In my last blog entry, I was discussing how to collaborate with other types of businesses that are partonized by the same type of customer. In my case, real estate, I like to give flyers with QR codes on them to business like banks, credit unions, moving companies, and home renavators, because they often deal with people looking to buy or sell a home. I know there’s a strong chance that if I work with these companies and give them some promising leads they will do the same for me. I use my QR code flyers like a hook and bait, dangling them in a pool of water that I know has enough fish in them to make it worth my while.

Sometime, though, you need to fish in bigger waters. You’ve fished all the promising leads from those smaller pools, and now its time not to use a hook, but a net, and a wider net at that. I’m talking direct mailers. Direct mailers are the fishing net of the real estate world – sometimes you cast them out and they reel in tons of customers. Other times, you’re not so lucky. Most real estate practices use direct mailers to some degree, and some use them more than others. Everyone who uses them, however, is aware of their fickle and unpredictable returns on investment.

I’ve figured out, however, to make direct mail campaigns a little more predictable and less frustrating, and the secret is, you guessed it – QR codes. I make sure to have them on my flyers, the same ones I drop off at the places of businesses that I mentioned in my last post. One neat little thing about QR codes that even people who use them for marketing may not realize is that every time someone scans one, you can track that scan and start accumulating data. With better data, you can make better decisions, especially when it comes to marketing. Stay tuned and next blog entry, I’m going to talk about the ultimate application for QR codes: analytics.

Throughout this blog, I’ve been teaching people how to use QR codes in marketing, especially for real estate. I’ve been so focused on growing one’s own business, however, that I’ve forgotten the importance of working with other businesses and industries that are related to yours or have similar customers.

There are many different types of business that have what I could a synergistic relationship – they are not direct competitors nor in the same exact industry, but occup similar “niches” in business ecosystems. For example, a store that sells maternity clothes isn’t a competitor to a business that baby proofs homes, but they have the same customer base. Now imagine if those businesses helped each other out by marketing the other one within both of the places of business. Over time, both businesses would find they had increased their revenue by “sharing” leads with one another.

So how does this translate to real estate? Well, what other types of businesses do people who are in the market to buy or sell a home patronize? What if you asked them to help market you in exchange for you marketing them, a little quid pro quo? Here’s a few thoughts of the top of my head:

1) Banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders – I’ve never sold a home to anybody who paid cash. Every single home I’ve sold was purchased with the assistance of a mortgage. Most real estate agents know this, of course, but not all of them work to develop relationships with their local banks, credit unions, and other mortage lenders. If you haven’t done so, I would recommend you start doing so.

One thing I like to do is stop at a few places that deal in mortgages that I’ve developed relationships with over the years and make sure they have a stack of flyers for my business and have QR codes on the flyers that lead potential home buyers to the most recent listings on my website. You can even generate a few different QR codes based on how much a future home buyer has been approved for at the mortgage lender – that way, you can really tailor the experience to the home buyer and their income level and show them houses that are only in their price range.

2) Moving companies – Of course people in apartments move the most, but a for every home buyer, there’s a seller, which means they need to move all of their possesions. Since home owners have more space and income relative to apartment renters, they also tend to have more stuff and need the services of professional moving companies. I’ve made contacts at the two biggest ones in my local area and always recommend them to home sellers. In return, they do the same for me by keeping a stack of my flyers with QR codes on them.

3) Contractors and renovators – Many home sellers looking to make their home more appealing to buyers do some renovations to their homes before selling them. Also, many home buyers buy fixer-uppers that need a little work but come with a reduced price tag and also renovate the home after purchase. Making a contact or two with a contractor or company that specializes in home renovation could pay off huge dividends down the road. I have one in particular who I know keeps a flyer or two with QR codes on them in his truck for leads, and I keep a business card or two of his on me.

It’s not often what you know, but who you know, that makes all the difference in the business world. I’ve worked hard over the years to learn who interact and deal with the people who could be my next customer, and I make sure to throw them leads. In return, all I ask is they return the favor by having some flyers of mine with QR codes printed on them.

I’ve alluded to in previous posts about one of the few frustrations I have using QR codes. Few things make me as crazy as when I scan a QR code with my smartphone only to be directed to a webpage that was never intended to be viewed on a phone. In short, it wasn’t optimized for mobile.

What does it mean for a page to be optimized for mobile? Here’s a few general guidelines:

1) Avoid large files that aren’t necessary. Large picture files and anything with Flash are really cumbersome and slow down load times on mobile browsers for webpages. If a larger image isn’t really necessary, it might be best to avoid it entirely.

2) Tweak your content. While even users on standard browsers are quick to move on to another website, those on mobile browsers are even more impatient. That’s why it’s so important to make the content on your site user friendly. Make the information the information the user wants quick to find and easy to understand.

