I love to see what is happening in real estate in other countries and where we are going with real estate innovations when it comes to marketing. This week’s content is a great taste of what we are seeing in other parts of the world and what we are seeing to innovate our own real estate marketing in 2017.
REAL ESTATE MARKETING INNOVATION #1
Business Models…
*Portugal – Average transaction commission is 3%. Exclusive listings only. No Office cooperation with one another at all
*France – Average transaction commission is 5-7%. Mandatory posting of your commissions displayed in your office window to the public. Just starting to cooperate with one another. Social interaction is key to their culture.
*Belgium – Average agent in the Netherlands do 35-40 ends a year and the top solo agent did 290 ends in a year. Buyer comes in, they tell you, you show them and they buy it! Social interaction with a consumer is an insult and complete waste of their time.
*Turkey – Completely unregulated profession and now just starting to see large franchises moving into the country to increase professionalism. Consumer is actually willing to pay more with a franchise because of the perception of professionalism vs. haggling culture.
REAL ESTATE MARKETING INNOVATION #2
Augmented Reality…
Phone technology that allows the consumer to scan over properties and the properties listed for sale pop up as you scan over through the phone. Click on the pop up on your phone and get all the details of the listing immediately. You can also take static real estate marketing piece and bring it to life.
Dedicated Property Sites or Personalized Seller Sites…
REAL ESTATE MARKETING INNOVATION #5
Single Property Websites…
This concept has been around for a few years now where the seller has a dedicated website for their property. ( Example www.1234maplestreet.com )The key to lead capturing using this marketing tool is to provide different photos, details, videos, neighborhood information, documents etc. in this platform that you don’t offer on the MLS listing platform and get them to enter their contact information to login and see all the extras you have on the property on the single property website.
REAL ESTATE MARKETING INNOVATION #6
Virtual Home Staging…
Computer enhanced virtual staging helps the consumer see the potential in the properties.
REAL ESTATE MARKETING INNOVATION #7
Seller Follow Up…
One of the biggest complaints we hear from sellers is that they listed with an agent and never heard from them again.
E Suivit – Electronic Follow Up ( France ) Online seller communication platform providing stats, feedback, showings, marketing etc.
· Seller sees all the buyers and contacts the agent that their home is a match and will sell
REAL ESTATE MARKETING INNOVATION #10
Seller Concierge Services…
3 year client follow up concierge service. $220 / Year
I hope to start seeing uses of these real estate marketing innovations popping up as you begin testing and implementing them in your own areas of business.
I am often reminded of the importance (if you have never done it before), of googling yourself. Actually sit down, open up google and search your name on google and look at what you see or worse, what you don’t see.
So let me ask you a question. When you google yourself, how do you rank?
When you google yourself, what else came up during your search? Anything? Nothing?
When I google myself I gratefully rank on the whole first page of the search but I found a solar company by the name “Wade Solar” and a judge in the mid-west with the name “Wade” in the search.
Now more importantly, how many results were about your business and would they make you want to work with you if you were a buyer or seller looking for an agent online? In February of this year, Inman reported that businesses with 10 or more reviews get 3.5x the attention and 6.5x the inquiries. Client reviews and testimonials help boost your incredibility with leads like crazy. They also help boost your credibility with Google.
So, if you’re not getting the results you want when you Google yourself and your business, that means Google doesn’t quite trust you yet. There are really only 3 ways to get traffic to your real estate website (Ads, SEO, and Social). This week we’re going to explore how your social media pages can help you rank better and higher in Google searches.
While Google may or may not use signals on Facebook or Twitter such as the number of followers you have to boost your placement, it’s clear that each platform still ranks and ranks well, at least for broad searches. If your content performs well and is widely shared, it can help drive more traffic and qualified leads your way for years to come. But let’s get back to social media. Social profiles are often among the top results in search listings for individuals and brand names. While your Pinterest page may not have the same impact as a 5-star Yelp review, it’s still a great place to start.
Think about it. If a lead only knows your name, they may start with that as a way to find out more about you and let’s be real – social media platforms are becoming just as much of a search engine as Google is. It’s likely future clients are going to want to learn more about you and the quickest way to connect is through social networks. If you’ve got a stellar Pinterest presence with several well-crafted boards full of useful information and a decent number of followers, you’re well on your way to making a great first impression and achieving your goal of gaining trust with your viewers and Google.
Whether you’re active on two or 12 social sites, here are a few practices that will easily increase your SEO and help push you to the first page of Google. Whether you have 100 or 100,000 followers on any given network, the way in which they engage with you will help establish you as a credible source. Growing your follower base is one way to do this, but they’ve got to be high-quality fans. What does this mean?
Well, for one, that they’re not bought. Buying Likes/followers will do absolutely nothing for you. Do Not Buy Fans. It’s not worth it and will ultimately decrease your chances of ranking on Google. As I said before though, there’s still a lot of conversation happening around whether your sheer number of followers even influences your Google ranking and whether it does or it doesn’t, how you interact with your audience totally matters. When thinking about increasing your reach, I want you to keep these three words in mind – Resonate, Relevant and Reach… let’s quickly break these down.
