#324 Mail-Right Show Effective Digital Marketing Advice For Real Estate Agents in 2022

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We discuss what we think will be the most effective digital marketing tools and strategies you the real estate agent or broker can use to promote and get quality leads in 2022Robert Newman: Welcome back, everybody hold onto your seats. We’re on episode number 324 of the Mail-Right podcast today. John and I are gonna talk about it, I’ve already got him laughing. I’m three seconds into the show.
Jonathan Denwood: It was just that introduction. I didn’t know what you were gonna say there. He is in a funny mood today, folks.

Robert Newman: I am, I had a really long call with like really two high-level digital professionals and it kind of got me a little bit buzzed in enthusiasm. We’re gonna invite them to the show. I’m gonna keep it a secret to who they are, but hopefully, they’ll accept. And then John and I will talk to them publicly with all of you and I’d be really excited for you to meet them because they were really cool. So, ladies and gentlemen though, this is episode number 324 last week, John kind of took the floor and talked about where the state of the real estate, what the market was, and he had a lot more about it, to be honest. Today’s episode number 324 is gonna be what digital marketing strategies are gonna work in 2022. And I’m actually gonna break this out into two categories. Okay for the people that are here. And since this is more my, well, that’s not necessarily true, but this is a strong area for me.

Jonathan Denwood: Well, I took up most of the time last week.

Robert Newman: There we go. That’s actually the truth. John’s being more honest than I am. The truth is he just is like, Hey, I took up all the time. Why don’t you take up most of the time? I’m like, okay, I can talk forever. Let’s do this.

Jonathan Denwood: I can testify for that listeners and viewers.

Robert Newman: Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can. All right. So buckle up buttercups here we go. We’re going to discuss digital like 2022, and I’m gonna break it into a couple of categories. The categories that everybody knows, you already know all these companies. And I’m just gonna kind of say, really few fast pros and cons. I’m gonna do this quick. And then I’m gonna tell you some of the cutting-edge stuff that I think is gonna work. I’m gonna cover the usual players. And then John has agreed to let me take the stage very briefly and discuss the strategies that I focus on, which are gonna work in any year very well all the time upmarket, downmarket doesn’t matter. And we’re gonna discuss some of those because they will work very well for you in 2022 if you decide to invest in ’em.

So first though, the usual players who are the usual players, direct marketing companies like KVCore, sync, real estate webmaster, boomtown Sierra interactive. Now Sierra interactive and real estate webmasters fall into an unusual category because you can do SEO on their site. But here is what we’re seeing in SEO unless you have a personal message attached to your site. These search sites that do really, really well for SEO, such as real estate webmasters and Sierra interactive are not performing as well on lead generation. You’re not getting as many leads nor as strong as leads. Hear me on that. So do you wanna necessarily make as big of an investment in those real estate search sites as you once did? That’s questionable.

The direct marketing companies that are out there. The only companies that are really probably going to continue to Excel in 2022 are the ones that are layering in ancillary technology. That right now mostly is Ylopo, but many other players are getting into the mix. So what do I mean by ancillary stuff like automated texting, automated checking of a lead? When they give you a secondary email address, what they can do is they can go out and check the email and then find out where the real email address is and give you a whole buyer profile. Even though technically the person tried to be clever and not give you their real information. That’s an ancillary, layer technology yet. Another one of the ones that Ylopo is using.

Now Ylopo has become overbooked. So please don’t listen to the show and go, oh, it’s all Ylopo. No, they, have huge momentum and most of their markets are crowded with these strategies that they’re using. So I’m starting to hear a lot of consumer feedback that they’re not as effective. That doesn’t mean that you can’t see a strong ROI. That doesn’t mean I’m not recommending ’em either. It just simply means that I want you all to be aware that this is a company that is now reaching maturity. Their strategies are reaching maturity, and many of them are not nearly as effective as they once were. Okay. So, you have lower quality websites, which everybody loves to, to bring up to me. And I understand there are literally 1.5 million of you who could be listening to the show and asking me questions about Wix, Squarespace and the list goes on. Anybody under the sub $200, easy agent pro, real geeks.

