LinkedIn rolled out polls this week, a cool new feature for LinkedIn Groups (important distinction: this feature is not available for Company Pages). The feature has been rolling out over the past couple of days, and if you haven't seen it yet, you're sure to soon. LinkedIn has also let you like, comment on, and follow polls, helping spark discussion and increase user engagement with the group. Let's take a look at how to set up polls in LinkedIn Groups, and discuss 5 creative ways to use this new feature.
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Topics:
n5r blog,
marketing ideas,
linkedin,
linked in,
marketing,
n5r,
online marketing,
online media
CondoOutlet.com just hit 4,000 Fans on Facebook with over 653 people Talking About This. Please find out what all of the fuss is about by Liking us on Facebook now
www.condooutlet.com
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A recent Globe and Mail poll asked "Do you think Canadian home prices will drop in 2012?" And thousands replied with mixed results:
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Topics:
toronto condo market,
home prices,
housing bubble,
real estate market
Every Friday we round up the week's news related to condo sales and marketing, paying particular attention on the Toronto condo market. Here’s what the media had to say the week of December 19th, 2011:
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Topics:
toronto condo news,
news roundup,
n5r
Yesterday, we talked about how to produce a professional, sales video for your condo development. Now that you’ve made the investment, it’s time to tell the world!
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Topics:
YouTube,
sales video,
online video
In my previous post, we talked about all the reasons why online video can be your best sales tool when it comes to selling your condo development. I hope that you’re convinced of the power of this condo marketing tool, so let’s go through the steps to strategize and produce your very own digital video that can deliver your best sales presentation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!
Developing your Video
#1: Set your objectives for your video. Obviously for condo developers, your video should sell the condo. Also, determine what role will the video play - do you want to build awareness of your condo project, increase “direct traffic” to your condo website, or grow your YouTube Channel’s subscribers. This will affect how you’ll ultimately market your video. Take inventory of all your creative assets that you have on-hand, including photos, logos, or proprietary images.
Tip: I recommend an interview-style format for your first foray into video, where the main role is given to your property and one main spokesperson (either the condo developer or a narrator) - as opposed to gimmicky characters.
#2: Find a video professional. Unless you have a video guru on your team, you’ll need to find a professional to actually tape, edit, and produce a final cut. Here at N5R, we’ve years of experience creating and marketing videos for top condo developers, so we’ve created a streamlined process that can produce a video in little time and it's relatively inexpensive when you compare traditional media costs. Not only will a video pro have the right equipment, they know how to take advantage of video’s ability to appeal to both audio and visual senses, ensuring that your video has powerful, emotional content that people love to share.
Tip: Be sure to include the video pro in an initial brainstorm meeting with your team in order to create a storyboard, which is a sequential breakdown of the story that you want to tell. Everyone should agree on the storyboard and official script before filming starts.
#3: Produce and Edit the video. Usually it takes 2-3 days to tape a professional video, depending on how long the video storyboard is, travel time, and number of people being interviewed.
Tip: Five (5) minutes is an excellent length for a YouTube video. You can re-cut 2 or 3 shorter segments that can tease the viewer to watch the full video. And, don’t forget to make a strong call-to-action that motivates an action from the condo prospect e.g. register, e-mail newsletter, facebook ‘like’, etc.
Now that you know the steps to creating an amazing video, you need to market it, which we’ll talk about in an upcoming post!
Email me to find out how easy it is to develop your own online video! And, the same video can be showcased on our TV show, The CondoOutlet TV Show, every Monday/Thursday @ 6:30pm on Ch 21 (Toronto, Rogers). Watch a selection of videos we've done for recent clients including King West Condos below.
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Topics:
video production,
online video,
condooutlet tv show,
n5r
Condo developers say one of the biggest challenges to selling a condo property during pre-construction is bringing the property to life. Without a shovel yet in the ground, how can your target audience see the building, hear your vision, and learn what makes your condo unique? And there's no better way to break through the clutter of all the condo marketing noise happening in Toronto right now than producing your own online video. Why online video?
