#188 Mail Right Show With Special Guest Zach Hammer

Learning How To Do Facebook Messenger Bots Correctly Connected To Getting More Leads

Zach Hammer is the co-founder of Real Estate Growth Hackers. Over
the last 36 months Zach and his team have managed ad budgets well
over $100,000, generated over 25,000 real estate leads, and helped
create over $50,000,0000 in business revenue for their clients. Zach is
also a highly sought after speaker and consultant whose work has
impacted some of the top Real Estate teams and brokerages across the country

http://realestategrowthhackers.com

Robert: Welcome back to the Male Right Show folks. Today we have Zach Hammer. Zach Hammer is a master of all things related to box and chats and he’s built up a successful agency using this technology. And we’re going to talk a little bit about technology for which it’s one of the few pieces of real estate marketing tech that I’m actually a little bit weak on. So I’m really looking forward to today’s meeting. Zach, why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience? And let them know who you are.

Zach: Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Zach Hammer. Again, like you said, I’m the founder of Real Estate Growth Hackers. So my company Real Estate Growth Hackers, what we do is just like a lot of real estate marketing companies, we help real estate agents to generate and convert leads. We kind of specialize in some little bit cutting edge tactics, but we also we do a lot of stuff that’s just a more advanced way of maybe doing what people are using, do like direct mail. And what not. So right now we’ve been getting a lot of success with Facebook bots and so, yeah. So I’m excited to talk about that today as well.

Robert: Okay. So actually bot is just a more, is just a recent iteration of a piece of technology that you’re integrating into your marketing services, if I understand that correctly.

Zach: Yeah and actually we, these days I am less of an agency and I focused more on teaching and training. I do maintain a handful of clients at any given point. Just so I’m always testing what we’re teaching. But yeah, so it’s one of the tactics that a lot of my students are getting good success with. And we’ve tested quite a bit and had a lot of success with,

Robert: Have you always been focused on real estate or is this something that you’ve done all industries and you just created this really cool word Because you knew you were doing a real estate meeting this morning?

Zach: No. No. So it’s a, yeah, I know I’ve been focused on real estate for probably the past. What is it now? Six years. So my background, I did local marketing starting about 10 years ago. Around four years into that I took a job as a marketing director for a real estate team. And that’s where I learned real estate. I essentially applied by Internet marketing and whatnot, knowledge to the real estate world directly on staff for a real estate team in Las Vegas. So then I took what I learned there. While I was there, we doubled in business every year I was there, I five extra lead flow, cut our cost per lead in half. But I’m a horrible employee. I’m an entrepreneur at heart. So I took what I, what I did there and I set out on my own helping agents all across the country. And so for the past years that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been helping real estate agents or to implement the things that I learned in the field with that team.

Robert: When you start saying Vegas, marketing and real estate, there’s only one name that comes to my mind. Were you with Lori Dalen?

Zach: I was not, I was not, but she was out of the same office.

Robert: Okay. All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. So because are all right, so you teaching and training now. So this is all curiosity from me right now. We’re not even dealing with whatever the audience might want to hear. I’m curious to know, give me an example of something. Do you do a big Webinar? Do you focus on agents who are, let’s say, new, like w like one year or do you, are you, are you trying to educate a marketing team director on the broker side or all of the above? Can you eliminate that for me?

Zach: Yeah. So, I mean, I really wish there was a land in terms of who a civically going after, I think a lot of my information works really well for at least the more established agent, probably not the Newbie. A lot of what I’m teaching is going to make a lot of sense for teams, teams and brokers and, and people who have a little bit more of that. That’s a support staff and the ability to process leads more readily. But I do, I really have a strong passion for just the teaching and the training period. So I like to help people wherever they are. I’d say a lot of the courses and trainings that I do they probably need to be a little bit more established. But some of the stuff is good for newbies as well.

