#395 – Mail-Right Show: With Special Guest Sarah Block of Tiny Marketing

Subscribe: RSS

What Does A Successful Social Media Plan Look Like For Real Estate Agents in 2023

Discover the future of real estate marketing in 2023. In this week’s show, we delve into the strategies and techniques that successful real estate agents use to thrive in the digital age. From leveraging social media platforms to adopting advanced analytics tools, learn how to create a winning marketing plan to set you apart from your competitors. Don’t miss out on these valuable insights.

Meet Sarah Noel Block, your Marketing Strategist friend. Sarah has rocked the content world with 16 years of experience, a BS in Public Communication, and an MS in Written Communication. She’s supported big shots like apartments.com and Prudential, but her heart lies with small teams. As the creator of Marketing Mad Libs, the StrategicStory, and Tiny Marketing Framework, she’s a master at helping tiny teams achieve significant results. Sarah knows her stuff with an award-winning content platform under her belt and features in Entrepreneur and Thrive. Catch her speaking at conferences and dazzling audiences with her wisdom. She’s like that favorite teacher who makes learning fun and impactful. Let Sarah guide your marketing journey and unlock the secrets to success 🙂

Episode Full Show Notes

[00:00:10.640] – Robert Newman

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 396 of the Mail Right Show. We are super excited. It is our first show with a guest in quite a while. So if you’ve gotten tired of listening to just me and Jon go back and forth.

[00:00:25.920] – Jonathan Denwood

No, but I see you got tired of me.

[00:00:27.230] – Robert Newman

I was listening to them. We are really excited to have Sarah Block, the founder of Tiny Marketing, with us today. Sarah has done many things, which I’ll let her describe. But some highlights are she has worked with a lot of small teams in the real estate space, and we’re really looking forward to talking to her specifically about social media. What does a social media marketing plan look like in 2023? Without any further ado, Sarah, I’m going to turn it over to you. And why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners?

[00:01:01.510] – Sarah Block

Yeah. Actually, my very first freelance gig was with Cozy. Com, which is a website that supports real estate investors and apartment com, bought them out. So then I ended up working with them, coming from a family of realtors. So real estate has always been a love of mine. I’m stoked to talk to you. And I had no idea I was their first guest in a while, so I feel extra special.

[00:01:33.430] – Robert Newman

Yeah. Well, we have not been precisely knocking down too many people’s doors to be a guest. So we’ve gotten very busy with our own little roadmap of shows that we wanted to cover. So we’re thrilled to have you. Delighted for you to be on display today. We are thrilled for it to be episode number 396. Believe it or not, we’ve done this 396 times. Not all of them together, but Jon has done this 396 times.

[00:01:59.870] – Jonathan Denwood

There are so many inappropriate ways to take that.

[00:02:06.000] – Sarah Block

396 is impressive.

[00:02:08.390] – Robert Newman

It is a lot of podcast shows. And believe it or not, Sarah, it’s not actually even John’s only podcast. He runs one of the better-known podcasts in the WordPress space called WP-Tonic. And he just found it because he doesn’t do this enough. He’s busy enough.

[00:02:28.230] – Sarah Block

He likes to talk.

[00:02:29.140] – Robert Newman

The mic. Yeah, he founded another podcast on learning systems or learning websites. Yeah, learning website. Thank you, John. You know what? Let me stop fumbling around. Jon, go ahead and tell people what that third podcast is. And while you’re at it, why don’t you introduce yourself to our new listeners?

[00:02:49.160] – Jonathan Denwood

Sure. It’s the membership machine show, where we look at membership websites, how to market them, and all sorts of really interesting stuff. But I’m the founder of Mail-right.om. We’re a platform, we compete against real geeks and Sarah Interactive. But we add the spice of your true customization through WordPress and a CRM, and a load of other fantastic marketing tools. Go and have a go and have a butcher of it, folks. You’ll be amazed. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:03:22.930] – Robert Newman

All right. So without any further ado, Sarah, I have a burning question that I have.

[00:03:31.430] – Sarah Block

Do you.

[00:03:33.120] – Robert Newman

Have something in the background? Some sound in the background?

[00:03:36.580] – Sarah Block

Maybe my kids. Summer break, they are in another room.

[00:03:42.420] – Robert Newman

Copy you. Okay, so I’m going to do this so that I get confused with it. Never mind. I have a white noise auditory issue. So, Sarah, what would be the number one social media platform that you would recommend the agents focus on in 2023?