The way you will resonate with your target audience is by producing relevant content and these two things will increase your reach. Listen to what your viewers are saying. This could be one person or 10. It doesn’t matter. Because if you can help one person solve a problem, chances are there are many more people looking for answers to the same question. Help them solve it to increase your reach.
Optimize Your Posts – Again, this all comes back to content. To make the most of your updates, make sure you’re sharing strong, valuable content consistently. A detailed blog post, video or infographic will help you accomplish this the fastest. Make sure to also say something about the content you’re sharing in the post description and try and include a keyword or term relevant to that search.
You can also focus on optimizing your posts for your local community and having them show up in big search engines. Hint: This is how you can start to compete with portal giants such as Zillow and Truila. It is impossible for you to be a local expert like them, so get out there and make it happen. An easy way to get started on this, aside from making sure your actual profile is up-to-date with your location and services..etc., is to engage other local players. Try Googling “best pizza (your area)” and see what comes up.
Choose the top 3 and then check out their social media profiles. Try out each one for lunch or dinner over the next few weeks and write your own guide for newcomers. You can then tag each place across social media and begin engaging them on a more regular basis.
Whether you work with a team or are a one-agent show, you are your brand. The best way you can increase your brand awareness and authority is by publishing quality content regularly. Your online reputation is essentially built upon your social media presence. In order to generate and maintain a credible image, you’ve got to keep active. Your social media presence, though important, is really just a way to give you more visibility online and drive traffic to your site. That’s where the real action happens.
I have been asking myself the question for many years now if there is any money in social media and real estate?
Are agents actually generating some good sales in their real estate business using social media?
How can we actually make any money using social media strategically with my real estate business?
It is rare to find a simple, strategic lead generating system using Twitter for real estate and even better a system using Twitter and social media that is FREE!
I am so excited to have my good friend Tyler Zey from Easy Agent Pro share with us all this fantastic tip that actually will make us money using social media and Twitter in your real estate business.
Hey there Agentboost.com reader! I’m Tyler from Easy Agent Pro, and today I’m going to be showing you how to get free real estate leads from Twitter. The tactic I’ll be sharing with you helps find interested buyers and sellers on Twitter. And sends you an email the second they tweet about something related to real estate.
You’ll be able to engage with them, and turn them into profitable leads for your business. Think of this method like you would an starting an expired listing letter campaign. You need to be consistent, timely, and helpful with your interactions to see maximum success from the method.
Here’s a quick video showing you the step-by-step method:
The method is quite simple to use. You’re going to be using IFTTT to create an email alert. (If you’re more advance, you can even activate a text message alert.)
To help you even more, I’ve setup a simple script for you. You’ll want to search Twitter for
“House hunt,” “house hunting,” “moving soon,” “moving to” or “headed for” and the city of your choice — for example, “Dallas.” You can adjust that as you see fit! You’ll probably want to search Twitter (https://twitter.com/search-home) with the string before creating the notification. This will make sure you know what type of tweets will be emailed to you.
Now that you’ve enabled the Twitter search, you need to setup your email alert section. I connect IFTTT to my gmail account and allow it to send me email everytime someone Tweets. Now, everytime someone nearby tweets about buying or selling real estate, I’ll instantly know! The opportunities here are endless.
Look at this tweet from earlier this year:
I’m not sure if Rob will be buying (or selling). He says he is in school, so he probably isn’t a potential client. But responding with a personalized message to a tweet like that is a much better use of your time than tweeting listing after listing!
I recommend you follow a 10 step followup system with all of these leads. The money, in real estate, is in the follow-up. This applies to these Twitter accounts as well!
Have you set something like this up for your business? How do you use Twitter to build your incoming leads?
I’ve been in marketing for over 6 years and have run a private web consulting company for the past 3 years. Recently, my firm has specialised in real estate. We have already generated over 5,000+ leads in the real estate niche in under 7 months. I am personally called by companies like Leadpages when it comes to generating real estate leads. And have been featured on sites like Inman, RISMedia, and The Real Estate Trainer. Additionally, I’ve given talks at many brokerages nationwide. – Tyler Zey
Tyler Zey is the digital marketing director and contributing editor for the real estate digital marketing blog on easyagentpro.com.
Easy Agent Pro helps realtors with some of the best websites and marketing available.
Thanks so much Tyler…
Pretty cool tactic isn’t it? Well jump onto implementing this right away and let the leads start to flow.
In previous posts I have shared how important and profitable it is for our real estate business to make our existing clients a priority by setting up a system where we regularly reach out to them in various ways. My previous posts provide details on how you can effectively do this…
This weeks post provides a tool to implement and execute this process. I realize many of you don’t have the time, expertise or desire to do this work yourself so I wanted to provide a tool to do it for you.
I was recently introduced to Travis Balinas, the Product Marketing Manager over at OutboundEngine. He writes a lot about marketing for real estate agents on their blog and recently put together an incredible infographic on how agents can the get most from their marketing dollars.