Of that entire stack, a real geek still remains a shining gem of a company. You can actually for the investment that you can make with them, they can succeed in direct marketing and they can succeed in SEO. They are one of those companies though that without the direction of their former founder is, a little harder to work with them than it used to be. So do I recommend ’em in 2022 until they go out of business I’m suspecting that in some way or another? I’ll be recommending them.

Jonathan Denwood: Can I ask, a quick question? Because that’s high praise from you, even though you quantified it a little bit from the next sentence, why do you think they shine out more than some of the other names that you were talking about?

Robert Newman: Mostly because it’s price versus value. That’s why they shine out. So they’re cheaper by far, they’re half the price of Sierra interactive. Who’s another very good company. They don’t have the diligence in development shops. They’re not trying to sell you and not like, like me Sierra, you want a really high-end sight? Sure, we can build it, but it’s gonna be 9, 10, $15,000, that’s a big number for 99% of the, well, 90% of the people listening to show. And for the other people, you have to justify the investment. Real Geeks is beautiful. $700, $200 a month, it’s reasonable. It’s in the reach of almost everybody listening to the show and it’s not gonna put anybody in major credit card debt. If they’re a brand new agent.

Jonathan Denwood: I’m sorry to interrupt. Obviously, you haven’t mentioned Mail-right? But the other factor

Robert Newman: I still don’t know well enough. I know all these other systems like the Back of my hand.

Jonathan Denwood: But another one that we kind of position ourselves is Agent on Fire. You’ve never really mentioned them at all. Don’t you rate ’em at all?

Robert Newman: Not really but here’s the thing there’s there are so many companies, Agent Fire, Realty NA. Like, I can go on and on and I can go on to ail- Right. And, here’s what I will say about Mail-Right John drives strong, crazy, but I’m always even-handed with everybody. Here’s what I like about Mail-Right? I still haven’t really deeply looked at the technology. John’s like development stack requirements to get up to the par of some of these systems would be very high. Maybe he’s achieved it. Maybe he’s not. I haven’t looked at it close enough, but here’s what I love about Mail-Right. That is true from my heart to anybody listening to the show. So you can still get John on the phone.

John is an incredibly well-versed WordPress developer. He’s deep, deep in that world. I strongly recommend that anybody who’s thinking of going in the direction and starting in the direction of building WordPress projects, you can talk to John if you’re in real estate, you can get some advice from him. Yes, he will talk to you about Mail-Right? Yes. He’ll show you Mail-Right if it works for you, then sign up for it. WordPress development is, complicated I wish it wasn’t, but it is. What plugins do you use? How do you build your site? Who do you have building your site? How do you support the site after it’s built? Do you have a way of checking the plugins? Are they being monitored managed and that’s without even going into the functionality that, you build to do real estate specifically? So all the things that I just mentioned before I even got into real estate, John is really, he’s a great resource.

Jonathan Denwood: So Thanks for that. I really appreciate it. But when it comes to Real Geeks, you know what species is the price point compared to some of the more advanced systems that you were talking about. Some of the other previous names you were mentioning, which have some very high ticket numbers as well, haven’t they, but for the price for what they offer and because of their background, you think of that lesser price group, Real Geeks kind of semi shines out for you. Would that be right?

Robert Newman: Yes. Again, it’s a value proposition. They have a reasonable CRM. You can text, you can do a lot of cool follow up out of it. And once again, you’re still spending less than $200 a month. It connects and does Facebook ads all for the sub $200 a month range its value for money. Most importantly, though, their websites are well structured and for SEO, for everything, they have skipped all the fancy graphics. They don’t even allow them to be built onto their platform. I’ve got a client that called me the other day, spending $5,000 a month and driving it into real geeks., website. But the real geeks’ website kind of looks like all the other sites, which is a pro and a con.

