Real estate data tool helps you overcome fatigue
There’s this phenomena that marketers refer to as “banner fatigue.” It’s when consumers ignore all those banner ads on a web page like they ignore billboards on a highway. Drops in banner click-through every year confirm this behavior.
Drove by a real estate sign the other day. The sign simply said: “3/2 with garage – $290,000.” It makes a person wonder: How many real estate messages suffer from “real estate fatigue?”
There’s a real estate data widget that can solve that problem.
First, here are some statistics on what is also called “banner blindness.” A study by Infolinks in 2012 found that 60% of people could not recall the last banner ad they saw. Of those who did remember, 80% thought the ad was irrelevant and did not appeal to them.
And this is in the day of targeted advertising, where if you visit a car site, you are going to start seeing car ads everywhere you go.
The “banner fatigue” factor does not just apply to banner advertising. There is a tsunami of information swamping the Internet right now. More and more companies are cranking out more and more content to try and capture visitors. They also do this to move up in the ranks with Google, Bing and Yahoo search. Google does determine its rankings based on how much relevant content a site offers AND how often it produces new content.
So, with this avalanche of information coming at them continually, consumers are learning to turn it off. Ignore it. Scan a headline and move on.
The rule of thumb is that people will look at a page for 3 seconds, then stay or move on. If they stay, the attention span of the average web reader has now dropped from 13 seconds to 8 seconds. That’s a blink of the eye. Maybe one or two sentences.
So to catch and keep their attention, real estate professionals must come up with more appealing content combined with attention-grabbing headlines. But you can’t just keep rewording the same old content, such as “3/2 with garage.” You need a new, fresh source of content as well. Content that is relevant. Content to appeals to the many and not just a few looking for a 3/2. Local content achieves that aim.
This is where hyper-local data tools such as SpatialMatch come in. SpatialMatch is a data widget that agents and brokers can embed into their sites. It not only pulls in all the MLS listings in the area, but it also pulls in related information as well, such as school data – student/teacher ratios, enrollment size, etc.
And, it pulls all that data onto a eye-catching map. This is critical because any posting on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc. absolutely needs to have an image attached to it to catch attention today.
There’s banner blindness and there’s text blindness as well. Images still work, especially for today’s web visitor who is scanning a page as fast as the pixels can appear.
For example, with SpatialMatch, you could pull up local Market Data. Perhaps dig out some stats about trending real estate sales in a particular neighborhood.
Here’s how the real estate message could play out: “For Your Free Report on The Growth of Home Prices in Your Neighborhood, Click Here.” Or, to “Get Your Free Report on the Latest School Data, Click Here.”
That’s the kind of information that will grab attention, likes and shares on Facebook and Twitter.
That’s powerful stuff. That’s the type of relevant information that home buyers and home sellers will want to see because it affects them personally. It affects the biggest purchasing decision they will make or the sale of the biggest purchase they’ve made.
And it gives you, the real estate professional, critical content to help them make that decision. Nobody will turn a blind eye to that.
