It’s the natural evolution of a marketplace to start putting all the hot features into a single unit (iPhone, anyone?) It sells like gangbusters. But, what gets left behind?
As pointed out over on the HomeGain blog, companies like HomeGain, Active Rain, Trulia, and Zillow are aggressively maneuvering to be the one-stop shop for online real estate marketing. Is this good for you?
A single company could conceivably provide you all the tools: website, seo, blog platform, email system, advertising, etc.
Here’s the thing… just because you have the tools does not mean you have a marketable business. And where’s the strategy?
At it’s highest level marketing is your brand, your unique selling proposition, your competitive advantages, your business identity, your relationships, your market vision.
Got that in a box?
Some folks say that a one-stop solution will help real estate agents cut through the confusion of online marketing. Cutting through the confusion is good. Selling them a box of tools with no education as to how to how to effectively use them in a strategy… bad.
What do you think of this direction?
Hi Mark
I agree with you -you can’t provide marketing in one box.
Its not that simple.
We do at HomeGain endeavor, however to provide a complete package.
HomeGain’s AgentView product provides agents with an exclusive and ad free environment to present their listings, blog and profiles.
Wherever we feature agents we brand THEM not homegain. We encourage our visitors to contact the agents at every possible juncture.
The agent piggybacks off the homegain natural traffic and our content tools like our home valuation and home sale maximizer tools as well as from the SEO page rank of their blogs which they can use to send google juice to their own web properties.
Our competitors may feature agents, but they also feature competiting ads as well right along side them.
We also provide training (a blog school, access to webinars, personal coaches, web forum like homegain nation and live events, like homegain live nation where they have access to each other).
Indeed many of our customers derive a substantial percentage of their business from us, proof that it works.
Many of our agents have made hundreds of thousands of dollars using our products.
I don’t hear that claim made by agents using our competitors products.
You hear them tout about THEIR successes in terms of page view, visitors etc.
HomeGain makes it a point to tout our agents’ successes (witness our recent press releases about customers having success on our products)
We also understand fully that HomeGain is not an agent’s only potential solution and we encourage our members to work with other systems to compliment or supplement homegain products.
BTW here is the correct link for the blog article you cite in the openig paragraph http://blog.homegain.com/guest-bloggers/the-arcane-science-of-lead-conversion-really-has-nothing-to-do-with-real-estate/