The Language of Luxury

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Monday, September 17, 2012

Luxury Real Estate Marketing Tip: Dominate Your Niche & Not Go Buggy!

In marketing luxury real estate, being a generalist is the surest path to mediocrity. The fastest route to market leadership is to identify an uncontested or underserved market niche that you can dominate. However, you must find a niche that you can serve better than anyone else and you must be genuinely passionate about it. To understand this vital principle, here is an example of how this plays out in a completely different field.

Did you happen to catch the season premiere of Shark Tank, the reality show where 5 wealthy entrepreneurs (including Barbara Corcoran, the New York real estate maven) compete to invest in promising start-up companies? The two women who invented BuggyBeds, the early detection system for bed bugs, made a presentation that wowed all five Sharks, and us too! They had turned down a buy-out of $5 million dollars prior to appearing on the show.

Apparently, there is a significant increase in the reported cases of bed bug infestation in the last few years. Females lay up to 500 eggs! Their patented early detection bed bug glue trap slips under a mattress and sells for $8.98 for a package of four. Now, here is an uncontested market niche! With the Shark’s help, every major hotel chain, every mattress company, every home improvement store chain and more will soon carry this product.

BuggyBeds is a need that consumers did not even know they had. Now, “over-night” it will become a necessity. They got their branding spot on! The brand name itself identifies the new product category they created.

When you identify an uncontested market niche you create news. By promoting the new category to a news-hungry media you can promote your brand in the process. By leveraging the media (including social media) you can maximize public relations and word-of-mouth advertising and minimize your marketing expense.

When you take on an uncontested market niche in this way, your competition, if any, becomes inconsequential. If they attempt to copy you they are perceived as a “me-too” (think Zune vs. iPod). Once you break the news about the category, their chance of getting substantial media coverage is very slim. They will have to out-spend you in marketing to try to keep up with you.

If you have selected a niche that is not new, but is underserved, you still have the opportunity to create news because you or your company becomes the viable alternative to your competition that heretofore was not challenged. You can still spark word-of-mouth advertising that can lead to dominating your niche.

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Thursday, September 13, 2012

Luxury Real Estate Website Design: The Winning Formula--Eye Catching Design + Original Content

In recent posts we have been focused on the importance of capturing attention with superior luxury real estate website design and holding attention with original content. We rarely include You Tube videos in our posts. But, this one is so astonishing because it so clearly illustrates both of these concepts.

Human beings tend to make snap judgments and pigeonhole people based on outward appearance. That is why great web design is vital for capturing attention. Apple, the most highly valued company in the world, certainly understood the value of excellence in design. Without it you may be ignored, despite your talent, not to mention the time, energy and money you have spent getting people to your site in the first place.

But, once you have captured their attention with eye-catching design, holding it is an entirely different challenge. That is where continuously providing fresh, follow-worthy and share-worthy ORIGINAL content comes into play. It can spark and accelerate word-of-mouth advertising for you or your company. This video has been viewed over 20 million times. We hope it inspires you as much as it did the two of us. If the video does not appear on your screen, here is the link.

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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Does Your Website Home Page Capture Attention and Draw Traffic?

The design of the home page of a luxury real estate marketing website should have a wow factor. The best global luxury retail brands understand this principle when they design their store front windows. The goal:capture attention-draw traffic into the store!

Whenever we are in Beverly Hills, we take the time to study the store front windows. In the window display depicted above, the handbag appears to be hung on a branch. However, the tree is actually a photograph that creates this optical illusion in the window of the Louis Vuitton store.

You can spin your wheels and waste valuable time in social media in blogging and in search engine marketing that drives traffic to your website if your website does not capture their attention immediately. Take a lesson from the top luxury brands and make sure that your website visitors feel compelled to enter your store and shop. Does Your Website Home Page Capture Attention and Draw Traffic?

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Saturday, September 8, 2012

Luxury Real Estate Marketing Tip: Why Google Keeps Changing Its Algorithms

This week, we were reviewing the Google ranking of a luxury real estate marketing professional who is the top producing agent in her marketplace, but ranks 7^th in natural search results on her primary keyword phrase. Of the two agents who were ranked higher on the same page, one sold just a single property over the last 12 months and the other did not sell even a single property!

