Real Estate Marketing

by James Bridges on July 17, 2023

How to Generate Real Estate Leads

Starting in real estate with the concept of lead generation will put you miles ahead of your competition. Most real estate professionals start with the idea that if you just have a few key relationships in place you will experience tremendous success. While relationships certainly are important a solid lead generation plan is essential when you want to close business each and every month.

Getting high quality real estate leads isn’t something that will happen with only 10 minutes of work, but when you put a little bit of planning in you can have a consistent flow of people contacting you each and every day. Keep in mind that generating quality leads (i.e. when you know you can close a certain percentage of the leads coming in monthly) is like going to the gym….you won’t get in shape with one workout and 1 month of “lead generation” isn’t going to make you the best lead generator either.

To help you transform your real estate business to one where you can count on leads daily, consider the following tips:

Focus on Lead Generation – When you focus on lead generation you won’t send any marketing out that is just “branding”. Branding ads waste money and won’t generate leads. Keeping your focus on leads will ensure that any marketing you do (online, print, etc) will have the focus on generating calls and leads. This focus may seem odd to those around you in the real estate community and that’s OK. Many times in real estate it is suggested that you have to “introduce yourself to the community” or “get the word out” but that just wastes money. Keep the focus on what will generate leads each and every day.
Investing – Leads will rarely come free. Investing capital into your real estate business will help you to get leads at a much faster rate. A good rule of thumb to stick to is spending no more than 7% of a standard commission on your advertising. Every 7% you spend should generate 1 transaction. Sticking to the 7% rule will keep more money in your pocket and make your marketing work harder for you. Anything that isn’t generating leads for just 7% of a commission will have to be cut. This means that if your average commission is $10,000 then you can spend $700 in marketing expenses to acquire that closing. Looked at another way, if you were paying $50 per lead that means you would get 14 leads for $700 and you would need to get 1 closing out of those 14 leads. When you start to evaluate your marketing with this lens it might make you rethink quite a bit of your marketing efforts.
Marketing Strategy – I am a big fan of an online real estate marketing strategy, but it’s not for every agent. Having a plan in place for your real estate lead generation activities will make it easier. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just know what steps you are going to take to generate leads. This may mean having more than 1 system to generate leads for you. Top real estate coaches around the country recommend having 4 marketing systems to generate leads for you. Each system must adhere to the 7% rule and must generate at least 2 transactions a month. The systems involved with your marketing strategy can be varied (i.e. websites, blog, postcards, magazine ads, etc.) but just ensure that each of them are generating enough leads for you to close 2 transactions per month, per system.

With just the above three steps you will be able to start getting real estate leads. Remember, your plan doesn’t have to be complicated; it just has to have enough steps so you can see where you need to take action. Keeping your focus on generating real estate leads (and making sure it’s cheap) will have you closing transactions each and every month.

by James Bridges on July 16, 2023

4 Tips for Improving Your Real Estate Website Meta Tags

Meta tags are an important aspect of optimizing your real estate website for search engines. While stuffing Meta tags with keywords used to be a common practice, it can now lead to negative consequences, including being penalized or banned by search engines. However, properly utilizing Meta tags can still provide benefits in terms of helping search engines understand your website’s content and driving targeted traffic to your site. The search engines are smart enough to determine the quality of your content and can even use information on your page to override your meta tags when it comes to displaying your site in the SERPs (search engine results pages); however, taking the time to enhance your meta tags is still a task that can have some upside.

Here are some guidelines to enhance your real estate Meta tags:

Ensure uniqueness on every page: Each page of your website should have unique Meta tags that accurately reflect its content. Avoid the temptation to copy and paste the same Meta description and keyword tags across all pages. Instead, take the time to create unique Meta tags for each page, providing a concise description of what visitors can expect to find on that specific page.
Focus on Meta Description: The Meta description tag should be kept within 160 characters and serve as a compelling summary of the page’s content. Rather than attempting to cram in additional keywords, focus on creating a concise and descriptive summary that accurately represents the page. This helps search engines and users understand the relevance of your content.
Utilize Meta Keywords: While search engines generally determine the keywords related to a page based on its content, including 1-2 relevant keywords in the Meta keywords tag can help reinforce the main focus of the page. When your page has a clear focus, it becomes easier to identify the primary keywords to include. If you struggle to identify the main keywords, it may be necessary to revise the page’s content to ensure it aligns with your target keywords.
Don’t overlook Meta tag completion: Many website owners often neglect filling out Meta tags on every page and fail to realize the benefits they can bring. The content within the Meta tag description can even be utilized by search engines as the snippet displayed in search engine results. Therefore, taking the time to properly fill out Meta tags can result in a significant increase in organic traffic to your real estate website.

