Hi, Doug. How ya doing?
Douglas Karr: The long lost Doug Karr.
Adam Small: Yeah, I know. It’s been a little while since you’ve been on with us, hasn’t it?
Douglas Karr: Well, we closed down the studio, so now you and I have to just get together in different places.
Adam Small: Glad to have you back.
Douglas Karr: Good to be back.
Adam Small: Yeah. So, we were talking earlier, and we kind of decided it would be a cool thing to do a podcast on marketing trends for 2019.
Douglas Karr: I like that. What I hate though, is the resolution ones, like, this is what you’ve gotta do, you know?
Adam Small: Oh, where they tell you the-
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: Yeah, because I think half of those are wrong and then the other half of it’s either super expensive to implement or it’s only gonna help like maybe 5% of the people, right?
Douglas Karr: Right. Right. And I think in the real estate business, it’s built on relationships so it’s pretty consistent. You know work of mouth, and then we’re gonna talk about the things that can help with that.
Adam Small: Right, right, right, right.
Douglas Karr: We’ll start with SSL?
Adam Small: Sure, we’ll start with SSL. So, here over the last few years, SEL has always been a big thing for real estate marketing and you know any sort of marketing in general online.
Douglas Karr: Organic search, people searching for terms within google and finding houses from real estate agents.
Adam Small: Right and when you say google, it’s actually any search engine, right?
Douglas Karr: Sure.
Adam Small: But google has the lion share.
Douglas Karr: 99% of the market.
Adam Small: Yeah, so one of the things that google’s done here over the last year or so is in order to rank better and not have if you’re using google chrome, which is their browser, and let’s be honest, if you look at your analytics traffic on your website, probably 78% of the is in fact Google Chrome, so the lion share is google chrome.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. I think Safari’s starting to creep up and then I read lately that Microsoft is actually gonna use Chromium as a base, so I think we’ll start to see some changes.
Adam Small: Yeah.
Douglas Karr: But for the most part, it’s the same engine.
Adam Small: And my point in saying that is Google in their Google Chrome browser is saying if a site isn’t SSL, then they’re gonna flag it up top as not safe or not secure.
Douglas Karr: Yeah and Safari’s gonna do the same.
Adam Small: Right, and then the other piece of that is from an SEO perspective, search engine optimization perspective, Google also says that having that SSL certificate will have some impact on ranking.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: And you know that’s as clear as they get, right? And they don’t tell you that this is a major ranking factor. They just say it will have some impact. How much that is, nobody really knows except them.
Douglas Karr: Well, I think there’s a couple reasons, right, in the eyes of Google, they want a good user experience and so almost every single website now, you put information into.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: So even if it’s your real estate site, you’re gonna enter your contact information, maybe a phone number in a field.
Adam Small: Right. Well-
Douglas Karr: If they don’t have a secure certificate, then it’s just gonna be raw data that’s floating through the interwebs.
Adam Small: It’s gonna get transmitted over the internet in clear text so it can be seen by anybody in between.
Douglas Karr: Right and so I think on one side, they’re just trying to get a best practice-
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: … In there from a user standpoint. But on the other side, too, is it’s so easy now to spin up websites and domains and everything else that all these spammers out there, they could spin up 100 websites in a couple seconds and then spin them back down when they get caught, but configuring an SSL certificate and having them verify the business and everything else is a lot more difficult.
Adam Small: It does get more difficult and you know it’s funny because as Google is putting that requirement out there or that recommendation at the same time making it quote unquote harder for spammers to spin up websites, there are also tools out there that are making it easier to add SSL too you know-
Douglas Karr: Spin up SSL, yeah. It’s true.
Adam Small: Add SSL certificates, right, so let’s encrypt is a really good one that comes to mind because they’ve got a great little process where they can verify everything and you know it’s done through command line so it’s a little bit harder for the average Joe, but at the same time, it can also be automated and therefore it can be utilized by the spammers as well.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. You can, in the long run, yeah, but-
Adam Small: Also at the same time they’re making it easier to do SSL and Google’s requiring it for you know security and that sort of thing, it’s still a good thing one way or the other because it does help eliminate some of that work or it makes it harder, it does still make it harder for the spammers as well as make your site more secure and give people a better comfort factor like you said, a user’s experience when they come to visit your site.