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Topics:
online video,
n5r
Don't miss our TV show, The CondoOutlet TV Show, tonight at 6:30 pm (every Monday and Thursday, Rogers Toronto, CH 21). The only television program dedicated to the Toronto condo market, The CondoOutlet TV Show showcases the hottest Toronto condo properties and gives in-depth interviews with top condo developers and their teams. Click here to watch recent broadcasts of the show.
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Topics:
condooutlet.com TV show,
condo show
Online marketers have known that the general population usually follows a similar visual path as they visit any web page. How do we know this? Called heat mapping, this technology tracks the eye's movements of a person as they view the contents of the web page. The results are astoundingly homogeneous across the online population and have influenced many web site re-designs, usability testing, and content decisions. Did you know that most of your site visitors follow an "F" pattern as they scroll your web page? You can find out more at HubSpot or Crazy Egg.
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Topics:
Google,
heatmapping,
usability testing,
social media,
twitter,
online marketing
Every Friday we round up the week's news related to condo sales and marketing, paying particular attention on the Toronto condo market.
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Topics:
condo news,
toronto condos,
condo market,
urbanation,
Metro,
The Star,
The Globe and Mail
Looking to furnish your new condo, but can't afford that designer price tag, or the cost of an Interior Designer? Look no further, Design Solutions finally has the answer. Designer living with an economical cost!
Topics:
toronto,
designer,
interior design,
cost effective,
furniture,
condo living
Don't miss our TV show, The CondoOutlet TV Show, tonight at 6:30 pm (every Monday and Thursday, Rogers Toronto, CH 21). The only television program dedicated to the Toronto condo market, The CondoOutlet TV Show showcases the hottest Toronto condo properties and gives in-depth interviews with top condo developers and their teams. Click here to watch recent broadcasts of the show.
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Topics:
toronto,
condooutlet.com,
condo show
Selling your new condo development online is more than building a flashy web site with lots of pictures of your model suite and floor plans. While these are must-have tactics in bringing your condo brand to life online, it's just the beginning. The power of the web can give you a competitive edge over other condo developments just by starting with these 5 ways to sell your condo development online:
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Topics:
condo sales,
selling condos,
condo developers
Social media has certainly become mainstream in the past two years and 2011 was a year of phenomenal growth for Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube particularly. A 2010 study by Comscore found that Canadians rock when it comes to social media usage:
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Topics:
YouTube,
twitter,
2011 Social Media Marketing,
trends
Twitter can be much more than a 140 character sound bite for your condo development - it just may be the easiest way to keep the conversation going with prospective condo buyers. Just think about it, this is a free marketing tool that allows you to make daily connections with your leads or recent buyers who are your best ambassadors for word-of-mouth sales opportunities.
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Topics:
real estate marketing,
social media,
twitter
Twitter is a must-have for condo developers and now it's even easier to make your business come to life with more than 140 characters - with the newly announced Twitter Business Account.
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Topics:
condo marketing,
n5r,
twitter,
business accounts
Don't Forget to Tune in to Shop TV(Rogers Channel 21) Tonight at 6:30 for the Condo Outlet TV Show produced by N5R.
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Topics:
Condo Outlet,
tv,
advertising,
marketing,
toronto,
n5r,
condo,
produced
Let's do some quick math. PPC + Inbound Marketing = Relevancy. Furthermore, Relevancy = Sales. Paid searchcan be difficult, but it doesn't have to be if you adhere to the basic principles of inbound marketing. Being relevant can also be difficult in terms of finding opportunities, but it is a key component to connecting with your target market. With paid search, if a user on Google or Bing types in a search query, you as a marketer have the ability to present an offering that is almost identical to what was specifically searched for by that user. Now isn't that the perfect opportunity to be relevant?
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Topics:
landing pages,
ads,
ppc,
margeting,
digital
Starting from the bottom:
Free content is delivered to anyone who is willing to consume it, usually as a way of engaging attention and leading to sales of content down the road. This is the movie trailer, the guest on Oprah, the free chapter, the tweets highlighting big ideas.
