Category: Help-U-Sell

Holistic Marketing

Ahhhh . . .  .remember the good old days?  You know:  a dozen years ago or so, when you would buy an ad of some kind and then measure the leads it would create, even analyze the quality of the leads created, and then pick and choose the marketing vehicles that seemed to work the best going forward?  That process of trial-measurement-choose to arrive at a marketing plan was central to the mindset of a Help-U-Sell Broker.  Unfortunately:

It Don’t Work That Way No More!

I talk with brokers every day, mostly about marketing.  Many are still looking for that magical marketing silver bullet, that one advertising vehicle where they can invest their money and receive the highest return.  Truth is:  there are no magical lead-generating machines – not today.  Today, marketing is not about spending a little money here and there and waiting for the phone to ring; it is about laying down a prolific blanket of media that reminds the consumer you are there and can save them money.

Flashback – 2005:  Sitting in a room full of Help-U-Sell Brokers hearing about a Help-U-Sell only homes magazine one group had created.  They were distributed in bright red boxes all over town and produced lead after lead after lead.

We used to hear that kind of story all the time . . . but we don’t anymore.  The consumer is fundamentally different today and there are a dozen reasons why, the most powerful being the maturation of the Internet. With all of the information readily available online, consumers very rarely respond to a specific ad about a specific property.  Today, they are slowly drawn to work with you.

Slowly drawn.  What does that mean?

I know brokers whose Google Ad Words campaigns work.  I know brokers who get leads every time they send out an EDDM.  I know brokers whose CI postcards produce listings and sales.  Often it is the same brokers.   These are the ones who understand that they must mount a continuous, multi-pronged assault on their target markets.  They do Ad Words, Facebook, Zillow, EDDMs, Just Listed/Sold, FSBO, CIs and even toss in a little print advertising from time to time.  For this group, marketing is not the placing of an ad here or there, it is a holistic combination of dozens of things that keep their name and program firmly rooted in the minds of consumers in their target markets.

Today it is much more difficult to determine the source of the lead you get.  They didn’t call you because of one specific marketing piece, they called you because they have casually noticed you in the market over and over and over again.  ‘I found you on the Internet’ doesn’t just mean they got lucky with a Google search.  It probably means they saw your EDDM a couple of times, noticed when your sign went up in a neighbors yard, received your door hanger, passed your office with its prominent sign 6 times last week . . . and on and on.

Richard Cricchio of Help-U-Sell Honolulu Properties is a good example of how to market today.  Not coincidentally, he has been the number one Help-U-Sell office in the world for a several years.  Richard started with Help-U-Sell core marketing, one piece at a time.  Then as the program began to work, instead of wondering where he could cut, he looked around for what he could add.  Every year he adds a thing or two to his marketing program:  radio, homes magazines, new postcard program, blog and so on.  He almost never cuts anything out because he realizes that all of it works to keep his company firmly in the minds of home sellers and buyers on Oahu.

Now, I know.  If you are not drowning in discretionary income, you’re probably thinking, ‘Ok, Holistic . . . that means Expensive, right?’ Yes, it does.  But it also means one step at a time.  Your first order of business is to crank up core marketing.  Get that working and keep it working for  . . . well, forever.  If you need a refresher about what Help-U-Sell core marketing is, you can find it here.  Then start looking for what to add.  Talk to me as you make those decisions; I may be able to help.

Help-U-Sell Core Marketing

Wow.  We have come a long way!  I remember a dozen years ago working with brokers to create a marketing plan that would be effective in their local markets.  It was a complex process that involved trying and evaluating a multitude of advertising vehicles available to create a short list of tools that would work together to make a marketing system.  Each local market was a little different and so the system was a little different from office to office.

Today, we have finally reached the point where marketing is almost a prescription.  The system is easy and consistent, and it works in almost every market.

