Читать книгу The New Rules of Marketing and PR - David Meerman Scott, Kevin Nalty, Steve Garfield - Страница 40

Century 21 Real Estate LLC³ is the franchisor of the world’s largest residential real estate sales organization, an industry giant with approximately 8,000 offices in 45 countries. The company had been spending on television advertising for years but, in a significant strategy change, pulled its national television advertising and invested those resources into online marketing.

Wow! I’ve seen Century 21 TV ads for years. We’re talking millions of dollars shifting from TV to the web. This is a big deal.

“We are moving our advertising investments to the mediums that have the greatest relevance to our target buyers and sellers, and to where the return on our investment is most significant,” says Bev Thorne, chief marketing officer at Century 21. “We found that our online investments provided a return that was substantively higher than our more traditional TV media investments.”

Thorne and her team learned that people who are in the market to buy or sell a home rely heavily on the web and that the closer they get to a real estate transaction, the more they use online resources. “We are embracing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, ActiveRain, and others,” Thorne says. “YouTube is a central component of our activities, and we seek to utilize it even more.”

Many companies spending large amounts of money on television advertising (and other offline marketing such as direct mail, magazine and newspaper advertising, and Yellow Pages listings) are afraid to make even partial moves away from their comfort zones and into online marketing and social media. But the evidence describing how people actually research products overwhelmingly suggests that companies must tell their stories and spread their ideas online, at the precise moment that potential buyers are searching for answers.

It’s an exciting time to be a marketer, no matter what business you’re in. We have been liberated from relying exclusively on buying access through advertising or convincing mainstream media to talk us up. Now we can publish information on the web that people are eager to pay attention to.