#296 Mail-Right Show We Talk About Video Marketing

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What Are The Lead Generation Online Tactics That Are Still Working In 2021?

Robert Newman: Welcome back to the Mail- Right Show Ladies and gentlemen, this is a show where we talk about real estate marketing and everybody is in luck today because you get me and Jonathan talking about, what to do in a super overheated market. We’re going to skip around. We’ve decided that we’re just going to kind of riff a bit because we talk about marketing, just the two of us all the time, we are having a conversation before we slip the camera on. And, we’re just going to have some conversations that are coming up for us and our clients. And we’re going to share this information with all of you. Those lucky enough to turn into this episode.

Its June 17th is we’re doing the recording. It’s the height of an overheated real estate market. I’ve got clients telling me they’re getting as many as 30, 40, and 50 offers per property that they have listed. Jonathan and I were talking about how do you continue to get leads to get results inside this kind of overheated marketplace? So, Jonathan, I’m going to kick it over to you too, to maybe serve up the first question or two, while I get this in front of my Facebook and my other audiences. So why don’t you go ahead and, and tee up one of your comments that we were talking about before the show?

Jonathan Denwood: Well, I think in this market, I think it really depends where you are in the market. as a real estate agent If you got some existing clientele and you got revenue coming in, I think this is the time to really look at the medium long-term I think, also if you’re looking to get some more quality lead generations, probably the more traditional methods of farming your database, your existing database is probably where you’re going to get the biggest return at the present moment that are the relationships you’ve already established, and you should have a database and you should be marketing to that database consistently and effectively, and really concentrate in on that database at the present moment and redoubling your outreach to data database is probably, you’re going to get the biggest return from that at the present moment.

Also, look at your online marketing strategy, the medium to long term medium as we’ve been discussing quite regularly, it’s video, on the long-term how you’re going to build the value of your website to your target a local audience, if that’s based on geography or it’s based on some other kind of niche we’ve talked about over the coming months, that you shouldn’t try and appeal to everybody because, in the end, you end up appealing to nobody. You’re just another agent in a mass of local agents. So I think there are some of the key things we could be talking about. What do you feel Robert?

Robert Newman: I would say, okay. I think that one of the things that, I mean, I do agree with you, so database marketing, relationship marketing, and I think there’s a lot of people who listen to the show. As a matter of fact, I forgot to tell you, there’s a young lady here, who contacted me from the show. One of, the few times that somebody that is listening to us and she’s been listening to us for years you and me collectively, she tuned in right around the time I joined their show and has stayed an audience member the entire time. She had a fascinating story where she was doing geographic farming for 10 straight years. The first thing that she ever did out of the gate started dropping mail pieces to the same neighborhoods.10 years later, she gets tons and tons of business from those neighborhoods.

That’s certainly one way to go. It’s not very helpful for most real estate agents you don’t have the time or the patience to do 10 years with geographic farming. You and I also spend most of our time talking about digital marketing. And I think that one of those things that like, I’m going to repeat to you right now live for our podcast audience because Jonathan asked me the question prior to the show going live. He asked me, how are my clients doing? How are our campaigns performing? And we do a long-term type of lead generation. And here’s the thing most of the time, like I’m spending a tremendous amount of time and effort as a business owner, trying to reach out to my clients and get them to do video and connected into hyper-local pages.

I’m also trying to get, I mean, encouraging them to increase the amount of information that we have about an area, like how, how much we’ve written, are these strategies working as well as they did in a non-overheated market? No, they’re not. Are they still working? Yes, they are. Especially with clients of mine that have done a lot of videos. Clients of mine who’ve done a lot of videos have proven to be fairly bulletproof as it relates to other types of marketing that I’m exposed to. I have many other business owners I have John. I have many, many other people that I talked to that do a lot of different types of lead generation inside the real estate space. And a lot of those are getting hit right now. So when John and I were talking about it and he saying, well, if it was you, what would you do, do you do listing lead generation? If I was doing direct marketing, I said, somewhere in there, I’d probably try to leverage video, which is something that, companies like [Inaudible 06:10] have done.

