THE SMALL, TEXT-ONLY AD PLACED BY BROKER DJK RESIDENTIAL on Curbed.com, a market-specific real estate weblog (or “blog”), will never win any design awards, but the strategy behind it just might—or at least serve as a lesson to any professional home seller to break out of conventional marketing molds. Looking to boost consumer traffic to its Web site for its latest Manhattan listings, the brokerage supported the popular blog with its ad, paying a negotiated price to achieve 8,000 impressions per day and then a per-hit fee when anyone clicked through the ad to the company's Web site.
Though the content at Curbed.com runs the gamut from gossip to valuable insight about local properties and deals, it's the critical mass it attracts that got the broker thinking outside the box. “Curbed gets lots of industry traffic and consumers flock to it more than any other real estate Web site in New York City,” says James Conigliaro, general manager of DJK Residential. “We're getting more and better-qualified leads.” After just five months on the blog, the brokerage has seen a 35 percent increase in consumer business. The nature of the technology (and simplicity of the ad link) also enables Conigliaro to easily and quickly change the ad to promote new or hot listings. “It's a contemporary approach to doing business,” he says.
CAMPAIGN DETAILS Program: Weblog advertising strategy; Broker: DJK Residential, New York; Cost: $10,000 per month (entire pay-per-hit budget); Advertising agency: Quinn & Co., New York
Learn more about markets featured in this article: New York, NY.