Robert: Okay. All right. So, so we got all that. So here we are in 2019 you’re teaching and training. You’ve gotten out of the working pro broker side. But most of our audience I would suspect, so we probably have a mixed audience. We have the listeners that we picked up and I think that from what I’ve heard, those are more new agents. But we also have my audience, which are almost exclusively established agents. Most of the people that are on for Inbound REM tend to be agents of brokers who have five 10 years’ experience. That’s who I’m looking for in terms of my client. That’s also the information that I provide educates. Like normally like let’s say you’re going to go out and you’re going to take a piece of real estate technology and you’re going to buy it.

A lot of the technology, I’m reviewing is stuff that people couldn’t even afford until they been in the real estate business for two or three years at a minimum. So you’ve got, let’s just say that what piece of advice you give for the brand new agent and what piece of advice you give to them. Like, what’s your favorite marketing tip for a new person? And probably the people that you and I speak to more regularly? Like the vet, somebody who has a budget, but they’re trying to figure out how to invest it. What are those two pieces of information that you get?

Zach: Yeah, so I actually put out a free course called ultimate lead machine that walks people through exactly. Kind of how I think about lead, follow-up and processing. It’s a culmination of a lot of different influences from some of the top agents that I’ve interacted with or worked with. Plus my own knowledge of marketing. And I’d say one of the foundational ideas of that is that most agents when they’re doing their marketing and their lead generation and their follow-up, tend to be very focused on the like right now deals. Or even the people who maybe they’re a bit of a ways out. But they, you’ll at least know that they’re planning on doing a deal. I think right now where we’re sitting in terms of the way technology is moving, the companies that are coming in. I think the biggest advantage that agents can get is by actually effectively marketing to the people that aren’t in the market for a transaction right now.

So being top of mind, being aware, so the people who live in your area might be looking to move to your area. But right now don’t have real estate on their mind. Because essentially a lot of that landscape is being taken and is being effectively marketed to. And people have easy ways to get into somebodies funnel. If they’re looking to do a real estate transaction right now, if they’re looking to buy, if they’re looking to sell. But if you can own mindshare with leads that aren’t there yet, but we know the average person does a real estate transaction every three to five years. You essentially build up this massive pipeline of business that becomes laid down, easy business. That is honestly, it’s a lot more fun to do the marketing for it and it’s a lot easier to convert those types of deals.

So I mean that, that whether it’s new or old, that would be my biggest recommendation. The problem that comes with that is that you have to have a long-term view. You’re going to be doing your marketing for a while before you start seeing the deals come out of that. So you need to balance that with strategies that are focused on the right now stuff. But having something in your pocket where you’re not so concerned about I spent x amount to generate this specific deal. Because more and more that’s getting saturated more and more. That’s where everybody’s competing. That’s like the 5% of the market at any point. 95% of the people aren’t in the market for a transaction. So I’m advising a lot of my clients right now to start looking there. Start looking at how you can reach those people.

Robert: Okay. All right, so I am sold. Great stroke of genius. You’re the man. How do I do that?

Zach: Yeah. So great question. The basic idea that you want to leverage for those people, is you don’t want to send them real estate specific information. So don’t talking about how to sell their home for the most money. Don’t be talking about how to buy a home, with no money down. Don’t be talking about that. You do want to talk about that stuff. You just want to talk about it to the people who were actually in the market for that. So what you want to be talking to everybody else about it is you want to talk about. So let me give you my least favorite but still work and then I’ll give you my most favorite at the end. So my least favorite are just like lifestyle tips. Things like hey, we’re coming into spring and summer.

So you know, maybe you put out information about dealing with allergies or you put out information about your making a backyard space where you can watch movies in the summer. That kind of an idea or if you’re going into the winter you put out information like, or maybe in the fall where you put out information like, hey, you know, it’s time to clean your gutters. Here’s an easy way to do it, or here’s a good service to do it, et cetera. You put out information that no matter if somebody is looking to do a transaction, you’re putting out interesting information. That’s relevant to them, right then. That kind of content works well. It’s fairly simple to do. You can go to Zillow and check out their blog. They put out a ton of that kind of concept.

