Written by Fernando Maciá
Índice
More than just e-Commerce, the Internet is now a strategic tool for companies.
Shopping as a sensory experience
Have you ever stopped to watch a group of eager shoppers in the midst of sale fever? They approach the display where all kinds of garments are piled up in a messy hodgepodge. They choose one, spread it on the pile, stretch it to check the elasticity of the fabric. They touch it again and again to perceive the softness and feel of the fabric. They lift it up and tilt it in front of the light to see how it affects qualities such as brightness, color…. See, touch, smell… A computer screen is only capable of representing the visual appearance of an object, and even then only very imperfectly: the image is flat, usually motionless, and any resemblance to the actual color of the object represented is purely coincidental. Does this mean that if our item is not software, books or electronic gadgets we cannot get any benefit from the Internet? Nothing could be further from the truth. By applying a little common sense, it is possible to extract a great performance from our website, even if we do not sell directly through it.
How to transfer the experience to the Internet
Let’s look at a somewhat caricatured example, but our experience shows that it is not far from reality.
Looking for a house in Spain
Kjell is Norwegian and 54 years old. In a few months he will retire early. After vacationing on the Costa Brava two years ago, he and his wife, Britt, planned to purchase a home in Spain for the winter seasons. In the summer, they thought, they could return to Norway to visit family and friends, and perhaps then their daughter, who works in Germany, could take advantage of the apartment for a vacation. Kjell and Britt plan to come to Spain next spring to look for that home they want to buy. Until then, Kjell spends a few afternoons searching the Internet for prices, procedures, etc. When you find a property that you would like to visit, print the file and save it along with the rest of the selected properties in a folder that you will take with you on your trip to Spain. If you have a real estate website, your goal is not to sell a home to Kjell online. Your goal is to have a page of your website printed in that folder. Let’s see what you can do to achieve this.
Online showcase
Juan owns a real estate agency. After a first few years of uncertainty, his small real estate company is taking off. He has even become a developer and is building a small development of twelve semi-detached houses. Juan likes new technologies, so he decides to register a domain and looks for a company to develop a website for him. The first web site, inmojuan.com, presents some of the second-hand properties whose listings are accumulating in Juan’s real estate showcase, and there is a section dedicated to presenting the development in progress. Juan is very proud of the fact that visitors to the website can see the different housing models and even download the specifications.
Adapting to the market
As a good salesman, Juan has noticed the high number of people from other countries who choose Spain to buy a second home. For this reason, it has commissioned an English version of its website. In this way, he hopes to reach a much wider audience. By developing his website in English, Juan realizes that it is likely to be viewed by people who have never visited his area, maybe not even Spain. So you decide to add a few pages with information about your area, activities that may be attractive to foreigners, etc. He wants that when someone like Kjell comes to his site from the freezing temperatures of the North, a breath of Mediterranean air floods his room and transmits the Spanish style to him. You want that person to unconsciously want to be there.
To appear in the top positions
As he wants to know what the result of this investment is, Juan consults the traffic statistics of his new website almost daily and sees, with despair, that the months go by and the visits do not increase. And he added his web address on all his stationery and even had it emblazoned on the window display and on the real estate van. Upon further investigation, Juan discovers that his website does not appear in the search engine results, even when he searches for the name of his new promotion. Hire a specialized company that optimizes the contents of your website and submits your pages to the main national, international and specialized search engines. This company advises you to add new content regularly and to update your pages frequently and also finds several websites with which inmojuan.com can exchange links.
A few weeks later, inmojuan.com appears in the top results for several of the key concepts for your business, both in English and Spanish. Juan sees the increase in visitors in the statistics and is very satisfied. In addition, the information from the search terms your visitors entered to find your site gives you many clues about the type of homes and areas that the market is demanding. But something still doesn’t fit. The number of visitors has increased a lot but the number of page views has increased very little. Juan attributes this to the fact that his website is complicated to use, is too static or does not present attractive content for his visitors.
Content optimization
In a new evolution of its website, inmojuan.com now has an intranet with a content management system (CMS) with which one of the real estate commercials can update daily the content of the website, add new properties, cancel those that are already sold, etc. In addition, taking advantage of the fact that the information is now in a database, Juan commissions a real estate search engine. With it, the visitors to your web can know much more easily if there is any property in inmojuan.com that interests them. Juan’s website has gone from being a static showcase to a dynamic showcase, much better adapted to the needs of his customer profile.
Very soon, statistics show that the search engine page and the results page are the most visited pages on the web. Visitors now view a greater number of pages while viewing detailed data on each property.
Juan knows from experience that many people want to sell a property they own in order to buy another one. On the other hand, selling second-hand homes is one of the most important activities of your real estate company. For this reason, it includes a page on its website where people interested in selling their property can leave their property details. Juan thus provides a service and saves a lot of time searching for new apartments for sale.
Statistics show an increasing activity in inmojuan.com. However, Juan finds that he receives very few calls to the real estate agency compared to the number of queries registered by the real estate search engine on his website. Can it be that so many people are unable to find homes that meet their search criteria? Juan decides that something should be done with these visitors, and orders a real estate alert system, so that now his visitors can define the property they are looking for and the inmojuan.com website will send them a message to their e-mail when there are properties matching that profile. Juan has taken another step forward in his proactive attitude towards his customer.
Leveraging statistics
The first demands for real estate are starting to arrive. Soon, they number in the dozens. Juan suspects that he could make greater use of this information since, after all, it is a survey of what his clients are demanding: preferred areas, type of housing, number of rooms, price they are willing to pay…. Very soon, Juan will have a statistical exploitation system for all this information on his intranet: he will be able to know, at any time, which area is the most in demand, what types of housing, in what price range… and then he will extend this information to the requests for property sales and the use of the real estate search engine. Juan is now getting first-hand information where potential customers are telling him the type of product they prefer. In this way, Juan can concentrate his sales force on finding this type of product and design his next promotion much more closely to demand.
Customer loyalty
When he starts selling to foreign customers, Juan soon also includes an extranet from which he builds a closer relationship with them. Kjell, who has finally bought his house from Juan after consulting inmojuan.com, can see from Oslo how the construction works are progressing, he can download the plans of the electrical installation, he is aware of possible delays in the delivery of keys and he can leave indications to personalize his house. Kjell and Britt are very pleased to have dealt with inmojuan.com and recommend the website whenever they can to their friends and acquaintances. His testimonial is also on the inmojuan.com website, which instills confidence in future clients.
Juan and Kjell don’t exist, but someone who has taken Juan’s steps is on the right track to get great performance from their website. Let’s recap and see how Juan has succeeded in his strategy to incorporate his business on the Internet: first, to know the market we are targeting and adapt our content to that profile. Secondly, make sure we are visible in search engines for our most important key concepts. Thirdly, adopting a proactive attitude: how can we bring more added value to our visitors? How can we make it easier for them to find what they are looking for? After all, that’s what they came to our website for. Fourthly, let’s take advantage of statistical data and activity on the different pages and functionalities of our website to extract as much data as possible from our customers and have an efficient system to convert that data into interpretable information that gives us clues about trends, evolution of demand, etc. Fifth, let’s build customer loyalty with our website by providing them with value-added services.
There is much more that Juan will be able to do in the future. The Internet opens up new fields and possibilities for experimentation every day. Let us not be dazzled by technology. Traditional marketing principles and, ultimately, some common sense, are still fully valid when it comes to successfully approaching this medium.
