Tag Archives: banner ads

Blogging for advertising

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Blogging as an advertising medium?

It’s obvious that the internet and the marketing of real estate (including luxury real estate) have merged. You might be slightly out of touch to believe otherwise. It’s also okay if you do. If what you’re doing is working, why change? If the money you’re spending on advertising is not working the same as it did four or five years ago, there is probably a good reason for it.

As for why it’s not working, I’m not sure I have all the answers. In fact, I’ll bet spending 50 grand a year on gorgeous printed magazines will pay off. Of course, it may be more if you consider all the other marketing expenses (i.e., fee to your respective brand, fees for banner ads.)

As far as banner ads are concerned, you need not even click on this link about banner advertising efficacy:

Being a familiar name takes you miles closer to closing a sale. People like to buy from companies they’ve heard of.

It turns out that this is an overlooked benefit of banner ads.
Banner ads are fairly worthless in terms of generating clickthroughs… you have to trick too much and manipulate too much to get clicks worth much of anything. But, if you build ads with no intent of clicks, no hope for clicks… then you can focus on ads that drill your name or picture or phrase into my head. 100 impressions and you’re almost famous.

A household name. Not for everyone, but for people who matter.

That was a year ago, also. If this is true, and you’re not getting an ROI, doesn’t it make sense to stop spending over 50 thousand dollars a year hoping that it will start working?

One thing I’m absolutely certain of is that marketing your brand online is cost effective. And writing online for your brand is not as simple as a facebook status update. If you are writing online (or blogging, which I write with extreme caution because it has the tendency to be equated to the LOLcats or to a personal journal), and you do it everyday with the same idea that the 50 thousand dollars a year in ads you’re spending, you’ll probably save about half, if not more.

P.S. The reason I haven’t been maintaining this blog is because I’ve been building semantic sites for agents. Li Read, someone I admire as well as someone who frequently made brilliant insights contributing to this blog (in the past) is about to prove my point. It starts tomorrow. Watch.

Luxury market disruption

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Disruptive marketing isn’t new. The digital camera, the flash drive, the compact disc, the cassette tape, the automobile, … dare I say… marketing? well, I didn’t actually. Jeff Weinberger did. Read more about it here. Here are some specific gems on his blog.
This is particularly true in the luxury market for many reasons. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you already know why. In case you don’t know why, it’s because our eyeballs and attention has shifted.

“Marketers (and, I’ve noticed, many companies) are not as good at the kind of experimentation that creates change. It’s really not that different. Experiment with things you have not yet tried. Try a new medium for communication – outbound, inbound or (preferably) two-way. Try a few all at once. See if any work. Maybe try a structure to a program, or create something in your market that’s never been created before. It might not work, but it might, and even if it doesn’t, you’ve learned something about having the conversation with your market that your current structure would never have allowed you to learn.”

“Why does this matter? I will refrain from beating the now-tired drum of “the market is changing” (which really means your buyer is changing) – we all know it’s true, and will continue to be. If you’re trying the same things over and over again (even if you are improving them every time), you will become irrelevant.”

I think it’s important to remember that the internet was merely the enabler for marketing to be disruptive. It is the ‘medium’ not the actual disruption. For example: online shopping. It’s like blaming your car stereo for the music that is playing.

You can use the internet as a disruptive tool, (i.e. spamming, banner ads) but they won’t be as effective as earning the right to market to people that want to hear from you. The future lies with these people.

One more thought to consider:

“Television redefines the relationships of family and community; cloning challenges basic understandings and definitions of character and personhood. Electronic commerce has caught national and local governments completely off guard, and while they scamper to figure out how to apply whomever’s law, the technology continues to evolve into forms less and less analogous to enterprises with which they are familiar.” – Larry Downes, The Law of Disruption