Are consumers being served by placing mediocre agents ahead of market leaders? Google doesn’t think so. That is why they are constantly trying to fine-tune their algorithms to achieve more satisfying results.

In the context of finding qualified local service professionals on the Internet, Google’s ideal job is simply to match the consumer’s search query with the most authoritative experts in a given marketplace. For Google, customer satisfaction with this “matchmaking” service is paramount because they are able to place revenue-generating ads on these popular pages.

Prior to the Internet and search engines, it was statistically proven that whoever got the first buyer or seller call had the best chance of winning the business. While this may still be true with telephone contact, we question that it is true online when it comes to search engine ranking, especially in luxury real estate marketing. One glance at a cluttered site that is difficult to navigate can send a web visitor back to the search result page in a single click.

In another instance one of our local business organizations was looking for a speaker on social media. They hired the #1 ranked “authority” on Google to speak and the group was horrified by the presentation. It was obvious to every businessperson in attendance that this guy barely knew what he was talking about. When confronted his response was, “I know how to rank #1”.

In addition to strong basic SEO architectural structure on your site itself, Google is looking for current, fresh, relevant, authoritative, ORIGINAL CONTENT more so now than ever. And, they are adjusting their algorithms accordingly.

Consistently publishing and distributing new content (through social media channels) via your blog is the best vehicle to achieve this. Getting other authoritative websites to establish links to your newsworthy, follow worthy, original content is also very helpful. But, the days of just publishing unoriginal content, that has even become boring to the Google robots, is over!

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Friday, September 7, 2012

Marketing Luxury Real Estate: Beverly Hills Branded Barricades

As a luxury real estate marketing professional it is important to immerse oneself in all aspects of luxury marketing, not just real estate. By observing the top global luxury brands one can learn volumes about communicating to high net worth clients.

Today on an early morning jaunt to Beverly Hills for a meeting, we had time to spare. After fueling ourselves with a warm bagel from St. Urbain, we took a walk on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Dior had moved up the street to a larger location. They had an innovative branded barricade to mask the remodeling and construction in the store.

Dior created a façade that looks like a quilted leather bag. It was so realistic that we were compelled to feel the paper to make sure it was not leather. Every detail was present including the handle and the Dior bauble that hangs on it. The strategy here was promoting their unique handbags as well as their innovative, creative designs.

The Christian Dior brand, which is part of the LVMH family (Louis Vuitton Moet & Hennessy), is beautifully and harmoniously represented here. Christian Dior, the designer, revolutionized the fashion industry in 1946, departing from the then popular boxy look to more feminine lines. He said, “I have designed flower women," emphasizing the curvaceous form of women. His innovative thinking provided a legacy that lives on as you can see,

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Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Personal & Company Branding: The High Cost of Being Vague About Your Brand

Photo by Gerald Bougham

Be explicit about who you are and what you stand for, as a luxury real estate marketing professional. Being vague about your personal or company brand can cost you considerably.

An important aspect of personal and company branding is clearly and consistently articulating how you want to be perceived by others. If you do not explicitly define who you are and what your brand stands for, people will brand you or classify you in their own pigeonholes.

In our commercial real estate practice in West Los Angeles, we were best known for our expertise in leasing high-end retail space and working with the entertainment industry. We had a high profile in this niche because our signs were on buildings from West Hollywood to Beverly Hills to Santa Monica by the ocean.

We also sold many commercial properties (most of which were not actually listed) to a select group of developers and investors. We typically kept a low profile about our sales because we just did not like to boast.

But, when the property manager of one of our leasing listings needed to sell another building that he managed he looked for a buyer on his own instead of giving us the listing. He would have gladly given us the listing, but, he just did not know that we sold buildings too! Ironically, that property fell out of escrow with his buyer and we had it sold within 24 hours to one of our clients.

Here was business right under our noses. Although, we were well branded as leasing experts in the mind of this property manager, he was clueless of our sales expertise. That was a $75,000 opportunity that almost passed us by. This is the value of branding that we will never forget. Nor, should you.

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