6 Steps To Success With Your Web Agent Solutions Website

Transcription

1 6 Steps To Success With Your Web Agent Solutions Website By Jay Kinder and Michael Reese

2 Introduction Congratulations on your decision to join the Web Agent Solutions family. It s an enormously effective tool in our real estate businesses, and we know it will be in yours as well. Our company, Kinder Reese Real Estate Partners, is dedicated to helping other real estate agents achieve the same level of success that we have. It s our sincere hope that this guide is helpful for you and that you learn some cheap and easy ways to generate revenue with your website. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please don t hesitate to contact one of us or your Kinder Reese marketing consultant. We are all here for you. To your success, Jay Kinder and Michael Reese KinderReese.com

3 Step 1 Follow the Right Leaders The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, and sadly that s the business model that most real estate agents follow. They do what everyone else does and then scratch their heads and wonder why they can t get ahead. The truth is, if you copy what everyone else does, you re going to get what everyone else gets. And that isn t much considering most agents either go out of business in the first few years or get stuck in a cycle of closing just one or two transactions a month. To be clear, though, the problem isn t copying what others are doing, the problem is copying what the wrong people are doing. You see, asking an agent who does one transaction a month what kind of marketing you should do is like asking a three year old what the square root of 25 is. They may give you an answer, but it s not going to be the right one. In contrast, if you learn from and copy agents who have achieved great success in real estate, then you will also achieve great success. It s not rocket science, it s just common sense. We re not trying to toot our own horns, but we have both reached a level of success in real estate that most people never get to, and that makes us the right leaders for you to follow. Our Web Agent Solutions websites are a vitally important tool in our real estate businesses, so joining the family was a great move on your part. Now if you just follow all six steps in this guide, you ll be well on your way to achieving your goals and getting to the next level in your real estate career.

4 Step 2 Accept That Marketing is a Necessity The Cold, Hard Truth: You can be the best, smartest, most capable real estate agent in the entire world, but it means nothing if you don t market yourself. You can memorize every real estate law ever written and read a thousand books on client service, but absolutely none of it matters if no one knows about you. Unfortunately, real estate professionals are a dime a dozen. You can t simply become one and wait for people to find you. And you can t just rely on your circle of friends either. We can t tell you how many times struggling agents have come to us for advice wondering why they don t have clients to work with, when the fact is they don t advertise. They say that money is tight and they can t afford to, but hear us loud and clear: It doesn t matter how tight money is, you can t afford NOT to advertise! It s a recipe for failure every time. Working with friends and family is great, but there s only so many of them to go around. To succeed in real estate, the general public will have to make up the lion s share of your business, and there s no way for them to know about you and what you can offer them unless you communicate it consistently and strategically. Real estate knowledge is important, but it s not enough to make you successful unless it s paired with effective marketing.

5 Step 3 Understand Unbranded Marketing All marketing falls into one of two categories, branded and unbranded, and it s imperative that you understand the difference. Branded advertising is essentially anything that identifies you and promotes you as a real estate agent. Branded marketing pieces include just listed and sold cards, magazine ads, billboards, postcards, newsletters, TV and radio spots, and even the signs that you put out at your listings. In stark contrast, unbranded advertising doesn t mention you at all and it s designed to look like it s not coming from a Realtor. An example would be a postcard that you send out that simply says: To find out what your home is worth, visit ExactHomeValue.com. People who respond to an ad like this usually don t realize they re going to a Realtor s website, they think they re just getting free public information. If you don t have a dominant presence in your real estate market, unbranded marketing is the way to change that. Unfortunately, the average agent doesn t use unbranded advertising to break into the business, and that s one of the reasons that so many fail. Consider this scenario: Joe Realtor has been an agent in your marketplace for more than ten years. Over time, he s built a name for himself through consistent marketing and loyal past clients who send him referrals. If you ask most people for the names of three Realtors in the area, Joe s is likely to be one of them. Now you start marketing to the same people Joe s marketing to. You give them your contact information, your picture, and maybe even a snazzy headline to remember you by. But a year later when they re ready to sell their home, (cont )