However, you stick with, like, if you, if, as a website developer, you keep telling your real estate clients, I don’t care what you tell me you want, I’m gonna build you a well-structured site. That’s gonna work well in the search engines and everything else. That is a very hard message John, many people will not buy from you when you give ’em that message as a real estate agent, which is fine. The ones that do get a well-structured website, that’s gonna work well in search engines. It’s not very pretty, It’s probably not what a branded or luxury agent’s gonna look at, but it is absolutely something that’s functional, which is gonna serve 50% of the real estate market. They have one of the broadest market appeals that is out there because.

Jonathan Denwood: Can I put this to you and we might have a little bit of time to discuss it before we go for our break. I have some real problems with this whole conversation, really. Not with you personally or anything or what, you’ve said. I just wanna explain why I have a problem with it. Because these sites, as you totally know because you really understand this and it’s the bread and butter of your business. In coding terms, it might be SEO friendly in some of the technical sides of SEO it might be friendly. But I also see websites divided between those that are designed for buyers and those that are designed for sellers in a way.

Without quality relevant content that really Google likes, they can be as technically proficient as they like, but they have no value to Google. That’s how I’m seeing it. I don’t know what your response to that attitude is. Now, without investment on why you’re writing content ought to be useful for people coming to your website. And then they might look at properties that you are displaying for your IDX feed. But without that value proposition, I find with a lot of these conversations and I find with a lot of real estate websites, that’s fundamentally missing, that core value proposition.

Robert Newman: Okay. So that’s gonna be the second half of the show because I’m gonna cover the stuff that we do, which is all about content and such, but I’m gonna answer the question halfway, and then we should probably go to break. The halfway answer is this so very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very few real estate websites are built with on-page technical SEO signals that are correct the right amount of links that guide to the right amount of pages that have the right titles that also connect in a kind of silo way like neighborhood city building that kind of way. Things like that, like an organized way that Google understands.

Because so few real estate sites are actually built in a technically SEO proficient way. I’m not talking about content, just talking about SEO. Google really likes the ones that are now there’s very few of those, as I’ve already said, that real geeks sierra interactive and real estate, the webmaster is, the only people that have the chops probably to do it on a consistent basis and they don’t necessarily do it. Union street media, and some other like very independent, small shops, they might have the ability me definitely. But we’re nothing like I don’t plug inbound REM because I’m not a competitor to any of these places that we’ve mention

Jonathan Denwood: You are like Mail- Right, You’re a boutique player, aren’t you?

Robert Newman: Right. So all of us in the boutique area, you might get somebody who could do a well-branded site and do it in a technically SEO proficient way. But these guys that are churning out, 20, 50,100 projects per month, maybe more who knows you and I don’t know, I don’t know. Like who knows how many they’re churning out? To do it at that scale, there’s only a small handful of players now could that change? Sure. There might be a product line that Placester has that they could build because I’m pretty convinced they probably could with the direction that they’ve gone. But that doesn’t mean like when you look at their lower end product John, like the same price range, like $140 a month, that’s their new pricing. I looked at their new pricing. You look at their new pricing, nobody’s getting a technically SEO sound site for $140 a month.
Jonathan Denwood: I wouldn’t have thought so.

Robert Newman: So, they have a concierge product though. That’s a much higher-end product that, attaches an account manager. And as I haven’t yet published my reviews, but I’m going to, when I do, I’m gonna say this, this level of performance that you’re gonna get probably is gonna come down to how skilled are the people that they’re putting you on the phone? Like, what kind of advice do you get? What kind of consultation do you get? How do you decide to build it?

Jonathan Denwood: I still get to the point, which you’re gonna cover in the next minute after we go for our break is yeah, can have a technically structured optimized, SEO, the structure, the navigation system, the meta-tagging all the technical SEO bits. But if there’s no real content on the bloody side, and you’re not using paid traffic to drive traffic to that web website, and you also don’t invest any time, effort, or money in the actual content, you’re still not gonna get any results. Are you?

