Mediaboss Marketing

On Aug. 10, 1991, the World Wide Web went live. Now, more than 25 years later, its had a lasting impact on real estate, business and the world.

Despite the fact that the internet has changed how the vast majority of consumers search for and hire people in service-related industries such as real estate, some businesses still havent caught up with the times.

The real estate industry in particular seems to have a hard time letting older less effective marketing methods go.

If youre still wasting resources on marketing methods that became obsolete along with floppy drives and dial-up modems, its time to make a change.

Here are five real estate marketing methods that should have died off years ago:

Print advertisements are more expensive and less effective than ever. Not only are less people looking at these ads year after year, but its also nearly impossible to target potential clients via printed ads with any success.

Your online reputation will make or break your business

Foster a thriving business by cultivating and distributing glowing client recommendations READ MORE

Stop wasting your time and money with printed ads, and start learning how to reach the right people via Facebook advertising.

Dont you just hate making cold calls? Thats probably because the vast majority of modern consumers hate receiving them.

Instead of popping into peoples lives unannounced and unappreciated, reach out to leads at opportune times with a system that allows you to catch them when theyre ready and willing to hear what you have to offer.

Theres one thing that people hate even more than unsolicited phone calls: unsolicited home visits.

If youre knocking on random doors in random neighborhoods and hoping to snag a few eager clients, youre going to be disappointed.

On the other hand, if youre hosting an open house nearby, stopping by neighbors homes to invite them over is a lot less likely to end with doors slamming in your face.

Believe it or not, your contact list is not interested in every detail pertaining to local real estate. If you regularly send generic messages to your entire email database en masse, please do everyone (including yourself) a favor and stop.

Marketing via email is fine, but you need to do it in a strategic, segmented manner to achieve respectable results.

A decade ago, pushing out content that wasnt optimized for mobile was pretty much a non-issue. Now that nearly everyone has and uses a smartphone, however, mobile-friendly websites and emails are essential for effective marketing.

Consider this: How effective can your marketing truly be if roughly half of the people reading it are thinking about how bad the formatting is instead of the message youre trying to convey?

As the internet continues to shape how potential clients perceive your business and your marketing, theres only one thing you can do: adapt.

If youre still reliant on any of the aforementioned marketing methods, take a moment to step back and evaluate your strategy. If you somehow manage to make it work, by all means keep at it.

However, if youre doing what youre doing simply because its what youve always done, keeping your business afloat is only going to get harder unless you make some major changes.

Pat Hiban is the author of the NYT bestselling book 6 steps to 7 figures A Real Estate Professionals Guide to Building Wealth and Creating Your Destiny, the founder of online real estate sales training site Rebus University, and the host of Pat Hiban Interviews Real Estate Rockstars, an agent-to-agent real estate podcast with Hiban Digital in Baltimore, Maryland. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter.

Email Pat Hiban

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5 real estate marketing habits we should have left in the '90s - Inman.com

The Storage Group (TSG), an Internet-marketing company serving the self-storage industry, has hired Stevie Harris as its first business-development manager in the west-coast office. In her newly created position, Harris will manage the companys involvement in industry tradeshows, develop new vendor partnerships, build on existing relationships with industry associations, and enhance business processes. Shell also partner with the sales and marketing teams to build new market messaging, expand the companys reach and accomplish TSGs strategic business goals, according to a press release.

Harris has extensive experience working with associations in the construction and real estate industries, particularly in professional education and license compliance. In previous positions, she developed and managed programs to increase and retain association membership and implemented a CRM (customer-relationship management) platform for small businesses. She also spent time in the corporate world managing online-learning and service-area training programs.

Im thrilled to be joining an industry that prides itself on innovation, yet simplicity, Harris said. We have some projects in the works, specifically for small self-storage owners, that Im excited to implement and oversee. I truly believe my experience in small business will be a good crossover to this role.

Based in Maitland, Fla., TSG provides online tools and marketing solutions to the self-storage industry. The company's services include local-listing management, mobile websites, online rentals, pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, social media marketing and website development.

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Self-Storage Marketing Firm The Storage Group Hires Business-Development Manager - Inside Self-Storage

Consumers rarely take necessary precautions when it comes to privacy and information security. A new paper presented during the 2017 DEF CON eventcovered this trend in painstaking detail. In fact, researchers have dubbed this trend dark data, which can easily be used to cause all kinds of harm to people. It is a very disturbing trend as well, especially considering how criminals operate to exploit dark data.

The lackluster approach by most consumers to keep their information safe will cause all kinds of problems over time. Leaving digital breadcrumbs for third parties to exploit is never a good idea, yet it appears few people are aware of what they can do to counter this problem. The research paperregarding dark data certainly paints an interesting, if worrying, picture.

The researchersnote thatthe vast majority of internet users leave a significant amountof data exposed to criminals who are waiting to abuse it. Collecting data aboutinternet users has proven to be incredibly easy, and it seems this problem has only grown worse over time. Anything you see online can be a major threat to your online privacy at any given moment. That is quite disheartening to think about.

The paper outlineshow the team set up a bogus online marketing consultancy firm. It looks quite professional, all things considered, but that just goes to show how easily people are tricked into believing awebsite has only honest intentions. They then looked for web analytics companies providing clickstream data. Suchdata includes a list of websites users visit and in which order, as well as URL details of pages accessedon the sites. This is a powerfultool utilizedby retailers and other service providers.

Signing up for a free web analytics trial can give malicious entities access to clickstream data for several millions of users. There are companies specializing in collecting user data, and they can easily be taken advantage of to a certain degree. While thedata should be harmless more often than not no real names are included that is not necessarily the case. Anyone who knows what theyare looking for can use suchinformation to identifyinternet users.

