This presentation seeks to take the guesswork out of marketing real estate on the internet. Longtime digital marketer Dave Hitt reviews how to choose successful strategies on the web, to help market various types of for-sale and for-lease real estate.

1. Today’s Topic:
Let’s Play Marketing Roulette!
(No, Let’s Not)
presented by:
David Hitt
Principal, Splat Inc.
Philadelphia, PA
April 1, 2021

2. Splat, Inc. is a digital marketing studio, based here in Philly. We're
called on by our clients to solve marketing challenges on the web.
We're known for brand design and website development, as well
as paid digital advertising, content strategy and search engine
optimization. As a web-first agency, we're often called to fix and
improve failing websites and poorly implemented digital
strategies. We focus on real estate and professional services and
some of our local clients have included Dranoff Properties, Cross
Properties, Silvertree Equities, Reinhold Residential and others.
Introduction

3. Too often, web marketing for real estate falls prey to ‘marketing by recipe.’ Clients come to
marketing agencies with a list of ‘what they need.’ Marketing agencies are quick to offer a list
of ‘solutions.’ Often those solutions are based on agency strengths, rather than actual need.
Both parties are often to blame for not thinking hard enough about what an actual real estate
project actually needs. Too often, the critical first phase of assessment is tossed aside for one
reason or another.
For the next few minutes, I’d like to share some hard lessons learned about what actually works
in digital marketing for real estate. We’ll give a looksee at the typical strategies and we’ll also
talk about which strategies are right for what situations. Finally, we’ll look at differences in
execution. The right execution can bring in more leads and cost less, in the long run, than
cheaper, more vanilla alternatives.
Presentation Overview

4. Presentation Objectives
What we’re hoping we’ll communicate:
• There’s an array of tactics you can use to market property on
the web. We’ll touch on when to use which, where
• Choosing a tactic is one part of the process. Proper execution is
a very important other part
.

5. Beginning the Marketing Journey

6. The foundation of your project branding starts with the
visual imagery and story you’re telling...
But this isn’t a branding presentation. So we’ll
acknowledge the importance of branding and storytelling,
but we’re moving right past that part of your marketing
journey...
Your brand and it’s Story

7. So many Choices
Brand Assets
Organic Engagement Paid Engagement (Advertising)
Identity (Logos, taglines, etc.)
Website & Content
Owned Social Channels
Paid Profiles (Apartments.com, for example)
Contact Database (for email marketing, etc.)
Content (blog posts or any website content)
Organic Social Media
Email Marketing
Ongoing Sales Efforts
Paid Social Posts
Google Ads
Paid Display Advertising
Programmatic Advertising
Press Releases

8. What’s right for your Project?

9. Do I even need a Website?

10. SIDEBAR TOPIC
You DO need a website if:
You may not need a website if:
1.Your project is small.Builders doing single family
conversions or projects with only a handful of units might
be better off featuring small projects on their corporate
brand’s website.
1. Your project is larger; features many floorplans, is located
within an especially identifiable neighborhood, etc.
2. Your project is larger, but is marketed within the context of
larger corporate website.For instance, a project called
Kew Gardens by Impact Homes’ might ‘live’ on the Impact
Homes website.Advertising, creative URL naming and a
content strategy could still make the project easily
findable, within organic search.
2. Your company builds many different types of projects,
which creates ‘identity conflicts.’ For instance, a client of
ours manages both student-living rentals and rentals
geared towards higher-income young professionals.
The two demos want and need different things.
Brand conflicts result and result in muddled storytelling.

11. SIDEBAR TOPIC

12. SIDEBAR TOPIC

13. Taking the Big Boys Down:
Winning at Search with Content
in Real Estate

16. Moskowitz, LLC, marketing for real estate falls prey to
‘marketing by recipe.’ Clients come to marketing agencies
with a list of ‘what they need.’ Marketing agencies are
quick to offer a list of ‘solutions.’ Often those solutions are
based on agency strengths, rather than actual need.
Both parties are often to blame for not thinking hard
enough about what an actual real estate project actually
needs. Too often, the critical first phase of assessment is
tossed aside for one reason or another.
Strategies & Outcomes

17. Moskowitz, LLP is a tax law firm client of ours and has been since 2017. In the fall of
2020, we began fine tuning the content strategy for the firm. They’ve been writing blog
content on a variety of tax issues since 2009. Our keyword optimization initiative
scoured their existing blog articles for keywords. Based on article content, we
cross-referenced post content with keyword popularity on Google. Where we saw
opportunities, we changed content slightly and carefully re-wrote page and image tags.
From November 2020 to March 31, 2021:
• We have more than doubled organic traffic, increase positioning and visibility
• Won new keywords we were never ranking for before and pushed mid-ranking
keywords into the top 1-3 seats in SERPS (this is an ongoing strategy to see more of the
yellow bars in one of the last charts)
.
Content Strategy Plays the
Long Game
Case Study:
M
o
s
k
o
w
i
t
z
,
L
L
C

