Category: Marketing

DON’T Accept that Friend Request!

Be careful when you get a friend request on Facebook.  Scammers and spammers will try to get you to accept such a request in order to lure you into their various schemes.

I’m writing this today because I got a friend request from a good Help-U-Sell Broker, which I accepted.  Almost immediately, he started a Facebook Messenger conversation with me that was . . . just odd.  This broker would have said different things about different topics.  Soon he was talking about the International Monetary Fund, and my crap-meter went off.

I quickly went to his Facebook News Feed and saw that he had posted nothing except his profile picture.  I also saw that half a dozen other Help-U-Sell Brokers had accepted his friend request.  Then I did what I should have done when I got the request:  I searched Facebook for users with his name and, bingo, two profiles using the same name and photo showed up.

I went back to the Messenger conversation and told the person I doubted he was who he said he was and he assured me that was not so.  So I asked him a question I KNEW the real person would know . . and the faker couldn’t answer.  I unfriended him and messaged every other person I could see who had accepted his friend request.   I also alerted the real person that someone was impersonating him.

Rule one with Facebook Friend requests:  if this is someone you know, check first to see if you aren’t already friends on Facebook.  A scammer will copy your real friend’s picture and name, set up a fake Facebook account then send friend requests to all of the real person’s friends.  Then they will engage you in a text conversation that usually involves you clicking on some kind of link.  Once you’ve done that, they’ve got you.  The link usually facilitates the downloading of some kind of virus or malware onto your computer.

Rule two with Facebook Friend requests:  if you don’t know the person, don’t accept!  I know: Duh!  But if there is no basis for this person interacting with you, their motives for ‘Friending’ you have to be suspect!

Creating a Marketing Plan for Your Real Estate Business

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately:  the very specific process we, as Help-U-Sell Brokers, undertake when preparing to market.  We used to spend more than a day on it in University, which underscored its importance.  If you’ve forgotten some of it, here’s a brief reminder:

First, we have to be clear about what we are marketing FOR.  The answer, without hesitation, is SELLERS.  Our powerful consumer offer (sell fast – save thousands) is directed at home sellers.  It is our competitive edge.  We can beat everybody on that playing field.  When we shift our focus to the other side of the business (buyers), the differentiation is lost and we are just like everyone else.  Even if we do something crazy like offer a rebate (why would you ever do that?), we’re not doing anything any other broker couldn’t do.

You might argue that we owe it to our sellers to market for buyers for their properties . . . and you would be right.  However, we’ve found out over the years that the best way to market for buyers is to control inventory.  Buyers find their way to brokers who have listings in the area in which they want to live.  So the best thing you can do for your listed seller . . . is to go out and get another listing, and another and another.

Next, we have to get clear on the budget.  How much can you commit to spend on marketing each month – without fail – for the next year?  Maybe you’re just getting started or are coming out of a down market and don’t have much free cash;  that’s ok.  Acknowledging that fact and letting it guide your decisions about marketing is the smart thing to do.  The alternative would be to create a marketing plan that will break you.  Most of you are further along than that and can budget more . . . but how much more?

Think like a Help-U-Sell Broker.  Remember what you learned in University?  Ideally you want to cover your operating expenses with 1 1/2 to 2 of your Set Fees.  In some situations we may have stretched that to 3 fees, but that would be pushing it!   If your fee is, say, $5,950,  you’d probably want your expenses to come in at or near $12,000 a month. How much of that should be devoted to marketing?

Rule of thumb #1:  about a third.  Really.  Think about that.  $4,000 a month in marketing!

I know you want to argue about that;  you think it’s way too high!  But it’s not.  That’s the formula we used to dominate local markets and terrify ordinary brokers for years.  It’s true that with the Internet, marketing has gotten a little less expensive, but there’s also a problem in that.

I keep running into brokers who grasp at online marketing as if it were the answer to all of their lead generation issues.  They see what others are doing and it’s cool; and most important, it’s cheap!  And they want to drop everything that looks tougher or more expensive and put all their eggs in that online marketing basket.  That’s a mistake.

Consumers seeing your online marketing – whether it’s Google AdWords or Facebook pay-per-click or anything else – assume they are looking at a message from a large, faceless, generic organization.  They don’t see your online ad as being from the friendly guy down the street;  they don’t see it as local or personal.  When they receive a postcard or EDDM piece in their mailbox or a CI followup piece, the KNOW it’s from someone who lives, works and thrives in their local neighborhood.  They see a sold and saved and recognize the house.  They read a testimonial and realize it’s from someone they met at a party.  That’s powerful!

Online marketing works – and works well – when it is in support of a strong local analog marketing campaign.  Remember that $4,000 marketing budget in our example?  Ideally $3,000 of it should be spent on Arounds, Brag Cards, EDDMs, CI follow up mailings, even print ads.  The balance should go to online marketing.  If that’s how you’ve structured your marketing, when a local consumer sees your Facebook ad or comes across your ad on Google, they think, ‘Oh, that’s that company down the street and around the corner.  They sold the Smith’s house last year.’  And that only happens when you’ve been in their mailboxes and in their line of sight on a regular and continuous basis for some time.