By following these guidelines and implementing effective Meta tags for your real estate website, you can enhance your online visibility, improve search engine understanding of your content, and attract more targeted traffic to your site. Remember to stay up to date with best practices in SEO, as search engine algorithms and ranking factors evolve over time.

by James Bridges on March 8, 2023

3 Mistakes That Can Kill Your Real Estate Career

Real estate can be a great career provided that you have a foundation to build upon. Once you get that license you feel like you rule the world and can conquer the real estate market but that doesn’t happen for everyone. The courses you study for your license are practical for following the law, but it won’t necessarily translate to monetary success.

You most certainly can conquer the real estate market; however, there are 3 big mistakes that new (and sometimes experienced) agents make that kill their careers. I would invite you to read below to discover these 3 mistakes and how you can avoid them.

Failing to have a plan for the business. The plan doesn’t have to be so detailed that printing it kills a rainforest. It should be simple and to the point. A successful real estate plan should have an outline of the goals along with how to achieve them. Break down a yearly goal into a monthly goal and turn that into a weekly and daily plan. That way you only have to focus one day at a time. Your plan shouldn’t just include your topline goals (i.e. number of transactions and commissions) but should also include the activities that will lead to that success (i.e. leads and appointments). When you have the leading activities as a goal you can then hold yourself accountable to those metrics each day on your way to your larger economic goals.
Not taking real estate seriously as work. Is real estate fun? It most certainly can be. What isn’t fun is doing real estate and not making money. Most agents make this mistake completely by accident. They don’t mean to not take it seriously. They model after agents who have been in the business awhile and figure that is the way to do it. This can mean they see activities such as going to a broker’s open or going to the weekly team meeting as “work” but then they struggle with why those activities aren’t leading to more business. What you don’t see is what is usually the secret sauce. What are people doing when the door is closed? To make money in real estate it is work. Make sure the model you are basing your success on is one that fits you and your personality.
Failing to base your real estate business on marketing. When economies get tight, like the one we are in, companies change their tunes on real estate marketing. Suddenly marketing isn’t as good as it used to be. Marketing should always be the foundation of a business, but it rarely is put in place correctly which means people cut their marketing when the economy gets tight. When your marketing is done correctly, stopping your marketing efforts is the equivalent of not filling your car with gas when the economy gets tight….it just doesn’t make sense. Does this mean you spend money and “hope” people call you. No! What it means is that your marketing should generate leads and you should aggressively follow up to see if they are interested in your product or services.

Mistake #3 is probably the biggest mistake of all. You will discover that a real estate business based on marketing that generates leads can weather any economy. As technology changes you will find that your marketing can also change. Often you can get many years out of a particular marketing channel (i.e. Google Paid Search, Facebook Marketing, etc.) before the channel either gets too competitive or is no longer attracting the types of customers that you desire in your marketplace.

Hold your marketing accountable to performance, meaning you know exactly how much of your marketing dollars are driving each lead, appointment and sale. There are many ways to build your marketing strategy for your business. Take the time to understand your local market, your personality, and how much success you want to have and watch your real estate business grow.3 Mistakes That Will Kill Your Real Estate Career

by James Bridges on February 28, 2023

What is the Focus of your Real Estate Advertising?

In any business advertising is looked at as a key component to generate new business. When someone starts an ad campaign (whether it be TV, Online, or Print) you might hear them say “I have to get the word out”. The striking part about that statement is it doesn’t imply any direct result in sales. This could be because of the definition of “advertising”. Consider the following definition:

Advertising (noun): The activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media.

With this definition of advertising in place, it’s no wonder so many real estate professionals spend money on advertising and get absolutely no business! In the above most simple definition there isn’t any consideration for what that advertising shall do other than to bring “public attention”. In real estate we have very few funds to invest, so every dollar we spend on advertising must result in sales.

I invite you to consider a different definition of Advertising:

Advertising (noun) : The activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media that shall result in leads and closed business.

With this definition in place you can allow yourself to make very different on which forms of advertising you choose for your real estate business. Every form of advertising needs to not just pay for itself*, it needs to generate business for you!

Now, let’s look at some common forms of advertising and how you can determine if you should be using it for your business.

Magazine Ads – Magazine ads can be very effective. Before placing an ad, ask the advertiser how many calls the average agent receives from an ad. The entire point of launching a magazine ad is to get calls that you can turn into business. You don’t care about the circulation, the readership, etc., just how many calls should you expect!
Online Paid Advertising – Online advertising takes many forms from PPC (pay per click), display ads, social media ads, video ads, and more.. When you are examining pay per click ads take into consideration the following. How many clicks will it take to get a lead? When you know this number then you can quickly calculate what your cost per lead is and determine if you want to start with online advertising.
Postcards – Before sending out thousands of postcards take the time to understand what response rate you should expect. Your real estate coach might already be able to tell you what to expect, but if you don’t have a coach, send out just a few hundred postcards and track the number of calls you receive. When you don’t receive any calls, it means your advertising didn’t work, so you may need to change your marketing message, where you are mailing etc., but don’t send that postcard out again if you didn’t see any results!

*Maybe Some Ads Don’t Have to Pay for Themselves?