I’ve asked Travis to give you all some information that you can apply to your marketing strategies to get you the most ROI.
Thank you Wade. I’m excited to share this infographic with your readers.
After digging into the latest National Association of Realtors’ 2014 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends report and exploring other agent statistics and polls, I’ve learned that you guys are incredible at staying up to date with marketing trends, love trying new things and really hustle to grow your businesses.
But what these various reports made alarmingly clear is that you’re investing lots of money (and time) targeting people who don’t know you, meaning you don’t have credibility with these potential clients. This is what led me to the conclusion that the biggest mistake agents make when investing in marketing is wasting money advertising to the wrong people.
This year’s 2014 Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends report sheds a lot of light on consumer behaviors that significantly impact the success of your marketing. Rather than spending time and money trying to figure out what the next “it” marketing trend is going to be, you’ve got an even better resource at your disposal that might not be on your radar: your database of past client contact information.
The statistics don’t lie here. 71% of all closed seller transactions and 68% of all closed buyer leads came from trusted sources or face-to-face contact. Did you know that it’s more beneficial to host an open house than it is to launch a direct mail piece? Agents reported that 8% of their closed sales came from open house interactions compared to the less than 2% that came from all forms of direct mail. What all these numbers show is that money spent on unknown audiences is a lot harder to get back. That’s especially true when compared to the ROI of referral business from your past customers.
What consumers have made entirely clear, both from NAR commissioned surveys and consumer reports in general, is that they’re going to turn to their friends, family and other trusted information sources for recommendations about major purchases. This means that your marketing dollars need to be spent on activating your sphere of influence and inspiring them to take action on your behalf.
With the bulk of your business coming from word-of-mouth referrals, it’s only logical that you invest in growing your business through your existing clients. Focus your attention on keeping your past clients engaged to build awareness, keep you top of mind and ultimately lead to increased referrals and repeat business.
And speaking of referrals, I did a survey of about 500 agents on our own blog, asking them various questions about their referral business. Already knowing that agents get roughly 3/4 of their business from referrals, I wanted to investigate this metric a little more in-depth. I asked our panel of agents a simple question and was absolutely shocked by the answer.
I asked them: Of your past clients, what percentage sends you referral business?
What I learned is that the majority of agents are getting less than 20 percent of their past clients to send them leads, meaning there is a large well of untapped potential in their databases of past clients. This number is huge for you guys! Can you imagine just how many qualified, inbound referral leads you could have if you just activated even 5 percent more of your sphere of influence?
2015 is filled with plenty of challenges for agents, and worrying about making poor marketing investments should be at the bottom of your list. As a marketer now deeply familiar with consumer buying trends and real estate agent spending habits for lead gen, I’ve developed a full-cycle marketing process that I love to share with agents to help increase their repeat business and referrals.
1. Market to people who know you – they’re your largest source of qualified leads and won’t be matched by any other lead gen platform.
2. Use a multi-touch approach to marketing – not everyone you know is on social media and not everyone you send an email to will open it, so you need to do both to increase your chances of being seen. You’re building up your pipeline by staying visible to the people who will send business your way.
3. Quality content marketing – Good content marketing gives your audience information that they find interesting, helpful and entertaining. You want them to keep reading your emails and social posts, so work to help them, not sell to them.
4. Established online presence – A website for the sole purpose of capturing organic leads is expensive and not very effective. However, when a newly referred prospect Googles your name, you definitely want to provide them with a mobile-optimized, comprehensive experience that speaks for you before you even get a chance to connect.
5. Generate referral business – Steps 1 – 4 provide an excellent foundation for marketing to your sphere of influence. With all these elements in place, you’ll have branded yourself as a trusted advisor. You can leverage this trust to help grow your business. In exchange for offering your contacts helpful, insightful content in a non-intrusive way, you will earn the opportunity to directly ask them for referral business, thus helping you repeat this process again.
That is why I’ve put together this infographic on 3 Ways to Fail at Being a Real Estate Agent…and 1 Way to Win, which you can check out below.
One last thing before I hand things over to Wade. Staying in touch with past clients through email and social media to drive referral business, reduce marketing costs and get back your day is what we do at OutboundEngine. I’m excited Wade let me reach out to you today with this infographic and he has arranged an incredible, limited-time offer for you guys too.
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Thank you, Travis for sharing this with us. We’ll get to that infographic in just a second.
OutboundEngine is great because they do 100% of the work for you. It’s a service for agents where the content is written for you, emails are sent automatically and your social media accounts are updated with relevant content to help you stay top of mind with clients. It’s an effective way to grow your business while freeing you up to doing what you do best – sell real estate.
I’ve spoken to the owner of OutboundEngine and negotiated a special offer for you… Click here to check out www.outboundengine.com/agentsboost/ and get a full demo at my discounted pricing. Take note, the offer is only good during the month of February. **Reminder… We don’t make a single penny if you sign up. We provide these posts to help you succeed and used our influence with the owner of this tool to get you a special discount but not to make “a cut”. We believe in this service which is the only reason we recommend it.
Enjoy the infographic below…
Strength and courage,
Wade
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