[00:03:59.870] – Sarah Block

Oh, my goodness. So it depends on what your niche is in real estate. But in my experience, I found that Instagram and TikTok have been really good for real estate. Now, I also work with people in the commercial space, commercial real estate or investing, and they’re all on LinkedIn. So it depends on what your niche is. Okay.

[00:04:23.040] – Robert Newman

So if somebody was talking to ostensibly a social media expert, somebody spent a lot of time building up an expertise in social media, it feels to me like your response would be, you’re going to have to have a consultation with them if they really know what they’re doing. Would you agree with that?

[00:04:38.970] – Sarah Block

Yeah. I start every client relationship with a thorough strategy you before, I’m like, You should do this because it’s always different and it depends on your goals and who you’re trying to reach. You need to start with a customer first approach. And I always interview customers to get that.

[00:04:59.170] – Robert Newman

And just for kicks, you’ve done a lot more than what we just announced you. When we interviewed you into the show, we didn’t actually cover all the things that you sent in to us when we were introduced to you. You also mentioned something called the marketing MadL ibs and the strategic story. What are those about?

[00:05:22.430] – Sarah Block

Okay, so those are fun. Marketing MadL ibs is a workshop I do with the stakeholders within your business, and I bring them all together so we can build out your brand messaging on a page where everybody agrees. So a lot of times the problem that I see is that when there’s a bunch of people working within a business, they don’t talk about the business the same way. They don’t position it the right way. They’re always talking about it differently. But with this, you get everybody on the same page and they buy into it and you have it documented. So it’s easy when you’re hiring learning people to say, this is how we talk about the business. This is who we are. This is our personality. This is our why.

[00:06:07.390] – Robert Newman

Got you. So it’s an exercise. It is a formalized exercise that is fun, it sounds like for people to change the way that they speak of the business.

[00:06:16.740] – Sarah Block

Yeah. It gets everybody on the same page. There’s almost always a disconnect if you tell people this is how we talk about it, rather than having them involved in the process. Got you.

[00:06:30.940] – Robert Newman

Okay, and then the next one was strategic story.

[00:06:33.600] – Sarah Block

Strategic story. So that is where we build an entire marketing strategy from beginning to end. So it starts with that marketing MadL ibs workshop. We get a good idea of what people think they are, what’s different about their business through that stakeholder workshop, and what the messaging should be. But then with this, we build out a customer Avatar, their journey, how you can clone your favorite customer through their journey, and then messaging content and marketing action plan. So you know exactly what you need to do to reach your favorite people.

[00:07:16.120] – Robert Newman

Got you. And then I’m going to ask you, I have a series of questions surrounding tools, one in particular that is a favorite of mine because it happens to do with one of my favorite entrepreneurs that left the SEO space and got into the social space and then connected the two. But before I ask that question, Jon, you’ve been strikingly silent, so I want to give you a chance before I engine hard into something that you have. You have your small handful of introductory questions to ask Sarah.

[00:07:48.520] – Jonathan Denwood

Yes, Sarah. Is there any examples come to mind where any clients that you’ve worked with that t have done social media in a way that really linked into the two things you just discussed with Rob in a really effective way. Just give a quick outline what you liked about what you observed.

[00:08:14.160] – Sarah Block

Yeah. So I worked with this real estate company called Kinship. We work together and they identified that they tend to work with people who are buying their second home. We identified this is their ideal customer. It is a fluent family who’s buying their second home and we were able to build out a strategy that talked to them. So a lot of the mistakes that I see is that we talk about ourselves on social media, and everything becomes a little bit too me focused, where when you make your customer the star and you’re telling their stories, case studies how you’ve helped people and user stories or, I guess client stories, that is a lot more effective. And they also use reels better than anybody I’ve ever seen. They do an amazing job of telling stories through reels and just making sure to document those initial walkthroughs of houses and the experience that people go through when they buy that house.

[00:09:30.350] – Jonathan Denwood

All right. It’s fantastic.

[00:09:32.560] – Robert Newman

What was the name of that company? Was it Kinship you said?

[00:09:35.910] – Sarah Block

Yeah, Kinship.

[00:09:37.180] – Jonathan Denwood

I love the name.

[00:09:38.930] – Sarah Block

I know. The person who owns it, that’s her vibe, too. She gives out a kinship energy.

