#140 Mail-Right Show With The Show’s New Co-Host Robert Newman Of InboundREM

In this show we going to be introducing to you the show’s new co-host Robert Newman of InboundRem We also going to be discussing the present situation connected to what are the best value online technologies connected to getting you quality sell and buyer leads in 2018.

Who’s this Robert Newman guy?

RobeNewman Of InboundREMIt is likely I am the most experienced Real Estate online marketing consultant in the U.S.

From 2007 to 2017 I’ve had an estimated THREE THOUSAND one on one online marketing consultations with Real Estate Professionals from all over the U.S in every sort of real estate vertical. These conversations have focused on Websites, Social Media, IDX, Lead Generation, CRM’s, Local Marketing, SEO, Blogging and of course Real Estate Lead Generation is a recurring favorite.

From 2007 to 2014 these conversations would occur while I was a sales contractor representing Agent Image and/or imFORZA. In both cases, I wore many hats(mostly senior or leadership roles) but one of my primary responsibilities was always consumer-facing (meeting real estate agents and brokers especially high end or well known real estate professionals). Here is a SMALL handful of my more visible clients.

Here’s a Full Transcription of Our Interview With Robert  

Jonathan: Welcome back folks to the Mail-Right Real Estate show. It’s episode 140. Folks, we’ve got a new co-host who’s going to be trying out to be my co-host for a few weeks. And then, if I don’t put him completely off, hopefully, he will decide to become a semi-permanent feature of our show. I’ve got the great pleasure of introducing Robert Newman of inboundREM. Like to introduce yourself to the audience, Robert?

Robert: I’d love to. So thanks, Jon. I’m thrilled to be a part of the podcast. I’m certain that you’ll probably fire me. So we’ll make it about 190 times I’ve been fired in my career. But I’m thrilled to be joining you for a few weeks at a minimum and I’m looking forward to meeting some interesting people and talking about Online Marketing and what they’re doing with it and how it affects Real Estate. I am the founder of my own Real Estate Marketing company called Inbound Real Estate Marketing as you mentioned. But my experience for the last 10 years has been managing and running sales teams for very well established Real Estate technology companies that a lot of our listeners or your listeners will have known, like Agent Image or . And I’m really really looking forward to hearing how the audience or the people out there in world kind of perceive Real Estate technology and what they’re interested in asking in terms of questions because I’ve never quite done this format before. So I’m really looking forward to this. It’s going to be fun.

Jonathan: Oh, that’s great. As we said in last week’s episode, Thomas has decided to go off and do his own thing. Like I said in last week’s show, with Robert’s help, I want to focus the show a lot more on Real Estate technology, still have guests. But if we don’t have a guest, I want to have a technology feast with Robert. I don’t think that would have been Thomas’ cup of tea. But we parted company quite friendly. So let’s get started on our feast Robert.

Robert: Sure.

Jonathan: So basically, how do you see the landscape of Real Estate Online Marketing at the present moment? There’s a few players that we’ve all heard of. You’ve blogged extensively, I can’t talk this morning, God knows, extensively about this.

Robert: And that’s different from every other morning, how? No, I just kidding. All right. 

Jonathan: It depends on how much coffee I’ve had. 

Robert: Fair enough.

Jonathan: Tea in the morning. Coffee in the afternoon. I’m not on my third cup actually because we’re doing this a little bit earlier. So basically, how do you see the landscape at the present moment in 2018?

Robert: I see it differently than the way everybody else sees it. So I see two big topics that almost everybody brings up which is video, YouTube’s place inside Real Estate Marketing because I get that question literally almost every day because I still take calls for my business. And then, I also see a lot of people talking about and I’m also researching deeply the concept of how voice searches are going to impact search in general. And because Real Estate is such a mobile business, it actually impacts this particular vertical a lot more than other verticals. Though the interesting thing is that since voice searches are very much a product of SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Like the same things that you’d have to do to optimize your site are the same things that would make you place well inside of voice search. I discovered that it’s really a topic that very few Real Estate professionals are prepared to talk about. So it’s not that they don’t understand it’s important, they’re bringing it up to me. But when I explain to them what is required to perhaps rank in voice search, they seem to be thrown back a bit and I’m really looking forward through this show and any other avenue that I can because voice search is so bleeding edge, I probably am not going to blog about it. So I’m looking forward to this medium to talk about it and other things that are just a little more bleeding edge that I can’t really justify spending the time on in terms of writing an article about it.

