As you can see from the photo, my mail “in box” gets very little attention.  Imagine my surprise when I received a direct mail marketing piece from Google!

For the past 5 years or so, real estate brokers and practitioners have been bludgeoned to believe that print marketing is dead, and that online marketing is the way to go.  One would think that there would be no better poster child for online marketing than the inventor of the concept - Google.  But alas, the king has revealed that online advertising on its own is not good enough.  Google realizes that direct mail, print advertising is an effective way to communicate with decision makers about the adoption of their adwords product.

In the WAV Group Broker Website study, we looked at the behavior of more than 1 Million unique visitors to broker websites.  We learned that 85% or more of all traffic to those websites comes from consumers typing in or searching for the broker’s domain name.  This confirms that Brand recognition, yard signs, bus stops, direct mail, newspaper advertising, magazine advertising, movie advertising and television adversing all are significant contributors to building a consumer relationship that results in a web visit.  Don’t give up the basics of print advertising - just spread your marketing activities over a wide array of media outlets and favor the ones that seem to work best for your brand.