At Inman Connect last week I had the pleasure of meeting Matt Fagioli.  Mr. Fagioli, a HomeGain AgentView customer, has organized an impressive “Inman South” conference called RETech South, which boasts a fine roster of speakers to be held at the Gwinnett Center in Atlanta on Friday March 20.

Yesterday Matt and I spoke about RETech South and its objectives.

Matt is also a member of HomeGain Nation a 200+ member interactive forum on the Ning platform. This morning Matt posted a blog entitled “How Print Marketing Still Brings Home the Bacon” and I have reproduced it in its entirety here:

How Print Marketing Still Brings Home The Bacon

I had the pleasure of a phone call yesterday with our friend Louis. His view of “all this 2.0 stuff” is really refreshing because he realizes that while it’s all very cool and trendy and slick, it does NOT replace print marketing – nor does it replace the good old fashioned handshake. Our 2.0 world merely compliments our off-line efforts.

I’ve spent the last two years of my life building a real estate brokerage model – totally centered on blogs, video and all things 2.0. In some ways Diamond Dwellings is now leading the charge in that space, so I feel like I have some authority to comment. There is no doubt that RE.net/2.0 stuff is important now and it will be more important each year going forward. But, it can’t be the entire game. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that it’s not critically important. In fact, we’re going to invest heavily in online marketing this year and every year for the next 10 years+.

There’s an interesting twist to our online marketing that I shared with Louis…

We do a considerable amount of print marketing still.
It’s all very focused & targeted – and we’ve worked hard to drive the cost as low as possible.
But, we do it. Our #1 goal with print media is to drive traffic to our web assets (our sites).

When they get to our site(s) we do our very best to keep them engaged for as long as possible (duh).

If they want to connect for a listing appointment, etc, they will fill out a form or send email or whatever.
Of course, we respond very quickly and set the appointment.

When we get to that meeting, we’ll always do our best to establish how we aquired the lead.
We never assume that it’s “just a web lead”. Unless you have amazing traffic on your site, I’d bet $100 that most of your leads actually come from some off-line source — even if they show up on your website as initial contact. Somebody told them about you or sent them to your site — 9 out of 10.

Here’s what we’re seeing that blows me away…

People respond to our print marketing (usually postcards) by going to our website.
Some combination of reputation & brand image leads them to choose our services.
When they hire us they will almost always say “we hired you for your awesome internet marketing”.

Did you catch that? They love all our 2.0 stuff — BUT the fact is they found us through print marketing.

So, (at least in my world) print marketing, face-to-face networking and “old school” still starts the lead cycle.

Louis Cammarosano