Most people know and acknowledge that technology adoption is happening at a dizzying speed – but do you know how it is impacting your real estate business?
If you take a look at consumer research data, a very clear image of today’s tech-savvy home shopper begins to emerge. Technology adoption has facilitated a dramatic shift in consumer behavior – one that requires businesses (e.g. real estate agents) to adapt their marketing strategy in order to keep pace with evolving consumer demands. If you’re not on board with harnessing technology to optimize your marketing efforts, you're almost certainly losing real estate leads to more tech-savvy agents on a regular basis.
Let’s think about smartphones for a moment, and discuss the impact they’ve had on the day-to-day behavior of a prospective homebuyer. Smartphones are so powerful that everyone who owns one (which is to say, almost everyone) is walking around with a mini-laptop in his or her pocket.
“Phones” are used for much more than just making or receiving calls. In fact, I so rarely use my phone for calls anymore that sometimes when it rings, I just look at it quizzically and forget what to do for a moment.
Real estate leads are now using their mini-laptop devices to browse the web, connect on social media, complete bank transactions, shop for everything imaginable and hunt for houses.
But that's not all - take a look at these stats:
- At the end of 2013, there were more mobile devices than people on earth
- The average age of owning a first cell phone is now 13 years old
- 90% of American adults own a smartphone and 42% own a tablet
- 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal
- 90% of people have a mobile device within reach 100% of the time
- 70% of mobile searches lead to online action within 1 hour – a 3X conversion rate than the same search done on a desktop or laptop
- 75% of users prefer a mobile-friendly site but 96% of consumers say they’ve encountered sites that were clearly not designed for mobile devices
- 48% said that if a site didn’t work well on their smartphones, it made them feel like the company didn’t care about their business
Sources: Huffington Post & Google
You must take these things into consideration when deciding on your marketing strategy. Not doing so means losing leads to competitors. It’s really that simple.
