We talk to Kate Hulbert, Marketing Director at Bozeman Real Estate Group, about how a robust, up-to-date agent website can drive traffic and leads. These sites can compete with the national search sites if they are done well. Here are some of the things we cover on the episode:
- Why it’s so important to keep your website up to date, and what that entails (including being mobile responsive)
- Why stock images are bad
- Which fonts and website features to avoid
- How frequently you need to post new, authentic content on your site
- Where to put your contact information
- Lead capture through relevant content
- SEO and how to make it manageable
- How to mine Google Analytics for valuable information about your audience
Links mentioned:
You can listen to this episode here, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Gayle Weiswasser:
Welcome to the Homesnap Snapshot, a podcast about digital marketing for real estate agents. I’m Gayle, the host of the show. And each episode we talk to agents just like you, who are successfully using some type of digital marketing to build their brands. When it’s over, you’ll walk away with concrete ideas that you can use in your own marketing to help grow your business. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe using whatever app or platform you’ve used to listen to podcasts. And I’d really appreciate it if you’d take a minute to rate and review the show. That helps us get new listeners. Now let’s get to today’s guest. Today’s guest on the show is Kate Hulbert, who is the marketing director at Bozeman Real Estate Group. Kate, how are you doing?
Kate Hulbert:
Good. How are you?
Gayle Weiswasser:
I’m fine. Thank you for coming on the show today.
Kate Hulbert:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Gayle Weiswasser:
So let’s start a little bit talking about how you got into real estate and tell us about the Bozeman Real Estate Group.
Kate Hulbert:
So yeah, I started working in real estate about eight years ago. I took a job as the marketing director for a franchise branch of a well-known national company. And I had a background in marketing. So I really enjoyed working for the company and further developing the connection between the company and the clients and building the company’s local presence in the market, but ultimately working for a franchise just wasn’t a good match for me. I felt pretty constricted on what we could do and how we could grow. So it’s kind of a funny story. I was in my late twenties at that point, and I was frustrated enough that I decided I was going to quit my job and travel for a year. So the same week I was going to book a one-way ticket to Africa, one of the owners of that company took me out to lunch and explained his plans to start a new independent brokerage. That was tempting enough that I made some changes to the plan. And about six months later, we opened up a Bozeman Real Estate Group.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Did you ever make it to Africa?
Kate Hulbert:
I didn’t go to Africa, but I did wander around Southeast Asia for about five months in between. So it was a good consolation prize.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yes.
Kate Hulbert:
Yeah. So we started Bozeman Real Estate Group and the company was everything that the other was not. We were able to build it from the ground up. We started the whole brand. It was very grassroots and we were able to really hone in the mission of the company and what we wanted it to be. We focused a lot on creating a presence in our market that was based on trust and authenticity. It’s been a wild ride ever since, but I’m really proud of what we’ve created and the presence that we’ve been able to build. We’re one of the strongest offices in our market now, and it’s only been four years. So the first two years, we really spent a lot of time marketing-wise, building up content, working on the website. We actually wound up competing with the content we had created at the previous company for quite a while. And so that was a bit of a challenge kind of competing with ourselves, but ultimately were able to pass all that. And now our website generates 100’s of leads for our agents every month and it’s really kind of a powerhouse in our market and we’re really proud of what we’ve done.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Nice. Well today we’re actually going to talk about agent websites and how they can turn into lead generators. I feel like agent websites are a bit of a mainstay of real estate marketing and we on this show, we’ve talked about all kinds of things like TikTok and Clubhouse and Instagram, and sort of sexy and exciting things and websites don’t maybe get the attention that they deserve because they’re not as exciting, but they can be super powerful, like you said, in driving leads and traffic to an agent or to their company or brokerage. So you wrote an article that we saw Inman with advice about how to keep your site up-to-date and how to make sure that your site is working hard for you. And there were so many great tips in there.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I said, we need to get this woman on the show so we can go through some of these tips and have her explain them. So I’m going to link to that article so if anyone who’s listening wants to read it in Inman, then there will be a link in the show notes, so you can find it there, but let’s talk a little bit about websites and some kind of common mistakes you see, and some sort of easy ways to tweak a website so that it is working much more powerfully for you. And one of the first things you talk about are outdated or poorly designed sites. So what are we looking for here? What are some of the essential elements that need to be in a website? And how can you tell when something is out of date?
