Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog.

According to Estate Agent Today, MovingAdvantage has joined the many agencies who offer pay-per-click (PPC) services to the SME market. According to them, on offer is a possible 15p cost per click and a monthly fee to manage your campaigns.

We know there are 2 other UK agencies who are doing this specifically for the SME or estate agent market and they are Starberry and Minute Steak. Of course, estate agents could always try out PPC via a do-it-yourself method. In other words, use your credit card and go direct to Google AdWords.

Active Rain has launched a very interesting pay per click product called Listing Router. Active Rain is arguably the biggest social network for real estate agents in the USA. You can think of Active Rain as the best parts of Facebook but with a professional twist like LinkedIn.

Anyway, within the internet space, people are very curious as to how social networks will best serve advertisers. Active Rain is attempting to crack this problem with it’s new Listing Router service for a property social network. We’ll be watching this space to see how it evolves.

As an ex-employee of pay-per-click (PPC) pioneer Espotting, I keep in touch with my ex-colleagues to see what they’re up to. Don’t we all ? One of them, Piri Ramazanoglu, is now the MD of a company called Minute Steak.

Minute Steak is basically intended to bring PPC to the masses. Traditionally, PPC management agencies only dealt with you if you were above a certain spend per month, let’s say around £10k. Otherwise it wasn’t worth the effort for the agency to get involved. For all those smaller SMEs (like you the estate agent), spending £10k per month was never going to happen. But now, Minute Steak has changed that. Their target market is those smaller SMEs who want to spend on PPC but don’t have the time to manage/learn it.

So let’s say you’re in the following situation -

1. You want to leave a subscription model portal like Rightmove. Everyone seems to be thinking this according to Daily Mirror, Property Owl, and Rat and Mouse.
2. You don’t want to lose the lead generation that a big portal like Rightmove provides, but you are unhappy with their treatment of you in these hard times.
3. You’ve heard that search is a good way to drive more cost efficient leads but you’re worried you don’t have the expertise.
4. You approached a big agency like the Search Works and they laughed at you when you told them how much you’d like to spend per month.

Well, if you think you fit into the above mold, it might be time to call on the services of Minute Steak.

It’s no surprise that online advertising is continuing to grow. In a recent report from Ofcom, online advertising is doing the following -

1. growth of 40% from 2006
2. 2.7 billion spent in 2007 compared with 4.7 billion spent in newspapers
3. online advertising is now bigger than mainstream TV
4. paid search is now 1.6 billion of the 2.7 being the largest share

So what insight can be gained for you as a property professional?

1. Online spend should be balanced in a similar fashion to the bigger trend.
2. More spend is going online because more people are spending time online. There is an old saying in advertising; the money follows the eyeballs. This is true. More internet connections and more time has equated in more spend moving online.
3. Online is cheaper than your traditional media outlets, therefore you will be more efficient in reaching those eyeballs.
4. The future will be online, so why not start understanding how to use it? The time is now.

As it’s taking longer to sell that house and win that instruction, don’t you think it’s worth an hour or two in discovering what the future can hold for you?