[00:09:52.830] – Robert Newman

I’ve never had the chance to… John, you’re silent, so I’m going to jump in. I’m going to say that I’ve never had the chance to actually intro this name in a full show environment, even though a long time ago, John did have him on the show. But to my eternal heartbreak, it was before I joined as a co host. And to give you an understanding, Sarah, this is years ago because I’ve been here for over 250 episodes now. That’s also a lot. That is also a lot. That is a number of years of podcasting together. This person in question is a guy by the name of Rand Fishkin. Have you ever heard the name?

[00:10:33.850] – Sarah Block

Yes, of course. Amazing.

[00:10:37.150] – Robert Newman

All right. So Rand, I’m a huge fan of him. I’m a huge fan of him because of the humanity that he takes and how much of his own personal story that he shares inside of his marketing. And whether you do agree or don’t agree, he is the only guy that I follow in the entire real estate space. I’m on his Twitter, I try to talk to him. I don’t engage with that on brands. I am not doing that with Brian Dean. I’m not doing that with Neil Patel, who are both big guys in the SEO space. I am, however, doing that with Rand Fishkin. And one of the greatest moments of my recent year was when he acknowledged a tweet and we had a two sentence conversation.

[00:11:23.600] – Sarah Block

An.

[00:11:23.690] – Robert Newman

Interaction. I’m like, fan girling. So he started a company called Spark Toro. It’s his most recent. Are you familiar with it?

[00:11:33.410] – Sarah Block

Yeah.

[00:11:34.070] – Robert Newman

I’ve used it. Have you? Really? Okay. Which leads us into, which is a great segue and lead in into what I’m seeing in the social space. I was curious to know your take, which is I’m starting to see some really cool tools, such as Spark Toro. Now, I don’t focus on social, but I do do a lot of consultations that involve social as part of that consultation. I just don’t do the work. I don’t get on and manage anybody’s social accounts, anything like that. One of the fascinating things for me is the way that people are trying to segment out and target influencers that might be relevant inside their space. Are there tools that do that or similar things that you use for social media that you might be willing to share with us in your audience?

[00:12:23.330] – Sarah Block

Toro is where I go for that to identify the right people for partnerships. I actually just posted an article today about partnership marketing because I really think that influencer is overused. You don’t need to be connecting with influencers. But subject matter experts who have their own little niche audience and you have the same audience, those people make sense to do collaborative content with. Whether it is social media, doing a swap or a social media takeover or asking them to promote your lead magnet while you promote their lead magnet, it makes sense to do. And you don’t need to have influencer status to have success with that.

[00:13:17.300] – Robert Newman

But.

[00:13:18.130] – Sarah Block

I do it real scrappy and go to LinkedIn. That’s my platform of choice. And I find the people that I find fascinating and I reach out to them.

[00:13:30.380] – Robert Newman

And you do that manually. You do that yourself. You’re not using a tool to do the reach out. You’re physically reaching out to whoever it is you’re interested in connecting with. Am I reading through your comments correctly?

[00:13:42.990] – Sarah Block

You are. I do do that manually. And I have done it with tools. Meet Alfred is one of those tools that I’ve used. And it did. It was successful. I did have a lot of people that I was able to connect with, and we ended up having partnerships. They ended up on my podcast. I ended up on theirs. But I only do it automated if I’m in a real push. There’s a campaign and I need to be in front of a lot of people at one time. Otherwise, I don’t need to be in front of a million people all the time. So I will connect as I find someone that I find fascinating.

[00:14:26.590] – Robert Newman

Copy you. And how did you go ahead?

[00:14:30.580] – Sarah Block

Sorry, one more thing. There is a community for people who like to collaborate, too. Let me pull that up real fast so I can remember what they’re called. Ready, set, collab. So that is another community where it’s a database of people who are open to collaborations. That’s another route to go.

[00:14:52.260] – Robert Newman

I’ve never heard of those. I’ve never heard of them before. Have you ever heard of those ready set collab, Jon?

[00:14:58.710] – Jonathan Denwood

No, I haven’t actually. No.

[00:15:00.910] – Robert Newman

Interesting. All right, well, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Sarah, we’re going to go to break. We’ll be right back. And when we come back, I will continue to ask some questions. I do want to say as we are exiting onto the break that I don’t follow that many people on Twitter. So it’s fascinating to me that you and I follow 75 of the same people. I went to your Twitter account just to look up really quickly what you had posted so that maybe I could comment on that and discuss. I was like, Wow, Sarah and I actually follow a lot of the same people, which is shocking because I don’t do a crap ton on Twitter.