Kate Hulbert:
Yeah. You know, I think when you land on a website that it’s out of date. It’s painfully obvious, oftentimes, and I think it’s important to think about what message is that sending to the person who comes to your website. It’s basically your first impression to that potential client. And when someone lands on a website that looks out of date, that’s designed poorly, that has low quality images, you make assumptions about that person or that company. And you might assume that the company’s not successful because they clearly don’t have the resources to invest in a better website, or you might assume that they don’t care enough about their business to make a better website. So I think it’s really important… this is the foundation, everything that you’re doing, all the things that you guys have talked about on the podcast, whether it’s TikTok or social media efforts or anything outside of that, the website is your foundation.
Kate Hulbert:
And that’s where people will come to find out the information about you. So really paying attention to how that works. So I’d say that the most important things are having a Mobile Responsive Website. So one that adjusts to display correctly on whatever device someone is looking at your website on, high quality images. We see a lot of stock images in our industry. And I think that’s a huge mistake because you can clearly tell a stock image from an authentic image. So hiring a photographer to take great natural professional images of yourself, your team, your area, paying local photographers, to give you the rights for their photos of the mountain ranges that’s surround you, or the popular lakes in your area. Anything like that. Little touches really helped.
Kate Hulbert:
Font is huge. Using any kind of outdated or unprofessional font really jumps out. Large blocks of texts are never a good idea, particularly on a landing page, any animations or playing music, are obviously not a great choice, but I would hope that those don’t exist anymore. But sometimes you’re surprised. And a non-existent or difficult to use navigation bar are also a really big mistake as well. You want people to be able to navigate your site easily and efficiently, and if they can’t they’ll leave.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I wanted to ask you about fonts. Can you give us a couple of fonts that if you see them, you immediately just kind of shudder.
Kate Hulbert:
Comic Sans is a go-to, right?
Gayle Weiswasser:
There cannot be any real estate agents that are using Comic Sans, are there really?
Kate Hulbert:
I don’t know, Gayle, I’ve been surprised.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Oh man.
Kate Hulbert:
I’ve been surprised before. So I think that circles back to the point of I think people underestimate the power of their website. And I think that a lot of people have given up trying to hold any competitive advantage with their websites against the national ones like Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor. It’s like, what’s the point in even trying, because those websites dominate. They dominate my local search, they dominate national search, and there’s no point in me even trying. But what we’ve seen with ours and what I’ve seen other companies do is that you absolutely can compete with those national websites, particularly in your specific market. And it’s well worth the effort and the time and the consistency that it takes to get to that point. Because once you can, rather than paying for those third party leads, you have a website that’s generating your own, which is invaluable.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I feel like websites also don’t always have to compete with those, the big search sites, because sometimes people are getting to your website, not necessarily through search, but maybe they’ve heard of you. They want to know more about you. They want to check you out. And that’s where that first impression thing becomes so important. Because if they’re weighing a couple of different agents they’ve heard of, or if maybe they’re a casual acquaintance and they’re thinking about getting in the market, and so they just kind of proactively go check out your site, then you don’t even have to think about that as being in competition with large search sites, but just as an additional piece of marketing.
Kate Hulbert:
For sure. And it’s a really important one. As a real estate agent, people are Googling you and they’re looking you up and you got to really pay attention to what’s out there. And that reflects who you are and the type of business person that you want to be.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I was going to say when we were talking about fonts, that the one font that whenever I see it really screams outdated to me is a Papyrus. I feel like it had a moment like 15 years ago, maybe 16, 17 years ago.
Kate Hulbert:
It did have a moment.
Gayle Weiswasser:
And it was clean and fresh and new, and then it was everywhere. I just feel like everyone was like Papyrus, I want to use that.
Kate Hulbert:
Oh god. Simple is best, right?
Gayle Weiswasser:
Right.
