by Josh Schoenly and Ryan Hartman
Special to Realty/Builder Connection
There are three monstrous mistakes that we still see agents and brokers making with their real estate marketing and lead generation efforts every day.
We’re very passionate about this topic, so we’re not trying to offend anyone; rather, we’re just telling you what we know doesn’t work and we’ll show you how to avoid these mistakes moving forward. So let’s get started!
Biggest Mistake 1: Focusing too much on “branding.”
Branding only works for big conglomerations like Coke and Pepsi. Although agents and brokers feel like they are building name recognition, typically branding is not very effective. Now, we’re not saying you should ignore it entirely. However, you should be more focused on getting a response from your consumers than spending time and money on creating radio, newspaper or billboard ads. Even though the ad rep may be telling you, “Consumers need to see your name and face “X” amount of times before they contact you,” this is not the case.
Instead, you need to be marketing for response. You need to get the phone ringing, people filling out opt in forms on your website, and prospects landing on your social media fan pages/profiles and so forth. That is the way you connect with people and generate business, not brand advertising. So forget about branding, or at least make sure that all of your marketing is at a minimum, a combination of branding and direct response marketing.
Biggest mistake 2: No lead capture trap(s).
We still see this all the time. On our Facebook fan page, we have about 8,000 or 9,000 fans. Once people hit the “like” button on the page, we recommend they share their real estate website to get feedback from other members. We’re shocked at the number of times that these websites being shared have no lead capture function at all! There is virtually no way for a consumer to get in touch with them, or if there is one, it’s so hard to find that no one takes time to do it. Therefore, you’ve got to make your lead capture big, bold and easy to find so when someone lands on your website, they can end up as a lead in your database.
Examples: Let’s say you focus on working with investors. We should see in big, bold type, “Put in your email address to get the real estate investor deal of the week for _____(your area).”
Or if you focus on luxury buyers than say something like, “Fill out your email to get our luxury home “best buy” list each and every week.” That’s how you capture leads.
Biggest mistake 3: Not tracking your website numbers.
When somebody chooses to share their site with us we’ll ask, “How many visitors and how many leads has your site generated in the last week, four weeks, or four months?” And usually the answer is, “I don’t know” or “I have no idea!” You have got to know your numbers. It is unwise to be blindly spending time and money without knowing what kind of results those efforts are producing.
If you were to ask us, “How many leads did you generate in the last day, week, and month,” within minutes we would be able to tell you how many leads and visitors we got, the conversion rates, and the charges for each new client. We’re not saying this to brag, but to emphasize the importance of this component. Otherwise, you would have no idea where to spend your hard earned time and money. So you need to track your numbers, period.
— Josh Schoenly and Ryan Hartman own ReTechulous.com, LLC, and can be reached at [email protected] or 888-809-7520.