What a Fast-paced World We Live In
Technology continues to evolve at record-speed, and the tools available to help you market your real estate business keep growing, and growing, with an unimaginable number of email programs, social networks, video websites, blogs, CRM’s, drip programs, syndication sites, photo-sharing sites, advertisement solutions, the list goes on.
How are you supposed to keep up, and find time each day to utilize the marketing tools? You still have to manage the day to day of your business, whether it be sales, managing the books, taking customer service calls, paying bills, taking inventory, consulting on your product or service, managing your office or store, etc, etc, etc!!!
Believe us: We can feel your frustration.
It is enough to make you throw your hands up in complete exhaustion and not want to do any of it. And that is exactly what many REALTORS® and Broker Owners do. You ignore the nagging Facebook Fans and the Twitter Followers that are constantly calling out to you because you either don’t have the time to Tweet or send out a fancy email to your list, or you don’t understand how to make the most of these tools to effectively get the word out about your business to convert to customers.
In today’s business world, companies are seeking creative ways to maximize their ROI. The Internet is becoming the new battleground, as many businesses and industries move from offline marketing projects to online strategies that hold accountability like no other. A successful strategy must be fluid to change and adapt to the fast-paced Internet marketplace. The leaders of this marketplace not only welcome the change, but embrace it.
Online Lead Generation Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
Now, we know your time is precious, so in this Guide, we show you how to create a roadmap that will move people from a prospect to a customer with a fully automated system.
If we can walk you through the simple steps to keep a customer engaged and stay “top of mind,” putting yourself in front of your customers and leads in a way that has the most impact on your business…Would you keep listening?
We Want to Hand You the Exact Process
Below is a Simple Blueprint on how you can dramatically increase your online lead generation.
We’ve laid it all out so that you can implement this immediately!
Who are you and why should I listen to you?
That is a great question…you probably don’t know anything about us. Internet Media was founded by us, Jason and Nikki Christiansen, a husband/wife team, and we have taken our years of experience in business, and our passion for helping others, to form this dynamic company.
Jason’s prior 10 years of Internet related experience in the Mortgage and Real Estate industry, in conjunction with Nikki’s ability to smoothly manage the company’s core operations has led to a successful and rewarding partnership. Our mutual commitment to helping others has fostered a company environment where clients feel inspired and motivated to learn new Internet marketing strategies.
[OK, that was the formal Company History…now here is the real story…]
Over the last several years, our company has tested and implemented what has been working in marketing and web technology for real estate professionals just like yourself, and we have found some amazing discoveries.
Before we share that with you, allow us to give you a glimpse into the big picture and why we are so passionate about this type of marketing.
In 2002, Jason was working for a pretty large Internet-based .com technology firm, selling technology to banks and mortgage loan officers around the country and he decided that he wanted to go on his own and what happened was....
...the day Jason quit his job, he came home from work to find Nikki crying on the couch.
And the problem was that he was out of a job AND she was out of a job! …and we happened to have all these bills and we had a young daughter that we need to take care of.
How we were able to go from Broke to running a Successful Business for almost 16 years!
So we realized what we needed was a system in order to generate consistent quality leads to be able to provide for our family.
Then what we did was researched every marketing system, paid for every course we could get our hands on to teach us how to generate leads, and read every book associated with Internet marketing and web technology.
What we found out was that most people had no idea in the real world on what it took to actually generate not only quality leads, but to create a client for life!
It wasn't simple but it took us years to figure out and create what we call the SSP: Strategy, System and Plan so we could get consistent, quality results every given time and that's what we did.
We built marketing funnels and pipelines and put prospects into those systems and we used VIDEO to educate them on how to utilize the technology and how to create a better system for them and their business.
– and we put into action the exact same system I'm showing you here today.
Can I Use SSP in my Real Estate Business?
Let’s talk about SSP for a minute. SSP (Strategy, System and Plan) is a simple philosophy that not only do we believe all businesses should follow for success, but we implement it into our own business! Not only should a business as a whole have an SSP, but each marketing campaign or project should have its own SSP to ensure speed of execution and success.
Strategy
What is that right Strategy to solve your business puzzle? There are five things you can do to drastically increase your business, and it is incredibly simple. It comes down to just five elements, what we call the F5. It is the right website, targeted traffic, lead generation, follow-through, and a happy client.
Let me say it again: the right website, target traffic, lead generation, follow-through, and a happy client. That's all! Isn’t that simple?
By following these 5 steps you could drastically change the traffic and brand messaging for any company. We use and teach these 5 steps because they have the largest impact on the overall marketing and branding of all size companies.
To develop a strategy, you need to identify:
- What you want to achieve?
- Who are you targeting?
- What kind of marketing message are you sending them?
System
To make your Strategy work and perform at its best, you need to have the right System, which comes down to having the right tools. Those tools are essential, and you want to make sure you have the right ones. Now, there is a little bit of overlap from Strategy here, in that the right website is also part of the System. Having the right website as a tool in your system can make the difference between your Plan coming together or falling apart. The other piece to your system is Marketing. Utilizing the right Marketing system is essential to the Plan.
To develop a system, you need to identify:
- What tools do you need?
- How will you use your tools to engage your target market and monetize your database?
Plan
This is the most important part of SSP. Why? Because this is the part where you take ACTION. Action and Accountability are key ingredients to making any Strategy and System work. You have probably heard it many ways, but the saying means the same:
“The difference between knowing what to do, and doing what you know, it all comes down to ACTION!”
( Jason Christiansen, Founder/CEO of Internet Media Consultants.)
To develop a plan, you need to identify:
- How will you deploy your system to effectively achieve your goals with consistent, reliable results every given time.
- What is your timeline and steps needed?
