Category: Help-U-Sell

Lead Generation with Facebook

I get asked all the time:  ‘What kinds of things should I post on Facebook to generate leads?’

The answer is:  ‘I don’t care.’

OK.  That’s a little over the top.  My answer is supposed to unfreeze the questioner, to get them off the notion that posting on Facebook will somehow magically generate leads.  It won’t.

If you are a Realtor, you can use your personal Facebook page and/or your Facebook business page to keep in touch with people who know you – at least a little – and to remind them that you are in the business.  Of course this is important!  We want everyone who knows us – even those who know us just a little – to know we sell real estate, are active and successful.  That’s why we post our new listings on Facebook, our photos of happy clients after closing, our open houses and relevant articles about the market.

But the audience here is people who know us.  It’s not strangers.  Leads – which are the things everyone wants to generate with Facebook – are strangers who call us to help with their home buying or selling process.

If you want to generate LEADS with Facebook, you’re going to have to go about it the old fashioned way:  you’re going to have to market on Facebook.

Marketing is the careful planning, creating, executing and monetizing of a strategy aimed at reaching a specific target audience with potential for needing your services.  With Facebook, your tool for accomplishing this is Pay-Per-Click advertising.

When you open your Facebook page, you’ll see a column to the left of your Newsfeed that contains Pay-Per-Click ads that have been targeted to you based on your profile and Facebook behavior.  That’s where you want your ad to be.  The small teaser ads lead to a Landing Page of some kind that gives the clicker the information hinted at in the teaser.  Sounds simple . . . and it would be if we were in the giving information business.  But we are not.  We are in the real estate sales and marketing business, so that simple process of Facebook Teaser ad and Landing Page becomes a little more complex.

At Help-U-Sell, we market for one thing:  Sellers.  So your teaser ad needs to appeal to home owners who are thinking of selling.  That part really is easy.  The logo, all by itself, speaks to them.  But so do phrases like:  ‘Never pay 6% to sell your home again!’, ‘You paid HOW MUCH to sell your home?’ , ‘How to save thousands selling your home,’ ‘Sell your home for $4,950!’ and so on.

But once a potential seller sees your ad and clicks on it, where do they go?  To you Help-U-Sell website?  I don’t think so.  Your website is geared toward buyers (and it should be).  Your website is a place where we connect with them via home search and other tools.  Instead, you need to send people who click on your teaser ad to a very specific Landing Page, absolutely focused on your offer to home sellers, sizzling with just enough information to motivate the clicker to contact the office.

That’s really important, so I’ll repeat it:  You need to send people who click on your teaser ad to a very specific Landing Page, absolutely focused on your offer to home sellers, sizzling with just enough information to motivate the clicker to contact the office.  

Your landing page should say nothing aimed at buyers, mortgages, credit repair, or any other aspect of the business.  It should be short, simple and razor focused on what you do for home sellers and how much they can save.  It should also be packed with Help-U-Sell credibility boosters:  Sold and Saveds and Testimonials.  In other words, your Landing Page should look like an ETM . . . because that’s what it is:  an electronic ETM, delivered via Facebook as opposed to the old fashioned one delivered in the mailbox. It should have the same structure and encourage the same event:  a call to the office to find out more about your program for home sellers. Click HERE for an example.

I love Facebook pay-per-click for Help-U-Sell brokers for several reasons:

  • It is highly targeted advertising and fits perfectly well with our own geographical targeting strategy.
  • It is surprisingly inexpensive.  And effective campaign can be mounted for $200 a month, more or less.
  • It is wonderfully flexible.  You can change up your campaign in mid stream, start and stop it at will.
  • It is trackable.  Facebook keeps track of the clicks so if you install office systems to track resulting inquiries, you’ll know what the program produces.

I have created Facebook pay-per-click campaigns for my Blogging clients (you know, I create, manage and feed blogs for a handful of Help-U-Sell Brokers).  This past week I offered the same service – which includes creation of the Landing Page, the Teaser Ad and managing the setup process – to Help-U-Sell brokers in general.  I’d be happy to help you jump into this exciting process, too.  Just send me an email (jamesdingman@gmail.com) and we’ll explore the possibilities.