Douglas Karr: The other thing too that I would add to that is if you’re on a web post that requires some kind of technical capability to install SSL, you’re probably on an older, slower web post.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: SSL on an older site-
Adam Small: It can bring the site down.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, it can slow you down. So, I would really recommend people invest the money and get with a host that has a one click security install and everything else because they’ve probably got other tools to keep the site fast as well.
Adam Small: Right, that’s just a matter of keeping up with technology.
Douglas Karr: People might, you know, I won’t say the name, it begins with a color and ends with host. But they’re so slow, the sites are so bad that Google literally doesn’t index them well because they’re so slow.
Adam Small: Right, analyze it right because they can’t pull the data, right.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. And what people don’t understand is they might be paying ten bucks a month for that or whatever and a really really good host is 30 dollars a month.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: And so, if you sold one more house a year-
Adam Small: Exactly. The return on it is amazing-
Douglas Karr: Unbelievable.
Adam Small: … for that small amount of investment, there’s no doubt.
Douglas Karr: Plus, the new ones have automatic back ups, they have security monitoring. They have everything that you need, so spend the money and get with a good host.
Adam Small: Exactly. Exactly. So, what’s the next thing on our topic there? Next topic on our list, Doug?
Douglas Karr: I think big time mobile first and what we mean by that is sometimes people won’t necessarily make a conscious purchase decision on a mobile device, but people are researching a ton via mobile so they’re, if I go check out a piece of equipment that I might wanna buy or something, I’m gonna sit and watch TV and have my phone out, be reading about it, looking it up, everything else, and then maybe the next day, I’ll get on my desktop and actually purchase it.
Adam Small: Right. Well, and from a real estate perspective, you know, the vast majority of real estate searches start online. I think the number, depending on the resources your look at, it’s anywhere from 80 to 95 percent start online and chances are good in today’s day and age, that starting online, it’s on a mobile device and probably an app of some sort and you know if I had to guess, it’s one of the big three in the real estate industries and the realtor.com, Zillow, maybe Trulia, that would be my guess. You know there are a couple others that are growing, but they haven’t quite got that penetration and such that those three have, so one way or another, it’s mobile first. It’s starting on mobile.
Douglas Karr: And so your site has to be mobile first as well.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: If I go to your website and it’s not easy to navigate and-
Adam Small: It’s not easy to find the information you want, that when I go and I look at the listing, I can’t see the pictures because they’re distorted or load take forever to load up, or whatever it is for me to get through it, I’m just gonna move on, you know? I’m not even gonna get to the point where I go home and I look at it the next day, or if I’m sitting at my house, I say, well, I’m gonna get on my computer and see this better. That’s not gonna happen.
Douglas Karr: Right, we talked about it before from an SEO standpoint. So Google gives different results based on whether you’re mobile or desktop.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: So if your site isn’t mobile friendly, even if your buttons are too close together or your links are too close together-
Adam Small: And it’s amazing that they actually check that stuff, there are actual programs that can help give you an idea of the, I mean, if that’s what’s going on, Google has tools that help you know about those errors on your site. So they actually do check.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, you can just, if you google mobile friendly test, it’ll tell you-
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: But the thing is though, if people are you know sitting at night and they’re punching into a browser you know houses for sale in this zip code or whatever, and your site is not optimized for mobile, you’re not even gonna show up-
Adam Small: You’re not gonna show up at all.
Douglas Karr: … on the page. Right. And so, if your competitors are and again, we’re talking about minimal investment. You can go get a site nowadays that’s mobile friendly and what do we pay for some of the themes that we-
Adam Small: Well, you know, for single, one time use, you can buy a great theme from some place like theme forest for anywhere for 40 to 100 bucks.
Douglas Karr: And it’s totally mobile optimized.