Start with Having the Right Website
A website is a website, right? WRONG! In the competitive online marketplace, your website is the hub of your marketing. And if it is not, it should be!
Your website is the online face of your real estate business, so put your best foot forward.
42% of buyers' first step was looking online for a home (NAR, 2016)
People seek you out online to check you out before even contacting you. There is no easier way to connect with your target market than through your website and/or blog.
Your website should be the hub of all your marketing. Whether it is online or offline marketing, most of your leads will end up at your website. You must make sure that you have the right website to engage and convert your visitors with interactive IDX Integration, fully Mobile responsive design, and easy Content Management.
So how do you know if you have the right website? There are several key components that will indicate if your website is effective for both your business, your customers and your prospects.
- Do you have the ability to create and publish fresh new content on your website or blog?
- Do you have access to edit the content yourself?
- Are you able to embed or display video on your website or blog?
- Can you build landing pages for targeted marketing?
- Can you display properties through an integrated IDX?
We recommend WordPress websites as the preferred CMS website for REALTORS. What is CMS? Content Management Solution. It just simply means that you, the end-user, are able to manage and edit your website easily.
Our Agent Pro and Agent Enhanced Real Estate Website Solutions allow you to edit and create pages, blog posts, add video, and most importantly, create Call-To-Action Landing Pages, right within your Dashboard…on the fly!
Learn more about the right real estate website and how to use it. Register now to join our or the next scheduled Webinar. REGISTER HERE
How to Identify and Reach Your Perfect Audience:
Targeted Traffic
Now that you have the right website, it is important to drive targeted traffic to your website. In order to do so, we need to have a good understanding of who our target audience is. The concept of a persona is not a new one in advertising, and is the creation of a character with real aspirations, fears, motivators, and needs. If this person were real, how could we best market to them? What kind of content would they prefer, and what kind of social media would reach them?
What initiates someone to make the first move to search for information about your industry or company online?
A “Motivator” is an event or a set of events that results in a person from your target market to decide that they are in need of your services. The Motivators in real estate can be a change in life events, like a growing family, or becoming an empty nester, or a job relocation.
When someone in your target market has experienced one of the Motivators, they now have an “Objective” of which they want to achieve. As they relate to the above Motivators, the Objectives would be to find a larger house, to downsize your living space, or to move closer to your new job.
To be effective in Inbound and Relationship Marketing, you must have an understanding of your target market’s motivations and objectives and anticipate what they will need to know to view your solution as the best choice to achieve that objective.
Make an Offer They Can’t Refuse
Once you understand who you are marketing to, and have identified the “hooks” that will attract them to your product or service, you then can utilize various tools that will drive traffic to your landing pages and website.
In order to make an effective marketing campaign, we need to focus on the awareness phase. This means your goal is to create content that attracts new visitors with the intent of generating leads. The most effective way to do this is with a Lead Magnet, or an offer. Providing your prospects with free and valuable information will draw them to you.
A Lead Magnet could be:
- A Free Buyers or Sellers Guide
- A Free Home Valuation Report
- A List of Upcoming Open Houses
- A Preview of Upcoming Listings or Solds
- A Market Report of their Neighborhood
The list can go on and on…
The focused marketing will bring only those who are truly interested in what you have to offer, and cut down on poor quality leads.
Facebook Advertising…The Easiest Way to Find Your Buyers and Sellers
Did you know that you can tell Facebook who to show your ads to, and who NOT to! This is called Facebook Audience Targeting, and it is very simple to do.
By narrowing down who you are marketing to, you can make sure that you are attracting only those who are the most likely to take action on your offer, and increase your conversions! That means MORE LEADS.
First, let’s have a look at why you should even bother to target smaller audiences instead of a larger one.
Benefits of Facebook Detailed Targeting:
- Higher relevancy – advertising to highly targeted audiences lets you create custom ads that are targeting specific ad groups
- Higher CTR – by showing highly relevant ads to people, they’re more likely to be interested and click on them, leading to a higher CTR (click-through-rate)
- Higher engagement – if people see a highly relevant ad, they’ll like and share it with their Facebook friends, giving your brand a free advertising boost
- Higher ROI – by excluding people who aren’t really interested in your product and offers, you can reach the right audience at a lower cost
How Facebook Detailed Targeting works:
As you start to create a new audience, take advantage of the Detailed Targeting.
You can narrow your audience by adding several layers of required categories. Start by targeting people by interests, continue with demographics, and add a separate layer of behaviors.
Using the narrowing option means that your audience must match at least one variation in each targeting layers. If you want your audience to match five specific characteristics, you need to create five separate targeting layers by narrowing the audience five times.
Example: Let’s say you want to showcase some homes that are horse properties and want to target higher income families that are likely to move in the near future.
You would select the following Detailed Targeting Options:
Interests: Horses, Horse Showing, Horse Jumping, Equestrian, Horseback Riding, etc
Demographics: Household Income Levels $125,000+, Homeowners, Family-based Households
Behaviors: Residential Profile > Most Likely to Move
A Landing Page is NOT Your Home Page!
A good landing page targets a specific audience, such as traffic from an Facebook Campaign. Each offer you create should have its own landing page, regardless of what content formats you choose. It all depends on the offer itself. A good landing page contains something of value to get the visitor interested. This increases lead generation.
Creating an Effective Landing Page
There are three main pieces of a landing page, each of which play an important role in its effectiveness. These are the headline, the body of the page, and the offer form.
Headline
The headline’s purpose is to immediately make your offer clear. People have short attention spans, and may choose to leave a page if they don’t find it relevant. Your headline is the first, and possibly last, thing a visitor sees. Make sure it grabs their attention.