Kate Hulbert:
Just keep it simple.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Keep it classic. Yep. All right. So now you talk in your article about content. So we’ve got a sense of what the site should look like. Now we have to talk about what the site should have in it. So how frequently should people think about updating or expanding content, refreshing what’s there? And then what kinds of content does best for getting traffic?
Kate Hulbert:
Yeah. Anything is better than nothing when it comes to content. Every piece you write has value to it. So if you can do one every three months and that’s all you can do, that’s better than nothing. But I would say a general rule of thumb would be to try to turn out content two to four times a month. And just to clarify, when we’re talking about content, it’s often thrown into the blog section of a website. And however you decide to present that, whether that’s a news page or a resources page or a blog page or content spread out throughout your site, it can be anything. But it’s essentially articles or pieces of information that you are writing for your site, specifically… original content that is then posted and used to drive traffic.
Kate Hulbert:
So two to four times a month is what we certainly aim for and that’s where you’ll see the most consistent effort, but content’s my favorite thing to talk about, because I really believe it’s the number one thing you can do to get your site noticed. So talking outside the realm of using your site as sort of a business card for people who already are aware of you, or know of your business and are looking you up, content is what reaches the people who don’t know of you yet. And so it’s a way to reach a whole new audience, whether they’re within your area or outside your area. And you can use that content to direct people from all different stages of the home buying process, maybe they’re in the research phase. Maybe you use it to attract tourists to your area. There’s so many things you can do.
Kate Hulbert:
Writing content is also one of the hardest things to do. And that’s why so many people don’t do it because it takes consistent effort. And you have to sit down in front of your computer and write. And that’s hard for everybody. And that’s often why most of your competition isn’t doing it. There’s a huge opportunity there for so many people, you just have to commit to doing it. Another thing I think that’s important to note is every marketing webinar SEO person will tell you that content is the key piece to all this. And so a lot of people will hire a third party site or a third party company or someone on Fiverr or an intern to write posts for them.
Kate Hulbert:
And I’ve seen that just miss the mark so many times, because I think when you are writing content, you need it to be authentic. You need it to be true to your voice and true to your brand. You need it to be something different. You don’t want just your basic article of 10 things a first time home buyer needs to know. You need it to have some uniqueness and authenticity. I really try to advise people to shy away from using people outside their sphere. Their knit group of corporates working in their office, or whoever’s on their team to write content, because I just think that could backfire.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I have two people sort of in my sphere. One is actually an agent that we used. And another is an agent that I know because her kids were in my kid’s class many years ago. And so I’m on both of their mailing lists. They both work for the same national brokerage, national brand. One of them sent out an email last week and mentioned… it was like a summer themed email. And it mentioned beach reads or hot books to read this summer. Well on the side, I’m a book blogger or a book reviewer. I spend a lot of time reading about books. So I was like, oh, that’s so cool. I wonder how she knew which books to pick. And I looked over the list and I was thinking, oh, I had no idea she was a reader.
Gayle Weiswasser:
And then like an hour later, I got the email from the other agent that I know who also works for that same thing. And it was the same list. And so I realized it was the same email, with the same books. And I realized, well, this is just content that’s been provided to them by their marketing department that says, here’s your June email. And I was like, what a miss. I was very turned off by that because I just thought, well, it’s so obvious that you’re not creating your own content. And it would have been so much more interesting to me to know that you were curating this. I’d love to know what you think. Doesn’t have to be books. It can be whatever. Top favorite vacation destinations or what refreshing drinks do you like to have in the summer? Whatever it is, just something personal that makes me think, oh, this person is interesting and here’s a side to them I didn’t know about, but then you just getting the same one twice in a row was very disappointing.
Kate Hulbert:
Absolutely. Because it’s almost like you feel like you’re connecting with that person when you can read a book like that, that they’ve written and now you’ve lost that connection. And let me ask you, will you read… will you open their emails again? Will you click on their links again?