Adam Small: And it’s great themed, completely mobile optimized, amazing feature set, that sort of thing, you know, so I would definitely make sure that if your website’s a couple years old that you revisit it, not only looking at it on mobile making sure that it looks good, but make sure that it loads fast and that everything’s readable. Run that mobile friendly test on it from google and it’s really eye opening.
Douglas Karr: It is. And again, what we’re saying here is that you might have a beautiful website on desktop, but if people are going to it first on a mobile device and they’re not gonna take the time to go visit you tomorrow on desktop if they can’t see it, so make sure that your site is mobile optimized. What’s next on our list there?
Adam Small: Maybe we should talk about mediums a little bit, like real time videos and podcasting?
Douglas Karr: Oh yeah, absolutely. So you know, every year it seems like it’s gonna be the year of the video.
Adam Small: Yeah, right?
Douglas Karr: Right? For the last ten years.
Adam Small: And the same with podcasting for that matter, right. But I do feel like this coming year, 2019, they’re really coming into their own. Obviously if you’re listening to our podcasts, you’re a podcast listener, so it’s a great way to reach people. There are a lot of great advantages to doing a podcast because if you do one regularly, then you have regular content that you can refocus and put up on your website, take advantage of that. Put it on your social channels, take advantage of that. So, you know, that’s a big thing from just kind of a process perspective, but they’re also great ways of being found, right? We’ve been doing our podcast, we’re actually, I think this is our second year.
Douglas Karr: Nice.
Adam Small: Of doing our podcast. We finished up two full years of it now-
Douglas Karr: Woohoo.
Adam Small: Exactly. And what we’re finding is that our podcast downloads are increasing and it’s a weird kind of correlation, but at the same time our website visits are increasing and nobody’s ever said well you know I heard your podcast and so I checked out your site, but you know there’s a correlation between the two and maybe it’s just an overall marketing effort, but there’s something to it.
Douglas Karr: Well, and sometimes people if you’re on the way to work or you’re jogging on the treadmill or whatever a podcast comes in handy, where you’re reaching an audience that might not go and read your website or whatever and so you gotta remember that it’s not about you know that you gotta be everything to everybody, it’s literally that you got a segment of the population that they love podcasts, they’re listening to podcasts.
Adam Small: Well and you know like with Agent Soft, one of the thing that we do is text and toll free call capture, right? And we tell people when somebody texts or calls in, you respond to them in the same fashion because they’re telling you-
Douglas Karr: Oh, thank you.
Adam Small: They’re telling you the medium that they prefer to communicate with, that’s exactly what you’re talking about here. So yeah, we put the podcast out right, but the reason that we repurpose it and put out a transcript of it is because some people aren’t gonna sit and listen to it.
Douglas Karr: Exactly.
Adam Small: Right, they’re not gonna watch a video, but they will read something. But then other people, like, I’m not reading that, I’m gonna play that in the background you know while I’m doing something else or I’d rather see a video. So it’s all about finding the medium and being on those mediums when somebody’s looking for what you do.
Douglas Karr: You hit it on the head because I have an issue with my refrigerator where I have to, some kind of latch mechanism or whatever, I have to close the door funny on it. And so I called the refrigerator, I emailed the refrigerator company, you know it was info at and their domain.com. So I clicked email-
Adam Small: You have faith in that one, didn’t you?
Douglas Karr: I clicked it and it was a local refrigerator repair company, so it’s a legitimate business. But I clicked it, emailed them, they emailed me back and said call this number and we’ll make an appointment.
Adam Small: If I wanted to call, I would have called.
Douglas Karr: That’s exactly it and I never called them. I mean I didn’t call them because I was like you just took the time to respond via email. Why didn’t you just say yeah, we can come out and take a look, here’s some times, do they work for you?
Adam Small: Right. Right.
Douglas Karr: And it’s the same conversation I would have had on the phone.
Adam Small: Exactly.
Douglas Karr: It’s nuts.
Adam Small: Exactly.
Douglas Karr: So, and sometimes I don’t wanna talk to people.