And that would be a fairly easy way to put out some content that will appeal to people no matter where they are in the market. My favorite way though is actually really niche down locally. Cause that’s going to be something that you can be an expert on that other people are going to have a hard time competing with unless they’re doing the same thing. So what you do with that is you start talking about the businesses that you love in the area. You start talking about the restaurants that you love in the area. You start talking about the events that are going on that people would love. And essentially what your goal is your goal is to be the connector that connects them from where they are now to falling more in love with their community.

And by doing this, you show yourself as a local market expert. You show yourself as a local area expert. And so you get this lateral celebrity, but it’s still in the right vein. You’re showing that you know your area, which is an important thing as a real estate agent. And then you essentially you just make it clear. It’s like hey I’m a real estate agent. And so when the time comes, instead of them going through the process of looking to see who has the most reviews. Instead of them going through the process of just looking for homes, they think, hey, I’ve been following this guy for the past year or two. He obviously knows the area. Well, let me give him a call. Like that’s the way that that process ends up going. So that’s the basic idea. You can do that through written, you can do that through audio. You can do that through video. You can bring on local show or local businesses and local restaurants. Or you could even just hop on and talk about what you like.

Robert: Okay. All right. To our beloved users. I am going to take what he said and I’m gonna add a little bit of detail to it. So what Zach was referring to when he was talking about Zillow is actually, he’s talking about Zillow porch light. So if you’re going to Google it, you’re going to Google Zillow Porchlight now I just did that so our listeners can get a little bit of extra value. And what you see is eight curb appeal boosters you can do in a three must use before you listing. You are listing your house for sale from Halos to Hardwoods. So he’s right. It’s a great example of an amazing like value added content that you’re going to get in front of people who are thinking of listing your home. Home improvement is a great way to go with that. I agree 100%. Also in terms of that neighborhood expert thing, something that I’m starting to talk a lot about Zach. And you may want to load it into your own gun is Next Door.

So Next Door is a social media site that is only for homeowners in neighborhoods. And what it is mostly right now currently it’s like people talking about somebody knocked my trashcan over on windows. And I’m not thrilled about that. But guess what? More and more and more, I’m starting to see local real estate people or other people talk come in and actually the police come in and talk about broader neighborhood concerns. If you position yourself on this site, if let’s say you’re doing, the way that I would do that is I would take, I would just put a little bit of extra thought into the content I was going to create for my blog. And then I would make sure that it was multipurpose. In other words, more and more and more, I’m starting to see that there’s extra value that we can get out of content that we’re producing for our blog and places that we can post it such as Next Door. If he did like restaurant reviews, you can say like, if it was hyper local and you’re on Next Door, in Van Nuys. And I’m in Van Nuys and I say, these are my 10 favorite restaurants in Van Nuys. Then that’s something that would go very, very well on Next Door. And my experiences so far, it drives a lot of traffic. It’s like the online version of Craigslist without everybody’s selling their dressers.

Zach: Absolutely, and for anybody who’s listening who isn’t familiar with Next Door as well. Part of what’s super cool about it is in order to join you have to verify your address. So everybody that’s part of this is confirmed in the area. It’s not just sort of a general access thing. Everybody that you’re interacting with is very truly your neighbor. And so it’s a great way to have just this added level of trust that that happens. By using our platform. Yeah, I agree with you. I loved that store as a platform.

Robert: Perfect. So we’re going to go to a, we’re going to give it a slight pause here and guys, because I don’t usually steer the ship. Zach, I’m just going to say this out loud so that all our podcasts can hear it. We’re going to just pause for about 10 seconds. Starting right now.

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Robert: Welcome back to the Mail Right Show people. I think that so that John can throw in a commercial break. I honest to God don’t know because I am a terrible, terrible podcast cohost. I have no idea what he does with it, but I do watch a lot of our episodes and I’ve never noticed what the break is for, but whatever. So here we are. Today we’re back again with Zach Hammer who is proving to be a delightful expert of many, many different real estate marketing tactics is what I’m finding in this conversation. So we’ve given you some tips on his favorite tactics. We’ve talked about Next Door, we’ve talked about Zillow Porch light in terms of like a content strategy that you can emulate to stay top of mind with people that you’re already doing business with. The way that this meeting was introduced to me was that I was talking about bots. So if you don’t mind, Zach, why don’t we move into that and talk a little bit about like I’m looking at a link. But so everybody that might be listening or watching or if you’re on my Facebook feed. In the actual live cast notes, there is a link and I’m going to click on it right now. You’ve got somebody named John Duncan waving at you on live.