Body
The body needs to contain a description of the offer and why visitors should download it or sign up. Specific benefits of the offer and what visitors need to do should also be included. Simplify the visual layout with bullet points and numbering, if needed. Highlight the main points with bold or italicized text.
Include images that feature the offer. Images have the power to immediately attract the visitor’s attention. Use this to your advantage.
Form
The form is the ultimate goal of the landing page. It should appear above the fold, keeping visitors from having to move further down the page to find it.
Pay attention to the length of the offer form. It’s important to find a balance between a visitor’s time and the information you need. You need enough info to both contact and qualify the lead. There is a tradeoff between quality and quantity with forms. More information leads to a better quality prospect, but a long form means less people will be willing to fill it out.
After getting your prospects to provide a name and email on your landing page, you will need to provide them with their free report, which we call the Payoff. Give them what they asked for, quickly and easily. You will lose people if they have to jump through hoops.
Learn more about creating and using Landing Pages. Register now to join our or the next scheduled Webinar. REGISTER HERE
What to Do Next
We know that we have just hit you with a fire hose of information!! That is why we have compiled a list of some of the tools you will need and steps to take to put this into ACTION.
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Marketing Automation - What's In It For Me?
It is more important than ever to automate parts of your business to make sure that you can maintain growth of your business. With the technologies that have been introduced, marketing automation has become a targeted focus for most businesses in most industries.
Marketing automation provides the solution to many companies’ objectives:
- Improves the quality of leads that are generated and converted to sales
- Optimizes conversion or profitability from various sources of leads
- Measures marketing performance more effectively
The right marketing automation platform should perform these essential tasks for optimal performance:
- Targeting and segmentation of potential customers across a number of dimensions including demographics, activities, interests, and length of engagement, among others
- Automate tasks and map the organization workflow between marketing and sales
- Store customer and prospect information and behavior profiles to help in delivering the right messaging for each individual
- Automate a multi-touch marketing campaign
In a survey in which best-in-class companies were asked about their use of marketing automation, some very interesting facts were uncovered:
The experience and skills required to plan an effective strategy are not often available in-house. That’s why 73% of the best-in-class outsource all or part of marketing automation planning.
Expectations for marketing automation systems are very high with an overwhelming 94% of the best-in-class saying it is “Very important” to the overall performance of marketing.
The best-in-class consider “Lack of an effective strategy” the most significant barrier to marketing automation success. An effective strategy requires a unique combination of experience and skills.
---Three Deep Marketing & Ascend2, Marketing Automation Trends Survey
Your leads can be divided into two kinds of leads: A Leads and B Leads. A leads are those who need your services today. B leads are people who may have been doing research, but are not ready to buy today. With the right system in place, if you know how to manage these B Leads, you're going to find that throughout time, what's going to happen is that people are going to raise their hands and say “can you help me?” and then all you need to do is say “yes!”
You can implement and customize a marketing automation to suit your goals.
Your buyers and sellers can automatically receive the right content from you based on what they clicked on in an email, a page visited on your website, or a form filled out to request a free report. Bring them through the funnel, make a call-to-action to gauge if they are in need of your services at that time. If not, let your marketing automation slide them over to the “B” leads part of your campaign, your Engagement.
Follow Through and Nurture Your Leads
Before you release the content to drive traffic to the landing page, you must first consider how you are going to handle the leads. How will you keep them interested enough to turn them into customers?
Lead nurturing is the process of further educating your leads about your business and positioning yourself as the expert in your industry. It is accomplished through a series of communications that pre-qualify early-stage leads before making them an offer.
Constant and consistent communication is extremely important. Research has shown that a business needs to reach out and touch their contacts 2-3 times per month minimum! That is 24–36 times per year. How many times are you touching your database?
A Shocking Truth: You will lose 10% of your contacts for every 30 days that you don’t communicate with them!!!
The point is to make the communication more personal, hopefully pushing them down the sales funnel quicker. Customize your communications to meet their needs, and you will turn that lead into an advocate of your business.
Lead nurturing can easily be automated with auto-responders and automation software. Marketing automation that listens and learns is an essential tool in online success. Discover what each contact wants and deliver the most effective message to convert them from visitors, to leads, to customers, to advocates. As you learn about a contact, you can send personalized messages that align perfectly with their interests — whether they're on your website, browsing their inbox, or out-and-about on a mobile device.
After you have generated a lead, one of the most important steps is kicked into action: Indoctrination.
This begins the middle of the Funnel, where you begin to build rapport and engage with your new lead. Indoctrination is a series of short emails that introduces who you are, what you do, and what they can expect from you in the future. Be a little personal, but keep your level of expertise. Even provide a quick tip or bit of advice.
If you do not keep your customer ENGAGED with your company, you will most certainly lose them to your competitors.
Has this happened to you before? How much revenue have you lost because you have not stayed engaged with your customers?
What does it mean to stay engaged with your customers?
Engagement: a : the act of engaging : the state of being engaged : emotional involvement or commitment
There are many meanings for engagement, but the one above is the closest to the type of engagement we are talking about. The act or state of being engaged with someone is an involvement AND a commitment.
Once they have completed the Indoctrination series of emails, your automated email solution will send them into your Engagement series, which is your consistent set of blog posts and videos that will build trust and demonstrate skill, knowledge and proficiency. Educate about your product or service, show success stories within your industry, and you will soon gain followers, fans, and an audience!
These Engagement emails will keep you in front of your potential customers, and top-of-mind when they are ready to make a buying decision.
You can help them along and guide them towards this buying decision by adding Call-To-Actions (CTAs) within each email. A CTA will draw attention to areas of interest, and thus created even more targeted engagement. This then draws them towards the bottom of the funnel: the Qualifying and Buying Decision.
How Do I Nurture My Leads?
We have broken it down into 3 simple Fast Action steps.
