Increase your social return on investment with KloutBy BDX Guest Blogger, Carol Morgan, mRELEVANCE

Klout, the online tool for measuring and leveraging your social media influence, recently released its newest round of updates in order to help users have a clearer understanding of their true influence.

For those who have never heard of Klout before, now is the time to officially join the site. Klout is a great way for home builders to show their buyers that they know what they’re talking about. Klout measures influence online using data from social networks. Higher scores reflect higher levels of engagement. In addition, users can give +Ks in regards to certain topics such as your local city, home building or real estate to people they follow. Currently, Klout scores everyone who has a social media presence even if they don’t have a profile, but joining the site allows you to connect all of your profiles, as well as better manage your score.

Recent Klout updates enhance the capabilities of the influence meter even more. The site now measures more than 400 social media signals from 12 billion data points across multiple social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.com, Last.fm and Flickr. Additionally, the site has integrated Wikipedia into their inputs in an order to better measure influence both online and offline as well as adjusted the distribution of their scores to reflect a growth in engagement across the Internet.

However, while these updates are important for your overall score, the newest tool called “moments” is probably the most useful for the normal user. Moments displays the recent content and ideas that have been the most influential across all of your social networks. It also creates interaction patterns for this content, so that home builders can see which information their clients find most useful to them.

Ultimately, Klout is all about proving to your buyers that you are relevant and important to your field. It also helps dramatically improve your relevance and engagement across your social media platforms by showing you what the people want. Talk about increasing return on investment!

Make sure to visit my Klout profile http://klout.com/AtlantaPR and while you are there list me as an influencer or give me some +K. If you’re looking to increase your return on investment through social media and Klout, contact Marketing RELEVANCE.

By Jon Odishoo, manager of email operations for BDX.

You’ve done all the hard work: you’ve chosen a design, finely tuned your content and agonized about subject lines, and now your email campaign has finally gone out. Now the waiting begins, and you are hoping for a strong response via email or phone, or perhaps increased activity on your website eventually leading to a home sale. But besides those varied and largely unconnected indicators, how are you to know if the campaign was a success? What benchmarks do you use to determine if your latest effort worked better or worse than the last?

Luckily, most good email campaign services provide reports that show who (and how many) are opening and clicking on your email, and some analysis of these metrics. Here we have assembled a few pointers on how to decipher these reports and compare the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Opens: This metric tracks how many times the email was opened, but if a user clicks on the message more than once it will be counted again. The “Unique Opens” metric, if available, is helpful to determine the true number of people who opened. The “Open Rate” is the percentage of messages sent that were opened. If this number is low, it is likely that the subject line is the culprit – make sure that the subject line is direct, concise and compelling for best effect.

Clicks: The number of how many clicked on a link or button in your message; the “Click Rate” being the percentage of messages sent that were clicked on. Analysis of what people clicked on more often may give important clues for refining the design of your campaigns, including the placement and wording of your call to action statement.

Conversions: A conversion can mean many things depending on the goals you’ve set for your campaign, but if you are a home builder attempting to gather consumer website visits or leads, a click-through on your call to action statement or a completed lead form that you can track back to your email message would equate to one conversion. Tracking the number of how many people you’ve sent into the conversion funnel is a good indicator of a campaign’s success. If these numbers are trending downward in your recent campaigns, try restructuring the email or the landing page that the lead form is on to be easier and more attractive for respondents.

Bounced: A bounce refers to a bad address that could not be delivered to. In a list of a few hundred or thousand, some bounces are definitely normal, but a spike in bounces may be cause for alarm – perhaps you’ve run into a temporary server block, or a group of your recipients changed email addresses. In these cases you can investigate yourself or ask your campaign service to check for you.

Unsubscribes: As with bounces, a few unsubscribes per email campaign is normal. However if these numbers are edging upward, take a look at the frequency with which you are sending emails, as this is the number one cause for high unsubscribe rates. If you slow your deployment schedule this may ease the frustration of your recipients, but if this doesn’t work you may want to change the tone and/or design of your emails. A great way to find out what your recipients are thinking, if they aren’t mailing you back with their annoyances, is to do a survey and ask them what they want to hear about most.

Hopefully these tips will help you in deciphering the sometimes confusing litany of email analytics that you might receive, and turn them into helpful indicators of how you might improve your campaigns.

Jon Odishoo is the manager of email operations for BDX. If you have any questions about reaching real estate agents through the BDX Connect email service, click here.