Adam Small: So, you know that’s podcasting and honestly video is the same concept.
Douglas Karr: Well, let’s do one more thing on podcasting because before this podcast, we were actually talking about it and that’s the price of equipment has really plummeted.
Adam Small: Right, right, right, I was actually gonna bring that up. I’m glad you did.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, so. I mean, Adam and I are sitting across from each other, we have a Zoom H6, which is kind of the Cadillac of-
Adam Small: Boom recording devices.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, that’s right. We have two microphones, two stands, and a couple cables. All of this was probably, what, 400 bucks?
Adam Small: I would say 400 at most with the microphones and the cables and stuff, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: And that’s you know, the Zoom H6 is the Cadillac. If you don’t wanna invest 400 bucks, you can go buy a Zoom H2 or H4, buy an H4 because then you can plug two microphones in and between that and the microphones, you’re looking at maybe 250 bucks, somewhere around there if you find a good deal.
Douglas Karr: And if you’re really, really terrible, you could just go get a microphone like a lav mic, and pass it back and forth on your-
Adam Small: On your phone.
Douglas Karr: On your android or your iPhone and still have pretty good audio.
Adam Small: It would sound okay.
Douglas Karr: And audio’s the key.
Adam Small: Exactly.
Douglas Karr: The reason why we spend a little bit of money on microphones and equipment is if there’s background noise or it’s difficult to hear somebody, it really is annoying when you’re listening.
Adam Small: Right, it’s gonna make it hard for somebody to pay attention, so investing a little bit, but even a couple hundred bucks isn’t a lot of money when you’re talking about something that you’re gonna use once a week or twice a month of something like that, you know, for a couple years on that.
Douglas Karr: It’s again, right?
Adam Small: Return on investment.
Douglas Karr: One house sale from someone listening to your podcast all year long is gonna pay for ten years of equipment.
Adam Small: Exactly. Exactly, so. So yeah, that’s a great point, I’m glad you brought that up and you know honestly, that point leads right into video too.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: You know you don’t have to go out and buy that 2,000 dollar camcorder. You can if you want, you’re not gonna get based on general usage, you’re not gonna get the value out of it that you would if you just used your cell phone, you know. Or you could buy something in between, you know there are some great little gimble phones. I bought one, it’s cheaper now, I bought it a couple months ago, it’s about a hundred dollars cheaper now. It’s about 300 dollars and it’s a Remeview K1 and it’s basically a little gimble phone, it’s about a foot tall and 4K video and I plug a little 50 dollar microphone into it and it is amazing. And you guys see it on some of the real estate marketing video, minute videos that I do, where I’m outside or whatever, that’s what I’m using. But you don’t even have to do that really, you could just buy a little stand for your cell phone and most of them have great video quality for you know those quick, short minute videos, couple minute long videos that you’re making that are authentic and all that. They’re not gonna be pro quality finish or anything, but they’re great for doing YouTube videos and stuff like that.
Douglas Karr: I think if you put your android or iPhone video and you put it on a stand so it’s not shaking. You have a good microphone, like you said, a lav mic is fine you know for that, you can get a Rove lav mic online for 20 bucks or something like that.
Adam Small: Yeah, not much at all.
Douglas Karr: But now, if you wanna step it up a notch, I think the gimble ones are really nice.
Adam Small: Yeah, I’m really liking the gimble one that we got.
Douglas Karr: I’ve watched these guys, professionals that are walking while they’re talking-
Adam Small: And that thing isn’t moving, is it, you know and it’s like-
Douglas Karr: It’s beautiful.
Adam Small: Is somebody holding that for him or what?
Douglas Karr: And it captures your attention because it’s motion and it’s you know, it’s, yeah, I think the one thing with video is real time is becoming quite popular, so going live on Facebook and everything. What I would say with that though I see a lot of people and this is my opinion, I don’t have stats on this, but my opinion is there’s a lot of bad video out there and I don’t, I’m not talking about the quality, the quality is there. It’s that people don’t think about what they’re gonna say-
Adam Small: They’re not prepared.