Gayle Weiswasser:
I will because I’m in the business and I do a social media podcast for real estate, so I will read them and I’ll probably do it… actually now I’ll probably read them religiously, because I’m going to want to see are they still tracking, are they still copying the same stuff? And it’s funny as I think about it, I’m not even sure that they are with the same brokerage. I think one is with one and one’s with another. So now I’m wondering is it their website company, or are they subscribing to some real estate marketing service that’s doing this for them? Like maybe that’s what it is. So it’s not even their brokerage. I’m going to have to investigate this because I sort of didn’t at the time I just was like, oh my God, it’s the same thing. But now that I’m thinking about it, I’m kind of curious to know where it’s coming from. It’s clearly coming from somewhere because there’s no way these two people would have come up with the same 10 books in the summer reading list. So I don’t know.
Kate Hulbert:
Keep me posted on that. I’m really curious.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I know. A big mystery.
Kate Hulbert:
Yeah. That’s such a common thing and I totally understand why busy agents sign up. They’re like, we’ll post your Facebook feed and we’ll send out your email list and we’ll do all these things that it’s going to be so great. And you even see a rush of traffic from it initially, but then the traffic starts to drop as people realize that this content is not authentic and then-
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah, it’s generic.
Kate Hulbert:
And then you lose credibility and the eyes of your readers, your followers and everything.
Gayle Weiswasser:
And the thing I kind of want to say about that, too, is it just doesn’t take that long to come up with content. I’ve been blogging a really long time some days I’m like, oh, I don’t know what I’m going to say today. But if you spend just a little bit of time thinking about it, you can usually think of something interesting in your life that you can put on there really quickly. And it just takes just some thought, it doesn’t take that much time. It just takes the singularity of mind to sit and think about it. Think about what is something interesting happening that people might want to know? And it doesn’t have to be long. And like you said, that’s what creates that personal connection. And that is where in this business, particularly that personal connection, that’s what leads to business.
Gayle Weiswasser:
That’s why these tools can be so popular or so powerful is because they create that emotional connection. And they build a bond where there wasn’t one before. Then that leads to relationships. And then it leads to business and repeat business and referrals and all of that great stuff. But without that personal connection and just the generic content, it’s not going to cut it.
Kate Hulbert:
I think one of the coolest things you can see happen when you do that, when you start just putting out your own real authentic content that you’re talking about is you start to build trust. People start to trust you and they start to see your articles come up. And they’re like, oh, I won’t wonder what they think about this, or wonder what they’re saying about this. And then after they start to trust you, then they start to seek you out. So then they start coming back to your website to see what you’re saying about a certain thing that’s happening more. When COVID hit… what are they saying about what’s happening to the real estate market? You know, what’s that company that always writes… we try to always write very honest articles. So we don’t sugarcoat things or dance around the fact that our market is insane. And it’s really difficult for people to purchase a home right now. And we’re very honest about that. And I think people come back because there’s no fluff. Like you can get a true, honest answer from that. And that’s something that you build as your thing, continue to write your content and just write what’s on your mind and on your heart and just put that out there.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yep. Alright. Let’s talk about contact information. So I laughed when I read your article that people forget to put their contact information on their blog, which I mean on their website, which is insane, but there may be an art to contact information. What’s your best practice recommendation for where to include it and how much information do you need to include?
Kate Hulbert:
Yeah it is really surprising how often that’s missed, because that’s kind of the point, right? Like you do all this work to build up your website and write all this content. And then if there’s nowhere for someone to reach out to you, you’ve got to drop the ball there. So I think the best advice is to put it where you would expect to find it. So you notice how you navigate websites and notice where you look for the contact information. So oftentimes there’s a contact page. That’s usually on the far right hand of the navigation bar or the bottom of the dropdown. So you definitely want your contact information there. You want it to be clickable. So you want your phone numbers to be clickable, your email address to be clickable. There’s some SEO benefit to including a Google map of your business location in there. You can also include plugins to schedule appointments. It can be as bare bones or as fancy as you want it, but definitely a phone number, definitely an email address. You got to have that.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Clickable, too. That’s so important to have it hyperlinked.
Kate Hulbert:
Yeah, for sure. How annoying is it when you’re on your iPhone and you find a phone number and then you can’t click it. So then you’re trying to copy and paste it. Yeah. That’s the worst.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yup.
