Zillow.com is a brand new online real estate tool. I was rather impressed by this slick, Web 2.0 type application.

Zillow is designed to do one thing very well—value homes. It’s still in Beta, which means that some of Zillow’s data on houses is incomplete, but for many areas it works very well. It currently has data for over 60 million homes, mostly based on county and state sales and tax records.

Something else I was drawn to was this statement from Zillow’s home page:

. . . you don’t have to enter any personal info and no one will contact you

Zillow’s coolest feature is its map—you can choose a streetmap, satellite image, or combo view. Home values and property lines are overlayed over the map. Navigation is intuitive and smooth. I quickly found my last 3 houses. Only the map application refreshes—the rest of the page is nice and static.

Focused is Coming

Whether Zillow will make it or not is hard to say—they need to cover more areas and make their estimates more accurate (my parents home was estimated to be worth about 4 times its last appraised value and twice what any home in the community has every sold for)—but that’s not the point.

Zillow is an example of a phenomenon we need to pay attention to.

In our world of powerful communication and increasingly easy search, highly focused and local solutions are going to grow dramatically. We are moving ever closer to one-to-one marketing when it comes to everything—mass markets are being cut up like so much holiday pie.

In order to be successful, you had darn better know who your customer niche or collection of niches is and you had better provide them with a very good solution to one of their problems.

Companies need to improve their communication—make their messages clearer and more concise. They don’t always need to be simpler, but messages should allow potential customers to find them and grasp them and persuade them to hold on to your company tightly. I think that the key word here is specificity.

Keyword phrases keep getting longer as customers become more search-savvy and search engines become more accurate.

More focused messages, smaller target segments, and highly specific keyword phrases are all a lot of work and are difficult to implement sometimes—I mean, it is easier to bid on the keyword “real estate” than to bid on 100 terms such as “Utah real estate valuations and appraisals”—but the ROI on highly specific campaigns and phrases is much higher.

Refocus

Take a look at your company. Is your mission clear? Do people understand what you’re about? Is your message consistent across all of your materials and coming out of the mouth of your employees? Do you provide a valuable service to a clearly defined group of people?

You can cut down on drag by streamlining and focusing. Your returns on investment will improve as you leave behind the prospects who don’t really want what you sell and focus on those who are specifically looking for your service. And everyone will be better off because we’ll waste less of each other’s time.