[00:15:36.700] – Sarah Block

Me either.

[00:15:38.290] – Robert Newman

Yeah, I set it up a long time ago. So you must have maybe set yours up a lot because whoever I followed, I followed so many years ago, I don’t remember.

[00:15:47.880] – Sarah Block

I set mine up in 2008. That’s how long ago.

[00:15:51.940] – Robert Newman

There you go. All right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, Sarah, you’ve been a delight. And we’re going to come back and we will continue down having a conversation about social media. I think just to serve you up a couple of queues, I would like to have a conversation really quickly about the viability of TikTok for traditional real estate brand building and lead generation and separate those out into two topics of conversation. Okay? Okay. So, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be right back. Stay tuned. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need MailR ight. 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. R ight. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We are here at episode number 396. We’re with the effervescent Sarah Noel. I’m hoping I’m saying that correctly. Block?

[00:17:01.580] – Sarah Block

It is Noelle. Hazzah.

[00:17:05.460] – Robert Newman

But you know what? And I’m here with Jonathan Denwood, but I’ll tell you a funny story that is true. Used to be that John led these shows, and then he mispronounced a guest or two’s name. And ever since then, he handed it back over to me. So now I’m eternally scared that what I’m going to do is mispronounce somebody’s name since he just asked it. He’s been asking me to do.

[00:17:27.060] – Jonathan Denwood

The thing. I had a bit of run of mispronounciations.

[00:17:33.190] – Sarah Block

It’s a little longer run than two.

[00:17:35.400] – Jonathan Denwood

No, it’s been all right in my other shows. I had a little period where I was really butchering people’s guest names, but I’m quite happy to let Rob do the lead. I do it occasionally, Rob, don’t I?

[00:17:50.150] – Robert Newman

No, you do. Every once in a while, you do, especially when it’s just the two of us. You know what my name is. Actually, I don’t.

[00:17:59.930] – Jonathan Denwood

It actually.

[00:18:00.900] – Sarah Block

But then… That’s so awkward.

[00:18:04.600] – Robert Newman

I think you do. But that’s neither here nor there. All right, so Sarah, before we went to break, I asked you, I tried to serve it up and give you a chance a minute to think about what the question was, which is, you have social media, you have TikTok, and you have the other one, I think you said Twitter, that you thought were… Instagram. Instagram. There you go. I have had a lot more success with my clients and talking to my clients about them generating leads off Instagram. But I’ve also seen huge amounts of traffic directed various places by TikTok. But I haven’t had that many conversations with people generating revenue based connections off TikTok. So I’m curious to know, every time a guest like you comes on who’s a social media person or I have these conversations in my non podcast related life, I always ask the question of… Because it will come a time that people start to figure out how to monetize TikTok. It’s only a matter of time. So I asked this question of everybody, have you seen away a direction that people in real estate, residential real estate specifically, are monetizing TikTok?

[00:19:15.830] – Robert Newman

I know they’re generating tons of traffic from it.

[00:19:19.170] – Sarah Block

Yeah. So I would say brand awareness is the biggest thing with TikTok because you don’t need a huge following to get a ton of views and getting people to know who you are. So I am seeing a ton of brand awareness when it comes to that. Now with lead generation, not necessarily in real estate, but I have seen it in writing, for example, authors using TikTok. And that has been really lucrative for them. As long as you have over a thousand followers on TikTok, then you can have a link in bio and the TikTok people are very happy to support you. So it has been pretty easy to monetize in that capacity. So for Realtors, what I would suggest is having some League match magnate as soon as you can, as soon as you have that 1,000 followers attached to your LinkedIn bio so you can transfer them to your email list and then you can start marketing to them so you can sell. But yeah, you need to get to that 1,000 first.

[00:20:32.480] – Robert Newman

Okay, interesting. And I guess the same question with Instagram, though, John and I have talked about it a lot more. We have probably had more people on the show that have concrete methodologies about either what they or their clients have done on Instagram. But I’m still curious to hear what your thoughts are.

[00:20:52.890] – Sarah Block

Yeah. So when you’re talking to me, I’m a holistic marketing strategist, and I’m going at it from the perspective of I’m going to be researching your customer, and then I’m going to be looking at their entire journey at everything, every touch point you’re going to have through that journey. So social media is just a point in it. And there’s strategy around that, but it’s completely customized depending on who that customer is. So I don’t have a concrete methodology that I use for social because I customize it every time. For Instagram, though, I can tell you that I have seen the most success with Reels and getting as much video content out there as possible and repurposing. I f you’re doing a podcast like this, for example. And I know a few other real estate podcasts, too, taking the video content from your podcast and repurposing it into Reels will get a lot more eyes on it.