Robert Newman: Well, that’s what I was gonna cover in the second half. But, let’s put the pin in here, ladies and gentlemen, we’re gonna come back, whatever you’re watching us on, please do us a favor, hit the thumb up, leave us a comment. John works so bloody hard on the show and I show up. So we should, absolutely positively be listening to you and hearing your thoughts, and getting what you want us to talk about. Cause John and I will just go on ad nauseum about whatever entertains us that particular day as those of you we love to keep coming back and, and probably realize, and we’re so grateful for you. So thank you very much. Stay tuned. Here’s what I’m gonna be covering in the second half. I’m actually gonna talk about my daily look. And for those of you who stay for bonus content today, I’ve got some gems for you because I’m gonna cover bleeding edge stuff that nobody knows about deadly serious, even John doesn’t.

Jonathan Denwood: There’s very, there’s very little that I know about actually. We’ll be back in a few moments folks.

Robert Newman: Welcome back to the Mail-Right? Show ladies and gentlemen. The second segment of the show is gonna be cover the show or talk about strategies that are gonna work in 2022. John and I got onto the big popular ones. We talked a bit about real geeks and then John, was starting to cover, hey, even if you have an SEO, technically proficient site, really, if you don’t have anything on it, that is, content-based. Is it really useful? That was effectively how I recognize the question. And I’m gonna say this. No is the answer. It’s not enough anymore because do these sites work? Do these technically proficient SEO sites work? Yes, they still do. Okay. They get you in front of organic search, both long-tail and primary keywords on Google.

Once people come to your site, though, I have to ask the question. I’m gonna ask John and John knows the answer cause he’s driving in this direction, but I have to ask the audience, the question, think of this to yourself. If what you’re driving them to is neighborhood searches. And all you have on your entire website, that’s personal to you is a bio. And I’ve seen hundreds of these. There’s no information about you. There’s just a real estate website and neighborhood searches, which might be a little bit more specific than a cheerleader, which is great. And maybe the recognition that you got on the search engines is in some markets still relevant. For most people though, when they’re looking at these search sites, they’re gonna do searches. They’re gonna use your site. They’re gonna find your site. They’re gonna maybe even register with your site. Now you have a lead, but did they make any personal connection with you? No, they did not. Did they learn anything interesting? No, they did not. And they’re gonna probably forget both you and the domain that they found as soon as they’re off it.

Now maybe if they come back to your site, five different times, you have a chance of them registering based upon brand recognition and having that lead be of value for those, you propped up this site, these kinds of sites for many years, I have no doubt that you’re still getting results. I will bet all of you listening to the show that you have watched those results in terms of lead quality and lead quantity dropping slowly over the last five years and now rapidly over the last two. That’s my bet for every single one of you listening to the show, you can tell me if I’m right or wrong, I’m guessing I am right.

Now to address your question, John, the answer to the question is today’s marketing in 2022 is about personalization, personalization in content personalization in the video, letting people know who you are, all effective marketing strategies are, heading in the direction. So John and I talk ad nauseum about the video. So needless to say, that’s still number one in the 2022 video, but it’s a personalized video. It’s not fancy listing presentations on your YouTube channel. it’s something that’s featuring you, letting people get to know you, but the same thing on your website, John, to answer the question, doing a deep content page is great and that is step one and it still does work. It doesn’t work as well as it used to. Text-based Content is not unfortunately drawing in the same kind of results as it used.

By the way, for everybody listening, this is what I’ve been doing for 16, straight years. I speak from this is my area of expertise. I speak from a great deal of data-based insight onto this subject. Jonathan Denwood: I just wanted to see if you agree with this Rob. I totally agree with what you just said, but I also link it with top quality. Can’t be done overnight, unless you’re gonna hire people like you to write it and know about. What I see is what you’ve just said, link to top quality, what I call evergreen content that has some real value. And we’ve had episodes where we’ve discussed evergreen content. So if you go to the Mail-Right YouTube channel and do in search for evergreen, it will come up. But that’s what I see in a video about the team about you, why you are different, and really top-quality evergreen content. What do you think about that, Rob?