Zach: Hello, John Duncan.

Robert: Zach says hello. Yes. So somebody from your side of the world, no doubt about it. Anyway, there is a free, if you go into the show notes, there’s a link that will take you to a free chat Bot. So why don’t you explain what that is? Because I think some of the people that we are listening don’t know.

Zach: Yeah. So essentially let’s step back a bit and we’ll get a look at messenger as a platform. So right now there are multiple of these different messaging platforms. If you have an iPhone, you’re probably familiar with messages. If you have an android phone you’re familiar with Google’s implementation of messages. But they’re also third party messaging platforms like We Chat and what’s it called? Kik. Kik, I think is another one. And then Facebook now has as its own messenger platform as well. We’ve had it for a while. Facebook Messenger. So what’s cool is that that you can actually develop these programmable chat bots. So these bits of code that will communicate with users automatically and sequentially. And you can do all sorts of cool automations with it and stuff. But the basic idea is that you can automate some level of conversation with people in order to get an end result that you want.

So some examples of like what people are doing with bots across the world. Some of this implementation is more so in use in places China where like their messenger platform is actually, it’s almost like its own APP store. So like, you could literally, like, you can hail a taxi, you get a table at a restaurant, you can pay your rent, you can pay for most clothing and stuff when you go like out to the mall in China. And essentially like there’s this whole economy of things that are happening in this chat platform anyway. As a result, Facebook is Facebook’s goal at any given point. Like you want to understand their incentive. The more that they can get people on their platform in some way, whether it’s in the newsfeed or whether it’s through video or whether it’s through now and messenger.

That gives them more opportunity to have eyeballs that they sort of add ads to, which is how they make their money. And so they’re looking to build up messenger as a bigger platform that they can then sort of add ads to. So they’re putting a lot of, a lot of power behind it, a lot of money, a lot of development time behind messenger as a platform. And so you’re seeing them invest a lot into that as a platform themselves. So that’s kind of the like where it’s positioned right now. So again the basic idea when you were chatting on Facebook, that’s Facebook messenger. The Bot is just an automated way of doing that, chatting and like, you can integrate that with other stuff. So let’s talk about why that’s potentially valuable as a real estate agent. Does that sound good?

So the basic idea, well there’s a number of things that you should know first and foremost about. How I’m seeing a lot of people doing this wrong. Because there’s a ton of implementation that I really don’t like and I don’t think it’s the way to go. And the biggest idea is that a lot of people are building out these bots that do everything and it’s very interesting and cool. And the tech side of it is super cool. But it’s like this really shiny thing that no one’s gonna use. So like the way that I like to word it is, when you call up, like support for something and you get that message that says for sales, press one for support, press two. And then okay, you press two and then you get another thing where it’s like, okay, please enter your password and then, and then check these things. Like who likes that more than, yeah, this is, you know, this is Sam and Denver. How can I help you? Like who likes the phone tree more than the live support?

Nobody likes the phone bots anymore. Everybody likes talking with a real person. And so what we’re seeing a lot of digging that that’s somehow better. In some cases it might work. Okay. Real estate, it’s very much conversational person to person, belly to belly, kind of business. And it’s all conversations to platform. So what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to just do everything that can be done in messenger and think that that’s somehow good. So the right way, or at least the way that I like doing it right now is very simple. Essentially what you’re doing is we’re finding that if you replace, maybe not completely, but it’s something to experiment with. If you exchange landing pages for Messenger Bots that we’re seeing a drastic increase in conversion rates. So the average landing page on a good day, it gets maybe a 20% conversion rate. Would you say that that’s fair traffic to lead?

Robert: Well I would say that’s being very generous, but, okay.