Fast Action 1 – Build your database of contacts that will know and like you.
Building a database of people into your marketing automation software who WANT to hear from you is one of the most valuable assets you have for your business.
Your Plan is to add at least 3 people a day to your database. These could be potential customers, people you meet at networking events, people you talk to over the phone, people who you may already know but don’t have in your list already, anyone whom you feel would say YES when you ask them this very simple question:
“Would you Mind if I Stay in Touch?”
It’s that simple. By asking someone if you may stay in touch with them, it is opening up the door for you to gather their contact information, like name, phone number and most importantly…Email!
Fast Action 2 – Create at least 2 educational videos and emails that your contacts are waiting to receive.
Steady, personal communication strengthens the relationship you have with your clients and prospects, building up their trust and preventing them from going elsewhere for your services. This strategy allows you to educate your customers before you sell them, creating the perfect Inbound Marketing Strategy. This step also ensures that you stay in front of your contacts consistently.
Here is where you come in to implement the Plan. Shoot your 2-4 minute video, twice a month, on a small video camera or quality Smartphone, download if needed, then get that video online. There are many simple to use solutions, like YouTube. You then create an email that links to your video, and send to your database of contacts through your marketing automation software.
So now you have a growing database of contacts that know, like and trust you, and you are creating awesome, educational videos that are going out twice a month via email and social media. Now you are asking yourself
“How does this help increase referrals and repeats and increase my profits?”
Fast Action 3 – Boost referrals and repeats by prioritizing your follow up.
When you are able to identify the hottest prospects in your database by knowing exactly WHO is watching your videos and are the most actively engaged with your marketing strategy, you will know who to contact directly because they are ready to give you referrals now.
Your follow up system involves only 2 simple tools: a complete report generated for you by your marketing automation software on who is opening your emails and watching your videos…and a phone.
By proactively asking those hot prospects who watch your videos for referrals and repeat business, with a simple phone call or a special offer, you can increase your bottom line profits, because you are following up with value.
When you implement this portion of the plan, here is where you will see the magic.
Let’s say you created a video on “3 Things You Should Do to Your Home Before You Sell.” Or “5 Questions to Ask When Searching For a New Doctor.” By tracking who in your database watches your video, you now have a list of who is interested in selling their home or looking for a doctor.
You now can send out a timely special offer aimed at your target market, or if it fits your business type, call that prospect and ask them for a referral of see if they are in need of your services.
Simple Theoretical Example
To give you a clearer picture of how this works, let me give you an example. Follow along with the diagram below.
Traffic: You run a Facebook campaign to attract new leads, targeting homeowners who are looking to upgrade their home.
Landing Page: your CTA (headline) is “See Homes for Sale in Denver over $500,000”. Susan sees your Facebook ad and clicks through.
Payoff: After Susan fills out the form and gives you her name and email, she is directed to a page on your website that shows her an IDX created page with all the current listings in Denver, CO over $500,00, complete with pictures and details.
Indoctrination: Susan has now been added to your “list” which is set up to automatically start sending out your Indoctrination welcome emails, introducing you and what you can offer to help Susan.
Engagement: once you have fully introduced yourself, you can now start sending Susan your Engagement emails, which can be video, pdfs, or blog posts. Keeping engaged with Susan keeps you top of mind!
Happy Client: after receiving consistent communication from you, Susan decides to put her house on the market! She calls you for a listing appointment! YEAH!
Learn more about Engagement and Marketing Automation. Register now to join our or the next scheduled Webinar. REGISTER HERE
Qualify and Convert to a Happy Client
Depending on your target clients’ needs at any given time, a particular CTA will catch their eye, peak their interest, and cause them to take further action…or engage. This throws them into the bottom of the funnel, which is where your lead will qualify themselves for the need and desire of your product or service, and make a buying decision.
You can convert your lead to a customer by providing them with some further education about the selected topic, but also include sales CTAs to bring them to make a buying decision. With your lead’s continued interaction with your consistent and targeted communications, you have greatly increased your conversion rate.
Targeted Engagement can be a number of different CTAs that will qualify a buyer. You may already have some of these in action.
- Get a Free CMA
- Schedule a Free Consultation
- Receive New Listing Notifications
- Download this Free Report (Targeted Interest)
- Reduced Rate Commission
- Send me a Referral and Receive a Free Inspection
- Referrals are Appreciated
Leads at this stage are ready to speak directly with a sales person, so be sure to have your sales process set to follow up with a phone call or email follow up.
As you can see, it takes some work and effort to get leads through this sales funnel. Once you have it set up, though, you can be focusing on your active buyers and sellers, while the automated marketing nurtures and educates your “back-burner” leads that are not ready to say “YES” quite yet.
What to Do Next
Yup, we’ve done it again…overloaded you with too much information. So review the list of Tools and Actions that will help you implement the previous steps, and catapult you to the best part of it all. Closing more deals and making more money.
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The Simple Conclusion
Remember back at the beginning of this awesome “Definitive Guide” where we talked about Strategy, System, Plan? The SSP to generating more leads online is simple:
- The Right Real Estate Website
- Find and Attract Your Targeted Market
- Use the Right Tools for Lead Generation
- Follow Through with Automated Behavior-based Responses and Engagement Content
- Gain Many New Happy Clients with Continued Education and CTA’s
Your competition is also trying to attract the same ideal client, or at least there is an overlap in the type of client you and your competitor want to acquire. By identifying your ideal client, and developing your message to target that customer specifically, you will have a higher ration of conversion of the customer that you want to work with over your competition.
FREE MASTERCLASS WEBINAR
If you have enjoyed this Guide to Online Lead Generation for Realtors, you won’t want to miss this webinar “3 Best Practices to Unleash Your Real Estate Website Potential”
Register now to join our or the next scheduled Webinar.