So, the final step would be to decide where to spend your budget, and to make sure you allocate heavily toward local visibility oriented marketing – what I call analog marketing.  Spend only about a quarter to a third of your total marketing budget online.  And if you are cash poor and don’t have much of a budget, don’t throw it all at the Internet thinking it will rain business down upon your head.  It won’t.  Instead, talk to me or Ron McCoy about low cost/no cost marketing and get in gear making a strong impression in your local market.

Centers of Influence

When I was selling real estate, back in the Pleistocene Era, agents all had their ‘Sphere-of-Influence.’  In the 90’s, as computers became more and more a part of the equation and CRM programs moved to the forefront, agents started to referring to their ‘Client Base.’  The idea was the same:  these were people who had done business with you in the past and/or might do business with you in the future.

Being the anti-realtors* we tend to be, we never used that language.  Instead, we used the term our founder, Don Taylor, taught us:  Centers-of-Influence, or CI.

There is a subtle but significant difference between a CI and a Sphere-of-Influence, and it has to do with marketing.  We believe the most powerful form of marketing is word-of-mouth.  We believe that consumers put more faith in the recommendations of other people just like themselves than they do in slick advertisements on television, radio, in print or on the Internet.  When you look at ALL Help-U-Sell marketing, it is clear that we have a very specific and provocative message we are trying to install into our target markets:  that we are here, we are very different, people use us, it works and they save money.  The message is so powerful that it ‘sticks’ in the mind.  It hovers there.

Even if the person receiving the message has no need for our service, they are apt to remember the message when they talk with someone who does:  ‘Oh, hey, I saw an ad from this Help-U-Sell company the other day.  Looks like they might be able to save you some money.  I think it might be worth checking out before you do anything.’  And, Bingo!  Our marketing has worked.  It has caused one person to tell another person about us.  And that’s what we want to be happening with our CIs:  we want them talking about us with the other people in their lives over whom they have some influence.

While the typical Realtor is hitting their Sphere-of-Influence with, ‘Wanna buy? Wanna sell?’  Help-U-Sell folks remind their CIs they have a great program that saves people money.  All we are trying to do is build and maintain credibility with our CIs and keep our message in the conversations that occur day in and day out.

All of this brings me to a very important development.  Working with the Help-U-Sell Home Office and with Jack Bailey (the undisputed KING of CIs), Excel Print/Mail has developed an automated CI followup program.  It is a series of 8 beautiful cards that go out at specific times of the year.  The messages are informative, not sales-pitchey, and are designed to build credibility for your program and to keep your name in the forefront.  Cost is about 41 cents a card, including postage, and there is no contract (you may opt in or out at any time).  For about $100 you can reach a CI group of 250 people – and that’s pretty darn good!

The whole program is automated via OMS, is easy to set-up and use.  Without going into tedious detail, here’s what you do:

1.  Log into OMS and go to Setup-Office Details, and click on the ‘my office’ tab.  About a third of the way down the page, click ‘yes’ to opt-in to the CI program.

2.  Now, return to the menu on the left, select Contacts and My Office Contacts.  Note there is now a column with check boxes for CI.  Tick off the contacts you want to include in the program.  Make sure you have mailing addresses for them by clicking the ‘View’ button.  Add any other contacts that are not already in OMS.  AND:  if you have your CIs already on a separate spread sheet, you may get that over to Robbie and Kendra in Sarasota and they’ll get them in there for you.

3.  Again, back in OMS, select Marketing and Content, then Center of Influence.  This will take you to the page showing the cards and allowing your customization.  Set it up and you’re good to go.

You’ll notice on the card page, there is a Movement Mortgage Template button at the top of each card.  Introduced at Success Summit, Movement Mortgage has agreed to fund part of this new CI program if you so choose.  Cards will then include their Logo and RESPA required language.  It will be an optional feature and – it’s not ready yet.  So if you’re getting setup for this today, just keep that option set to No.  More information will be coming as the Movement Mortgage program is readied.

I can’t guarantee anything . . . but I can promise you this:  if you will take the couple of hours required to set this program up, get your CIs in, customize your cards, and then let it run for 2015, you’ll experience at least a 10% increase in closed sides next year.  I think this program is that good.   Go ahead, do the multiplication and see what impact a 10% increase would have on your bottom line.  And then get crackin’!  Excel will be collecting the mailing list on Dec. 29 for the first card, which goes out on January 15.