21. Answer: An SEO agency is something you’ve heard you
need to get more people to find you on the web. It’s
helmed by a dude that looks like this. When talks to you,
he can’t seem to define what he’s going to do for you in
plain English, but he uses lots of intimidating language
like ‘Meta tags’ and ‘canonicalization.’
Because you’ve heard you need them, and you’re
desperate to impress your boss, you hire them. For a
six-month or twelve-month, non-revocable contract. Every
month they email you impossibly complex reports that
make no sense to you. In six months, their efforst seem to
have generated only modest impacts. Frustrated and
shame-faced that you never really made an effort to
understand what you were buying in the first place, you
fire them. You move on with your life and they move on to
another naieve client.
What the Hell is an SEO Agency anyway?
SIDEBAR TOPIC

22. SEO was never rocket science. And, frankly, it
involves many skills that should come ‘out of
the box’ from your marketing agency. If they
know what they’re doing.
Technical SEO involves a few things but, basically, relates to
ensuring that your website is built well for search and that
content within it has all the necessary tags, keywords, etc to
rank well. Think of your website and Google as being in a
mating dance. Technical SEO is the perfume that makes your
site irrestible to Google.
Organic SEO relates to the optimization of content on your
website. These days, much of what used to be called ‘organic
SEO’ is now called Content Strategy. In a nutshell, good content
strategy starts with research (what do people want to read
about?) and ends with written, web-based content.
These branches of SEO concern how content is
chosen and prepared on your website.

23. Dranoff Properties is one of the region’s best known and respected developers of luxury
highrise for-sale and rental properties. In 2019, prior to the sale of a large portion of
their luxury rental apartments, we developed a strategy which would allow them to
compete in the competitive keyword spaces around phrases such as ‘luxury apartments
in philadelphia.’ The idea was to create a visitors guide to the neighborhoods of
Philadelphia which, coincidentally, were all neighborhoods where Dranoff had apartment
buildings. The project, which had to be shelved when the developer sold considerable
inventory nevertheless:
• Optimized searchability for all Dranoff Apartments, by placing them all ‘under one
roof’ in the form of a neighborhood-based directory of units
• Leveraged the high SEO value of the existing Dranoff Corporate Website
• Provided useful neighborhood details for both potential renters and visitors
.
Content Strategy Plays the
Long Game
Case Study:
Dranoff
Properties

24. One Theater Square, in Newark, NJ is a project owned by Dranoff
Properties. In 2018, we were tasked with increasing lead generation
for their Spring pre-leasing push.
Two areas of particular concern were local search and pay-per-click
advertising. The project was not showing up in the Google Maps ‘six
pack,’ making the project nearly invisible in maps. Additionally,
performance of lead generation/conversions was poor from the
Google Ads they were running.
On the local search side, we ensured their Google My Business
profile was claimed, well-designed, and filled with useful content,
which we updated over several months.
For the PPC ads, we overhauled the entire campaign. Additionally,
we designed a number of ad-specific landing pages, which sold
directly to those who had seen and clicked the ads.
Strategies & Outcomes

25. One Theater Square
• User visits increased 150%
• Avg. number of pages viewed increased
from 2.4 to 3.77
• Visits driven from paid advertising
increased from 25% to 40%, without
increasing budget
• Website visits driven by local search went
up considerably (see graphs following)
.
Local SEO & PPC
Case Study:
O
n
E
T
h
e
a
t
e
r
S
q
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a
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e
onetheatersquare.com

26. Organic Visitation Trends, April 1 – June 17

27. Local SEO Insights, Q2 (April, May & June)

28. Wehopewe’veeithertaughtyousomethingor,atleast,gotten
youtothinkaboutdigitalmarketingstrategies.Thetrickto
increasingthemarketingusefulnessofanygiventoolisknowing
whentouseandusingitwell.
We’dlovetohearfromyou.Youcaneithercallme,directlyonmy
cellat646-522-2774orreachmeatdavid@splatworld.tv.
Thankyou,we’redone!

29. 2118 South Street
Philadelphia, PA 19146
p.646.522.2774
p.877.SPLATME
splatworld.tv
info@splatworld.tv
Dansky | Katz | Ringold | York
Michael Dansky
Partner & Founder
Jim Staples Consulting & Former Law
Firm CMO
Jim Staples
President
David’s team was both
accessible and
responsive. And they
offered a thoughtfully
designed response to our
law firm’s needs.
McIntyre Capron & Associates
Tom Weston
Principal
Splat gets the ‘big picture’
part of digital marketing.
They support their design
work with marketing tactics
which have significantly
increased our brands’
visibility.
Working as an outsourced Chief Marketing Officer, I found Splat’s
team to be both thoughtful and responsive. Their input, execution,
and dedication to teamwork made them valuable assets to my team.