Douglas Karr: Right.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: And so they don’t have, if you’re gonna do a video, you gotta remember in the first few seconds, people are gonna leave and so you gotta capture their attention. I think in this podcast, we’re doing a good job, we’re trickling out information, we’re doing it as fast as we can, but you know that by the end of this podcast, you’re gonna learn five or six things that can help you next year.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: Well, in a video you got a few seconds. So you gotta say hey, in this video, I’m at this conference, I’m gonna introduce you to ten new you know tools.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: And then go through and concisely, you know, I watch people online that are blabbing forever and I’m just like you repeated that three times, that’s enough. I’m done.
Adam Small: Right. I kinda liken it to you know said you need to be prepared right, so what you don’t wanna do and I’m sure everybody’s been on the phone with this person where they call and they want you to help them out with something.
Douglas Karr: Yeah.
Adam Small: And then they want you to sit on the phone while they’re doing it and for me, it’s one of those things where I don’t mind doing tech support for Agent Soft. I don’t mind helping people out. I like doing that and I’m gonna tell them okay, let me walk you through this, this, this, and this, right? Where I end up with problems though is when somebody calls me up and they say hey, I wanna do this. It’s like okay, yeah, that’s exactly how you do it. Okay, well, just sit on the phone while I do that. And then five minutes later, I’m still sitting there and I haven’t heard from them, haven’t heard a word, you know I’m like, are you still there, is something going on? And that’s what a lot of those videos are like sometimes, they’re oh, well sit here while I figure this out. I got a problem, my computer’s not turning on, just wait until I figure it out and then.
It’s like no, no, no, you’ve completely lost me at that point. So preparation is really what it comes down to, if you’re gonna get up and you’re gonna do a video, be prepared. Think about what you’re gonna say ahead of time. I’m not saying write out a whole script-
Douglas Karr: But be brief.
Adam Small: But be brief.
Douglas Karr: Collapse it as much as possible, tease it at the beginning, tease people why they should stay and listen, and then get it done with.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: You know and it’s not if you’ve ever heard the, you hear a lot of people say this and I think it’s BS is you know people’s attention spans have changed. It’s not that. It’s that we have 100 things, I could be watching Netflix, I could be playing video games, I could be listening to a podcast, I could be doing whatever instead of sitting here and watching your video.
Adam Small: So you gotta make it worth my while.
Douglas Karr: So you gotta, now if you make it worth my while-
Adam Small: I’ll come back day after day.
Douglas Karr: Yep. Or I’ll even sit through a 50 minute video, because I know that every time, it’s quality.
Adam Small: Exactly.
Douglas Karr: But if it’s not, you know, so you said it, preparation for video. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t do a lot of video-
Adam Small: Because you’re terrible at preparation?
Douglas Karr: Yes. Exactly. No, I’m not prepared and I like these conversation type approaches. Well, conversations via video aren’t as compelling, you know. You gotta break it up. And then our last one we gotta talk about which is probably the biggest one is-
Adam Small: Google my business.
Douglas Karr: Yes.
Adam Small: So for those that don’t know, explain what google my business is because that’s something that you know the first thing that comes to mind, well, is that like google plus?
Douglas Karr: No.
Adam Small: Right?
Douglas Karr: No, no. It’s a, so whenever you get on your phone or even on a desktop and you do a search. On a mobile, if you’re on a phone, it’s gonna always take location into consideration regardless and then on desktop it’s starting to and so everybody’s search results are different based on their location. The first thing that you see up there is not search organic search results. The first thing that you see is the map pack, which are organic, but it’s not based on your website.
Adam Small: Right, but it’s that map and then it’s links underneath of it, right?
Douglas Karr: Exactly.
Adam Small: And basically it says oh, well this is the stuff that’s local to you that applies to whatever your search term was.