6 Step 3 Understand Unbranded Marketing (continued) who do you think they ll call: Joe who they ve been hearing from for ten years or you who they ve been hearing from for one? It s a no-brainer that Joe is going to be their likely choice, especially when you consider that he has a base of loyal past clients who will recommend him, and he s been in the business so long that he has plenty of performance statistics to help him seal the deal. When you re new or not established in your real estate business, it s very tough to compete with agents like Joe using traditional marketing approaches. To go head to head with them, you would need flattering statistics and testimonials, and a good amount of money to publicize them. So what do you do if you don t have those things? The answer: Unbranded Marketing. Unbranded marketing allows you to fly under the radar so that you reach your target market right before they are ready to buy or sell a home. The key words are right before. If you let your target market get all the way to the point that they are ready to make a move, Joe is who they re going to call. Your only hope is to get your foot in the door before they re ready so that you can build rapport and get their business when it s time for them to move forward. Think about car shopping. Typically people don t wake up one day, decide to buy a car, and then go out and buy it. Usually there are weeks or even months of research and preparation before they ever set foot on a car lot, and real estate is no different. People are generally not going to buy or a sell a home on an impulsive whim. There s going to be weeks or months of consideration and planning before they re ready to contact an agent and move forward, and that s the stage of the game when unbranded advertising is the most effective.

7 Step 4 Run an Unbranded Advertisement Out of every unbranded ad we ve ever run, home evaluation advertisements have proven to be the most effective at attracting seller leads because potential sellers will jump at the chance to find out what their home is worth. Again, the key to these ads working is making the potential buyer or seller think they re not contacting an agent because they re not ready to do that yet. You have to hit them with the unbranded triple threat: An unbranded ad with an unbranded URL that leads to an unbranded website. Two cheap and effective ways to do unbranded advertising are classified ads and fliers. If you want to go the classified route, try one of these: Find out what your home is worth! YourUnbrandedURL.com If classifieds aren t up your alley, putting fliers directly on people s doors is a great option because it s cheap (no postage!) and effective since few other people do it. It s one of the ways that we got started when we were new in the real estate business, and it s a tactic we still use today. Just print a few hundred fliers and put them on the doors in your farm areas. Keep it simple, and don t forget to subtly include whatever legal verbiage is required in your area (like your name and brokerage). One of the fliers we use looks like this: What s Your Home Worth? Find out for FREE at YourUnbrandedURL.com

8 Step 4 Run an Unbranded Advertisement (continued) Unbranded ads are incredibly effective if and only if they direct people to an unbranded website with captivating content. The site has to look and feel like it s not owned by an agent, and it has to have information on it that they ll willingly trade their contact details for. That s good news for you because your Web Agent Solutions website is absolutely the best in the industry at achieving both goals. Trust us; we have tried just about every real estate website out there and nothing even comes close to the results we get with Web Agent Solutions. Once a lead gets on your unbranded site, they ll find professionally written articles on just about every buying and selling topic imaginable. When they click on a link to read an article, they ll get some teaser copy that will whet their appetite about the article, and then they ll be required to give their contact information before they can read it. It works the same way if you drive traffic to your site by advertising the ability to get a free home evaluation. When they arrive on the home evaluation page of your website, they fill out a form with their address and contact information, and then you are notified of the lead. At that point you can follow up with them, build rapport, and turn them into a client. Speaking of following up, one of the greatest features of your Web Agent Solutions website is that it gives you the ability to do it very quickly. When someone submits a form on your site, you ll be notified immediately via and/or cell phone text message. That gives you the ability to respond to your leads in seconds or minutes instead of hours or days which is very important because the National Association of Realtors reports that if you can call an Internet lead within 15 minutes, you have a 70% chance of reaching them. And since most people hire the first agent they talk to, being prompt with your response is critical to your success. To sum up it up, if you re not already a dominant agent in your market, then unbranded advertising promoting your unbranded Web Agent Solutions website is a great way to change that.