3) Consider a sub-domain. If you have the IT resources or have the knowledge yourself, you can essentially create simpler, mobile friendly copies of your webpages on a separate subdomain of your website, something like this: http://www.mobile.example.com . While there are some SEO related concerns associated with subdomains, the pros of mobile usability might outweigh the SEO cons.

4) Learn which browsers to optimize for. Even sites optimized for mobile don’t always look the same on different browsers. One advantage for using subdomains besides mobile usability is that you can use the same analytics you normally would run to see which browsers are most commonly used to access your mobile pages. If one or two browsers are predominantly used more than others, you can use that information to optimize especially for those browser(s).

If you’re planning on using QR codes for any aspect of your business marketing, make sure that you’re taking the necessary steps to make the target page(s) mobile friendly. Otherwise, instead of getting more conversions, you might be turning off potential customers, customers who will then move onto a competitor’s site.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, QR codes are not a magic bullet for your marketing needs. You simply can’t create a QR code and think its going to instantly create more revenue for your business. What it can do, however, is help enhance the marketing efforts you already using and hopefully increase their conversion rates. So, really, its better to think of QR codes as a marketing facilitator rather than a standalone marketing practice.

One of the most tried and true marketing efforts for real estate practices are printed home listings. Today I’d like to talk about how you can use QR code alongside traditional listings to increase their power and earning potential.

I’ll be the first to admit that I live by home listings – online and in print forms. I think they’re what potential homebuyers are used to seeing, and people are by nature creatures of habit. So I’ve never stopped using them and I don’t see myself ever doing so. What I’ve started doing, however, is using QR codes in conjunction with these traditional listings to engage potential customers in new ways that they might not have seen before.

So what can a QR code alongiside a home listing do? How about lead a user to a virtual tour of the home. This is my personal favorite lately. When someone picks up a printed circular with a lot of home listings inside, you might be able to get them to see or photo or two of the home, maybe even a color one. But that’s it – no interactivity.

With QR codes, you can create unique codes for each listing, and have those codes direct the user to that specific listing on your website that has has a virtual tour of the home. That listing can also give other relevant information a potential homebuyer might want: directions to the property via Mapquest or Google maps, information about the neighborhood or local school district, even links to other listings you have for homes that are in the same neighborhood or price range.

A traditional print listing is free and can reach a lot of people. But if that static ad doesn’t catch someone’s eye, there are no other options. They simply flip the page. With a QR code, you get new and innovative ways to keep potential customers looking at your home listings.

In my experience, I find that the conversion rates for users who scanned the QR codes in my print lisitings are significantly higher than those who don’t. Why? – I’m making it easier for them to find the information they want in the first place. I’m literally letting the home sell itself.

In the entire field of web based and mobile marketing, there might not be a topic as controversial or as oftenly misunderstood as social media. Frankly, I think that a lot of businesses, real estate practices or not, simply don’t understand social media. They either don’t get what it is and isn’t or they have unrealistic expectations for it, or some combination of both.

As a result, there’s a lot of either hesistancy or frustration to embrace social media as a marketing practice. I’d like to shed some light here by exposing some common myths about social media.

Myth # 1: Social media will instantly increase your number of inbound sales leads. Ummm – no. It won’t. The simple fact is that the most common way for people to come across your Facebook or LinkedIn profile is that they were directed to it from some other marketing medium you were already using - your website, your signage, your radio/tv spots, whatever.

Social media accounts are not going to double or triple the number of potential customers through the form of inbound leads. Even if they did, Facebook and other forms of social media aren’t really set up for businesses to effectively harvest and utilize user information.

What social media can do, however, is simply give you another channel of communication with your potential and exisiting customer base. A billboard only generates inbound leads when interested customers drive or walk by it, which for any given customer is difficult to control or predict. But did you know that over 175 million people log onto Facebook every single day? I repeat – every single day. Like clockwork.

Now imagine if every single day you were posting on Facebook new listings, new promotions, new anything. Facebook = Dynamic Content. Billboards = Static Content. If your billboard didn’t get me to call or visit your website the first 20 times I drove by it, what makes you think I will later? Facebook and other forms of social media give you new chances every single day to re-engage potential and existing customers.

Myth # 2: Social media is just a fad. Again – no. While there may have been some eventual losers in social media (sorry MySpace, sorry Friendster), that’s the price paid for new and emerging business models.  There are, however,also some clear winners that are not going away and still attracting new users every month: Facebook, FourSquare, LinkedIn. Heck, I even consider YouTube social media. The original analogy of the internet was a “web” – a network of nodes, of hubs, connected togther. That’s exactly what social media is. So when people say social media is a fad or is dying, they’re either being contrarian or naive. Take your pick.