They’re not doing custom videos. They’re doing, it’s important to mention to everybody that they’re listing market service, which is where they do a video to the listing. It’s an automated thing. It’s not, custom video, John, of like you or me talking to the camera. And I feel like that would be more effective. I just know that with a marketing company, with thousands of clients, they can’t actually probably put that into their process. So why local can’t really do custom video, which makes an even better option for guys like you and me, because we’re still small. We still deal with our clients individually, so we can get video and they can’t. So that makes it one of those things that you can do that would still yield results. That the big voice can’t do, you’ve got a fairly big field that you would not be able to be competed with. And so it would be, that would be my thought.

We talk about video incessantly. You’re talking about database marketing and, and niches and things like that. And I think all those things are incredibly important. I have one thing that I’d like to mention to you, which is, here’s the way I view overheated markets. And I want the audience to hear too. And thank you, John, for just give me a chance to say it to everybody. Overheated markets. There is a big problem, both as a business owner, that’s me and John doing real estate marketing. And as a consumer of the services that we sell, there’s a big problem for all of us. That is, this is a very difficult marketplace to try to make a gut decision about marketing when the market itself is not normal and not, not only is it not normal, it’s way, way, way, overheated. It’s just way overheating. I haven’t seen anything like this since 2006 it’s way overheated.

So what do we do for those that can afford it? In my opinion now, now is the time you can’t make short-term decisions that are great. There’s no way to do it. There’s just not, there’s no way for you to make rock-solid short-term decisions because the market is too unstable. Whatever you’re deciding on might very well be different 90 days from now. We don’t know. I don’t know. John doesn’t know anybody that says that they know is just, they’re just not being honest with themselves. So what we want to do is we finally want to take the time and look at longer-term things, and how can you do that? What could you do? You could really tune into stuff that John and I have been saying for a long time, you could do high-quality content-based messaging, such as beefing up your, your bio on a website that you have with a video bio of yourself, starting to focus on the long-term digital presentation that you have to redo all your profiles from all your channels, such as, LinkedIn and things like that.

Takedown your Zillow profile because they are going to be removing it anyway. So you might as well, get used to that idea. And so what do you think about those things john? I’m kind of on one, but, but you, we talked a little bit about this before the show and you agreed that it was worth mentioning. So how do you feel about that?

Jonathan Denwood: Well, I think, yeah, basically, but I always try and place myself in the shoes of my clientele and we’ve got to face facts unless you are a well-established real estate agent or brokerage it’s commission only. So there’s always that pressure to get the next lead. Isn’t it, to get the next commission check, just, it comes with the territory, but you, you really, I think it’s really where your focus is. And if you want to break out of, of the mouse wheel as I call it, you say you’re trying to get leads and then you do get some leads and then you’re busy processing and working the clients, or you stop marketing. So the leads stop coming in, and then you have the market. Then you get somebody that is- it’s a Ferris wheel.

If you want to get out of that you really got to have a medium to long-term strategy. And that’s what you’re talking about. Isn’t it because otherwise you just get into that and that’s the right to get in, actually burn out basically. So about video one of the things I’m interested in, you were talking about, the company rocket and this video platform. Can you explain to the listeners and viewers what they’re trying to do with that?

Robert Newman: With rocket listing?

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah.

Robert Newman: Okay. So there, they’re basically taking a listing and they’re, they’re like converting, digital assets such as images and things like that into a video they’re taking digital assets that they can generate automatically, and then they’re turning them into a video. So that somebody can press the play button, and then watch a video scroll across. And of course, they then interposed those static, digital, like listing images and things like that with actual, like agents commentary on there. So its video but it’s kind of low quality generic video, but, but you do get to hit the play button and look at it at a video. So it’s called listing rocket. And I haven’t looked at it in like a year or two John, and maybe they’ve improved the technology since the last time that I saw it. But that’s what listing rocket was when I reviewed, Y local for my website.

Jonathan Denwood: So it was with your own client base, are there any kind of, in the past six months, memorable, video clients that your, clients, are there any kind of memorable case studies of particular videos that have impressed you and have gotten some traction or results? Or are there any insights that you can give to the listeners and viewers around that

Robert Newman: If anybody has the time and the energy, and they want to check somebody out, they should go to homes of Fort Ben, homes of Fort ben.com.