[00:21:59.060] – Robert Newman

The head of my branding content team has been on John’s track, trying to get him on the phone to do exactly that for weeks now. And he’s ratcheting up the fire under my portoocas for me to basically do the same. So I feel all of that.

[00:22:18.500] – Sarah Block

Hold on. Can we pause this for one second? Yeah, of course. We’re pausing to talk about this, though, because you’re using StreamYard and you can repurpose directly in StreamYard and send it to Instagram, just so you know.

[00:22:33.570] – Robert Newman

Okay. Well, I’ll be sure to let Ben know that when he finally gets access to the StreamYard content. And then, of course, the next thing that’s going to be required is that he has access to my Instagram account, which I don’t think he does. But yeah, I know. We have focused mostly on… We’re more on the content marketing side and content defined by us as long form written in video blog posts. We do tons of graphics. We’ve got so much money in a different part of the digital world that we have… My total social strategy has always been, let’s just share any of the mega pieces of content that we do. And if anybody does click on it and reads it, they will instantly discover that we’ve done something much deeper than anybody else has ever done before. Jon, it actually looks like you have something you want to say. So come on, out with it.

[00:23:32.950] – Jonathan Denwood

So what’s your thoughts been around threads then? Had over 100 million join, had it reduced by almost 50 %? But I think the spot where it could really work for real estate agents is using it with Instagram and then getting conversations through threads. I never really saw it as a as a real direct threat to X now, but I’m always going to call it Twitter. Because I think Twitter is a totally different beast, a really different vibe, a different type of audience. That’s my take on it. What’s your own through about Instagram and threads?

[00:24:22.750] – Sarah Block

Yeah. So I was actually having a conversation about threads yesterday, and so I’m on it, but I m not active on it. So if you want to hear my social media philosophy, it’s pick a channel, be really good at that channel. You don’t have to be everywhere. And once you grow enough, you can repurpose on those others, but just create original content in one place. So I have the Threads account just because I wanted to reserve my name and everyone else was on there. But they said that threads is a really happy place. It’s like Twitter, but happy.

[00:24:58.870] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s the what was it? A Twitter.

[00:25:01.060] – Sarah Block

Isn’t it? Yeah, right.

[00:25:03.690] – Jonathan Denwood

I call it dramaville. That is the whole purpose of Twitter, isn’t it?

[00:25:08.410] – Sarah Block

That’s an explosion of my mind. So I think that it’s good to at least preserve your name and see if it grows. But if you are in residential real estate, the general population is probably going to be slow to adapt and it’s brands that are getting on there quicker. So you’re probably not going to be reaching your ideal customer on there just yet.

[00:25:36.310] – Robert Newman

I’ve seen another number today, guys, where the engagement… So, John, it went from 100 million down to 50 million. It’s down to 25 million. And now they’re saying it’s dropping another 50 % off the 25 million down to 12 million. People who basically are using the platform at all. A lot of people seem to have done what Sarah did and what I should probably do, if I’m really straight about it, where you go on and you reserve whatever name that you want. That sounds like a really clever strategy to me, but I don’t have any intention of engaging with yet another.

[00:26:07.950] – Sarah Block

Social platform. I don’t have the energy for that.

[00:26:12.180] – Robert Newman

Yeah, it is a lot of work to even nate into the platform, keep track of it so that if you’re using a data aggregator like Hootsuite or whatever the popular social data aggregator is these days, probably the list goes on and on and on. Do you really want to try to wait for them to add another service? Do you add your content outside the service? Do you hire a human being? It becomes a really complicated question in my head because you’re already posting content in many different places if you’re using social at all, such as LinkedIn. I m LinkedIn, p interest, Facebook, Twitter, and probably a couple that I’m forgetting, Instagram that I’m forgetting. And I’m like, That is too much already, in my opinion. Too much So, Sarah, I guess I have a slight… I’m always curious to know how when you get on the phone with a resident sential, you’ve obviously got a consultation process because you’ve mentioned it two or three times. You said a holistic approach and that you’re basically bespoking your approach to each individual client that you speak to. All right, great. So when you are talking to somebody and you’re seeing small teams, who is it that you’re talking to?