What a Fast-paced World We Live In
Technology continues to evolve at record-speed, and the tools available to help you market your real estate business keep growing, and growing, with an unimaginable number of email programs, social networks, video websites, blogs, CRM’s, drip programs, syndication sites, photo-sharing sites, advertisement solutions, the list goes on.
How are you supposed to keep up, and find time each day to utilize the marketing tools? You still have to manage the day to day of your business, whether it be sales, managing the books, taking customer service calls, paying bills, taking inventory, consulting on your product or service, managing your office or store, etc, etc, etc!!!
Believe us: We can feel your frustration.
It is enough to make you throw your hands up in complete exhaustion and not want to do any of it. And that is exactly what many REALTORS® and Broker Owners do. You ignore the nagging Facebook Fans and the Twitter Followers that are constantly calling out to you because you either don’t have the time to Tweet or send out a fancy email to your list, or you don’t understand how to make the most of these tools to effectively get the word out about your business to convert to customers.
In today’s business world, companies are seeking creative ways to maximize their ROI. The Internet is becoming the new battleground, as many businesses and industries move from offline marketing projects to online strategies that hold accountability like no other. A successful strategy must be fluid to change and adapt to the fast-paced Internet marketplace. The leaders of this marketplace not only welcome the change, but embrace it.
Online Lead Generation Doesn’t Have to Be Hard
Now, we know your time is precious, so in this Guide, we show you how to create a roadmap that will move people from a prospect to a customer with a fully automated system.
If we can walk you through the simple steps to keep a customer engaged and stay “top of mind,” putting yourself in front of your customers and leads in a way that has the most impact on your business…Would you keep listening?
We Want to Hand You the Exact Process
Below is a Simple Blueprint on how you can dramatically increase your online lead generation.
We’ve laid it all out so that you can implement this immediately!
Who are you and why should I listen to you?
That is a great question…you probably don’t know anything about us. Internet Media was founded by us, Jason and Nikki Christiansen, a husband/wife team, and we have taken our years of experience in business, and our passion for helping others, to form this dynamic company.
Jason’s prior 10 years of Internet related experience in the Mortgage and Real Estate industry, in conjunction with Nikki’s ability to smoothly manage the company’s core operations has led to a successful and rewarding partnership. Our mutual commitment to helping others has fostered a company environment where clients feel inspired and motivated to learn new Internet marketing strategies.
[OK, that was the formal Company History…now here is the real story…]
Over the last several years, our company has tested and implemented what has been working in marketing and web technology for real estate professionals just like yourself, and we have found some amazing discoveries.
Before we share that with you, allow us to give you a glimpse into the big picture and why we are so passionate about this type of marketing.
In 2002, Jason was working for a pretty large Internet-based .com technology firm, selling technology to banks and mortgage loan officers around the country and he decided that he wanted to go on his own and what happened was....
...the day Jason quit his job, he came home from work to find Nikki crying on the couch.
And the problem was that he was out of a job AND she was out of a job! …and we happened to have all these bills and we had a young daughter that we need to take care of.
How we were able to go from Broke to running a Successful Business for almost 16 years!
So we realized what we needed was a system in order to generate consistent quality leads to be able to provide for our family.
Then what we did was researched every marketing system, paid for every course we could get our hands on to teach us how to generate leads, and read every book associated with Internet marketing and web technology.
What we found out was that most people had no idea in the real world on what it took to actually generate not only quality leads, but to create a client for life!
It wasn't simple but it took us years to figure out and create what we call the SSP: Strategy, System and Plan so we could get consistent, quality results every given time and that's what we did.
We built marketing funnels and pipelines and put prospects into those systems and we used VIDEO to educate them on how to utilize the technology and how to create a better system for them and their business.
– and we put into action the exact same system I'm showing you here today.
Can I Use SSP in my Real Estate Business?
Let’s talk about SSP for a minute. SSP (Strategy, System and Plan) is a simple philosophy that not only do we believe all businesses should follow for success, but we implement it into our own business! Not only should a business as a whole have an SSP, but each marketing campaign or project should have its own SSP to ensure speed of execution and success.
Strategy
What is that right Strategy to solve your business puzzle? There are five things you can do to drastically increase your business, and it is incredibly simple. It comes down to just five elements, what we call the F5. It is the right website, targeted traffic, lead generation, follow-through, and a happy client.
Let me say it again: the right website, target traffic, lead generation, follow-through, and a happy client. That's all! Isn’t that simple?
By following these 5 steps you could drastically change the traffic and brand messaging for any company. We use and teach these 5 steps because they have the largest impact on the overall marketing and branding of all size companies.
To develop a strategy, you need to identify:
- What you want to achieve?
- Who are you targeting?
- What kind of marketing message are you sending them?
System
To make your Strategy work and perform at its best, you need to have the right System, which comes down to having the right tools. Those tools are essential, and you want to make sure you have the right ones. Now, there is a little bit of overlap from Strategy here, in that the right website is also part of the System. Having the right website as a tool in your system can make the difference between your Plan coming together or falling apart. The other piece to your system is Marketing. Utilizing the right Marketing system is essential to the Plan.
To develop a system, you need to identify:
- What tools do you need?
- How will you use your tools to engage your target market and monetize your database?
Plan
This is the most important part of SSP. Why? Because this is the part where you take ACTION. Action and Accountability are key ingredients to making any Strategy and System work. You have probably heard it many ways, but the saying means the same:
“The difference between knowing what to do, and doing what you know, it all comes down to ACTION!”
( Jason Christiansen, Founder/CEO of Internet Media Consultants.)
To develop a plan, you need to identify:
- How will you deploy your system to effectively achieve your goals with consistent, reliable results every given time.