Jonathan Denwood: Great show the links in our chat, and then I can make sure it’s in the show notes.

Robert Newman: Sure. And the agent’s name is Brett Wallace. Brett really is become, he’s become like every good marketer, in my opinion, they need a case study. They need a client. That’s going to take every single thing that they say that, that you should do, and then they should do it. And then you get to see what the results are out in the real world, right? Either that or you got to do it yourself, you got to go out there and sell real estate and prove that your theories are effective. Well, Brett is that guy for me, he’s really leveraged video a year and two months ago we got, we did our first video. And now he’s got a channel that probably has 50 to a hundred thousand views. And, I don’t know what the numbers are, John, because he does a lot of videos these days.

He does probably one new video every single week. He’s created a second video channel that is focused on lifestyle updates for Fort Ben. But here’s what I do know the last time that I had a conversation with them about lead generation. He said he was getting one to two calls a day off his YouTube channel. And we’ve not yet talked about what the ROI is specifically. We know the ROI is good or decent. I think we’re moving very quickly in the territory of high and so good or decent to me, everybody who’s listening to the show is like two to three to one return on whatever the investment is that’s being made. Like that’s because that’s about average across all the real estate marketing platforms that you can look at now, anything that’s above average or high is anything past three or four to one.

If you’re doing eight to one in terms of return, you’re literally doubling most services that you could sign up with. So that’s great. And if you’re doing 12 to 1, 20 to 1, 30 to 1, now you’re in rare stratospheric areas where very few real estate agents ever get a chance to see that kind of return on marketing dollars. I would say that Brett’s probably an average moving into good is where he’s at. I don’t know for sure though, John because we haven’t sat. We’ve been really busy rebuilding a site and refocusing on distributing the videos that he already causes inside of a new website. I can tell you that despite the fact that he’s in a suburb of Houston, that the effort’s been wildly successful, that the return on both the website, the lead-generation return, it’s all been very strong.

I don’t think it’s oh, Robert Newman’s this miraculous web developer dude. I think that what’s happened is I have a good partner on the other end of my relationship who’s who understands what kind of market he’s in is making the extra effort to make sure that he’s being competitive and the combination of, yes, we built him a good website and I have a good partner is allowing him to defeat the odds in terms of his results. And he’s doing it with the video, he’s doing it with the right website, he’s doing it because he added additional verbiage to the website that makes his neighborhood pages more useful. There’s so much there, but if anybody wants to see a good example of somebody who’s doing a f**king great job and is doing both a short-term and a long-term strategy, that’s the example I have for you.

Jonathan Denwood: It is a really nice website. We need to go for a break Robert but maybe when we come back maybe we can discuss some of the key things about what you did on this website how does that sound?

Robert Newman: Sure, sure.

Jonathan Denwood: Can we go for the break Robert?

Robert Newman: Yeah. I’m sorry. We’re going to go for our break. Everybody stay tuned and listen to the show. You can’t see the website question, but we’ll do our best to verbally walk you through it. We really appreciate you being an audience member of the mail right show and, be right back.

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Robert Newman: Welcome back to the Mail-Right show. It’s episode number 294 or is it 95?

Jonathan Denwood: 95 Robert.

Robert Newman: It’s episode number 295. We’re looking at a couple of, trends beating, real estate websites. In this particular case, we’re using one, an example of one of my clients, who is leveraging a video and doing it in a very, very, very compelling way. John asked me to, kind of show how the site works. So when we’re leveraging video, one of the reasons I liked videos. So like if you have a clever web developer, one of those things that you could do is you can leverage video in numerous ways. So when you leverage it on the neighborhood the page, which is probably what everybody would expect. But, on the places that we have, actually, K is not the right place. Hold on a second here.

We haven’t done K yet for video guys. So if you’re wondering why I just backed out and we’d done Richmond, Richmond is a beast, in terms of cities in, Texas, these are all Houston servers, and this is what I’m talking about. So we’ve got video intermixed with, like a site and all the little maps that you’ve got there. That’s cool, but that’s not. What’s generating conversion that will generate an audience member to come here that will give us some SEO juice, all this stuff that you’re looking at, it will not can do a conversion right now in Today’s market. Used to work just fine this little page that you’re looking at here, but what really drives people to make the call is seeing a video where somebody has done the drive-through. Of the neighbourhood, sorry, it’s really loud, of the neighborhood. And then you, let me get this sound. There we go. And then the notes inside the video, this is what gets people to call is this the video getting introduced to Brett. It’s just four minutes. He’s driving around. He shows the neighbourhood and he’s done this 50, 60 times on his website.