We know that today’s consumer of real estate services is online.  We know he or she is into Facebook almost daily.  THIS is how you find that person.  THIS is the next step in the evolution of Help-U-Sell marketing and I urge you to get on board.

 

A Reminder for Help-U-Sell Brokers

Back to Basics:

Help-U-Sell is a marketing driven company.  Everything begins with marketing.  Marketing is how we gain market share, how we grow, how we increase profitability.  Contrast that with what the Ordinary Broker does;  he attempts to accomplish those things through recruiting.

We market to SELLERS.  Because our seller offer is so far superior to what Ordinary Brokers have, our biggest marketing challenge is to simply inform home owners that we are here and can save them money.

We love buyers – really, LOVE buyers – but we find them through our listings, not through our marketing.  Every new listing creates a dozen opportunities for buyers to connect with us and the more listings we have the more buyers we connect with.  (I know, ending a sentence with a preposition . . . but we are communicating here, not teaching grammar).

Which is not to say we don’t market our listings to buyers; of course we do.  But this is mostly a process of plugging our listings into established channels like the Internet, the MLS, our ongoing marketing and so on.  Our strategic marketing, our aggressive, proactive marketing is to SELLERS.

There are four messages we want to communicate to potential sellers in all of our marketing:

We are HERE

People use us

It works

They save money

We use three tools to communicate those four messages:

The Easy Way

(or the Smarter Way – though as a Help-U-Sell purist, I prefer the Easy Way)

Sold & Saveds

Testimonials

If you have marketing pieces out there (i.e. websites, Facebook pages, EDDMs, brag cards, newspaper ads (what’s a newspaper?), etc.) that do not use those three tools to communicate those four specific seller messages, you’re doing it wrong and missing the boat.

Help-U-Sell is a wonderful business model that produces outstanding results IF you do it right and do it with consistency.  It is so simple that it’s easy to second guess it and start making changes.  Most of the changes I see make the model look more like what Ordinary Brokers do . . . and that’s certainly madness.  I mean:  who in their right mind would want that? 

Get back to basics!  Start marketing . . . to SELLERS.

 

Great News to Start The Year!

Once again, The Franchise Business Review  has included Help-U-Sell Real Estate in its annual list of Franchisee Satisfaction Award winners.  It is our third straight year to make the list.  The list is created after surveys and interviews with current franchisees  and looks at franchisors in a variety of industries.  Making it onto the list means, basically, that our member franchisees are happy with their decision to affiliate, with the guidance and support they get and with the results they achieve.

We aren’t the only real estate franchise to make the list, but there were a few conspicuous absences.  Century 21 didn’t make it.  Neither did ERA or Re/Max.  Keller Williams didn’t make it, nor did Real Estate One.  A dozen of lesser known franchises also missed the mark.

I worked for the other guys in the distant past, always in franchise support, training and business consulting.  The pressure to sell franchises was so great that at times it seemed the only bulls-eye that mattered.  The emphasis on franchise sales (and the absence of anything truly different in the operating system) pushed salespeople into selling fluff, not stuff.  Franchisee dissatisfaction began shortly after Orientation as new franchisees realized that they’d bought very little.

We don’t have that problem at Help-U-Sell.  First, while franchise sales is important, it’s just one bulls-eye and in fact, is not even the most important one.  Secondly, we don’t have a big Franchise Sales department with an unlimited budget.  Most of our franchise sales originate with our existing franchisee base; our members bring in most of our prospects.*  And finally, what we have to sell is stuff:  real, tangible, results producing stuff.  It is different from what they other guys have, works differently, and works better.

A couple of posts ago, I invited curious outside brokers to pick up the phone and call a Help-U-Sell broker – any Help-U-Sell broker – to find out about us.  I made the invitation honestly because I know every broker in our system would wax poetic about the power of the brand, the operating system and the support.  It’s nice to have that belief validated by The Franchise Business Review.

*By the way, Help-U-Sell brokers:  you do know that you are rewarded when the franchise sales prospect you bring in becomes a franchisee, don’t you?  Ask Ron McCoy for details . . . maybe on next week’s Power Hour.

Your Future in Real Estate

It’s time to get serious about your career in real estate.  The market is rebounding, homes are selling and it looks like we are in for another multi-year cycle of appreciation and normalcy in the marketplace.

