Replacing Traditional Advertising with Social Media: One Realtor's Story

Steve recently chatted with Utah Realtor Utah Dave on how he uses social media. Dave focuses most of his marketing dollars in social media these days. Here is a synopsis of their conversation.
Steve: Have you seen that you have basically discontinued other kinds of media activity given what's happening or is social marketing something you've added on top of?
Utah Dave: The main thing I kind of discontinued was post cards and magazine advertisement and then I focused on social media. I eliminated any paid for leads online, where you subscribe to some Websites to get leads, I eliminated all of that stuff. I found that I could work calling 20 of those leads as hard as I can and maybe getting one person because they're inundated with 20 other people at the same time calling.
Steve: Right.
Utah Dave: I focus on my Facebook and my blog and so forth and people will just call me up. I prefer that.
Steve: Any change in the way you've basically been offering that as a part of a listing tool?
Utah Dave: Open houses, newspapers, magazines aren't going to sell your house. We show them that 80 percent of people from-- or almost 85 percent of people look online for a home. And then 70 percent go drive by the house from-- after they look online. And so we focus on two things. We focus online for their advertising. And then second we focus on responding to them within 15 minutes, because these people they go drive by a house they want info right away or they want to see the house right away. And so because we have a system set up that's focused on the internet, focused on getting info to them fast or getting them into the home fast, we sell more homes that way. So yeah, all those other marketing ways we, you know, it's not part of our presentation, it's worthless.
Steve: Yeah well especially your younger clientele maybe the old habits aren't there anyway.
Utah Dave: Right.
Steve: You know, "Where's my ad in the newspaper?" Nobody's looking at those anymore.
Utah Dave: No.
Steve: So do you advertise on Realtor.com or other places like that?
Utah Dave: No, no I don't. Because I gather statistics of where people look and I know all the Websites where people look at here in Utah. And Realtor.com is not one of them.
Steve: Where are you advertising then?
Utah Dave: I advertise PaperClick and I also do some SEO work. So most of my PaperClick I'm on Google, I'm on Yahoo. I do have billboards though and moving vans because when people see my billboards and my moving vans and then one day they're online and they see me on their friends profile or they type in "Utah homes for sale" they'll see my Website. It will click and they'll be like, "Oh I know this guy." And they'll go to my Website before someone else's. So I still use big media to brand me to the masses and that creates credibility and a higher conversion rate for me.

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