Myth # 3: You have to use social media the same way everybody else does. Why? Some of the best marketing campaigns are the ones that seem to run contrary to what everyone else does. When they zig, you should consider zagging. Sure, you can use social media to talk about sales or give out coupon codes like everyone else, or you could try experimenting and coming up with something truly original. The great thing about social media is that its based on sharing. Give just a few social media users something interesting to downright weird, and watch them share it. That’s the true meaning of viral.

Ok, it’s time to have that conversation. I’ve been putting it off and off for a while, and now I can’t put it off any longer. Lets talk about your url. Specifically, its length. Let’s say that you’re name is Mike Smith and you’re an agent at Bob Anderson and Associates. What’s the url for your webpage on the company website? Please don’t tell me it’s http://www.bobandersonandassociates.com/mike_smith . Because, I’ve got to be honest here. Unless I can directly click on a link that take me to that page, I’m never, I repeat NEVER going to either remember that or type all of that into my web browser to go to your website.

There’s a clear correlation between the length of your url and how user friendly it is. Short urls are easy to remember and entered into browsers far more often than long urls are. If your webpage has a nightmare url like the example above, I have two words of advice: shorten it.

Ideally, you or your company would have registered for the acronym for Bob Anderson and Associates, something like: http://www.baaa.com . But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you tried that, but it was taken already, so you went with the longform url. So now what do you do? Well, you could try a url shortener.

There are several websites out there like http://goo.gl/ or https://bitly.com/ that allow you to enter in a really long or cumbersome URL and get a short and sweet url randomly generated for you. The shortened url will simply direct the user to the longform original url. They would look something like this:http://bo.on/ubWr70 .

Now that’s not necessarily any easier to remember, but its certainly shorter. And that’s half the battle. It’s hard to Twitter or text someone a really long url, especially the dynamic ones you might have for home listings that probably exceed character limits on text messages. If someone sees a short url on a sign or hears one on the radio, its easier for them to put it into a web browser quickly. The point of mobile marketing is to generate more traffic and direct users to your website. It’s hard to do that when the listing is: http://www.bobandersonandassociates.com/listings/?zipcode=12345.php or whatever the url for page is.

In my last blog entry, I was talking about how QR codes are only one type of mobile marketing and that if you only focus on QR codes, you might miss the forest for the trees. One of the easiest marketing efforts to do in conjunction with QR codes is using SMS marketing.

What’s SMS? SMS stands for “short message services”. Pronounces “sims”, most readers would be familiar with SMS in the form of the now ubiquitous text messaging that over 75% of cellphone and smartphone owners use.

How can you use SMS as a form of mobile marketing for your real estate practice? Probably the simplest way is to regularly update potential customers about new listings or reductions in asking prices on the homes you are trying to sell.

Anytime I show a home, I always make sure to get the potential customer’s email and cell phone number. That way, if I don’t sell a customer that particular home on that particular day, I have an easy and effective way to communicate with them in the future.

So, whenever a homeowner I’m working with reduces their asking price, I send an SMS text message to every one I’ve shown that home to. You’d be surpised at the conversion rate for such an easy tactic, especially for people who you believed weren’t interested before.

Another thing I do is group potential homebuyers into “clusters” based on desired neighborhood or price range. That way, anytime a new listing pops up that meets that cluster’s criteria, I send out another round of SMS texts. Again, the conversion rate is remarkably high for this tactic, especially since all I had to do was reutilize information the homebuyer gave to me for free!

I combine the SMS texts with emails as well, of course, but one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that getting someone to even open up an email is a challenge. With spam filters and delete buttons, its harder to get someone to read an email. But did you know that almost everyone who recieves a text opens it up and reads it within 15 minutes? Amazing!

So far I’ve been blogging about QR codes this, QR codes that. Let’s take a step back though for a minute. QR codes are just a form of mobile marketing, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a few blog posts and talk about mobile marketing as a whole. After all, if all you fixate on is QR codes, you’re neglecting a broader range of marketing efforts that have equal chance to generate leads and convert sales for you.

So what is mobile marketing? A lot of people think of mobile marketing simply as marketing oriented towards cellphone and smartphones. You know – mobile phones. That certainly is an aspect of mobile marketing, but its larger than that. I like to think of mobile marketing as any type of marketing that customers can be exposed to when they’re on the go, away from their home and television, which continues to be the largest and most expensive marketing medium around today.

By that definition, a lot of things would count as mobile marketing. A billboard or sign on a bus or bus stop. A sign above a urinal in a public place with a lot of foot traffic. Heck, even a radio commercial when someone is driving in their car. But ask yourself this: can you scan a QR code off of the radio? No, you can’t. But you can give them a number to text or a website to visit to get a coupon or promotion.

In a previous post, I mentioned how marketing should always be multichanneled. Part of that means giving users as many ways to connect with your website and your business as possible, whether that means using QR codes, text messaging, or easy to remember URLs that they hear on the radio, television, or at speaking events.

