Real Estate Technology Blog | Real Estate Marketing Coach

Struggling with fresh, eye-catching ads?

Question - I struggle each week to come up with fresh, eye-catching ads, particularly for properties that have been on the market for a while. Of course our marketing budget is lean and our principal wants us to keep costs down.

I don’t blame your principal! Advertising is the most expensive way to generate leads. Do you need fresh, eye- catching ads? This might come as a surprise but…NO! If your ad is working and makes the phone ring - don’t change it. Run the same ad over and over again. Believe me, your prospects are NOT tired of it.

Every week there is a new pool of buyers looking for properties and they didn’t see your previous ads - so they will not know that it is the same ad no matter how many times it has run. And of course, each week some people who saw your ad previously but didn’t call will finally get interested enough to pick up the phone.

You may be concerned that some people will recognize that it is the same ad. Don’t worry about it! The idea is not to impress people with your creativity, and it surely isn’t to make the same prospects call you again and again. The idea is to compel them to call you once so that you can follow up. Are you measuring your results to know which of your ads are effective and which are not? Make sure you track results, so that you can repeat the most successful ads.

Advertising is a science - if it’s done right it can bring a predictable number of leads week after week. To do it right you need to learn how to write and create offers, so that people not only see and read your advertisement, but also are willing to call you in response. You need to know how to make your ad stand out and how to compel people who read it to answer right away. Without that knowledge, money spend on advertising is wasted.

Interestingly, the most effective real estate ads are not the ones that advertise a specific property or real estate company.

How to Guarantee Your Real Estate Services?

Seller asked if I can guarantee my services. But I’m reluctant to do it. I cannot be 100% sure that their property will sell during the listing period, and even if I were sure, I don’t know how to structure such guarantee - could you help please?

A major component of making the sales experience better is to remove the risk from the equation.

Empathize with your sellers. Realize that it is a great risk for them to list the property with you. And a great risk spells PAIN. When you boil it down, all human beings want two things: to find pleasure and to avoid pain. Sure, there is a lot more to life than just that, but these are fundamentals. Everybody wants to enjoy life, and nobody wants to suffer. Interestingly, studies prove over and over again that we do much more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure.

Back to your seller. If you think about it, I am sure you will agree, that sellers are afraid of getting stuck with a real estate agent who will not deliver on all those super promises given during a listing presentation. Can you blame the sellers? It’s normal. I bet you would feel the same!

Some sellers voice those fears, some don’t, but most of the time those fears exist. Those fears are as real as the real estate you are helping them sell. How effective you are in helping your sellers deal with those fears? You can pretend you don’t know about those fears - as most agents do, since they have no idea how to deal with them effectively… You can just reassure people saying "no reason to fear, I will take care of everything" (good luck!)… Or you can bring those fears into open and deal with them one by one, in more logical, honest, and more effective manner.

Removing risk starts with identifying what those fears are. And let’s face it, there is a long laundry list of horrors that might happen if the agent is not as professional and as committed as it appears on the surface. Traditional way of building trust through ongoing relationship with buyers and sellers, using testimonials, case studies, educating them about the sales process work very well. But quite often it is not enough. For some people this kind of fear can be a serious stumbling block and you need to do more to get their approval on the listing agreement.

Guaranteeing your service can give you that extra advantage over your competition. It is usually very effective. It can work like MAGIC!

But be careful here. Merely saying: "I guarantee that you will be happy with my services" is not nearly enough. To be effective, your guarantee must be specific. It must make clear what risk YOU are assuming if you don’t perform as promised.

Make sure that the guarantee offers a remedy - something that actually will inspire people to buy. I’ve seen so many guarantees that don’t do anything to remove risk or build trust, quite contrary! For example, one web host advertised:

If you are not happy with our service… we will give you a second month free.

Hey, that’s great! Your service is junk, and if I don’t like it, you’ll give me another month of disconnects, downtime and broken links. Could I get some broken glass with that, too? Just grind it right into my eye!!!!

A real estate company in California offers this guarantee: "we guarantee that we will meet your service expectations. If, upon closing with us, you do not feel that we have met your service expectations, tell us about it in writing and we will give you $250." — That’s rather lame…

I like much more this guarantee offered by Camille O’Brien from Executive Real Estate Inc.: "If you are not completely satisfied with my service, you can cancel our agreement at anytime, no questions asked." Very short, specific and very effective, I’m sure!

When I was still selling real estate, I offered following guarantee: "If I don’t sell your house in 90 days, I will work for free". No worry, I never had to work for free, because I was accepting only very salable listings and my marketing plan was next to none!

Jim Cummings of RE/MAX Austin Associates makes a similar promise: "We GUARANTEE, in writing, that we will sell your home in 60 days or less, AT A PRICE ACCEPTABLE TO YOU, or we will pay you $1,000 cash." - Wow, that’s powerful!!!! Wouldn’t that inspire your trust if you were the seller?

An old friend, who prefers to remain anonymous, offers the following guarantee: "If you are not completely satisfied with the house I help you buy in the first year, I will help you sell it and you will owe me no commission. On top of that, I will pay for your moving expenses." — After years of doing this, no one has taken him up on the offer. In the meantime, his business has increased so much as the result of this guarantee, that he doesn’t care if someone does….