[00:27:35.240] – Robert Newman

Are you talking to really established agents who’ve been in the business for 20 years? You’re talking to brand new agents who are younger like yourself, who are just really savvy and they want you to be their social media guru because they’re thinking that their audience or the business is out there on social. Who is it that you’re speaking to, both from an agent experience perspective? I want to let you know this is a loaded question because I’ve been doing this for 15 years and I talk to a lot of real estate professionals. I know who I generally tend to talk to because it’s exactly two camps for me and it’s consistent. So I’m curious to know if you’ve got a couple of camps and if so, if you might describe an example of one of those camps just so that we can all get an understanding.

[00:28:22.490] – Sarah Block

Yeah. So in the real estate, like residential real estate space, I’m usually working with the e main realtor, the person who started the business, and they have zero to one person marketing department. That’s where I come in and I build out their strategy, and then we build out an execution plan. My favorite clients, they serve the real estate industry. So a real estate photography company, a company that does the floor plans and the 3D modeling for real estate. Those are the ones that I like working with a lot or ones that buy houses, remodel them and then sell them. I work a lot with those.

[00:29:14.790] – Robert Newman

Got you. Okay, interesting. Jon, do you have any thoughts or comments to this? Because I’m going to jump into my two when you’ve shared your thoughts.

[00:29:26.770] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think the main thing, Sarah, I don’t know if you’re going agree with this is I think people tend to underestimate the volume of content that needs to be produced to get a result. They tend to drastically underestimate. And if you’re busy real estate brokerage, a boutique brokerage, a small power team, you’re busy with other things because the other thing is the volume, it needs reliability to be consistently pushing out a certain level content. And those two factors regularly, they tend to underestimate. And that’s why if you’ve got the budget or the capacity to get people to help you do that, it’s so beneficial. What’s your response to that, Sarah?

[00:30:16.490] – Sarah Block

Yeah. Actually, I think the people that do best with social media and real estate are thinking this can be content in every scenario where they are filming those walkthroughs. They’re filming that day that they hand over the key to their client. Why am I blinking? What’s an open house? They’re filming the open houses, things like that. If you have a mindset, everything is content and you’re filming, then it’s a lot easier to create content. But yeah, I’m not saying you have to hire me, hire a VA. Just think everything is content and then pass it on to the VA and they can put it together into a Reel and schedule it for you.

[00:31:05.860] – Robert Newman

I love that. My two are as follows. The younger generation, which I get a lot of calls from, because everybody is more familiar with the language of the search engines. They understand how much happens on the search engines. They know they’d like to insert themselves someplace in the search stream organically, which is what my history and my experience is. But when it comes to the second call, those people don’t tend to have as much of the revenue. They don’t tend to be super experienced, and they’re oftentimes not yet number one or number two in their own individual marketplace. Now, the other call that I get what I get, and the call that pays the bills but is actually twice as frustrating as the first call, is the older, more established agent. Now, those agents, I get calls from, they oftentimes have a credit card ready to go and they’re ready to purchase our services. However, getting them to do anything that I ask them to do is…

[00:32:09.670] – Jonathan Denwood

Is that worse to be?

[00:32:12.750] – Robert Newman

Yes, sure of Lee, John. I can give you a definitive black and white answer on that. Definitively. I have a client that has been two years, and I won’t reveal online how much he spent, but it’s been a staggering amount of money. I have asked him consistently for a five minute bio video that just explains the who, what, when, where, why of his particular career with a personal bent to it. Throw some personal stuff in there. It’s been a simple request. I’ve given a treatment, I’ve given written instructions, I’ve given examples of other people who’ve done the same thing. So the full package. And I still don’t have the five minute video.

[00:32:56.520] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, AI comes to the rescue because you’ll be able to get the AI to do the video for you, won’t you?

[00:33:04.980] – Robert Newman

I don’t even want to have that conversation with anybody, Jon. I have had a couple of clients that I’ve drifted into the AI conversation, the AI video conversation, and I feel like they sent me on a big rabbit chase because I actually did do one of those videos. Then I handed it over to the client after a six month worth of planning, finding the vendor, getting the video produced, and they’re like, Yeah, no, this doesn’t work.

[00:33:27.150] – Sarah Block

Oh, my God. Come on.

