Trulia’s online real estate network has become more social since adding Trulia Voices, which gives a more personal voice to the market and enables direct social networking amongst users. Now Trulia is hoping to provide even more benefit to the business professionals that use Trulia voices by launching a self-service marketing platform.
This new platform will essentially turn business user profiles into advertisements. It’s an opt-in feature for professional users that would like to leverage Trulia as a marketing platform. As Trulia’s network is broken down into cities, zip codes and neighborhoods, professional users can hyper-localize their advertisements throughout Trulia’s site.
In speaking with Peter Flint, co-founder and CEO of Trulia, I also found out part of the story behind Trulia’s pricing model and implementation for the self-service marketing platform. There’s no doubt that the economy’s slowed growth has affected the real estate market, and this is one industry in particular that will be needing to cut corners. So as an incentive to get professionals to use the new marketing platform, Trulia will be offering unlimited feature listings and local ad spots for the fixed monthly fee of $39. If you pay for a year’s subscription upfront, it will cost you $348.
To further incentivize early activity on the integrated marketing platform, Trulia will even give a 25% discount for those professionals and businesses that have existing ad campaigns on other advertising platforms, such as Google or Yahoo. This particular discount is being offered to those that are already active as advertisers because it’s this demographic that is most likely to quickly utilize the new platform. Flint likened his platform to that of Google AdWords nearly a decade ago for this very reason–early adopters will be able to reap the most benefits from a new marketing platform.
There’s another reason why Flint thinks Trulia’s marketing platform is somewhat like the early days of Google AdWords–the unlimited ads users get are displayed on targeted areas of Trulia on a rotational basis. This means that the more targeted your ad is (you select what type of targeting you’d like, based on Trulia’s pre-defined options), the more often your ad will be seen. The ads with broader targets will be seen less often, but possibly by a wider range of Trulia users.
It’s a trade-off that I wondered about in terms of sustainability. Will Trulia be able to support this type of unlimited display advertising on a self-service program when it begins to scale? Flint thinks so. The relativity of each ad based on targeting and variety ends up mimicking the AdWords system in more ways than one.
While the platform operates pretty simply for its users, Trulia is doing much more on the backend, taking into account the data occurring around the self-service marketing platform and even using some of it to improve targeted ads from its larger marketing partners. With plans to roll out more cross-network and -device systems for Trulia Voices, the potential of this new marketing platform will expand in coming months.
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