Robert Newman: Well, that’s true. So in terms of strategies that are gonna work in 2022, the direction my entire agency is going for every single reason that we ha– I go where the market goes for everybody listening I quantify myself as an inbound marketer, but really what I love is telling good stories which is an element of inbound marketing. John is calling it evergreen content. It’s telling a compelling enough, or it’s giving a compelling enough answer on a subject. So real database, data, data, friendly format, friendly information on things like property tax. Because another thing about SEO and 2022 is formatting page formatting interactivity on the content page itself, like, can you interact with it? These are signals that Google has gotten really, really good at collecting.

It does play into the evergreen story though. Do you have all a really good content piece? You just, reorganize the formatting? It doesn’t really change the concept of writing a really good content piece. It just changes how you’re presenting it. Do you have a good infographic that summarizes all the points in the content piece so that when somebody’s looking at it, they’re like, oh, that’s an interesting point about this neighborhood or 50 famous people who’ve lived here I didn’t know that? Or 50 years ago, this neighborhood was established by a guy that, was the descendant of a slave owner or something.

Just, some really interesting, detailed facts that people didn’t know because it catches their attention. They pay much more attention once you have one aha moment on an evergreen page here, I’ll tell you all, something that is listening to of the show. A great evergreen page of content only needs to present one aha moment. You need to try to get it early on in the page of the content so that somebody goes, oh, I didn’t know that. And here’s what happens, John. They pay a hell of a lot more attention to the other 90% of what you wrote. They’re like you wake ’em up with something that they actually learned. The problem with the internet is we’re not teaching anybody anything anymore. We’re regurgitating what everybody else is already taught. That’s the problem.

So you have to have good researchers and educated writers who are really trying to give an unusual and excellent answer. Now, everybody listening to the show, if you do this with email, if you do this on your website, if you do this on a blog, if you do this on a YouTube channel, these are all inbound marketing strategies. And I hate to say– I’ll ring this bell until it shouldn’t be run anymore, which is, this is still the best, most profitable marketing strategy long term that you can pursue. Now in 2022 is the best year I’ve ever seen to get into it. Why? Because we’re in for some market shifts, content marketing, evergreen marketing, as you said, John, it tends to be more stable.

Jonathan Denwood: just to finish off and I just wanna get your response there. I call it evergreen content. This is content you’ve invested time, either your own time and your own money, or you’ve got somebody like Robert, or we do some of this at Mail-Right, but we do it at a, a lesser price level than what Robert team does it at. But investing– the reason why I say evergreen content is important, cause it’s possible when it comes to blogging, Rob blogging is great blogging– What I mean by blogging is regularly writing about things that your target audience would be interested in and would find value. And writing blogs still has enormous value. The reason why I don’t– unless you’re going to hire a team like yourself, or a copywriter that has experience of the real estate industry, they’re not cheap it.

If you’re not gonna hire ’em, you’re gonna have to do it yourself. And you’re gonna have to dedicate yourself, doing it the same time and just doing it once a month, probably ain’t gonna push the needle. So you’re gonna have to do a lot more regularly and try and fit it in with the rest of the bloody things as a real estate agent you are expected to do. And I don’t think most agents can do it. For understandable reasons, it’s the first thing that gets dropped because they’ve got other things to deal with. So I don’t think regular blogging unless you hire a team like yourself else, you are better off investing the money on really great evergreen content because I think that will pay dividends. And it’s realistic.