Jonathan: Yeah. I totally agree with you there. Voice search increasingly is becoming important. The three areas which I think there’s some real interest for Real Estate professionals trying to look to get more quality leads, these three areas online, voice, you just mentioned, video, but more around live video on Facebook, YouTube. And then, Messenger on Facebook and what some people are doing on Messenger and also text messaging. But I personally don’t like companies texting me on my phone really. So I’ve got a little bit of obliviance to that. So those three areas I’ve just mentioned, do you think I’m correct that they might be three areas that might be most interesting in 2018?

Robert: Yeah. I think they’re all worth talking about. Most interesting, as a Marketer, when somebody starts throwing around like, “What is most interesting?”, I’m always, like I just did right now, I’m always inclined to look up the actual statistics and see. For me, it’s all about search and driving traffic from one place to the other. So I’m always looking at my numbers, looking at my statistics. So you’re saying text messaging. I think that text messaging is an important part of a response driven Marketing campaign. But I think it’s being automated a lot. I think there’s a lot of good AI programs out there, bots, things like that. So I think it is, which means that I agree with what you said. I do think we should be discussing it on both the show and in life. But I think it’s one of those things that is less and less impactful as it becomes a saturated marketing technique. You’ve called that out yourself. You said, Hey, I’m getting a lot of texts”. I ignore texts on my phone and you’re saying you don’t like them. So we’re two people who are business owners who are, our clients are the same way. They’re Real Estate agents. Their numbers are published. So, of course, they’re getting overwhelmed with texts.

Jonathan: Well, I don’t actually get a lot. I get about two or three companies that I’ve got subscriptions with that consistently send them to me and I wish they wouldn’t. I wish they could find some other ways to communicate. I think for initial touch, it’s fine. You know, if somebody signed up something and you send them one. And if they don’t respond to it, your automation system should have the intelligence not to keep bombarding them. I think it’s when you’ve got a system that doesn’t have that intelligence and they keep sending ones and it’s obvious you’re not interested. That’s when it becomes painful.

Robert: Right, right. Well, I would think that it would be interesting to see somebody weigh in on, give me a second, I’m posting our Facebook live link on my Facebook page here. Let’s see here, publish. There we go. I would be interested to hear like what Real Estate people say about receiving text messages. But I have to think, I have to believe that text messaging in terms of a Real Estate agent is very important. I certainly coach my clients as part of their response method to text. And all the big CRMs like Real Geeks and things like that, they include an automated text system within their product. So it’s definitely a part of, so yes, I guess it’s going to be a part of our dialog for the year. I wish it didn’t have to be though. I guess if I had to say something, I would say, I wish that it wasn’t necessarily necessary.

Jonathan: Do you think there’s more fundamental things that a Real Estate is looking to build up leads from their online activity can be doing that they should be focusing more on?

Robert: Oh God. That’s the easiet thing in the world and I’m going to get up on every platform that I’ve got and keep saying the same thing which is hyperlocal video that is uploaded to YouTube. That’s what I’m going to keep saying. And honestly, what we’re doing right now. Like how you utilize video is going to be unbelievably important. I had a conversation with the Kristoff too who’s one of the nation’s most influential Real Estate agents that’s on social media and he does a lot of 1-minute vignettes that he uploads to 16 different platforms, one of them being YouTube. But I think that that idea, taking a phone camera for a Real Estate agent and then recording something, something brief and then uploading it to their Facebook, to their Instagram, to their YouTube, I think it’s insanely powerful and I think everybody should be doing it.