Now is the time when great careers and great real estate businesses are made.  It is your moment, your time to shine, your best shot at major success . . . IF you are positioned to take advantage of the opportunity.  What does that mean?

If you are an agent working for an ordinary real estate company, be it franchised or independent, you are competing against thousands of other agents just like yourself, with the same tools, same information, same offering, and same pricing.  The only edge you could possibly have in that fishbowl – the only things that might set you apart from the pack – are your personality and your work ethic.  So, let’s assume you really apply yourself next year.  You work harder and smarter and you polish up that smile . . .  and you go from doing 18 deals to doing 25.  That’s very nice, but it’s hardly the stuff of real estate greatness.

This is not the time to increase your production by 30%.  It is the time to increase it by 300%.  And you won’t do it by doing the same things you did last year and the year before, only doing them harder.  It’s time to look for a better way to do the real estate business.

If you are a broker, get ready.  You have been able to rein back outrageous commission splits a little in the past few down years.  But with the market heating up, even your most mediocre agents will be looking for more, and you know if you don’t give it to them, the office down the street will.  You can expect your turnover to move higher in the months to come which means, if you are going to maintain current levels of production, you’re going to have to kick up your recruiting game.

I gotta tell ya:  I don’t envy you at all.  The success of your business is dependent on your ability to get people to come to work for you and then, to get them to stick around; and your only real tool for accomplishing either of those objectives is split.  And what the heck does any of that have to do with helping buyers buy and sellers sell real estate?

Clearly, it is time for a new game, a new model, a new way to do this business.  A way that results in incredibly satisfied clients, busy agents with healthy bank accounts and brokers who are functioning as successful entrepreneurs, not mere support for their sales staffs.

And you know what the way is:  It is Help-U-Sell.  Here’s why:

As a Help-U-Sell broker you will go into the marketplace with a consumer offer that is not only fundamentally different than that of your competitors, but also superior to theirs from a consumer point of view.  You’ll accomplish the same results the pack of ordinary agents and brokers will but you will save people thousands over what they’d pay anyone else!  It is an offer that is so compelling that, once word is out in the marketplace, potential sellers usually want to at least talk with you before making a listing decision.  And we find we get that listing about 90% of the time.

It is a focus on marketing and marketplace intelligence that more closely resembles what Home Depot does than what ABC Realty does. And because Help-U-Sell marketing is systematic and focused, it produces a steady stream of buyer and seller leads into the office.  These are leads the office has created, leads the office owns, leads the office will assign and track.

It is agents who want to come to work for you because you have the one thing nobody else can give them:  leads.  It’s agents who have had a close brush with burn out from the gigantic job description they tried to manage at an ordinary real estate company.  They will see the streamlined, focused job you have for them as an opportunity to do more, make more and have more fun doing it.

It is a smaller, tightly knit office team that is outperforming companies with 10 or 12 times the agents.  It is an team with one goal – yours, with one direction – yours, one purpose – profitability.  It is very different from an ordinary office where the broker begs people to come to work, begs people to stay, begs people to attend sales meeting, begs people to do the prospecting they promised to do and so on.  Aren’t you getting tired of all that begging?

And finally, it is a bottom line that is beyond healthy, that is growing and expanding every month.  This is the great truth ordinary real estate brokers and agents have the most difficulty understanding about Help-U-Sell:

Even though we charge consumers thousands less, we deliver more dollars to the bottom line per transaction than our ordinary competitors who charge much more!

I know you don’t believe me, but go ahead:  call a Help-U-Sell broker – any Help-U-Sell broker – and ask them to explain it to you.  I’m sure you will be surprised at what you hear.

The Help-U-Sell ship is sailing, and it’s going to do more than it did between 1998 and 2006 (the rough dates of the last up cycle in real estate).  And if you are serious about your success, it is time to fly a new flag on your own ship, to find a new and better way to do the real estate business.  For goodness sake!  Do it in a way that is different from what everyone else is doing and that is better for consumers and for you bottom line.  Do it with Help-U-Sell!

