Category: Marketing

Your 6% Partner

In my varied life as a business-person, I have had partners from time to time.  The form of business might vary –  sole proprietorship, limited partnership, even corporation – but in our guts we knew what we were:  partners.

As partners we had a division of labor:  I’d do things I was good at and my partner(s) would focus on areas in which they had expertise. And, as partners, we shared expenses and split profits.

My own partnerships were pretty simple and the split was usually equal among the parties.  Working with other businesses, however, I’ve often seen splits that were weighted one way or another 60/40 or 51/49 and so on.

Has it ever occurred to you that when you hire an ordinary real estate agent, you are taking them on as a partner in your property?  Really:  if you are agreeing to split with the agent on a 94/6 basis, you’re taking them on as a partner in your property.  Maybe you’ve been in it, improving it, investing in it for five years.  This agent is coming in during the final 3 or 4 months of your ownership,  and somehow is entitled to 6%* of what you’ve built!

And here’s the big kicker:  we’re not talking about splitting your profit 94/6 with the agent.  You’re going to pay them 6%* of the gross!  Of the Sale Price.

Let’s assume the house sells for $400,000 and that you have a $300,000 mortgage that must be paid off at closing.  The agent’s 6%* commission is $24,000.  Ouch!  That’s 6%* of the Sale Price.  But after you pay off your mortgage, you won’t have $400,000, you’ll only have $100,000 and it’s from that that you must pay the agent.  That $24,000 commission is almost 25% of your proceeds, your net!

Are you really going to give away 25% of your net to an agent who will put the property on the Internet, fill in the blanks of the contract, manage the inspections and keep things moving to closing?  Really??

I’m not.  No way.  There is not that much value in the relationship.  Don’t get me wrong:  Realtors are incredibly valuable in the equation, but 25% of your net valuable?  Hardly.  I”m going to pay a Set Fee to sell my house.  You know a Set Fee, like what my dentist charges to fill a tooth, like my doctor charges for an office visit, like my mechanic charges for an oil change. I’m going to pay a flat $5,550* to sell my $400,000 house – the same $5,550 my neighbor with the $350,000 house will pay.  And for that, I’m going to get full service, great marketing, agent representation and hand holding every step of the way.   I’ll be saving almost $20,000 over what that ordinary agent was going to charge me!

So how about you?  Do you want to save thousands?  Are you tired of having a new partner swoop in at the 11th hour of  your home ownership to claim a big chunk of your equity?  If so, here’s what you do:

Click the link up there in the top right of this page where it says ‘Find a Help-U-Sell Office.’  You’ll be glad you did!

*Real estate commissions, whether percentage based or set fee, are always negotiable between the consumer and the broker.  They are not set by law or Realtor rule and there is no ‘going rate.’  The $5,550 I used to illustrate a Help-U-Sell set fee is just an example.  Help-U-Sell fees vary by office because different marketplaces behave differently and require more or less effort and marketing expense.  Having said that, there is one great truth here:  you will almost always save big on real estate commissions when you work with Help-U-Sell.  Savings is what we are all about!

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.

 

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.

Beware! Facebook Friend Requests

There has been so much written about Facebook and your privacy.  Many are terrified that strangers may be able to see the photo they took of what they had for dinner last night!  Par for the course:  it seems we alternatively love Facebook and revile it every other Tuesday.

Here’s what I have to tell you about Facebook and your privacy:  it’s not a problem if you will take the time to manage your page and your friends.  It’s very simple and here is a link to a post that will walk you through that process:  LINK.  There have been a few changes to the look and feel of Facebook since that post was written but the basics are still sound.  Truth is:  you can limit what anyone sees of your Facebook profile.

But today there is a new threat.  It seems that Facebook scammers are sending out bulk friend requests hoping to get access to your information and your list of friends.  How they may use this information is up for speculation, but think about it:  would you go on television and tell the world what you had for dinner last night, where you dined and what you spent?  How may times you’ve been married and who your best friend in high school was?  How cute your 2 year old is in her new shoes?  Of course you wouldn’t.  But that’s what you’re doing when you accept friend requests from people you do not know.

Here is a list of tasks for you to do now:

  1. Review your list of Facebook friends.  See anybody you don’t know professionally or personally?  Perhaps you might want to un-friend them.
  2. When you click on ‘Friends’ from your home page notice that there is also a link for ‘Followers.’ Today, people can follow you – which means to read everything you post – whether you accept a friend request or not.  Take a look at your followers:  do you know them?  Maybe you’d be wise to block some or all of them.  Funny: when I checked my followers, I saw people whose friend requests I had refused!
  3. From now on when you receive a friend request from someone you don’t know, first send them a message and ask: How do I know you?  You probably won’t get a response, and so then, refuse the request and block them.
  4. Periodically check your followers.  You are notified when you have a new follower, but you are notified about so many things it is easy to overlook.  I don’t think legitimate followers are a bad thing, especially if you are using Facebook as part of your online business strategy, but maybe you’re bugged by the whole concept.  If so, go into your account settings, click on ‘Followers,’ and turn this feature off entirely.

I don’t think Facebook is the Boogie Man many say it is.  I believe in its ability to keep people connected and in its value as a marketing vehicle.  But I do believe that Facebook users have an obligation (to themselves) to manage their memberships, to take control of who sees what,, and to monitor more than the Newsfeed.

And, oh by the way . . . have you looked at Google + lately?  It’s come a long way.  Still, most of my friends don’t have accounts, but at some point it may become a social networking alternative.  My Spanish school in Oaxaca is actively using Google + Hangouts to teach the language over longdistances using live video feeds.  Impressive!

Here is an infographic from Barracuda Labs I found on ZDnet.com with more on fake Facebook friend requests:

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