- What is your timeline and steps needed?
Start with Having the Right Website
A website is a website, right? WRONG! In the competitive online marketplace, your website is the hub of your marketing. And if it is not, it should be!
Your website is the online face of your real estate business, so put your best foot forward.
42% of buyers' first step was looking online for a home (NAR, 2016)
People seek you out online to check you out before even contacting you. There is no easier way to connect with your target market than through your website and/or blog.
Your website should be the hub of all your marketing. Whether it is online or offline marketing, most of your leads will end up at your website. You must make sure that you have the right website to engage and convert your visitors with interactive IDX Integration, fully Mobile responsive design, and easy Content Management.
So how do you know if you have the right website? There are several key components that will indicate if your website is effective for both your business, your customers and your prospects.
- Do you have the ability to create and publish fresh new content on your website or blog?
- Do you have access to edit the content yourself?
- Are you able to embed or display video on your website or blog?
- Can you build landing pages for targeted marketing?
- Can you display properties through an integrated IDX?
We recommend WordPress websites as the preferred CMS website for REALTORS. What is CMS? Content Management Solution. It just simply means that you, the end-user, are able to manage and edit your website easily.
Our Agent Pro and Agent Enhanced Real Estate Website Solutions allow you to edit and create pages, blog posts, add video, and most importantly, create Call-To-Action Landing Pages, right within your Dashboard…on the fly!
Learn more about the right real estate website and how to use it. Register now to join our or the next scheduled Webinar. REGISTER HERE
How to Identify and Reach Your Perfect Audience:
Targeted Traffic
Now that you have the right website, it is important to drive targeted traffic to your website. In order to do so, we need to have a good understanding of who our target audience is. The concept of a persona is not a new one in advertising, and is the creation of a character with real aspirations, fears, motivators, and needs. If this person were real, how could we best market to them? What kind of content would they prefer, and what kind of social media would reach them?
What initiates someone to make the first move to search for information about your industry or company online?
A “Motivator” is an event or a set of events that results in a person from your target market to decide that they are in need of your services. The Motivators in real estate can be a change in life events, like a growing family, or becoming an empty nester, or a job relocation.
When someone in your target market has experienced one of the Motivators, they now have an “Objective” of which they want to achieve. As they relate to the above Motivators, the Objectives would be to find a larger house, to downsize your living space, or to move closer to your new job.
To be effective in Inbound and Relationship Marketing, you must have an understanding of your target market’s motivations and objectives and anticipate what they will need to know to view your solution as the best choice to achieve that objective.
Make an Offer They Can’t Refuse
Once you understand who you are marketing to, and have identified the “hooks” that will attract them to your product or service, you then can utilize various tools that will drive traffic to your landing pages and website.
In order to make an effective marketing campaign, we need to focus on the awareness phase. This means your goal is to create content that attracts new visitors with the intent of generating leads. The most effective way to do this is with a Lead Magnet, or an offer. Providing your prospects with free and valuable information will draw them to you.
A Lead Magnet could be:
- A Free Buyers or Sellers Guide
- A Free Home Valuation Report
- A List of Upcoming Open Houses
- A Preview of Upcoming Listings or Solds
- A Market Report of their Neighborhood
The list can go on and on…
The focused marketing will bring only those who are truly interested in what you have to offer, and cut down on poor quality leads.
Facebook Advertising…The Easiest Way to Find Your Buyers and Sellers
Did you know that you can tell Facebook who to show your ads to, and who NOT to! This is called Facebook Audience Targeting, and it is very simple to do.
By narrowing down who you are marketing to, you can make sure that you are attracting only those who are the most likely to take action on your offer, and increase your conversions! That means MORE LEADS.
First, let’s have a look at why you should even bother to target smaller audiences instead of a larger one.
Benefits of Facebook Detailed Targeting:
- Higher relevancy – advertising to highly targeted audiences lets you create custom ads that are targeting specific ad groups
- Higher CTR – by showing highly relevant ads to people, they’re more likely to be interested and click on them, leading to a higher CTR (click-through-rate)
- Higher engagement – if people see a highly relevant ad, they’ll like and share it with their Facebook friends, giving your brand a free advertising boost
- Higher ROI – by excluding people who aren’t really interested in your product and offers, you can reach the right audience at a lower cost
How Facebook Detailed Targeting works:
As you start to create a new audience, take advantage of the Detailed Targeting.
You can narrow your audience by adding several layers of required categories. Start by targeting people by interests, continue with demographics, and add a separate layer of behaviors.
Using the narrowing option means that your audience must match at least one variation in each targeting layers. If you want your audience to match five specific characteristics, you need to create five separate targeting layers by narrowing the audience five times.
Example: Let’s say you want to showcase some homes that are horse properties and want to target higher income families that are likely to move in the near future.
You would select the following Detailed Targeting Options:
Interests: Horses, Horse Showing, Horse Jumping, Equestrian, Horseback Riding, etc
Demographics: Household Income Levels $125,000+, Homeowners, Family-based Households
Behaviors: Residential Profile > Most Likely to Move
A Landing Page is NOT Your Home Page!
A good landing page targets a specific audience, such as traffic from an Facebook Campaign. Each offer you create should have its own landing page, regardless of what content formats you choose. It all depends on the offer itself. A good landing page contains something of value to get the visitor interested. This increases lead generation.
Creating an Effective Landing Page
There are three main pieces of a landing page, each of which play an important role in its effectiveness. These are the headline, the body of the page, and the offer form.
Headline
The headline’s purpose is to immediately make your offer clear. People have short attention spans, and may choose to leave a page if they don’t find it relevant. Your headline is the first, and possibly last, thing a visitor sees. Make sure it grabs their attention.