Zach: Very generous. Okay, so exactly. So anywhere from 10 to 20%. What we’re seeing in Messenger Bots is we’re seeing about a 70 to 80% opting rate. So when instead of clicking to go into your lining page, they click to engage with your Bot. Number of people that are engaging with our bots that are turning into full leads, meaning at least email, but very often email, phone name, et Cetera. We’re seeing around a 70 to 80% conversion rate on that. So like a 3.5 times increase just by taking the same concept of what you’re doing with a landing page and doing it through messenger instead of a landing page. So that by itself is super powerful. So when you’re running your ads, if instead of having the end result being a landing page, you have it be messenger.

We’re just getting more leads that way. So even if you don’t do anything else, even if even if that’s all you do, that’s getting incredible results for us right now. And so the other thing that you can do is that you can actually take this process where you’re starting this flow in this funnel with Messenger Bots and you can automate some level of that conversation. Now going back to what I said before, you don’t necessarily want to automate everything. You essentially, you want to pay attention to the context that they came in. So if they came in and asking for a list of coming soon properties. Maybe that’s what you’re advertising. Your next thing should be very relevant to that. It’s like, okay, they asked for coming soon properties, what would be something that maybe I could go deeper with?

Maybe that I can offer them in order to generate a conversation. Or maybe I can ask him a question in order to give them better information. And so then he actually started dialogue. And you start getting these people talking to you on Messenger where you can build that relationship and then take it offline. Call them up on the phone after having enough of a conversation. What you don’t want to do is you don’t want to try and automate all of it. You want it to be a fairly natural conversational flow. Does that make sense?

Robert: It does make sense. I’m going to suggest something here. So we are I think we’ve been live for 30 minutes, maybe just slightly. Actually, no, we’ve been, we’ve been live about 25 minutes but give or take. I’m going to ask if you can spend another 10 minutes with me and what we refer to as bonus notes. So John’s going to edit this out. For the bonus notes, I have a number of questions. So I just want to prep you because I want to get into the mechanics of how somebody would actually do like, hi, I’m an agent, I have a budget. How do I actually go about doing this? Because even I am a little bit murky on the details cause like I said to you at the beginning of the meeting and we were offline, I am not like Facebook marketing is something I’m familiar with, but that’s like saying you as a Facebook marketer are familiar with SEO. I live, walk and shit SEO by the bat like, but Facebook marketing is kind of like, I know some guys that are really good at it and they talk about it a lot. So are you down for the bonus content?

Zach: Yep. And maybe specifically in the bonus content. So wherever this is going on, you want to get the bonus thing because I will. I will tell you the exact software that you need to use this. And it’s the software is either free or only 10 bucks a month. And I don’t make any money off of that software. So if you want to hear the software hopping into the bonus content.

Robert: Alright, so for our audience, once again, Zach should they want to reach you where we’re wrapping up the standards show guys. We’re going to have the 10 minutes extra on the bonus content, on video and on a podcast as well. So if people would like to find you or learn a little bit more about you, Zach, how would they go about doing that?

Zach: You can check us out online realestategrowthhackers.com. You can find us on Facebook at the same page. Real estate growth hackers, facebook.com/real estate growth hackers. And yeah, that’s probably going to be the easiest way. I’m really active on Facebook. If you message me, if you interact with our pages or our group, you will likely hear from me. So yeah that’s a great way to check us out and see what we’re up to.

Robert: Okay. So one of, one of your methods of communicating to your people is through a group. Like you have a Facebook group. Okay. All right. Excellent. All right. And for those intrepid real estate entrepreneurs who happen to be online with this right now, I am Robert Newman. I am the founder of Inbound REM. We are a real estate marketing company that focuses on building a WordPress websites and doing SEO for them. And doing lead generation in a slightly different, more inbound marketing related way. So if you want to learn more about me, go to my website and you can find out all that crap there. But more importantly than that, in my opinion, you’re going to find out a lot of like really strong reviews on a lot of technology that you might buy that has nothing to do with me. So if you’re looking for some information in general about real estate marketing or technology, that’s when you really should probably should check out my website.

 

 

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