Core Marketing – those things every broker needs to have working all of the time – is really five things:

1.  EDDMs to the carefully defined target market.  At Summit last year, we refined the target market down to a collection of very active carrier routes.  Instead of shotgunning 10,000 households with an EDDM, we targeted a smaller more active group, maybe 1500 – 4,000 households.  Whether you go out with EDDMs once a month or every six weeks is driven mostly by budget.

2.  Arounds within that carefully defined target market.  Every time a competitor gets a new listing in the target, we postcard or door hang every home up and down the street around the listing.  The reason is obvious:  usually when one listing appears another follows within a week or two.  We want these possible sellers to have our information at this time.

3.  For Sale By Owners.  This is a broader target.  Of course you want to be all over FSBOs that occur in your target market (Expired Listings, too – I tend to lump them together).  But you also want to expand beyond your target as well.  You have the best and most appealing program for FSBOs.

4.  C.I.s.  Anyone who knows your name and associates it with real estate needs to hear from you regularly.  Of course we have the built in automatic CI program in OMS which reaches out to these important people 8 times a year, but occasional phone contact is important as well.

5.  Just Listed/Just Sold cards.  These go around all of your own listings, whether in your target market or not.

That’s it.  That’s the core of Help-U-Sell Marketing.  It’s what every broker needs to have in place and running every day.  Then it’s just a matter of adding in appropriate items as they become available.  Perhaps a newspaper campaign makes sense or radio or Little League sponsorship. These are added to the core marketing, not substituted for it.   Always the goal is to be more visible.

Now, let me take a minor detour to make a case for something many of us have abandoned:  seller participation.  Let’s assume you have the five key pieces of core marketing cranked up and producing.  You are making a real impact on your target market as they are seeing your information multiple times throughout the year.  You know it’s working because you’re getting listings in your target.

What if you start talking with your sellers about the benefits and potential savings of participating in the marketing by holding their own open houses?  Assume you have 3 listings in your 3,000 household target market.  Let’s assume that all 3 are holding an open house on Sunday. Each puts out 7 directional signs. Can you imagine the powerful impression those 21 signs will make?

It would be just a matter of time before you became the Big Gorilla in the neighborhood!

Measuring Success

We measure the success of our businesses in lots of ways and each tells us something different about how we are doing.  Some, though important are not quantifiable;  personal satisfaction and sense of accomplishment come to mind.  You can’t measure them numerically but you know when they are present and when they are not.  From a pure business standpoint, however, there are really only three metrics that establish the success of a business:  Profitability, Market Share, and Market Value.

Profitability:  Tells us how efficiently we are operating the business and whether we are building a business worth having.

(Let me digress with an example!  Suppose you are an ordinary real estate broker.  You have 20 agents and gross on average $90,000 per month.  That’s 20 agents doing half a side a month in a $300,000 neighborhood with you charging, say, 6%.  However, month after month you look at your bottom line, and you see $500 or $1,500 or $2,000.  It seems very little return for closing ten sides a month!  Obviously you are not running very efficiently!  So you do a little analysis. You look at your expenses, and right there you see it:  75% on average going for agent commissions.  It is the single biggest item in your operating statement.  You’re not really operating on $90,000 Gross, you’re giving away $67,500 before you even begin to pay expenses.  Fughetaboudit!  This is definitely a business not worth owning!  Shut it down!)

Market Value:  What is your business worth?  What could you sell it for?  Truth is, most residential real estate businesses are not worth much.  That’s because the business is being built by independent contractor agents who can leave at any time for any reason.  Therefore the value is really the office location, signage and fixtures plus the listing inventory at the time of purchase.  Your Help-U-Sell business is different.  It is a business built on marketing and replicatable systems.  It is not personality driven (like most ordinary real estate businesses).  If you’ve done it right, a new owner should be able to step in, take  control of your marketing and office systems and continue to produce just as you have.  That’s a business worth having and one that has value.