Jonathan: Yeah. I totally agree with you there, 100 percent. Hyperlocal, you know, your video, your blog post, it’s something that the real big players cannot compete with you because they just cannot for technical reasons. It just wouldn’t be profitable to do it. The other area quickly I want to go through before we go for our break, I just want to see if you agree. I’ve surprised with my journey with Mail-Right and with the Real Estate agents that have been my clients is the amount of agents, they’ve survived the first year. They’re into their second year of their career as a Real Estate professional. They’ve managed to survive that first terrible year in a way. But they’re still not building their database. They still have no methodology to build up their database and we’ve had to help them with the Mail-Right coaching and just supporting them. Your number one thing is to get leads, to get commission checks. But secondly, is to build your database. And I’ve just been amazed at the amount of agents that don’t really focus on that. Is that something that I should be surprised or is it just the people I’ve been talking to or is that just a general thing?

Robert: I think that Real Estate agents and brokers, they have a very hard time focusing on anything that isn’t going to result in revenue today. When you’re talking about a long-term investment, many many Real Estate agents and brokers actually have the ability to build up a database but they essentially don’t even track the information that they’re paying for, that they’re collecting through, let’s call it Zillow. So they get something sent to them, they go, “Oh, this is junk”, because they can’t get a hold of it and then they throw it away. Whereas that could be a valuable lead. It could be you or me and we just don’t want to talk to them. We know exactly what they’re doing. We don’t want to necessarily speak to them. But I’m qualified. I can buy a house. So why would you throw my name away? If you maybe start sending me some kind of information that might interest me, I am still a viable prospect because, at some point, I registered with some form of Marketing that’s connected to you. But they don’t nurture it or they think that the fact that their customer gets property updates is “nurturing”. It’s really not. So Database Marketing is something that, yes, I encounter it all the time where people aren’t doing it. Yes, they should be and it always surprising to me that there isn’t more of it.

Jonathan: Yeah. That’s the one thing I’ve been looking back on my 2 and a half years is that’s been the biggest surprise to me is the total lack, I see as kind of 101 of Real Estate Marketing in 2018 is getting yourself out there and building up your database. They’re the two major things. After that first year you’re still in the hustle, well, the hustle will always be there but you’ve really got to be moving, haven’t you?

Robert: Yeah. No doubt about it. And I think it goes into the next number of years. I’m getting agents calling me that are in the business 2 or 3 years and they don’t even have a single consistent lead generation funnel set up and that’s the first step before you start worrying about what you do with your list. It’s, “How do I generate names for my list?”. And a lot of Real Estate agents and brokers, I would say upwards of 50 percent, if I had to guess, don’t even have a strategy to do that. So they’re struggling with just figuring out how to get a name to start with. By the time that they get it, they then have to do something with it because they probably made an investment. They may have made two or three bad investments.

So in many cases, I think it’s pure exhaustion. It’s like, “Oh my God. Am I not at the Digital Marketing finish line yet? You mean there’s more things I’m supposed to do”. And then, they get on the phone with somebody like you or me and then, we’re like, “Well, yeah. You should nurture that lead and then maybe set up an ISA that calls them a year after the lead has been generated on top of everything else”. And they’re just like, “Oh my goodness”. They’re overwhelmed, is my opinion, on a lot of, a lot of Real Estate professionals continue to get overwhelmed. But then again, it’s just like any other profession. 20 percent of the profession does 80 percent of the business. And when you get a hold of one those 20 percent, the conversation is completely different. They’re like, “Yeah, I’ve got a database and I’ve three different tools that I manage it with and I’ve got somebody calling it and I’ve got an assistant”, and so on and so forth.

Jonathan: Yeah. I totally agree with you. We’re going to go for our break folks. We’re going to come back and we’ve been having an introductory with Robert who’s decided to become my co-host. We’ll be back in a few moments folks.