Kate Hulbert:
But then thinking throughout the website, where else can you put it? You know, it should certainly be on your about us page or your team page or your bio. That would be another place to think, but then where else can it go? Should it be floating in the footer of your website? Should it be on property pages so that people can click to inquire about a property? Really starting to think about where on my site will people need more information and how can I make that easy for them? Well, one thing that we’ve done on our website Bozeman Real Estate Group that’s been super helpful is we have a just very non-invasive floating click-to-call and click-to-email button that just stays on every page. And at first we really went back and forth about it with our designers. Just wondering if that was too invasive or not, and now it’s become the largest lead generator on our website. Just having that information there, whenever people need it. It’s right there, they can click to call you. And I mean, that’s one of our largest lead generations on there.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Alright? So let’s talk about lead capture. You just mentioned lead generation. Lead capture is people coming to your website and then feeling compelled to fill out their contact information and actually identify themselves and agree to be contacted by you later. What are some best practices for capturing leads from a website?
Kate Hulbert:
Yeah. So this is where it gets fun, right? Because you can start to think about who are the people coming to your website? What are they looking for? Are you getting a lot of out-of-staters? Are you getting a lot of second home buyers? Do you have a lot of tourists who come to your area and fall in love and start just browsing homes to see what they look like? Really thinking about who is landing there and what information do they want? How great is it, Gayle, when you land on a website that’s nailed everything you’re looking for? It answers your question. It gives you more information, and then it gives you an action to take. That’s basically what you want your website to do for these different groups of people.
Kate Hulbert:
So aside from your basic property information requests, thinking about things like… so we get a lot of people moving from out of state. We’re in Montana. It’s very popular, all of a sudden, and we have a lot of out-of-staters. So we have a lot of moving to Montana, moving to Bozeman content. We have downloadable guides that kind of touch on that research phase of people, which is the majority of our interest right now. So we guide them through a process of some content, lead them to a form and then give them that guide at the end. And so that’s a great lead capture that again, really answers the need of the people that are coming to our website. So another example would be, if you get a lot of first-time home buyers in your area, you want to answer their needs directly. So asking them questions like, are you pre-approved? What features are the most important to you? For second home buyers, you would ask them will this be a recreation property, a vacation home, and investment property? Asking them those questions so that they feel like you’re invested in their process as well, encourages them to engage with your website and eventually submit that form.
Gayle Weiswasser:
So now we’re going to get to the big guns of websites, which is SEO. And I think this is one of the more intimidating parts of having a website, because with SEO, you have to understand more than just what looks nice or what reads well, but you have to actually understand search. You have to understand the mechanics of search and algorithms and all of that. So can you give us some basic stuff for people that aren’t SEO experts, some basic advice on SEO and how to get the most out of a Google search?
Kate Hulbert:
So what’s cool about SEO is that you don’t necessarily have to understand all of that. I mean, if the word algorithm scares you, that’s okay. Like you can still learn SEO and you can still be successful. The way I like to think about SEO is that it’s a bunch of different puzzle pieces that all come together to eventually build your site up. So each piece has a certain level of importance. The more pieces you pull together, the more fully your picture comes together. And the more successful your website is, but you can focus efforts on each little piece and see results. So if there’s a piece that terrifies you, that’s okay, you don’t have to tackle that right away. So to simplify it as much as possible, I break it down into two categories. So the most important thing is your website and what content is on that website, how that website is structured and where do people go on your website?
Kate Hulbert:
So content structure and lead captures are the most important things. So we’ve covered all that I think in this podcast, but writing content that brings people in, structuring your website so that it’s easy to use, and the pages are easy to find and then placing forms or different captures on the website that pull people in and ultimately give you their information. That would be the first piece. So the second piece is thinking about how people will find your website. So using social media channels, email campaigns, paid ads, directory sites, and forums are all ways that you can use third-party sites to bring people back to your website. So thinking about all those things that point to you and where people will find you from, and as you start to build that up, you’ll start to see your SEO value come up and you’ll start to see your website ranking, hopefully in organic search results, which is really the ultimate goal. Because if you can get your website ranking for queries, like moving to Bozeman, that’s our market. That’s huge. I mean, those are thousands of visits each day. So as you pay attention to all those third-party sites, you build up that organic presence, and that is the ultimate goal.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right. You also talk about using analytics, Google analytics, specifically, to track how well your site is doing. What are the basic stats that agents should be looking at on a regular basis, whether that’s daily, weekly, monthly, whatever, in Google analytics.