Douglas Karr: Now, the second thing with google my business is you don’t even have to have a website. All you have to have is a registered business address. I say business address because I closed my business downtown. As soon as I closed my business and went to a P.O. Box, google my business closed my-
Adam Small: Google my business said not for you.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. And so this is, you have to have a physical location. So if you’re a real estate broker or agent or you’re whatever and you have a physical office location, you can apply to be on google my business. The incredible advantage there is because even if you rank number one on your website, you’re still not gonna be visible on the search engine page because the map pack shows up first. And so if someone searches for you know, a relocation real estate agent near me or real estate agent, whoever has that most authority in the google my business account for that is gonna pop right up.
Adam Small: They’re gonna pop up in the map section and you’re gonna be underneath them even if you rank number one.
Douglas Karr: Way underneath them.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. And so, they’re gonna have click the call because their phone number’s automated. If they’ve kept their google my business account up, they’re gonna have pictures and posts, hours to get there, directions, you know-
Adam Small: All sorts of great, lovely information about them that you want people to see about you.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. And so, we did an interview with a company called [Moz 00:23:13] who has local search tools. They call it the second home page, so literally we’re getting to a point and you can see this with google now, if you’re gonna search for a flight, you go to google flights. If you’re gonna search for a job, it’s google jobs. Like google is starting to splinter out all these things. Google doesn’t want you to leave the search engine page.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: They don’t wanna take you to somebody else’s website-
Adam Small: Because then you’re no longer using them, they’re no longer able to serve up ads.
Douglas Karr: Exactly.
Adam Small: Which means they’re not making money.
Douglas Karr: Right, and so the entire, so now, I can look at your testimonials and reviews, get your phone number, get directions to your place, find out what hours you’re in there, see what kind of products and services that you sell, look at pictures of your office or whatever, without ever going to your website.
Adam Small: You know why, that goes back to what I was saying earlier about putting your message where your customer is and communicating with them in the manner that they wanna be communicated with.
Douglas Karr: Perfect.
Adam Small: You know earlier it was podcasts and text message and toll free call capture and this is another example of making sure that your information is where your customer is, right? And using the google my business service to do that.
Douglas Karr: And so if you have a physical office location, download the app, google my business app is amazing. It’ll remind you that you haven’t updated or written a post in a week or so.
Adam Small: So it’s even prompting you, hey, let’s make you better.
Douglas Karr: You’ll get stats via email.
Adam Small: And you can put blog posts and pictures and all sorts of great information out there, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah. You can put offers. You can put a button to read more on your website, you can do all kinds of stuff, so. And it’s a fairly intuitive, for google, it’s a fairly nice interface and stuff but here’s the thing, it’s a destination. And so just like you’re putting a lot of time and energy into a website, this is a parallel site that you have to have and maintain.
Adam Small: It’s becoming that much more important.
Douglas Karr: It really is and I think they’re eating Facebook’s lunch with it because Facebook has basically cut off businesses from their customers.
Adam Small: Right and nowadays unless you’re paying for ads.
Douglas Karr: Unless you’re paying for ads.
Adam Small: And paying to boost your posts, your customers aren’t seeing it. Even if you have 10 million likes, only a certain very small percentage of people are actually gonna see anything you post unless you’re boosting it.
Douglas Karr: Right and Twitter has always had that trickling of stuff, but google my business is really becoming this you know powerful tool for people to find you online. The other aspect of that is reviews, reviews, reviews, reviews.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: You have to be collecting reviews, so if you sold someone a house, they’re happy. Send them a link to your google, you know, and you can find out, if you do it on a desktop, go to google maps, look up your business and then it’ll show up, you’ll get your link and you can send that to them and say hey, I’d really appreciate, you had such a great experience if you would write up a review on google for me and that activity, review activity is right there in plain sight for everybody, so they can see people with five stars versus three stars and guess where they’re gonna click?
Adam Small: Five.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, and so you’re gonna rank higher based on activity so I have clients that are sometimes afraid of that. They say well-
Adam Small: What if somebody puts a one star out there?
Douglas Karr: Well, go get more five stars or responses.