Male Voice in Commercial: Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need Mail-Right. It is a powerful, but easy to use, Online Marketing system that uses Facebook to generate Real Estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30-day money back guarantee. So don’t delay. Get started today. Go to mail-right.com. 

Jonathan: We’re coming back. We’ve had a feast of high-tech Online Marketing on Tuesday.

Robert: some coffee. Go ahead.

Jonathan: Yeah. A cup of tea actually. Actually, there’s more caffeine in tea than coffee actually. 

Robert: I believe it. 

Jonathan: Yeah. Another thing that struck me is, going to be a little bit controversial here. I didn’t understand the models of a lot of regional brokerages, that the model is to get a lot of part-time agents and get about five to six sales out of those agents and just have a very large group of agents and not invest a tremendous amount of money or time in supporting those agents. And that model, I can’t really see that model continuing, having a long-term future. Am I right about that or am I just deluding myself?

Robert: I think the number one purveyor of that model which is Keller Williams, I think they’ve realized that they have, I think there’s now 183,000 Keller Williams agents in the United States which means that over 10 percent of the people that are in the Real Estate profession are working for Keller Williams. I was there at the Keller Williams reunion when Gary Keller was giving a speech to everybody. And they’re behind on a lot of different things. You’d think that with almost 200,000, 10 percent of the people inside the profession, that you would find just massive amounts, libraries and libraries of training material that they’d be providing these 200,000 agents. And there’s not. There’s some but not much. And the stuff’s that out there isn’t really all that great. It’s certainly not bleeding edge. So would I say that, I think Keller Williams is going away from that model and I know they are. I know that they’re starting to change their tune about both technology and how they’re supposed to be training agents and supporting agents. I have to believe that while there’s always money to be made by training them in classes and kicking them in the a**, that that’s not a great way to make money. That’s the way multi-level Marketing companies make money and it’s never a healthy way to build a long-term enterprise. I think that the market would have to start telling people that. I believe that. 

Jonathan: Well, he’s because he’s built, I call it the Red book. It’s a little bit now. I know it’s been updated. Obviously, I’m English so it’s rather kind of salesy. I’ve read it and I’m listening to it multiple times on audiobook. But still, if you adopt the basic philosophy of his book, I still think it’s effective. So it’s really quite strange that your comment on the internal training is not up to par really, isn’t it?

Robert: I mean and don’t get me wrong, Gary Keller himself …

Jonathan: He’s a really smart guy.

 

Robert: …one of the most impressive people in all of Real Estate. But he’s gotten so big that I don’t think that, on the team level it’s really, they’ve got a position. It’s called the Operating Broker or the Operating Manager. They’ve done this really brilliant job of breaking out every single thing that you’re supposed to be doing inside of a brokerage into a particular role. But they don’t have a national system in place for, let’s say, the person that’s supposed to be training all of those agents and if there is a guidebook, they’re not following it because I do business with a lot of different Keller Williams brokerages and they don’t do business the same way or even close to it.

Jonathan: I think that’s a really good point. The local office in my area, when it comes to technology, they’re a little bit more advanced than some of the established regional brokerages. But what you’re saying, it really varies from different offices, different areas. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?

Robert: Right.

Jonathan: Yeah. That’s great. You’re frozen a little bit but, well, you’ll come back in a second. So we’ve had a go at the culture, the database, is there any other areas that you think that agents are really struggling, Robert? Oh, he’s frozen completely. He’s frozen folks. You might have to put up with me for a couple minutes. Can you hear me, Robert? He’s frozen completely. Oh goodness, gracious. All right. He’s going to come back, folks. Hopefully, he’ll be back. But like I was saying folks, it has surprised me how little support a lot of initial agents get from their brokerage around technology and about Online Marketing and about building their database. Hopefully, that’s changing though because I don’t think it needs an enormous investment. I just think agents need to be aware of it. Hopefully, Robert will be returning. Otherwise, I think I will end this podcast. You can always have technical problem folks, with a live podcast. But there we go, I’ll keep going. What I’d also like from you that are listening to this podcast is for you to contact us and tell us the kind of Online Marketing areas where you would like us to cover. It’s like I say, we’ve touched messaging, texting, lead generation online. These are the areas that I would like to mostly cover but if there’s other areas. We also hope to get some power agents on the show. Oh, he’s back. He’s coming back. He’s returned. He’s returned.