Chances are that you don’t feel comfortable offering this kind of guarantee. Don’t feel you have to. You can start small. For example Jim and Linda Giordano from RE/MAX Action Realty make this commitment: "We guarantee your home will be advertised 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until SOLD!" Not bad - although it is not clear what remedy they offer if they don’t perform as promised (as a seller I’d like to know this to believe that they really mean it).

You don’t have to go all they way, but offer SOME kind of meaningful guarantee - you will be amazed by the results. The idea is to be competitive and to offer something that makes your service irresistible, better than what’s offered by your competition.

The Postcard Makeover By: The Real Estate Coach

Question: Do you have any tips that we can use to do a postcard makeover?  We have generated a great number of leads using the "just listed" and "just sold" postcards, but we don’t feel the cards look good enough.

If you generated a lot number of leads using your postcards, most likely your postcards look just fine. Believe it or not, the best direct mail marketing pieces are not the ones that look that sharp. Some are quite ugly if we’d judge them by their look! (yeah, really

It is actually a good idea to make your postcards look like "home made". Sometimes I even advise my clients to make their postcards look as they were written some old typewriter!

Why? Such simple, unassuming, design is more intriguing and gets more attention (and response!) than those professionally designed, slick and very expensive, colorful cards printed on a glossy paper stock.

So, don’t sweat over the "look" alone. Here are the most important things to keep in mind in regards to postcards:

Use compelling headline. The headline is the most important part of ANY marketing piece - it should grab the attention of the reader. Here it serves as the ad for your postcard!

Print it on a bright yellow or orange card stock to make it stand out in the mail pile. Study prove that these colors work like magic in direct mail. And black color ink lowers your cost.

Don’t try to convince people to buy or sell a house with you - use postcards ONLY to generate leads. You will have plenty of time to convince people to buy from you later, after you know who they are.

Beside the headline, the most important part is the offer. Make your offer so irresistible that it will make their finger *itch* to pick up the phone to call you instantly …

Be persistent. Like with all other marketing efforts, it is doing it over and over again what brings great results!

Follow up on your leads. Phone, e-mail or visit with them within a day - no longer that a week. And keep going with your follow up. How long? My favorite saying is "until they buy or die".

Always try to improve your conversion rate - after all it is not only about getting the leads, right? You need to change those leads into transactions. That’s the real name of the game!

What is the single most important activity?

Question from new agent: What would be the single most important activity for a newly licensed agent to do in order to get listings?

The most important activity is prospecting. Of course, with the DO NOT CALL list, this presents a problem for someone who doesn’t have a large sphere of influence. It is safe to assume that with over 60 millions names on the "Do Not Call" list, most people you might want to call don’t want to hear from you.

But there are other ways you can do prospecting calls. For example, ask your broker for the orphan clients list from the last 18 months. Those are the people who bought or sold a property using your firm but their agent is not working with your company anymore. Since there is always an amazing turnover in real estate (only 20% of agents who enter the business stay in real estate longer a year!), such a list can be a good start.

Don’t expect a miracle from recontacting those people. It will take some time to get their business and referrals. Add those people to your database and court them, so that in future, when they will want to buy or sell real estate, they will come to you.

For much faster results work with FSBOs and Expireds. It has always been the gold mine for smart real estate agents. No need to waste your time looking for prospects - expireds are easy to find through MLS and FSBOs are advertising to be visible. The best thing is that the majority of them will list within the next 30 days!

With new laws regarding telephone solicitation, you cannot cold call expireds and FSBO prospects - but you CAN write to them and you can visit them! That’s good news because, there is NO more powerful strategy to establish rapport and trust than meeting face to face.

How To Compete with Big Boys?

Question: I’m a relatively new agent and would like to compete against the "big boys" in my local area. What’s the most feasible, effective marketing scheme and the best way to advertise or market my listings?

The best way to grow a business is not to compete with the "big boys" but on the contrary, to use guerrilla style marketing and avoid direct competition!

Big boys have deep pockets and a lot of muscle in areas where you are quite weak. Direct competition can completely deplete your limited resources and diminish your already fragile self-confidence.

Before you decide to compete with the big boys, take a closer look at your long term strategy and see if direct competition is indeed necessary. Usually it is much more productive to select a small niche, overlooked by your bigger competitors, and set out to dominate your own small pond where the big fish aren’t swimming.

If you are forced to compete, however, you need to find out:

In what areas is your competition doing better than you in the eyes of your potential clients? You may not be able to match everything they do, but at least be aware so that you know precisely what you are against.

In what areas are you and your competitors performing just the same in the eyes of your prospects? You might be surprised by how similar you are.

In what areas are you doing better than the competition in the eyes of your potential clients? If nothing is significantly different, you need to become significantly different! In what areas that matter to your clients and customers COULD you do better than others?

After that research you will be able to communicate to your target market how you differ from others - and that’s the key to successful competition. Concentrate on establishing a personal relationship with your prospects early in the buying/selling process. Demonstrate your knowledge by educating them and show how much you care by being involved with your local community. No matter how much money the other guys spend on advertising, no matter how flashy their marketing materials, you can OWN your niche and be virtually untouchable there if you focus and work smart.