Jonathan Denwood: I just want to say if you’re listening to, this you’ll be able to see the website and what Robert is talking to by going to the mail, right YouTube channel, and watching this episode of there. But, I think everything you’re saying is we’ve consistently been talking about this over the past year haven’t we?

Robert Newman: We really have, and I think it’s important that that, I’ve looked at lots of different marketing options. Like you’ve got your high-quality funnel-type lead generation systems. And the complaints that I had about lead funnels have all come to roost for the people that are using them. The problem with like high impact, low value, funnel strategies is that when the market goes wonky up or down like it’s really good or it’s really bad. It doesn’t matter which funnels stopped working. And, and there are hundreds of people that are listening to this show right now who are nodding because you’ve been using funnel systems without realizing that you’re using them. Pretty much every marketing company out there that you care to mention is using some kind of funnel systems, such as Y local and the big ones.

They’re all using these. We drive you to a destination, the destination is supposed to capture information. And then once your information is captured, we market the hell out of you on the backend. Well, that’s great. Unless there’s something weird going on in the market and which case stops working. And then you’re, sitting here paddling in the water. Now, fortunately for all of you listening, the market is so nuts that probably you still do have buyers. You probably still, you may not have sellers, though. Very few of you probably have as many listings as you would like. John has been telling me that’s a conversation he’s been having a lot. And blissfully, I’m not having that conversation as much with my clients, tends to be the strong organic strategies, kind of generate both kinds of leads, both, both seller and buyer leads.

More importantly, what, what you’re doing or what I focus on is starting conversations with people. And that’s what I think that most marketing companies should be trying to do is instead of getting a lead per se be like, here’s a valuable piece of information. Let’s start a conversation cause if all of you out there can get a conversation going, you have a chance to explore the relationship and find out if there’s an opportunity for sale or a listing, which I know is everybody’s preferred way of doing business.

Jonathan Denwood: You just made a really good point there. And it’s a point that we probably haven’t stressed because I think as, as if you want to have any type of future in the real estate industry, as a real estate agent with a franchise brokerage with on your own, whatever it is with one of the virtual brokerages you’re there to build a business and blah, blah, blah, but you’re there. You got to add the mindset of educator you, got to provide information about your area or a niche in the area that would be of more value to your target audience than the other people would on the right track. I think I am I, Robert?

Robert Newman: I believe so. Yes. I think that’s what we’re all looking for. John. I think in the digital era, even as we’re coming out of the pandemic, people are just looking for like, pretend you and I are mechanics or Toyota mechanics. Right. And we fixed Toyotas. Right. But in a perfect world, not only do you want to know what the quality of this Toyota mechanic is, but we do kind of want to know what their level of knowledge about Toyotas is like were you trained by Toyota. Were you certified that’s basic stuff, though? If you walk in and you talk to the mechanic who says I’ve fixed 10,000 Toyotas of every kind brand shape, model, and form and built one from the ground up and start, you have a conversation with them, you’re going to be like, oh, you probably can fix my Toyota Prius. Do you know what I mean?

That’s what our job is, as digital information Purveyors is we’re, supposed to give people an understanding of what our history is, and if we don’t have a good enough history, then it’s our job to go out and educate ourselves, become an expert, and then share that information with other people. I love the idea that all human beings are just inherently teachers. I think that I don’t think I’m alone in that John. I mean, we tend to, in our marketing, try to skip the learning part, like skip the dissemination of actual information of value, because we want to save that little, like many, many marketing systems say, I’ve got this great thing. I’ve got this great thing. And then you’re, you’re there. And you’re like, you think that they have a great thing, but their whole system is supposed to get you to pay like $40 to learn whatever the great thing is. And then you discover it’s a five-minute thing. It’s a two-minute thing that somebody put through together in a book and you just paid $40 for that answer. Have you ever had that happen to you?

Jonathan Denwood: More regularly than I would like.

