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The pitch
My wife and I travel often to ski and snowboard (she’s the two-planker), typically spending many days in Park City, Utah. We have a friend up there who sells for Berkshire Hathaway.
Naturally, we talk a lot about what it takes to build, market, manage — and, of course, buy — the lavish homes embedded in the hills along the lift lines.
And what it takes is money. Piles of it.
I love thumbing the big firms’ luxury catalogs to read the often grossly effusive, typo-riddled home descriptions. I know that sounds harsh; and in the interest of full disclosure, the primary culprit isn’t my friend’s firm.
Thus, after struggling through the third instance of “ski-in-ski-out” in the same block of copy, I can’t help but wonder: would using Beegit.com’s collaborative content writing platform make their clients’ listings sound more appealing? Or at the very least, would it cut down on typos?
The sale
Beegit.com is software that will primarily appeal to large firms that handle very expensive property.
The majority of residential agencies simply don’t invest that much in copy and content to justify use of such a purely creative tool. Better stated, most firms don’t sell property with a selling cycle that can accommodate being marketed in a long form, seasonal print catalog. A $250,000 three-bedroom and a $7,000,000 mountainside compound are two entirely different products.
When your pricey, professionally bound collateral is mailed out and serving as a cocktail coaster on country club locker room lounge tables in some of our nation’s most expensive ZIP codes, it’s critical that its copy be original, tight and tonally consistent. It better read similarly on the web, too.
While Beegit’s highest and best use is as a writing tool, its simple collaboration features provide an easy white-board style of team feedback. For example, if the name of the sculpture elaborating a guest house foyer escapes you, simply tag your colleague using “@” to invite comment. As someone who is often needing client or team insight as I go, that’s a very practical bit of programming.
Best of all, inline commenting beats sending a separate email to solicit input on a half-completed rough draft. This way, listing copy can be as complete as possible before it enters the editing queue. It’s like Microsoft Word’s “track changes” tool, but endlessly better.
Beegit allows the writers to maintain control of their copy and posit points on verbiage choices within the confines of the piece, not via yet another chain of argumentative emails.
Beegit also uses Markdown code, which is essentially a bridge between standard text and HTML. Once you learn it—and it’s not tough at all—your copy becomes imminently more flexible among publishing platforms.
Documents in Markdown can be exported cleanly to website editors or other online content management platforms. I use Markdown in every piece I write for Inman. It’s fast and useful, and Beegit lets you split screens between plain text and Markdown so you can monitor formatting as you go.
I’m not trying to pick on Word, but its HTML translation is downright criminal. It embeds an array of chunky code and fails on multiple levels to translate what you see on screen to suitable web-ready copy. Markdown eliminates the need to ever rely on “Save as HTML” again.
Plus, you can import your Beegit Markdown to Adobe’s InDesign, which would surely be the primary tool for pagination design of lengthy marketing packages.
Beegit also allows the input and control of images alongside your copy. This adds some content production functionality above its usefulness as a team writing tool.
And beyond the inline collaboration, Beegit connects to a host of major content storage and management resources, like Box.net, Evernote, and Google Drive, as well as social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. So you can grab property images to inspire your copy.
In short, Beegit serves as a CDN, or content delivery network. It connects and helps create the copy and content you need to market listings and services.
The close
The team at Beegit offers custom content marketing solutions on top of its writing and content creation tools, but I think agencies would be initially best served with its primary offer—and it’s a strong one.
If you consider yourself an outlier in your market, an agency that pushes your marketing beyond what’s expected, than Beegit may be worth the monthly overhead. Since most firms wouldn’t have more than a few folks handling creative services, the $49.00/ten member/month plan would be plenty suitable.
If you are a real estate brokerage that markets luxury and second homes, I urge you to consider ways to leverage tools like Beegit. The industry is changing—marketing needs a place under the same roof as sales. Tools like this can help you lead that change.
Do you use Beegit? What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know!
Do you have a product for our tech expert to review? Email Craig Rowe.