The concept of having ads pay for themselves is largely what direct response marketing is all about. You put in $X into your marketing and you get 5-10X that money back. When you think of advertising in this manner then there is no limit to the amount we can spend because it keeps bringing in revenue, but what if we stopped getting those returns?

In some instances you might need to launch an awareness campaign to drive more people to your direct response marketing efforts. This can occur when you launch a new product or in the case of real estate; maybe there is a new real estate development or even a new loan program that you need people to be aware of. Awareness campaigns can be very helpful but it is important to put tracking and target metrics on these types of campaigns to ensure they are truly worthy of your hard earned dollars.

Regardless of what form of advertising you choose, it is important to hold that advertising accountable for results. Every piece of real estate advertising that you launch should help you to close more business.

by jbridges on January 26, 2023

Create Jaw Dropping Headlines

Online magazine sites, social media professionals and magazine editors are some of the best at creating powerful headlines. After all, with all of the media that we run into on a daily basis, through our feeds, newspapers and magazines must be powerful enough to get us out of our daily endeavors, to take action.

Creating Powerful Headlines

In the online world headlines might be argued that they are even more important than print media due to the deluge of material, yet they often come last when we are writing new pages of content for our blogs and web pages. At least in blog posts, you are forced to put a title on your page, sometimes website pages are left without a good headline and that means they will be left without readers.

Creating eye catching, jaw dropping, headlines will take time and practice, but mastering this art is a sure fire way to have floods of traffic knocking at your door. Instead of wondering how to magically come up with these powerful headlines, let’s take a look at two different types of headlines that are known to grab someone’s attention.

Shock and Awe

Being a little over the top is a good thing. This doesn’t mean you have to be vulgar, it just means you need to challenge the “norm”. One of the best ways to do this is to relate seemingly unrelated aspects. For example: “What Rambo Can Teach Us About SEO”. Rambo has no reason to teach us anything about Search Engine Optimization, but it is a little shocking to think he might have some advice so you want to click and learn more. Be careful not to over use the shock and awe headlines because they will lose their effect quickly if you run them every day.

Lists

Lists are winners because the reader can already picture a path to success. Lists quickly rise to popularity all across the web, especially in the social media websites. The list headline needs to be thought provoking as well so take some time. Cosmopolitan Magazine is famous for headlines and lists. Take one of their headlines: “The 22 Best Relationship Tips Ever”, it just draws you in to see if you are missing out on some of the best tips to keep your relationship going.

Taking time to write a powerful headline will bring you traffic, get visitors subscribing to your Blog, and even help you increase your rankings in the search engines. It can seem like a small task, but that small task pays huge dividends.

by jbridges on September 13, 2022

New Rules of Real Estate Marketing

When you start in the business of real estate, very little is taught about marketing. In fact, oddly enough it’s almost an afterthought. When we were early in the business, we had asked a successful real estate agent what he did for marketing. After all, he was consistently closing multiple 7-figure homes each month, he must have “cracked the code” to un-earthing these eager buyers. Our anticipation of a great answer was short lived though as he said “just throw your picture on a postcard and mail it out, it doesn’t matter”. Not the type of inspiration or systematic approach to getting business we had hoped for.

His response is what many real estate agents still do today and that is why, when the market tightens, so many real estate professionals are left scrambling to find new work. While a license is required to practice real estate, your license doesn’t really prepare you for acquiring new business.

The enthusiasm of getting your license and visions of helping people accomplish their dream of home ownership makes you think very little of how you are going to go about getting your business. Once you start to ask the questions of what you should do to get business, you are generally given some of the following ideas:

Do an open house
Mail and call your friends and family
Get business cards

WOW! Not marketing options that really push any limits there. The problems with these ideas are numerous, the worst of which being, unless you have like 100+ family members who want to buy you are going to run out of business in just a month or two.

In order to be a true professional real estate agent, your marketing needs to be different and cost effective. In order to be different, you aren’t going to take out a billboard, or get bus benches!

Marketing online for real estate isn’t a concept that is totally new, yet the majority of agents still aren’t generating any business from their websites, blogging efforts, or social media. The problem for most agents is they have the wrong focus for their online presence. The good news is, when you change the focus, you get dramatic results.

Change the focus

The focus of your websites needs to be on the customer and what the customer is looking for. Too many websites have large pictures of agents and talk about awards on the first page. The person trying to purchase a home isn’t looking for awards, they are looking for information on the area and they are trying to find out what is available in the different neighborhoods that you support. Make your very first page of your website about looking for properties and draw them in deeper, always letting them know your website is there to help them.

Make it easy

If a customer has to search far and wide to get juicy information on your website, they will just leave for a better website. Make it easy for visitors to get area information and search your local MLS system. It needs to be obvious on each and every page of your website that they have the opportunity to learn more and get listings.

You don’t have to spend your budget on a fancy website to help your visitors get the information they long for. Simply take the time to make sure your website isn’t about you and that it’s all about your customers and watch your marketing start to generate serious business for you.