The question isn’t whether one of these methods is better than other. The real question is if you’re not using all of them together, why not?

So far, I’ve been blogging a lot about QR codes in general, but not really focusing on how to use it in a real estate setting. So I’m going to start mixing in some more entries for all those real estate agents out there that are looking for information on how to use QR codes in their own practice.

My first real estate oriented QR code blog entry is about using QR codes on business cards. If you’re like me or any other real estate agent out there, you’ve got a business card. In fact, you’ve got dozen of them on you at any moment. You’ve got them in your wallet or purse, in your car, in your office. You never know when you might need one, so you’re never without one. Great. But do you have a QR code on it? Here’s a few neat things you could do if you did:

1) Direct a customer to your website. Did you know that more and more potential homeowners are using the internet to look for homes than ever before? Not a week goes by that I show a home to someone who’s already seen the listing online and seems to know a bit about the home. That just makes my job easier – I know that if they’ve seen the home online and now want to see it in person, then I’m one step closer to making the sale. So now when I leave business cards or post one up on a bulletin board at my local grocery store or coffee shop, I make sure they all have QR codes on them.

2) Give a customer your contact information. There are few common ways to do this. The first, and my preference, is to create a QR code that encodes vCard information. This is probably the most widely used uniform way to transfer your contact information into someone’s smartphone. It allows you to enter your name, phone number, email, address, organization, and title all into someone’s contact list in their phone. A second way, that requires an additional step, is simply to point the QR code at a website where that contact info is contained. It’s basically a twist on #1, but rather than a homepage, it takes the user to a targeted contact info page where they can enter than information themselves.

3) Show a customer a commercial. This is something that one of my colleagues at the real estate firm I work at has started doing. The QR codes he prints on his business cards don’t go to his website or transfer contact information. They way he sees it, that information is already on the card. Instead, the QR code directs the potential customer to a YouTube video channel where a commercial and few free homebuying tutorials are located. TV commercials are expensive and only reach people who are watching tv.

A YouTube channel is completely free, and in some cases, can actually generate you some money from revenue sharing if you can generate a lot of traffic to the videos. He has not just a commercial on his channel, but the tutorials as well, and he gets a lot of traffic to his videos from people all over the world, not just the ones he gives business cards to. By giving out information for free, he generates enough traffic to the videos that he actually makes money (not a lot, but hey -its something) rather than spending any. Neat idea, huh?

One of my main goals for this blog is to educate readers about how they can use QR codes to increase their marketing efforts. One thing I’ve learned though, is that if you don’t know much about marketing to begin with, QR codes really aren’t going to help you. So this entry is dedicated to outlining some basic principles of marketing, especially as they pertain to QR codes.

1. Marketing should be oriented toward the customer, not the business. How many websites have you seen that are full of mission statements, corporate speak, and organizational flowcharts? Plenty. How many of those things really interest customers? Not many.
2. No matter what you plan to do with QR codes, the first thing you should be thinking about is how it’s going to interest the potential customer. If you can’t appeal to the customer and make them want to scan the code, then there’s no hope of QR codes adding anything to your bottom line.
3. Think about what information, product, service, or discount you can offer the customer that they would truly want. Even better, that they would tell their friends about and give you free promotion. One of the best ways to do this is look inward. Heck, if you were in their shoes, what would you want? Until you figure that part out, using QR codes in a marketing campaign will remain a gimmick. A neat, techy gimmick, but a gimmick nonetheless.
4. Marketing should be multi-channeled. Too many businesses, especially small ones, try to put all their marketing efforts into one specific type of advertising, the one that generates the most leads or conversions for them: print, billboard, radio, television, direct mail, etc. That’s a limited way of thinking about marketing. And if you fall into that way of thinking about QR codes, its going to get you into trouble.
5. QR codes are not a magic bullet, they are not a panacea or cure all. They are simply something that are free and easy to use that you could use right alongside whatever marketing campaigns you currently have going. If your company uses a circular to advertise, don’t cancel your account because now you’ve heard of QR codes and they’re free. Rather, use the QR codes in the ads on your circular. If you use signs or billboards, the same thing applies. Don’t stop doing what’s worked for you in the past. But use the QR codes as another way for your potential customers to interact with you and your business.
6. Marketing should be user friendly. Have you ever listened to a really annoying commercial on the radio or seen one on television? How did that make you feel? Did you want to buy the product or stab a pencil in your ear? Probably the latter. One of the most common mistakes companies make with their marketing dollars is making it unpleasant for their potential customers. This runs the risk of turning them off, or even worse, turning them toward your competitors.
7. If you use QR codes, don’t make the same mistake. Make sure whatever response you want the QR code to cause is user friendly and optimized for mobile phones. Nothing is more annoying than being directed to a website that was never intended to be viewed on a 2 inch screen. Do your customers a favor and yourself a favor. Think user friendly.