When it comes to being a successful agent in today’s market, you have to be on top of your marketing game. You need to know the most up to date techniques and what is on the cutting edge of today’s market. So where do we begin? Well, let’s start with the most basic and work our way up. Almost 100% of Buyers in today’s market are starting their search online. Whether that be Zillow, realtor.com, or any of the other big traffic sites, the one thing you have to have as a listing agent is what I call stopping power. Stopping power is something (usually a photo) that separates you from the competition. When buyers are scrolling through sometimes hundreds of different listings, something has to stand out and catch their eye. The two main ones are either priced low, or a photo that stands out. This can be an amazing backyard photo, or a view, it doesn’t always have to be the same boring front of the house photo like everyone else. And even if it is, you can take an HDR sunset photo with a ton of dynamic range and amazing color. More on that in the next section. This brings me to the first topic which are photos.
Look at Photos like they are the artist to your listings canvas. That artist can paint it amazing and capture a ton of attention and admiration, or they can paint it like a child’s first time with a brush in their hand and draw very little attention. By having great photos, You can simply have buyers excited before they get to the property for your open house. What this creates is a buyer who isn’t going around picking apart everything they don’t like about the house, but yet going around and solving those dislikes with solutions. THIS IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE! And yet, for some reason a lot of realtors skimp out on having professional photos taken of their listings. I mean come on guys, your set to make 5k on the low end of that sale. You’re telling me you can fork over 150 bucks to a photographer and have them make your listing stand out and even worth more in some cases? I find this crazy but it happens way more often than you would think. Now, if you have the skills to be able to take your own professional quality photos (which I have a cheap course on if you would like to learn), I push you to explore that avenue. It’s about capturing the buyer’s imagination and getting them to start seeing themselves not only living there, but doing things as well. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had buyers come through my open houses and they are damn near planning a party before they have even written an offer. This is what leads to bidding wars and a higher close price in the end. Now your not only look amazing to your client, you also made up for that 150 bucks you paid the photographer with future sales, and referrals. Which leads me to my next topic
Sellers love to brag to their friends about how much they got for their house, or how fast it sold, or how many offers they got on it. Now let me ask you this, when your client tells all of their friends about how you got them 102% of list price and it sold on the first weekend, what do you think they will say? I guarantee you It’s not “I’m never using that realtor when I buy or sell”. More times than not your information gets handed out and your database of clients continues to grow. Now when you sell a property for one of them and they tell all their friends, it starts to grow exponentially. This is how I was able to grow my business so quickly which intern lead to me starting The Viral Realtor. I was getting so many requests from peers on how I did my marketing, if I could take a look at their to make adjustments, if I could set them up with a guide on what I was doing, that I decided to change career paths and just start helping agents make a lot more money. But let’s get back on topic. The best referrals are word of mouth from people that those clients trust and you can grow your business pretty big on just this alone. Which leads us into my next topic which is pillars of business.
You should have 5 pillars of business feeding you leads and potential clients. These 4 consist of
1: Open Houses
2: Sphere of influence (people you know and actually hand out with)
3: Referrals
4: Paid advertising
5: Guerilla marketing
I’m not going to go over all 5 of these in great detail (if you would like a full detailed article on these go here) but I will cover them briefly. Open houses are exactly what you think they are. Open houses and acquiring clients through them. Meeting new potential clients at open houses though can be tough if you don’t know how to do so. (check out my mega open house blog for great details on how to gain new clients every weekend through open houses, even if they are not your own listing)
The next is your sphere of influence or people you know. This includes family and friends that you keep in touch with. Your goal is to have all of your family and friends refer to you as “their realtor” when the topic comes up. When they think of you, they think of real estate to some extent. If they don’t think of you as a realtor or thier realtor, you need to post more on social media and also speak with them more about real estate.
Referrals are one of those things that can come from all kinds of different avenues. I have teamed up with adivorce attorneys in the past where I would get fed 1-4 listings per year, per relationship. You can find bigger agents in other states and reach out to them to team up. And like we covered before your past clients and family bragging about your services. There are many more but you get the point. These are all easy ways to drum up business and keep you going through those low times that happen to everyone. The key is to keep those valleys shallow and those mountains high for as long as possible.
Paid advertising is a great way to get business IF you know what you are doing. In my own opinion, Zillow charges way too much for their services to be worth it. In the past I owned 40% of my home town’s market on Zillow and I closed 3 sales from it over the course of a year. Yes I doubled my Zillow investment but the amount of worthless headache calls we were fielding were outrageous. But there are better ways to spend your advertising dollars. I found that facebook got us the best results for over 15x less expensive than Zillow. We went from over 100 dollars per lead to just shy of 8 dollars per lead. Talk about a huge difference.
(I am putting together a Social Media Advertising course that goes over everything I have used to generate cheap good leads. If you are interested in that, I am putting together a pre-launch list and everyone on there will get the course for 75% off the list price when it’s released. Click here to be added to that email list if you are interested)
My main goal for The Viral Realtor site is to provide good advice and guidance that will help agents grow their business and be successful. And for those that are wanting to go more advanced and in depth on certain categories, I offer a cheap and affordable course catalog for those realtors. Whether that be an older realtor who doesn’t understand technology, or someone trying to stay on the cutting edge of what works and what is a waste.
The last one and the one I love the most is what I call guerilla marketing. This consists of a little bit of leg work on the computer and putting out some signs on the weekends, but it’s worth it in the end. I used to get the comment of “I see you everywhere” from buyers coming through my open houses when in reality I only had 1 or 2 listing on the market at that time. But through my “guerilla marketing” techniques, prospective buyers and sellers were looking at it like I was the one agent everyone was using as their realtor, thus giving me an edge in listing meetings and talking with buyers. I have a full Guerilla Marketing write up HERE if you would like to check that out.
All in all I hope you enjoyed this article. We will be posting new articles every week on marketing, growing your business, and new good software or technologies that are cutting edge in our industry. Don‘t forget to sign up for our email list where we will notify you when those new articles are released. Thank you for reading and have a great day.