Marketing companies and web analytics service providers prefer to be very meticulous when it comes to gathering information. Not only do they note whenpeople visit a particularwebsite, but they also collect information regarding user behavior. For example, when someone searches for an item on your website, do they stick around or leave the platform? Even though there is no real name attached to these behavioral profiles, people cannot change their online behavior either. Given enough key points to create a profile, it simply becomes a matter of matching that behavior to an actual internet user.

Indeed, a lot of information can be extracted from the website URLs onevisits, even if his or hername isnot attached. According to the paper, close to 3% of internet users can be identified from clues contained in a URL. Contrary to what one mightexpect, visiting a website prior to the site being analyzed by a service provider will often include metadata from aprevious platform. If that site happens to be a social media platform, the web analytics firm now seesyour Twitter or Facebook handle as part of that URL.

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What is Dark Data? - The Merkle

EAGLE, Idaho, Aug. 3, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --LiveRez.com, the most widely used cloud-based software for professional vacation rental managers, today announced that it has signed an agreement with Blizzard Internet Marketing to provide LiveRez's customers with a wide range of digital marketing services.

Based in Glenwood Springs, CO, Blizzard is a leading provider of online marketing services for professional vacation rental managers. As a preferred LiveRez industry partner, the company will become LiveRez's go-to recommendation for online marketing services for its rapidly growing base of customers (called partners).

"We carefully vet every single one of our preferred partners, and over the years we've seen Blizzard's commitment to the long-term, sustainable success of professional managers," said Tina Upson, LiveRez's VP of Operations. "As we've continued to grow, we've had a huge influx of our property manager partners requesting additional online marketing services. Partnering with Blizzard will allow us to provide our users with these services at scale."

Traditionally, LiveRez has accomodated its partners' needs with its own in-house professional services team, but due to the increasing interest in additional marketing services Upson said the company knew it would need to find an industry partner to help meet the demand.

"With all the recent changes to the marketing landscape in our industry, we've witnessed a fundamental shift in our partners' marketing strategies, trending toward online marketing services focused on building a manager's brand and helping them secure more direct bookings," Upson said. "But, as a company hyper-focused on our users' long-term success, we had to find a provider that shared our values."

Upson noted the work that Blizzard has done for some of LiveRez's current partners as a big factor in the company's decision, as well as Blizzard's ability to offer LiveRez partners a wide variety of services, including search engine optimization ("SEO"), paid ad management, email marketing, social media, and content writing.

"LiveRez is committed to the success of the professional managers using their property management software," said Susan Blizzard, CEO of Blizzard Internet Marketing. "That means having a solid online marketing presence. SEO and all other digital marketing strategies are constantly changing, and they are evolving even more rapidly now because of mobile devices. Blizzard has a team of experts specializing in each major area of online marketing, and we're excited for the opportunity to help LiveRez's partners further diversify their marketing portfolios and take their businesses to new levels."

About LiveRez.com

LiveRez is the world's most widely used software platform for marketing and managing vacation rental homes online. The LiveRez solution offers professional property managers all the tools they need to run their business in a single, cloud-based platform. And, the company's unique "pay-as-you-book" business model creates a mutually beneficial partnership between LiveRez and its vacation rental manager partners. This partnership fuels the company's mission of continually developing and supporting cutting-edge solutions that empower independent property managers to compete in the rapidly evolving vacation rental space.

About Blizzard Internet Marketing

Specializing in the Vacation Rental Management industry, Blizzard Internet Marketing provides comprehensive online marketing services, employing a group of in-house experts in all areas of online marketing, including SEO, Pay-Per-Click, Email Marketing, Social Media, Local Search, Analytics, Usability and Website Services. Our experts regularly attend online marketing symposiums, ongoing education courses, and subscribe to all of the most highly relevant blogs for their area of expertise. In addition, we offer training and consultation to our clients through our services as well as holding in person Blizzard University Workshops about digital marketing techniques.

Contact: Rob Holderness Director of Marketing (208) 639-6108 170887@email4pr.com

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/liverez-teams-up-with-blizzard-internet-marketing-to-offer-wider-range-of-services-to-its-property-manager-partners-300499053.html

SOURCE LiveRez.com

http://www.liverez.com

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LiveRez Teams Up with Blizzard Internet Marketing to Offer Wider ... - PR Newswire (press release)

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German publisher Axel Springer has agreed to buy internet service provider United Internet's online performance marketing business to create Europe's largest network of its kind and prepare it for a public listing, the companies said on Wednesday.

Performance marketing networks, or marketing affiliates, connect online advertisers and publishers, for which they earn a fee. The bigger they are, the better their technology gets at matching clients.

Axel Springer's Awin and United Internet's Affilinet together have advertising turnover of 718 million euros ($849 million), earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of 30 million euros and 1,100 employees, mostly software developers and salespeople.

Awin has 6,000 advertisers around the globe, while Affilinet has more than 3,500 advertisers in seven European countries.

Axel Springer will first buy out Swisscom's 48 percent share in Awin for 60 million euros plus interest by exercising a call option, valuing it at 5.2 times 2017 EBITDA.

It will then issue new shares to United Internet to buy most of Affilinet.

Axel Springer will hold 80 percent of the new Awin and United Internet the remaining 20 percent. Awin Chief Executive Mark Walters will head the combined company.

Reporting by Georgina Prodhan; Editing by Greg Mahlich

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Axel Springer to buy United Internet's performance marketing network - Reuters