Mass content is the inevitable result of a medium where the cost of making copies is inexpensive. So you get books for $20, movie tickets for $8 and newspapers for pocket change. Mass content has been the engine of popular culture for a century.
Limited content is something rare, and thus more expensive. It's the ticket that everyone can't possibly buy. This is a seat in a Broadway theater, attendance at a small seminar or a signed lithograph.
And finally, there's bespoke content. This is the truly expensive, truly limited performance. A unique painting, or hiring a singer to appear at an event.
Three things just happened:
A. Almost anyone can now publish almost anything. You can publish a book without a publisher, record a song without a label, host a seminar without a seminar company, sell your art without a gallery. This leads to an explosion of choice. (Or from the point of view of the media producer, an explosion of clutter and competition).
B. Because of A, attention is worth more than ever before. The single gating factor for almost all success in media is, "do people know enough about it to choose to buy something?"
C. The marginal cost of one more copy in the digital world is precisely zero. One more viewer on YouTube, one more listener to your MP3, one more blog reader--they cost the producer nothing to produce or deliver.
As a result of these three factors, there's a huge sucking sound, and that's the erosion of mass as part of the media model. Fewer people buying movie tickets and hardcover books, more people engaging in free media.
Overlooked in all the handwringing is a rise in the willingness of some consumers (true fans) to move up the pyramid and engage in limited works. Is this enough to replace the money that's not being spent on mass? Of course not. But no one said it was fair.
By head count, just about everyone who works in the media industry is in the business of formalizing, reproducing, distributing, marketing and selling copies of the original creative work to the masses. The creators aren't going to go away--they have no choice but to create. The infrastructure around monetizing work that used to have a marginal cost but no longer does is in for a radical shift, though.
Media projects of the future will be cheaper to build, faster to market, less staffed with expensive marketers and more focused on creating free media that earns enough attention to pay for itself with limited patronage.
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Topics:
marketing,
free content,
public,
media,
BLMF,
social,
mass
It is a brave new world for mobile marketing, and without a proper guide, you could get lost in all the new developments. To help you better grasp this exciting industry, we have identified the 8 most significant mobile marketing trends of 2011 that are sure to change the mobile marketing world we know now.
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Topics:
marketing ideas,
mobile,
tricks,
trends
The number of people you can reach around the world using the internet is astounding, but if you are a local business, reaching all of these people could be a waste of your time. Luckily, by using a combination of page optimization, inbound linking, social media involvement and focusing on local search terms, you can get your site to a top ranking position in local search easier than you might think. Hubspot’s Corey Eridon has a new blog post, in which he outlines the importance of using long tailed keywords, Google Places and other local directories and let’s you know how to best optimize your blog content. Click here to read the article.
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Topics:
2011 real estate,
seo,
ad agency,
advertising,
ad agencies,
ads,
search,
locally,
local,
Hubspot,
marketing,
n5r,
2011 Social Media Marketing
We produce a half and hour long TV show for www.CondoOutlet.com. It plays Monday and Thursdays at 6:30pm on Channel 21. Tune in to see some of the most interesting condo projects in Toronto.
Topics:
social media blog,
Video,
blog,
condo investment,
real estate investments,
advertising,
video production,
web site design,
web site optimization,
real estate,
toronto,
n5r,
condo,
online marketing,
tv production,
corporate video production
Visualized content has become a very powerful tool when posting reports or articles on your website and for a good reason, it grabs the audiences attention quickly. Largely, people are not likely to dive into a large block of block of text, but if you are able to convey a point right away using visualized content, they are likely to read your article to learn more about that point. Hubspot’s Pamela Vaughn recently posted a list of 17 examples of great visualized content on her blog, check it out here and see how using visualized content can help out your website or blog.
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Topics:
advertising,
content,
visualization,
visualized,
online,
Hubspot,
marketing,
n5r