*Unlike other franchises who will give you a list of their 12 happiest franchisees to call, I have no problem telling you to talk with any Help-U-Sell franchisee.  We are a multi-year winner of the Franchise Business Review’s franchisee satisfaction survey.  Year after year, our brokers affirm their delight with the business model and the power of the team.  So go ahead:  pick a Help-U-Sell broker – any Help-U-Sell broker – and let them tell you why joining this team is a very smart move.

 

The Secret to Help-U-Sell Success

The secret to how Help-U-Sell works isn’t a secret at all.  We’ve never tried to hide it.  Though it is very simple, it is so different from the way ordinary real estate works that our competitors dismiss it and assume we’re not telling the whole truth; so we continue to hide in plain sight.  Here’s the easiest description of how Help-U-Sell works I can create – it’s just four steps:

  1. Help-U-Sell begins with a superior offer to home sellers.   We go into the market offering a service very similar to what ordinary brokers offer, but we charge a logical set fee (rather than a percentage commission), which can save the seller thousands.
  2. The superior offer enables the Help-U-Sell broker to take more than his or her share of listings in the target market.
  3. More listings means more signs and better marketing, and  ultimately, the large listing inventory generates a strong flow of Buyer (and Seller) inquiries into the office.
  4. We capture those inquiries and turn them over to Buyer Agents who are carefully groomed and trained (via Science to Sales) to convert them into sales.  As listings increase, as the flow of leads increases, as we add Buyer Agents to handle the flow, production snowballs.

That’s it.

The mechanics are easy.  What’s more difficult – especially when dealing with people who have grown up in the ordinary real estate universe – are the attitudes required to make it all work.  There are four critical areas that underpin successful implementation of the Help-U-Sell system.  These are essential areas of focus on which the whole program depends.  If these elements are faulty, Help-U-Sell will not perform to its potential.  They are:

  1. Broker Control.  The Broker is the business, and the business is the Broker’s.  The Broker is in the business of selling real estate.  This contrasts with ordinary brokers who, by and large, are in the recruiting business. The ordinary Broker recruits to expand his business; every agent added increases the Broker’s reach (well . . . in theory, anyway).  Help-U-Sell Brokers rely on their marketing and office systems to expand their business.  Agents come in to help the Broker handle the large amount of business the office is generating.
  2. Systematic Marketing.  Because the broker is in control, he or she creates and manages a marketing plan for the Help-U-Sell office and for all the office listings.  The marketing plan is constantly fine tuned and eventually becomes a relatively stable, almost fixed expense.  When we take a listing, we don’t create a whole unique marketing plan for that one listing — that’s what ordinary real estate agents do and the result is thousands of agents running around willy-nilly with almost no marketing coordination.  We take the new listing and simply plug it into our existing office marketing program which produces results for all of our listings.
  3. The Buyer Inquiry.  This is the single most important moment in a Help-U-Sell office.  It is the place where we take the power of our superior offer and our marketing and convert it into leads, prospects, clients and sales.  That’s why we work so hard to make sure our people are handling the inquiry – whether from phone or Internet – effectively.  Really:  if you want to improve your production and your bottom line, I know of no better way than to improve the way inquiries are handled in your office.
  4. Buyer Agent Job Description.  Help-U-Sell Buyer agents focus on one single but very important aspect of the business:  they convert Buyer leads generated by the office into closed transactions.  They don’t prospect for listings, don’t call FSBOS, don’t go on listing appointments or orchestrate marketing.  It’s an easily managed job description that enables the agent to do many more transactions than he or she could at an ordinary office.

As I read this I am struck by how much of it deals with Buyers and Buyer Agents and Brokers hiring Buyer Agents.  The Listing and the Seller side of the transaction are mentioned only a couple of times.  But we are Help-U-Sell. Doesn’t that indicate that this description is a little twisted?  Not at all.  At Help-U-Sell, the listing side of the business is pretty simple.  It’s easier to take listings when you have a superior offer and our systematic approach to marketing gets listings sold.  It’s the buyer side that requires the greatest shift in attitude by the largest group of people.

I am reminded of my first ever meeting with our founder,  Don Taylor.  He smiled as only Don Taylor can smile and said, ‘People forget, but Help-U-Sell was always about the buyer.’

Let’s try to remember that.

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