Robert Newman: I agree. There’s no disagreement. And in terms of investing in content, oftentimes like you end up getting out of it what you. want with us it’s not so much, I don’t do a blog of post month, which kind of funny that you mentioned that, but, but quality here’s one thing that we do agree on. I don’t know that I agree on quantity. Once a month would be an aim, but here’s the critical factor in that thinking you, if you blog a lot, you can get lucky and hit a topic that maybe there isn’t, like a lot of strong results in. And so your content doesn’t have to be quite as good. And so you can back in some traffic. That’s, a great reason to blog more frequently.

If you think that you have the skill and ability to have a good shot at ranking each and every single time you write something because you’ve spent so much time on it, it’s high quality. You’re gonna send all the signals in such as manual outreach, backlinking, maybe a social push onto social channels. Maybe even you add a YouTube video onto the same post. So now you have three or four different levels of signals. Your images are properly optimized. That’s another level of signals. So now you’ve got five levels of signals into a high-quality piece of content. That to me is the better investment. It’s quality, focus, concentration on what you’re trying to say. End users in my experience and John, we may disagree on this, but I’ve noticed a proliferation of people paying less and less attention to s**t that’s being put on the internet. Like they’re just not it’s you really either have to set yourself apart. Or in my opinion, you probably shouldn’t be bothered.

So, that’s just an opinion I wanna stay what that opinion is based on. It’s not enough to get somebody, to browse a piece of content. We need to make an impact. We need to get them to pay attention. We need to at least get them to watch your video, the personal connection bit. Because if we get all that going and we get that personal connection, guess what everybody listening to the show, I’m going to say something that is so contrary to what we all believe. One of the big things that are gonna happen in 2022? People are gonna use their d**n phones to call you a lot more. Your phone’s gonna ring a lot more. Believe it or not. Some of this digital stuff is driving people towards a phone call. Now there are lots of reasons for it. We could do a whole nother show for all those reasons.

Jonathan Denwood: I totally agree with you. But I think, I think what is, and just to finish off before we go on to bonus content is I notice with my other business. I’ve got Mail-Right and I’ve got another business folks, is you get, you get the person that hits your website that, looks at the home page. And if your proposition, isn’t what they’re looking for, they bounce, you got other people that might spend five minutes, like three, four minutes looking at some of the crucial pages. And then they bounce. They’re probably not going to come back.

Now the person that’s come to you, cuz they’ve read about you or they listened to a podcast or they’ve seen you on local radio or they’ve been following you on Instagram. Doesn’t matter what it is. And they come, they know what you are about. And it’s come to the time where they’re interested in your service, they come to your website. Those types of people when I look at my Google analytics, look at every freaking page of the website. They crawl in every part of it. They know the bloody– I’ve had customers that signed up for my services, Rob that pointed out grammar mistakes to me. And I’m not good at grammar cause of my dyslexia, but I have everything copied, read, and checked over. But they still find things or they find contradictions deep in the frequently asked question section that nobody has visited in donkey years. They’ve literally read every freaking word on that website. Rob, would you agree with that?

Robert Newman: Oh, Totally. I had a client the other day that came in and, and read my terms and conditions and pointed to about 50 different errors and inconsistencies in it. And I’m just like, who are you? Like who reads the terms? So yes. I agree with you. So, ladies and gentlemen, this has been an interesting first half. We’re gonna go to the second half. We’re gonna take a–

Jonathan Denwood: Well Bonus content

Robert Newman: Bonus Content. Sorry, my bad John’s right. Bonus content. I’m gonna cover, this is guesswork, bleeding-edge s**t. Okay. But it’s gonna be its bleeding-edge that I’m using that I’m looking at that I think is gonna not just move the needle, but destroy the needle, and it’s gonna be very uncommon that anybody in real estate is gonna hear me. I’m gonna tell it you anyway. And then you’re gonna come to me and pay me a small fortune to get me to do the same thing for you. For those two people that might be proactive and listen to the show and really hear me on this. Maybe you check these services out without a Robert or John and you go out and these two, these things I’m about ready to discuss. They could change your business. So stay tuned.