Adam Small: Well and another piece of that is, that’s what I was gonna say. Somebody puts a one star review on you, don’t get mad. Don’t get upset about it. Go out there and respond to it.
Douglas Karr: Yep.
Adam Small: You know and there are a couple ways to respond. One is if it’s unjust, you can point that out in the professional manner.
Douglas Karr: In a professional manner yeah, don’t get into a fight with them.
Adam Small: Don’t get into a fight, but the other option is to respond publicly and fix it. Offer to fix it. Say hey, you know what, I’m really sorry you had a poor experience, what can I do to fix it because people-
Douglas Karr: Acknowledge that publicly.
Adam Small: Yeah, you did it publicly. You showed people that not only did you have a problem, but you knew how to address it in a manner that made the person happy.
Douglas Karr: And that’s awesome marketing right there.
Adam Small: Exactly. You’re showing you care.
Douglas Karr: Yeah. I love seeing, if I look at someone’s reviews, and this is what I do, right, I look at the one star reviews first.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: All the time. And it’s exactly that. Like if it’s a product, sometimes I go, well that’s a dumb reason to give them a one star.
Adam Small: Right, right.
Douglas Karr: And I go buy the product anyways. If it’s a service, I look at it and they write back and oh I’m sorry or whatever, or they defend it. Like we’ve had, there’s a restaurant down the street, they know that they were getting bad fake reviews. So one of their competitors, so they would complain about this special, but there was no special you know, and so they just responded and go I think you got the wrong restaurant because we actually don’t serve that at our restaurant and stuff.
Adam Small: Well I saw one where somebody was complaining about a restaurant and the owner, he was a little bit rough around the edges in his response, but the basic was look dude, you’re 20 years old. I can’t serve you alcohol no matter what. You know? So, and that’s a great response when somebody’s complaining, you know, I think he could’ve been a little bit more politic about the way he responded, but that was the gist of it and so okay, I know that one’s bogus, right? I don’t have to take this one into account.
Douglas Karr: I think nowadays people are reasonable. We know that businesses make mistakes.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: All we wanna make sure is that they’re easy to work with to make it right.
Adam Small: Exactly. Same thing goes with real estate agents, you know, you wanna just make sure if somebody’s dealing with you, if one of your customers, if somebody’s dealing with you, if somebody’s looking at you to represent them, you know they wanna make sure that you’re gonna do the best for them and if there’s problems, you know how to take care of it and that’s where that negative review comes in, you know, it shows that there was a problem and then you know how to address it.
Douglas Karr: Yep. So let’s run them down again.
Adam Small: Yeah, let’s do a recap there.
Douglas Karr: So, SSL.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: Get a certificate on your site and if it’s difficult to do, move to a new host.
Adam Small: Exactly.
Douglas Karr: And number two was mobile first.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: Make sure that your site is easy to navigate mobiley.
Adam Small: May be time to update that site.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, yeah. We just did a site for a client that had, they have like 20 different products and services. Well, on mobile, I’m not gonna have it scroll and scroll and scroll for all of those and so we hid them on mobile and put them into like a drop down navigation and that way you could still see the majority of the site very easy, but you could very easily navigate with your thumb to where you wanted to go.
Adam Small: Very nice.
Douglas Karr: Number three was podcasting.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: I think podcasting especially for real estate agents, going around and talking to local community leaders, business owners-
Adam Small: Excellent tool.
Douglas Karr: Right?
Adam Small: Yeah, absolutely.
Douglas Karr: What a way to get things across. And then video and real time video, just like you said, your number one thing was preparation.
Adam Small: Preparation.
Douglas Karr: Yeah, absolutely. And then, I think we saved the best for last is google my business.
Adam Small: Probably the one with one of the biggest impacts, potential for biggest impact is what I’ll say.
Douglas Karr: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Adam Small: All right, great. Well, Doug, thanks so much for joining us today and to all your listeners out there, if you like what you hear, don’t forget to like or subscribe us.
Douglas Karr: And give us a review.
Adam Small: Give us a review, that would help out too. Thanks for listening guys, we’ll see you next time.