Body
The body needs to contain a description of the offer and why visitors should download it or sign up. Specific benefits of the offer and what visitors need to do should also be included. Simplify the visual layout with bullet points and numbering, if needed. Highlight the main points with bold or italicized text.
Include images that feature the offer. Images have the power to immediately attract the visitor’s attention. Use this to your advantage.
Form
The form is the ultimate goal of the landing page. It should appear above the fold, keeping visitors from having to move further down the page to find it.
Pay attention to the length of the offer form. It’s important to find a balance between a visitor’s time and the information you need. You need enough info to both contact and qualify the lead. There is a tradeoff between quality and quantity with forms. More information leads to a better quality prospect, but a long form means less people will be willing to fill it out.
After getting your prospects to provide a name and email on your landing page, you will need to provide them with their free report, which we call the Payoff. Give them what they asked for, quickly and easily. You will lose people if they have to jump through hoops.
Learn more about creating and using Landing Pages. Register now to join our or the next scheduled Webinar. REGISTER HERE
What to Do Next
We know that we have just hit you with a fire hose of information!! That is why we have compiled a list of some of the tools you will need and steps to take to put this into ACTION.
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Follow Through and Nurture Your Leads
Before you release the content to drive traffic to the landing page, you must first consider how you are going to handle the leads. How will you keep them interested enough to turn them into customers?
Lead nurturing is the process of further educating your leads about your business and positioning yourself as the expert in your industry. It is accomplished through a series of communications that pre-qualify early-stage leads before making them an offer.
Constant and consistent communication is extremely important. Research has shown that a business needs to reach out and touch their contacts 2-3 times per month minimum! That is 24–36 times per year. How many times are you touching your database?
A Shocking Truth: You will lose 10% of your contacts for every 30 days that you don’t communicate with them!!!
The point is to make the communication more personal, hopefully pushing them down the sales funnel quicker. Customize your communications to meet their needs, and you will turn that lead into an advocate of your business.
Lead nurturing can easily be automated with auto-responders and automation software. Marketing automation that listens and learns is an essential tool in online success. Discover what each contact wants and deliver the most effective message to convert them from visitors, to leads, to customers, to advocates. As you learn about a contact, you can send personalized messages that align perfectly with their interests — whether they're on your website, browsing their inbox, or out-and-about on a mobile device.
After you have generated a lead, one of the most important steps is kicked into action: Indoctrination.
This begins the middle of the Funnel, where you begin to build rapport and engage with your new lead. Indoctrination is a series of short emails that introduces who you are, what you do, and what they can expect from you in the future. Be a little personal, but keep your level of expertise. Even provide a quick tip or bit of advice.
If you do not keep your customer ENGAGED with your company, you will most certainly lose them to your competitors.
Has this happened to you before? How much revenue have you lost because you have not stayed engaged with your customers?
What does it mean to stay engaged with your customers?
Engagement: a : the act of engaging : the state of being engaged : emotional involvement or commitment
There are many meanings for engagement, but the one above is the closest to the type of engagement we are talking about. The act or state of being engaged with someone is an involvement AND a commitment.
Once they have completed the Indoctrination series of emails, your automated email solution will send them into your Engagement series, which is your consistent set of blog posts and videos that will build trust and demonstrate skill, knowledge and proficiency. Educate about your product or service, show success stories within your industry, and you will soon gain followers, fans, and an audience!
These Engagement emails will keep you in front of your potential customers, and top-of-mind when they are ready to make a buying decision.
You can help them along and guide them towards this buying decision by adding Call-To-Actions (CTAs) within each email. A CTA will draw attention to areas of interest, and thus created even more targeted engagement. This then draws them towards the bottom of the funnel: the Qualifying and Buying Decision.
Simple Theoretical Example
To give you a clearer picture of how this works, let me give you an example. Follow along with the diagram below.
Traffic: You run a Facebook campaign to attract new leads, targeting homeowners who are looking to upgrade their home.
Landing Page: your CTA (headline) is “See Homes for Sale in Denver over $500,000”. Susan sees your Facebook ad and clicks through.
Payoff: After Susan fills out the form and gives you her name and email, she is directed to a page on your website that shows her an IDX created page with all the current listings in Denver, CO over $500,00, complete with pictures and details.
Indoctrination: Susan has now been added to your “list” which is set up to automatically start sending out your Indoctrination welcome emails, introducing you and what you can offer to help Susan.
Engagement: once you have fully introduced yourself, you can now start sending Susan your Engagement emails, which can be video, pdfs, or blog posts. Keeping engaged with Susan keeps you top of mind!
Happy Client: after receiving consistent communication from you, Susan decides to put her house on the market! She calls you for a listing appointment! YEAH!
Learn more about Engagement and Marketing Automation. Register now to join our or the next scheduled Webinar. REGISTER HERE
Qualify and Convert to a Happy Client
Depending on your target clients’ needs at any given time, a particular CTA will catch their eye, peak their interest, and cause them to take further action…or engage. This throws them into the bottom of the funnel, which is where your lead will qualify themselves for the need and desire of your product or service, and make a buying decision.
You can convert your lead to a customer by providing them with some further education about the selected topic, but also include sales CTAs to bring them to make a buying decision. With your lead’s continued interaction with your consistent and targeted communications, you have greatly increased your conversion rate.
Targeted Engagement can be a number of different CTAs that will qualify a buyer. You may already have some of these in action.
- Get a Free CMA
- Schedule a Free Consultation
- Receive New Listing Notifications
- Download this Free Report (Targeted Interest)
- Reduced Rate Commission
- Send me a Referral and Receive a Free Inspection
- Referrals are Appreciated
Leads at this stage are ready to speak directly with a sales person, so be sure to have your sales process set to follow up with a phone call or email follow up.