[00:33:29.380] – Robert Newman

I told them that it wouldn’t be up to their production standard. So just a quick declination of anything after all that effort. And I was just like, you know what? What the fuck? Excuse me. What am I doing? This is ridiculous. Why am I running so hard down this rabbit hole when there are very basic conversations that most of my clients don’t have? But I will say this, of everything that we talked about today, the thing that you’ve said, sir, that mirrors what I say all the time to both camps of people is the changing your mindset into a content producing mindset. If there’s one thing that I was going to do, like, if I was still a coach, I’m no longer a coach, I own an agency now. But if I was, the thing that I would be talking about on my social media ad nauseam is the idea of taking a cell phone and then just trying to train yourself into a content producing mindset because I feel like you hit a really important point, which is you can have a phone and be driving your car to just about anything that you’re going to do for real estate and inspection and open house, the list goes on.

[00:34:40.100] – Robert Newman

And any of those are opportunities to create something clever in the content space. The thing is, I belong to the biggest YouTube Mastermind for real estate that’s been in place for seven years. There’s only 14,000 people that are there, but there are 2 million people that hold a license for real estate in the US right now. 2 million, 14,000. If you do those numbers and use it as a marketing petri dish, you got to figure that it’s legitimately less than 0.25 % of all licensed real estate agents that are even thinking of trying to get in the habit of using a device as a content production machine.

[00:35:25.290] – Sarah Block

And all the…

[00:35:26.760] – Robert Newman

Never mind. All the social company… Ahead, please. Please, save me.

[00:35:32.160] – Sarah Block

Along this vein, what people need to understand is the people that you are selling to are probably not thinking about buying a house right now or selling a house right now. But when they’re researching it and it’s tickling in their mind, this content will move them quicker to you. It shortens the sales cycle by a lot, creating content consistently, showing up consistently. So yes, not everybody who goes on your platform is going to be immediately looking to buy a house. But when they are, they’re going to think of you.

[00:36:15.270] – Robert Newman

One last question, and then we’re going to wrap it up. I have a quick fascination. Something that I talk about a lot that deals with the psychology of social and video in particular is the idea of a connection. You and I are not in the same place John and I are not in the same place. Matter of fact, John and I have never been in the same place in all the years that we’ve done this. Yet, I do feel like I know him. I do feel like there is a connection, almost like I would have with a personal business associate that I work in the same space with. And what I oftentimes I’m trying to explain to my customers is that the connection is created specifically through video more than the written word, even more than with images like pictures of you going, Hi, stuff like that. Do you agree with that? Do you not agree with that? Do you have your own.

[00:37:04.600] – Sarah Block

Thoughts about…

[00:37:05.180] – Robert Newman

No, I 100 %.

[00:37:05.900] – Sarah Block

Agree with that. It is the only way that you can meet people in person online. And you can’t get that effect of who this person is without video. It creates a stronger bond. And in the content marketing space, we say it’s no like trust, and that’s precisely what video does, much faster. It gets them to know you faster. It gets them to like you faster because your personality shines through and to trust you because you’re teaching something.

[00:37:40.800] – Robert Newman

Brilliant. All right. Couldn’t have said it better myself. So without further ado, since you are the guest, you get to go first. Sarah, if people were to see or listen to the show and how we distribute it, how would you like them to reach out or research you?

[00:37:55.900] – Sarah Block

Yeah, they can go to my website, my name is Sarah Noelle Block om, and my podcast is Tiny Marketing so they can see me there.

[00:38:05.910] – Robert Newman

Okay. And for those who are just listening to the show, it’s Sarah H N OEL BLOck. All right, Jonathan, how would you like people to contact you?

[00:38:16.780] – Jonathan Denwood

I’ll just go over to the mail hyphen write—com website. We’ve got a load of content. We do videos every week. We got a load of articles. We’re building out a bag of information and just have a look at the platform, and you can book a demo with me. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:38:35.410] – Robert Newman

Awesome sauce. My name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound R AM. You can look up my website. I have hundreds of articles educating you on CRMs, lead generation systems. I’ve even touched on social media. I have about six or seven people that we’ve done deep dive analysis of that we think are doing incredible things inside the real estate space. You can look at those people to see exactly the specifics of strategies that we think you should follow or at least other people that have working strategies that we like. Thank you both for the time and a fascinating conversation and social. We haven’t had a chance to dive into it with a person that wasn’t me and John for a little while. So super excited to have you on the show, Sarah. And with no further ado, John, take us off when you’re ready.

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

————————————–