There are marketing principals that are universally followed by the best marketers in the world, but consistently violated by real estate agents. Most people in our industry fail to learn their craft. But if you can become an expert marketer you will have a huge advantage in your market. It comes down to direct response vs branding based marketing. For real estate, one will kill you and the other will make you wealthy. Follow these 7 steps to create more quality leads that are predisposed to doing business with you.
1. Make An Offer
There’s a very direct and specific reason prospects are contacting you. It’s because they have a need and they know that you have the tools, strategies and systems to help them achieve that goal.
Regardless what it is that they need, you have to make a direct offer, so test that offer and hold it accountable. Whether it’s a YouTube and Facebook advertising, newsletters, postcards, email campaigns or even a billboards – if they’re not bringing you results, you need to refresh, restart and rebuild your content within your advertisement so that it pertains to the audience you’re looking to attract.
2. Clear Instructions
You need to distinguish and define your audience so you can create clear content that is going to get them to act now – rather than later or worse, not at all.
For example, if you’re at a seminar, live event or a webinar and you’ve just listened to a direct offer that motivated you to want to take action NOW. The speakers don’t tell you to register later, fill out the form another time or think about what you just listened to. Instead, the speaker is going to tell you to take out your pen, fill out the form now and hand it in on your way out the door.
3. Track & Measure
It’s simple. Track absolutely everything. On my team, we actively sell Real Estate through big numbers because we have a big budget. How do we have a big budget? By simply, tracking and understanding the fundamentals and significance behind every number within your business.
For example, within my business we know the numbers and how many conversions we get from our newsletter ads, postcards, radio ads and websites. As long as we know how many leads get generated through each of our marketing platforms – we know where to place our money, rather than guessing and gambling our way through and risking losing everything.
If one of your platforms isn’t generating, converting or just wasting away your time, energy and money – you cut it. You don’t try to turn it around, you cut it out of the budget and place that money towards a platform you know will drive in more traffic that will ultimately convert to leads.
4. Branding as a Byproduct
The biggest mistake I see Real Estate Agents making whether they’re a part of a team or an owner and they’re spending all their money branding themselves.
When you’re dealing with a smaller business you can’t depend on branding or else you’ll go broke. You’re not Coke, Pepsi or Nike where you can spend limitless amount of dollars and see that return in seconds.
You need to generate a return.
You can’t give credit to branding. You need to hold your dollars accountable through Direct Response because now you’re growing your database, consistently making real money, doing business, calls are coming in a and getting more clients because those people are now in your world.
5. Follow up
Follow up should always be apart of your marketing. Majority of the time people don’t “buy now” they wait on it and then think about the decision on the purchase or product they may be considering.
The follow up effort whether it’s phones, texting, emailing or automated follow up typically through email that is reinforcing the reason as to why they opted in to your world and remind them why it’s so significant they purchase whatever it is you may be offering.
6. Strong copy
When it comes to you copy you need to be bold, stand the part and essentially create a “pattern interrupt” in the sense that you need to throw your audience out of their comfort zone by giving them a new perspective in terms of how they perceive and think within a situation.
If your content is strong and you’re able to make someone feel something through your copy then you know you’re doing something right – because you’re creating a feeling through content which will ultimately make you stand out from your competitors while gaining credibility from new audiences.
7. Results
No matter what you do, how much content you produce or how pretty your copy is – if you’re not getting any results, converting leads or generating any traffic – then something is wrong.
Everyone wants their copy to look good but it all comes down to what your copy is saying and if your content comes across as empty, basic or similar to everything else within your industry – chances are you won’t get any results because your message either wasn’t’ strong enough, detailed in depth or it wasn’t targeted to the specific audience you were looking to attract
Results rule and the moment you choose to stick with what works rather than continuously trying to fix what doesn’t – you and your business will both succeed.