Kate Hulbert:
Yeah. Google analytics is awesome. Do you use it?
Gayle Weiswasser:
Not enough? I really should.
Kate Hulbert:
Okay and is it because it’s intimidating or it’s not part of your process?
Gayle Weiswasser:
I think it’s because it’s depressing because I have this hobby blog and I feel like there’s probably a lot more I could do to it. A lot of the things that you’re talking about, SEO and lead capture, newsletter and on and on. And I just don’t have the time for it because I do it on the side. It’s not my full-time job. And so sometimes I think when I look at my Google analytics, I get sad. Because I think I spent all this time reading and posting and then this is the traffic I have. So I tend to not look at it. That’s not a very good answer, but it’s an honest one.
Kate Hulbert:
No, no, I get that. I can totally relate to that actually. And I think that that’s a very common place to be, and it can be depressing when you write a post and it has two views and one from your mom and one’s from you. I totally get that. I think if you can frame Google analytics as looking at it as a place where you can find your opportunities, that helps. So rather than logging in and saying, oh, my post has had two views looking at, okay, where can I find the opportunity here? So the main three things to answer your question that I think you should be looking at in Google analytics are your audience demographics. So seeing where people are coming to your website from, and this is a chance to spot an opportunity. So if you know there’s a lot of buyers coming into your market from California, but you have no website traffic coming in from California, that gives you the green light.
Kate Hulbert:
This is an opportunity for you to develop content, to get in front of those particular buyers. So it all circles back to content. That’s what it’s all about. So if you see that hole, you could start thinking about, well, gosh, what if I wrote an article about relocating from Bozeman to California or how many people are moving to Bozeman from California or writing those types of content that answered that group of people’s specific needs is a way that you could start to see that traffic grow. So I think just always framing it as an opportunity rather than a failure or a hole in your efforts when you might-
Gayle Weiswasser:
I like that way of looking at it.
Kate Hulbert:
Yeah. It makes it a little less depressing, right?
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah.
Kate Hulbert:
You know, this is helpful too, because you might start to get insights about your market that you didn’t know. Like for example, we’ve always seen people moving here from Washington and Colorado and Utah, but when COVID hit, all of a sudden we started seeing spikes in traffic in Texas and New York and places… in Florida, places that had never really been on our radar before. So that gave us a real insight to pass on to all our agents and to pass on well, yeah, to the agents to help them then navigate, to help them talk to their sellers and help them figure out what was going on in our market. So it’s beneficial in many ways, for sure.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah. That’s a great way of looking at it. Don’t look at it like a sign of failure or a reminder of what you’re not… improve. And there’s lots of great, very valuable information in there that can show you things that you might not have known about your audience.
Kate Hulbert:
Exactly. It’s a tool it’s not, it’s not a report, it’s a tool. And I think, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah. That’s great.
Kate Hulbert:
I have three most important things to look at in Google analytics. I’d say the second would be acquisition. So this means how people are finding your traffic. So what the ultimate goal in acquisition is a high number of organic traffic, because that means… that’s what we talked about before. That means people are finding your website in search engines. You’re not paying for it. You’re not putting any effort into it. That just means people are seeing your stuff in Google search, clicking on it and driving traffic and leads to your website. So that’s the ultimate goal. When you’re first getting started, you probably see high numbers of direct traffic, which means probably you and your team clicking on your website, anyone who is typing in the address directly into the search bar, things like that.
Kate Hulbert:
You might see high social media referrals. If you’re really active on social media and you might see paid search engine traffic, all of that is important to look at again with the framing it as where’s the opportunity here? So if your numbers are really high for paid search, starting to balance that out with maybe some pins on Pinterest to try to direct traffic back that way, some more posts on your Facebook page to get people clicking back to your website, always trying to round out where people are coming to your website from.