As you can see, it takes some work and effort to get leads through this sales funnel. Once you have it set up, though, you can be focusing on your active buyers and sellers, while the automated marketing nurtures and educates your “back-burner” leads that are not ready to say “YES” quite yet.
What to Do Next
Yup, we’ve done it again…overloaded you with too much information. So review the list of Tools and Actions that will help you implement the previous steps, and catapult you to the best part of it all. Closing more deals and making more money.
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The Simple Conclusion
Remember back at the beginning of this awesome “Definitive Guide” where we talked about Strategy, System, Plan? The SSP to generating more leads online is simple:
- The Right Real Estate Website
- Find and Attract Your Targeted Market
- Use the Right Tools for Lead Generation
- Follow Through with Automated Behavior-based Responses and Engagement Content
- Gain Many New Happy Clients with Continued Education and CTA’s
Your competition is also trying to attract the same ideal client, or at least there is an overlap in the type of client you and your competitor want to acquire. By identifying your ideal client, and developing your message to target that customer specifically, you will have a higher ration of conversion of the customer that you want to work with over your competition.
FREE MASTERCLASS WEBINAR
If you have enjoyed this Guide to Online Lead Generation for Realtors, you won’t want to miss this webinar “3 Best Practices to Unleash Your Real Estate Website Potential”
Register now to join our or the next scheduled Webinar.
It is more important than ever to automate parts of your business to make sure that you can maintain growth of your business. With the technologies that have been introduced, marketing automation has become a targeted focus for most businesses in most industries.
Marketing automation provides the solution to many companies’
objectives:
- Improves the quality of leads that are generated and converted to sales
- Optimizes conversion or profitability from various sources of leads
- Measures marketing performance more effectively
The right marketing automation platform should perform these essential tasks for optimal performance:
- Targeting and segmentation of potential customers across a number of dimensions including demographics, activities, interests, and length of engagement, among others
- Automate tasks and map the organization workflow between marketing and sales
- Store customer and prospect information and behavior profiles to help in delivering the right messaging for each individual
- Automate a multi-touch marketing campaign
The experience and skills required to plan an effective strategy are not often available in-house. That’s why 73% of the best-in-class outsource all or part of marketing automation planning.
Expectations for marketing automation systems are very high with an
overwhelming 94% of the best-in-class saying it is “Very important” to the
overall performance of marketing.
The best-in-class consider “Lack of an effective strategy” the most significant barrier to marketing automation success. An effective strategy requires a unique combination of experience and skills.
Three Deep Marketing & Ascend2, Marketing Automation Trends Survey
Your leads can be divided into two kinds of leads: A Leads and B Leads. A leads are those who need your services today. B leads are people who may have been doing research, but are not ready to buy today. With the right system in place, if you know how to manage these B Leads, you're going to find that throughout time, what's going to happen is that people are going to raise their hands and say “can you help me?” and then all you need to do is say “yes!”
You can implement and customize a marketing automation to suit your goals.
Your buyers and sellers can automatically receive the right content from you based on what they clicked on in an email, a page visited on your website, or a form filled out to request a free report. Bring them through the funnel, make a call-to-action to gauge if they are in need of your services at that time. If not, let your marketing automation slide them over to the “B” leads part of your campaign, your Engagement.
How Do I Nurture My Leads?
We have broken it down into 3 simple Fast Action steps.
Fast Action 1 – Build your database of contacts that will know and like you.
Building a database of people into your marketing automation software who WANT to hear from you is one of the most valuable assets you have for your business.
Your Plan is to add at least 3 people a day to your database. These could be potential customers, people you meet at networking events, people you talk to over the phone, people who you may already know but don’t have in your list already, anyone whom you feel would say YES when you ask them this very simple question:
“Would you Mind if I Stay in Touch?”
It’s that simple. By asking someone if you may stay in touch with them, it is opening up the door for you to gather their contact information, like name, phone number and most importantly…Email!
Fast Action 2 – Create at least 2 educational videos and emails that your contacts are waiting to receive.
Steady, personal communication strengthens the relationship you have with your clients and prospects, building up their trust and preventing them from going elsewhere for your services. This strategy allows you to educate your customers before you sell them, creating the perfect Inbound Marketing Strategy. This step also ensures that you stay in front of your contacts consistently.
Here is where you come in to implement the Plan. Shoot your 2-4 minute video, twice a month, on a small video camera or quality Smartphone, download if needed, then get that video online. There are many simple to use solutions, like YouTube. You then create an email that links to your video, and send to your database of contacts through your marketing automation software.
So now you have a growing database of contacts that know, like and trust you, and you are creating awesome, educational videos that are going out twice a month via email and social media. Now you are asking yourself
“How does this help increase referrals and repeats and increase my profits?”
Fast Action 3 – Boost referrals and repeats by prioritizing your follow up.
When you are able to identify the hottest prospects in your database by knowing exactly WHO is watching your videos and are the most actively engaged with your marketing strategy, you will know who to contact directly because they are ready to give you referrals now.
Your follow up system involves only 2 simple tools: a complete report generated for you by your marketing automation software on who is opening your emails and watching your videos…and a phone.
By proactively asking those hot prospects who watch your videos for referrals and repeat business, with a simple phone call or a special offer, you can increase your bottom line profits, because you are following up with value.
When you implement this portion of the plan, here is where you will see the magic.
Let’s say you created a video on “3 Things You Should Do to Your Home Before You Sell.” Or “5 Questions to Ask When Searching For a New Doctor.” By tracking who in your database watches your video, you now have a list of who is interested in selling their home or looking for a doctor.
You now can send out a timely special offer aimed at your target market, or if it fits your business type, call that prospect and ask them for a referral of see if they are in need of your services.