Robert: Sorry about that. I did something that may have been a little bit silly. I tried to, nevermind. I’m reseting up my system and I tried to change the way that my displays were set up so that I could have a better, anyway, my system froze. I’m really sorry.

Jonathan: No, it’s no problem. Technology folks. You can either love it or hate it.

Robert: Right, right.

Jonathan: So, I was on Robert. I was blabbing about some of the areas. Just to finish off. Over the coming weeks, what are some of the areas that you would really like us to cover Robert?

Robert: Honestly, it’s going to be like, I’m fascinated today. We’re going to be talking to somebody who gets people on podcasts and I’d love to hear how they feel about that strategy. So I really would like to dive into whatever it is that our guests are doing and then maybe kind of apply it to some of my thoughts about SEO or Online Marketing. If there’s a general theme that I would like to say, I’d like to be honest with everybody. Doing this kind of podcast, it’s new for me and it’s part Content Marketing and I really would like to kind of just have the conversation about creating something, that our audience creating something for themselves that in general that people can engage with and there’s so many different ways to do it. We can record it. They can do podcasts. They can do videos. I mean there’s so much. I’m a big believer in trying to educate people that it’s okay to be a Guerilla Marketer inside Real Estate. And all you need to do that is just a phone and 10 minutes a day. That’s it. And if there’s a message that I’d like to consistently see throughout all of our conversations, in terms of our listeners, it’s I’d like to keep hitting that home because you asked me the question like, “Gee, how do Real Estate agents market themselves?”. You know what? Start with Facebook Live. Start with talking to the people that are in their friend circles but make sure that you’re finding something that’s interesting to those people. If you get a chance to go on a, there’s these things out here in LA, where I’m at, called and they do these ones in Beverly Hills, as an example. And they have these days in which all these really big mansions open up their doors so that Real Estate agents, Luxury brokers can go and they can tour these homes. Yet, there are none of those guys except for Kristoff that take their phones in and turn them on so that the world can see these homes. You and I, we’ll probably never, you know, maybe not, who knows. But most people will never get a chance to actually buy a home, let alone set foot inside it. So going through and talking about it or hearing what the history of the home is or why that particular person is selling it or why that family is selling it or the Trust is selling it, I just think it’s interesting. And if you engage your audience, you build a relationship with them, which for any Real Estate agent is going to be a good idea. Long-term, if I can build a relationship with my 500 friends and family, that’s going to do good for me, no matter what.

Jonathan: Right. I think that’s a good way to end this introduction really. I totally agreed with that. So I think we’ve had a good start actually because I’ve agreed with almost everything you said, Robert.

Robert: I’ll come up with something that you can’ agree with. There we go. 

Jonathan: To wrap up the show, how can people contact you and find out more about you Robert?

Robert: Honestly, I know that these platforms are designed to promote ourselves. But honestly Jon, my logo’s up here, Inbound. Just Google inboundREM and you can find me in 100 different places, in terms of my website and that’s probably the only way that I’d want somebody to look me up. They can if they wanted to contact me off the site. But I do long-term Inbound Marketing as my service side of my business and that it not for most Real Estate agents. So for the handful of people that are looking for a long-term solution they own, my website will sell itself. It really does. I’m the only game in town. There’s nobody else you can turn to. Just go to my website. Check it out. See if there’s something on there that might help you.

Jonathan: That’s great. And if you want to get a hold of Mail-Right, it’s really simple folks. To get a hold of me, go to the Mail-Right, we’ve got some great blogs and we’ve some great information up on there. And we’ll be back next week with a guest and we’ll see you soon. See you later folks. Bye.

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