Gayle Weiswasser:
That’s great advice.
Kate Hulbert:
Good. Yeah. I think it’s circling back to the principles of SEO. I mean, it’s all about the puzzle pieces, right? So using all those pieces to eventually build your website up, to to a powerful marketing tool and then the third most important one, and this was I think the fun one to look up, but I guess it does depend behavior.
Kate Hulbert:
And so looking at behavior in analytics, I check this one every single day because I want to know what pages are bringing people to our website. And it’s interesting because you see it fluctuate. We’ve done all your typical seasonal posts about the best waterfall likes and all those things, where to camp. So you see that fluctuate, but then you also see interest in the market fluctuate. So how can I buy a home in this market? How can I sell my home in this market? All those things, you see, those kinds of changes, especially with the volatile world we’re living in right now. So this fluctuates based on what type of content you’re putting out. And it’s really interesting to see where the interest is. And so that’s where the behavior insights are really helpful. And it really helps you see where the larger trends are, too.
Kate Hulbert:
Another example would be right after COVID, when everyone was very unsure as to what was going to happen. We started seeing interest trickling in about moving to Montana. And that was our first inkling of things could really shift here. And so paying attention to that and again, using that as a tool to know, okay, let’s start writing more content about moving to Montana and what it’s like to live in Montana. And you know, all the basics about buying a home here and everything like that. So that allows you to be ahead of the curve to get in front of those people who are interested, who wouldn’t otherwise find you.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Nice. Was that a big surprise to you when you started to see that traffic?
Kate Hulbert:
When I think through what happened, I think the first couple of weeks we really thought we were in for a serious recession and that the housing market would go first. But I think after about two weeks, no, I don’t think it was a surprise. I think, as you kind of thought through what COVID was going to do to people’s needs and just our culture in general, I think it became pretty obvious that space, nature, and getting away from cities were going to be pretty popular trends.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah.
Kate Hulbert:
It was really crazy to watch it all unfold. I mean, I’m a nerd on Google analytics. So I just sit there and watch what’s happening. And I thought it was really wild to kind of see those theories proven and see traffic flooding in from cities that we hadn’t seen before, states that we hadn’t seen before and realizing how everything that was happening in the world was affecting that.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Alright. This has been super helpful. I love all this advice, lots of very easy, actionable things that you’ve talked about here that I think hopefully our listeners can sort of see themselves putting into practice pretty quickly and without a tremendous amount of effort. So that’s great. Before I let you go, I’m going to ask the question I always ask people who come on the show, which is tell our audience about some apps that you’re using that they might not know about. They don’t have to be for marketing or real estate or anything, but just ones that you like that maybe we haven’t heard of before.
Kate Hulbert:
I love the Insight Timer app. I don’t know if that one’s been mentioned, but I try to minimize screen time and I try to also take 10 minutes each day for some mindfulness. So it’s a meditation app that gives you free access to literally thousands of meditations or courses or talks or timers or sweet music. It’s incredible what they offer for free on that app. I use that daily to just sit for 10 minutes to try to ground myself. It’s a great tool. I can’t believe that they have everything that I have on there, but Insight Timer is a great app. And then I love my Solitaire app because that’s just a good way to zone out at the end of the day, right?
Gayle Weiswasser:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Nice. Okay. Alright. I will link to those and thank you so much for coming on. Kate, tell the world listening where they can find you.
Kate Hulbert:
So you can find our website bozemanrealestate.group, online. You can find us on Instagram at Bozeman Real Estate Group or same on Facebook, Appleton Real Estate Group. And we’re here in Bozeman, Montana for anyone who’s looking to move to the area.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Great. Alright. We will link to that and thank you for taking the time to come on the show.
Kate Hulbert:
Thanks for having me Gayle.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Snapshot. I hope that you enjoyed what you heard today. If you have a moment, please leave us a review. It really helps us get new listeners. This podcast is part of Industry Syndicate, a curated media network containing the highest rated real estate and mortgage podcasts. Find other excellent real estate content at industrysyndicate.com. Home of real estate’s first media network.