By BDX Guest Blogger, Carol Morgan, mRELEVANCE

Problem: you’ve created your website, blog and social media and have implemented search engine optimization, but you don’t know how to effectively measure your return on investment (ROI). Solution: Google Analytics. Yes, the answer really is that simple. Google Analytics is a free, easy to use tool offered by Google that allows you to filter your traffic to see the true impact of your efforts.

Once you’ve created an account, your Google Analytics report will show you graphs of your daily visits, average time on site, bounce rate, the geographical areas your visitors are from and more. Furthermore, Google Analytics recently launched social reporting which means you can now see the referrals to your website from social media, conversations on your social media sites, how your content is being shared socially and more. Both of these reports allow you to analyze your traffic to determine what your home buyers are actually looking at and looking for.

By becoming better educated about how home buyers are interacting with you on all of your online platforms, your company will be able to adjust or make changes to your plan to meet unforeseen needs and to continue to increase what is working. These tools essentially make you a smarter provider because you’ll know what your audience wants and how to get that to them.

For example, in 2008, we had a Florida home builder who needed to cut their marketing budget. And, even though they cut their budget by 85 percent over the next three years, traffic to their website tripled thanks to the information we gained from Google Analytics. Now that’s what we call a good ROI!

If you’re company wants to increase your ROI or if you’d like a walkthrough of what your Google Analytics report is trying to tell you, contact Marketing RELEVANCE.

Carol Flammer is managing partner of Marketing RELEVANCE, LLC, a Marketing, Communication, Interactive agency with offices in Atlanta and Chicago.

Jon Luther Receives His EO of the Year Award!

BDX was a proud sponsor of the Association Leadership Conference in New Orleans last week. We really enjoyed connecting with our current and future HBA partners.

The conference was a great mix of networking and educational opportunities. During the show it became apparent that HBAs across the country are all facing similar challenges. HBA’s are asking: How do we attract and retain members — the average member retention rate for HBA’s is 72%.  How do we generate revenue beyond our membership dues?

Will Nash, BDX and Diane Swenson, Maryland

The more we talked to HBA leadership, the more clear it became that BDX is in a great position to help these organizations through some of these challenges.

We’ve been working with our partners to provide a free listing website for their HBA, revenue sharing and builder education. For more information, click here.

 

Eleanor Bowman, BDX and David Ellis, Atlanta

The other big takeaway from the conference was that we are working with some really amazing people. It was so exciting to see so many of our partner HBA’s winnning awards and doing great work in their local communities.

Congratulations to Jon Luther (New Orleans) for winning Executive Officer of the Year and Earl McCloed (Columbia) for your Life Time Achievement Award! We are proud to know and work with both of you!

Thanks New Orleans friends for being such a great host of the week’s events!

For more information about the conference, you can visit: http://www.nahb.org/ali or follow the discussion on Twitter: #ALI12

Thanks again to everyone who participated for a great week — we’ll see you in Portland in 2013!

 

 

By BDX Guest Blogger, Carol Morgan, mRELEVANCE

The new Timeline layout for Facebook Pages has been around for a couple of months now, but many businesses still aren’t taking full advantage of the social media site’s redesign. Here are some ways your home building company could be using Facebook to build your brand:

  • Create a unique, relevant cover photo. Get creative with this critical space by using photos and collages of your homes and communities, photos of home buyers or highlight favorite features. Include your tagline or unique selling proposition, and make it fun.
  • Add content. The new timeline layout allows pages to go back and add dates of important company events. Pages can also choose what information they want to “highlight” or hide on their page. Page managers can now schedule posts for a future date, so feel free to plan posts for the future.  Just don’t forget to monitor your page!
  • Delegate. One of the most recent updates to Pages is the ability to assign administrative roles to the people who manage your page. The five roles include manager, content creator, moderator, advertiser and insights analyst. Descriptions of these roles can be easily found in the Admin Panel.
  • Promote it. You may have seen or gotten emails about the new Facebook Ads and Promoted Posts. These two options allow pages to pay Facebook to help increase their business’ reach. Businesses may create ads that encourage people to like their page or to view one of their posts, while promoted posts simply increase the reach of a specific post on your page.

The best way to acclimate yourself and your company with the new Facebook Timeline Pages design is to use it. By taking into account our suggestions of some of the design’s coolest features, and by playing around with the site, your home building business will be well on its way to improving your interaction with customers and potential buyers.

Carol Flammer is managing partner of Marketing RELEVANCE, LLC, a Marketing, Communication, Interactive agency with offices in Atlanta and Chicago. She is the author of “Social Media for Home Builders 2.0” published by BuilderBooks.