Robert Newman: So, I think that summed up the way that you handle overheated market, is you go against the flow, you give out a lot of good information, wherever you can, either on a PDF for some kind of place on your website, a video that’s connected. Like if you’re going to do a funnel-like, like John and other people do, then, then if John calls you and asks you to do like a high-quality video, or like a couple of minutes long video, do the video, everybody that’s listening to the show, find the time, do the video, like take the time to improve the quality of your own marketing systems. And then you might have a chance of competing in the market that we’re in today.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. Every new client that approaches us really, unless they’re prepared to utilize their, iPhone and do some personalized Videos, which we use in the Facebook marketing campaigns. I tend, not to want to work with them because I know it’s not really going to pan out that well, you know what I mean, Robert?

Robert Newman: I do. I don’t want to take on clients who aren’t going to do video either. As a matter of fact, typically I verbally I say that we won’t, I’ve hired on extra resources to follow up with my clients. So that we’re doing our job as a, as a marketing company and touching these people all the time saying, do this, do this, please, please, please do this. Because, and I absolutely say, I don’t really want you as a client unless you’re going to do video. Now that doesn’t mean I’d get video though. Unfortunately, I wish it did, but some clients have hired me and proceeded to have the best year of their 20 or 30 year career. And what are you going to, what can you say to people who are writing more business than they’ve ever written in their entire life? That’s like, okay I’ll be here when you have time. It’s like, that’s all I can say. ,

Jonathan Denwood: Now you got you- We’re coming to the end of the podcast. But, you got Google analytics up so yeah. You got your Google analytics up.

Robert Newman: I forget we were recording the screen

Jonathan Denwood: In the bonus content, do you, do you want to go through some of the things, people have got to know about when it comes to Google analytics? Do you want to quickly go through that?

Robert Newman: Sure why not? Are we actually, are we actually at the end, should we,

Jonathan Denwood: Well, we can keep on sharing the screen, which they can see on the Mai-Right YouTube channel with the bonus content, but wrap up the podcast part of the show for us. Robert,

Robert Newman: Aye, Aye captain. All right. So ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Thank you so very much. Once again, I’m going to ask for both me and Jonathan, if you’re watching this on YouTube thumbs up or like the video, leave us a comment. If you’re listening to this on apple iTunes, please go to the Apple iTunes store. It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass to navigate it. But if you know how to do it, please go to the store and leave us a review on the show. I had just found out that some of you have been listening to the show for years and yet John and I don’t really know. We know that our audience count is going up. That’s what we know. And we’re really grateful to all of you, every single person we’re super grateful or super humbled that you-

Jonathan Denwood: Well, actually, because the podcasting space in real estate is actually getting very more competitive. I’ve noticed that some of our former guests and some other major people have got more serious about podcasting in the recent few months. But, our audience is still growing. So, I’m very thankful for that, Robert.

Yeah. And so am I, I’m, I’m grateful that you’re tuning into us and that you think we’ve got something to say, but do us a favor though. Don’t leave us hanging, leave us some comments, tell us what you do or don’t like about the show. If you’d like us to talk about something specific, if you feel like John and I focus on any one thing too much, we don’t know that. So just do us a favor and leave us a comment somewhere so that we can figure that out.

Jonathan Denwood: The places to do that are on the mail, right? Facebook page or the mail, right? YouTube channel. Just give us some feedback folks.

there you go. All right. With no further do tune into the bonus content. I’m going to be reviewing one of my clients. John said, what am I looking at an analytics site? Honestly, pull the screen up by habit. I always look at analytics, but actually more than I look at websites. And so I was just, anyway, I will share with the audience, what I’m looking at as a professional marketer and what I’m excited about and what might need more work. Alright. Thank you, everybody. Oh, John, do you want to, do you want to tell people how to get in touch with you?

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. Just go to the mail right website. There you can. There’s a chatbot there that goes straight to me. Or there’s a phone number and you can give me a call and we have a chat.

Jonathan Denwood: Lovely. And guys, and gals. If you want to learn anything about me, you can go to inbound, rem.com. We’re in the process of redesigning the website. I’d love to hear what you think of the new one. All right. Thanks, everybody. Catch you the next time.