Market Share:  This is where I want to focus because it is a much bigger topic than you might think.  Technically, when we talk about market share we’re talking about what portion of the business in your target market you are getting.  In real estate, that means closed sides.  So, last year, how many closed sides were done in your target market, and how many of them were done by you?  Is it 2% or 5%?  Is that percentage growing or shrinking?  What is a reasonable goal for next year?  And what are you going to do differently to achieve that?

Close Sides market share is a wonderful metric, however there are problems with it, too.  First, it’s a big number that fluctuates a lot in our business.  It wouldn’t make sense to measure closed sides monthly; in our business we have big closing months and not so big ones.  It makes more sense to measure it annually or semi-annually, and you should.

What makes more sense to measure your effectiveness month in and month out in your target market is Listing Share.  This month, how many listings were taken in the target?  How many of them were taken by you?  What share is that?  20%? 50%?

Not only does Listing Share give you a metric you can track from month-to-month, hopefully seeing growth throughout the year, it measures your success at getting your key message into your target market.  You are in the business of teaching home sellers that they can ‘Sell Fast and Save Thousands’ with your Help-U-Sell office.  If your Listing Share is growing, so is your effectiveness in marketing that message.  I think you should be measuring Listing Share every month and cumulatively throughout the year.

Going one step further, there are a couple of Key Performance Indicators that don’t really demonstrate the success of your business but rather your ability to deliver on the promises you make your home seller clients. They are Days on Market, Sale to List price ratio, and % of in house or seller generated sales.

To me, Days on Market is from Listing to Pending status.  We don’t really control how long it takes to get from contract to closing and that’s why I don’t like to include it.  However some MLS’s don’t report the under contract date, so you have to work with the data you can get.

Sale to List price ratio shows how far off list price sellers had to come to make a sale.  Did they 95% of list price on sale?  Or was it 97%.  This does indicate your effectiveness at helping sellers set a realistic price but can also demonstrate the power of your marketing to generate a flow of buyer prospects.

% of In House Sales and/or seller generated sales is important to Help-U-Sell Brokers because these are the situations where sellers save the most.

All three of the KPI can be used as powerful marketing ammunition.  Compare your results on the first two against the MLS in your target market.  You will almost certainly find that your performance is far better than the MLS, and that’s something to share with potential sellers.  The third KPI is valuable in helping a seller decide to participate in the selling process by holding their own open houses.  It says, ‘You really can do this and save a lot of money!’

Before we leave this topic I want to hammer home one point.  Most of what I’ve talked about here involves your Target Market.  That’s probably NOT a Zip Code or Codes (too big) or the entire MLS (WAY too big).  It is that town or collection of Carrier Routes you have analyzed and chosen to plant your flag.  It’s where you focus your marketing, where you are the expert.  Measure your Market Share, Listing Share and KPI there, where your program is aimed.

GET CO-OP’d!!

Ok, gang it’s time (FYI:  ‘gang’ means Help-U-Sell Brokers).  Mike Paholke and the folks at Excel have opened ordering for the Co-op EDDM program.  You can order your mailers now through Jan. 15, in bulk, for close to half what it would cost at any other time.  The Co-op program runs four times a year, so if your target market is, say, 2,000 households and you want to be in their mailboxes once a month, you probably need to order 6,000 pieces now to get you through to the next Co-op date.  In fact, I’d probably order 8,000 just to be sure.  Mike will warehouse your pieces for free and send them out whenever you tell him to.

Just to be sure you understand what a deal this is, if you were to order 2,000 EDDMs at random, your cost, including postage, would be about 50 cents per piece.  Ordering during the Co-op run, the cost drops to:

29 cents per household!

Not too shabby!

So let’s get serious about marketing in 2016, make regular EDDMs to your target market a key component and minimize your cost by ordering during the co-op.  Just in case you forgot, here’s the website:  www.husmailnow.com.