 

*Let me explain what I mean by ‘anti-realtors.’  It’s not that we hate Realtors or anything like that.  Heck, we ARE Realtors.  And it’s not that we always do the opposite of what Realtors do.  It’s just that Realtors in general are so off track, so far away from the essence of our business that, in an effort to remain relevant and viable,  we often do things differently than they do.  We make choices based on what’s good for the consumer.  They say they do the same (some of them even believe it), but all you have to do is look at the commission line on a typical HUD-1 to know who they are looking out for!  

The heart of our business is the consumer – the buyer and seller facing a big financial transaction.  It’s not the real estate agent.  Unfortunately, the contemporary business is structured around the agent.  It’s all about the agent.  Whole companies – big ones – focus their business plans NOT on selling real estate (and helping consumers with their property transactions) but on recruiting more and more real estate agents.  It’s completely upside down, and so deeply ingrained that the industry will collapse and evaporate in a cloud of irrelevance before it changes.  

Help-U-Sell is a brilliant re-invention of the real estate business.  It’s as if a group of really smart people with a big pile of money examined every aspect of the business and reworked it to make sense to buyers, sellers, agents and brokers.  It is real estate without all of the lunacy that results in consumers paying tens of thousands of dollars to sell their homes.

 

 

Two New Videos For You to Use

Robbie Stevens sometimes asks me to write and record a short video for use on various Help-U-Sell websites.  Usually these are consumer-focused pieces designed to present the superior Help-U-Sell offer and encourage viewers to seek more information.

As a new Corporate website is just around the corner (and if you haven’t seen it, it is a home run), he asked me to do two new ones.  One is a Help-U-Sell overview, mostly directed at potential sellers; the other is directed at potential buyers and presents our unique approach to helping them find their dream homes.

You can add these to your own Help-U-Sell website by logging into OMS, going to ‘Marketing and Content’ and ‘Website CMS.’ Click ‘Edit’ and select the page on which you’d like to use the video.  Scroll down and select the HTML view, then copy/paste the embed code from YouTube where you’d like to see the video.  Once you have done that a few times it is VERY easy, but I’m sure if you’ve never done it, my brief instructions seem daunting.  Give yourself 10 minutes to get as far as you can with it, then call tech support at Help-U-Sell and let them walk you through it or do it for you.

You may also email the link to prospective sellers and buyers.  I’ve included the YouTube link under each of these videos.  Here is Help-U-Sell for Buyers:

Here is the link to this video:  http://youtu.be/agkvmZYN5-8

And here is ‘The Help-U-Sell Difference’:

And here is the link to this video: http://youtu.be/sxgnCJi1CMc

Feel free to use these in any way that may help you garner new business!

Us, Them and You-We-They

Sometimes I think the way we market ourselves reinforces all of the bad rumors ordinary real estate agents spread about us. By ‘WE’ and ‘US,’ I mean Help-U-Sell.

There is a great book by Al Reis and Jack Trout called ‘Marketing Warfare.’ Really:  it is an absolute MUST READ for anyone trying to establish a real estate company (or any other kind of company, really).  One of the principals they advocate is studying your competitor’s strength, and then finding the weakness within the strength . . . and exploiting that.  I think our competitors have done a pretty good job doing it to us.  We offer home sellers the option of finding their own buyer and thus saving tons of money.  That’s a strength of our program.  Our competitors turn that against us by telling sellers we are a For Sale By Owner company and they will have to do all the work.  That bad rumor is further reinforced by our name:  Help-U-Sell.

Our primary marketing message – which is:  we are here, people use us, it works, and they save money – does a pretty good job of opening many doors.  However, I think it sometimes falls on deaf ears if the bad rumors have become established as if they were fact.

I wonder if one of our key tools – The Seller Savings Comparison (you know:  the You-We-They chart) – doesn’t further reinforce the mis-information about us that is out there. We all know it’s a perfectly logical document that sellers can have difficulty understanding because it flies in the face of what’s normally done in the industry. We know we have an educational challenge when we use it to explain our fee structure;  and the first thing we usually talk about is how they save the most money by finding their own buyer.  I think that taps into the well of bad information the other guys have installed in the general psyche, reinforcing that false picture of us.

Maybe the YOU option should just be a footnote.  Maybe we should stop talking about a showing fee or buyer agent fee.  Maybe we have only two options:  WE find the buyer or THEY find the buyer.  For example:

Untitled-presentation

 

Discussion about seller participation and saving even more ends up being a conversation, a footnote, not the featured attraction.

One of the things I find interesting about this ‘Two Way’ approach is that it shows we have an incentive to find the buyer ourselves that ALSO increases the seller’s bottom line.  They save MORE and we make MORE.  In the traditional ‘You-We-They’ chart, the fee is seen as going up, not down.

NOW HEAR THIS:  this is not a change I am advocating (yet).  I’m putting it out here to see what you think.  Are we feeding into the mis-information about ourselves that is out in the marketplace by over-emphasizing seller participation and finding your own buyer?  Would this kind of presentation be easier to explain and easier for sellers to understand?  Please, click the ‘add a comment’ link below and tell me and everyone else in the company what you think!

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