9 Step 5 Start a Pay-Per-Click Campaign Pay-per-click is a unique form of advertising that emerged around How it works is an advertiser bids on keywords that they think their target market might use when searching for products or services, and when someone types one of those keywords into a search engine, the advertiser s ad may appear on the results page. The great part is that the advertiser doesn t pay when their ad is displayed, only when someone clicks on it, hence the name pay-per-click. We ve been using PPC for several years now, and we get incredible results from it. It s like a water faucet: If we re inundated with new leads from another ad, we simply turn our PPC off for a few days, and if we re slow we keep it on. It only takes a few minutes to do this, and it saves us from flushing our advertising dollars down the toilet. Paying for leads that you can t follow up with is a colossal waste of valuable resources. Because of it s effectiveness, PPC is a must in our businesses. Over 75% of agents are found online by buyers and sellers doing searches, so not doing PPC would mean we d be passing up 75% of our potential client base. Marketing gurus often teach that you have to fish where the fish are to succeed in business, meaning that you have to invest your marketing dollars in the places where you re most likely to be seen by your target market. As a Realtor, your target market is buyers and sellers, and the Internet is hands down the right pond to fish in. Besides the vast numbers of buyers and sellers you ll reach, there are other advantages to PPC advertising as well. 1. Budget Control You have the ability to choose what you want to spend on a monthly basis, and it can always be modified. 2. Consistency Traditional ads give you an influx of leads followed by a slow period until the next ad comes out. In contrast, PPC gives you a steady stream of leads throughout the month. 3. Return On Investment Tracking The back end of your Web Agent Solutions website makes it easy to track every advertising dollar you spend so that you can tweak your PPC budget to maximize your results. (cont )

10 Step 5 Start a Pay-Per-Click Campaign (continued) We ve found that a lot of agents don t ever try pay-per-click, or try and fail with it because they don t really understand how it works and they don t have time to learn the ins and outs. Well, the staff members at Web Agent Solutions are experts at real estate PPC, and they will manage your advertising campaign from start to finish with very little involvement from you. You ll have a ton of new leads to work with thanks to their proprietary list of over 2,000 keywords that has been developed, tested, and optimized over the years. This invaluable service is a mere $40 a month which is nothing compared to what most companies charge. Go to wpromotions.com to see the typical fees, and you ll find they re hundreds of dollars a month. Web Agent Solutions does it for dramatically cheaper because they know that when you pair PPC with their sites, you ll get incredible results and remain a website client for life. Charging less to manage your campaign leaves you with more advertising dollars to spend on actual click charges. Whether you can allocate $100 or $1,000 a month for clicks, the Web Agent Solutions team will help you maximize your investment so that you get the most bang for your buck. To get started with PPC, simply call or your Web Agent Solutions technician. They ll discuss some different options with you and have you fill out a quick five-question form. Then you can just sit back, relax, and watch the leads pour in!

11 Step 6 Participate in the Kinder Reese Coaching Calls Every other Thursday at 8:30am CST, Michael Reese and Jay Kinder host a conference call exclusively for Web Agent Solutions clients. It s a one hour question and answer session where they will tell you everything you want to know about how they have gotten to where they are in their real estate careers and what tools you can use to get to their level. If you have questions about any of the following subjects, simply submit them to Questions@KinderReese.com and Michael and Jay will do their best to address them on an upcoming call. Marketing strategies and tools Converting leads to clients Turning clients into sales Building your real estate team Getting referral business Talk to your Kinder Reese marketing consultant if you would like to participate. He or she will be happy to provide you with a schedule of upcoming calls as well as the phone number and call-in procedures.