 

Working with Buyers, Step-by-Step

Kendra, Alejandro and I were talking with Stephen Taber today.  He is setting goals for the new year and one of the items that jumped out was the lopsided mix of anticipated buyer and seller sides.  Stephen was planning on just 30% of his production being from buyer sides.

Of course, we all know why buyer sides are important.  Truth is, we market like crazy for sellers so that we can dominate the listing inventory . . . because doing so will create a strong and steady stream of buyer leads.  Yes, we make plenty of money selling our listings; but we generally make MORE working with buyers.  Even Don Taylor said it:  ‘People forget, but Help-U-Sell Real Estate was always about the buyer.’

By the way:  Stephen’s lopsided mix of buyer to seller sides is not unusual.  Almost every Help-U-Sell office is weighted toward seller sides.  Often the imbalance is slight, but it is usually there.  We strive for a 50/50 mix of buyer to seller sides, but usually fall a little shy of that goal because our marketing is so heavily weighted toward home sellers and it’s easy to spend all of your energy and effort there.

Stephen said, ‘I just like listing!  I enjoy it.  You never know with a buyer when they’re going to go somewhere else or drop out all together.’  What I heard was that listing is predictable;  working with buyers is not.  We know what to do when we are working on a listing.  Conscious or not, we know step 1, step 2, step 3.  We know our scripts and how to respond when the prospective seller voices a concern.  In other words:  when it comes to listing, we have a system.  When it comes to buyers, well . . . not so much.

Of course, there is a very notable exception to that generalization:  Jack Bailey’s Buyer Consultation system.  Nobody does it better than Jack and as proof of that, his buyer to seller sides mix is usually weighted to the buyer side.  He usually does more buyer sides in a year than he does seller sides!   For Jack, working buyers is as easy and predictable as step 1, step 2, step 3, and he’s helped many Help-U-Sell Brokers and Agents get to the same comfort zone.  But still there are a lot of folks out there essentially winging it when a buyer calls.  I think it’s time we had a simple, systematic approach to buyers.

Today’s buyers can and usually want to do a lot of the home search process on their own.  One of the ways we can establish our value to buyers is to help them do that.  Maybe step one is to ask the buyer how they are currently searching for homes.  They will probably say Zillow or Trulia . . . both of which we know are horribly flawed, with duplicate listings and dead listings and bad Zestimates of value.

Right now, you know of a superior home search tool focused on your local market.  It might be your own Help-U-Sell office website.  After all, it is updated from your local MLS every day and gives buyers the ability to search very much like an agent would.  It might be your MLS’s own public home-search portal.  Or it might be a 3rd party tool like Listingbook.  Whatever the best site for searching in the local market, you need to know how to use it backwards and forwards.

Then when the buyer calls and you ask how they are searching, you can give them a better alternative.  Stephen had the great idea of:

  1. Pointing out the limitations of their current search method (trust me:  if they’re searching on Zillow, they are painfully aware of the limitations)
  2. Asking if they are in front of a computer and if so, emailing them a link to a free online meeting site like join.me*
  3. Once online together, showing the buyer how to search on the broker website or MLS public site or Listingbook or whatever the best local tool is
  4. Exploiting the opportunity further by showing them how to set up a ‘First to Know’ profile and so on.

In less than 1o minutes you will have established a comfortable rapport based on your desire to HELP them.  What could be better.

I’m going to be looking into this whole issue of buyer step 1, step 2, step 3 and how we might have a simple system for working with these important customers going forward.  In the mean time, if you are so inclined, perhaps you could begin to think about how you might make the process a little more predictable.  I’d love to hear from you if you do!  And Thanks, Stephen for the great brainstorm.

*join.me is a free GoToMeeting type of online meeting/screen sharing platform.  What’s great about it is that you, the presenter, need to install a small piece of software, but the person you’re meeting need only go to a website – and you will be together.  There is nothing for  the attendee to install.  Once in the meeting, you can share you screen and show the person how to search effectively.  It is sooo coool.  

 

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