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Welcome back to episode number 367 of the Mail Right podcast. John and I are incredibly excited to be back on the show to talk to all of you. And we’re going to talk about something that John has brought up using different terminology in 2022. But the name of the show is redefining your Digital Lead Generation. Goals and Expectations for 2023. This is something that we’ve talked about in pieces, and I thought that it would be a really good idea to kick off the new year and start our own do the whole episode. Now, before we get into that, I would love it if all of the audience could be introduced to you, john, I would also love for you to explain to them why there’s a wptonic.com up in the upper right-hand side of the show.
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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman
jonathan@mail-right.com
775-372-6322
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
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Robert Newman
InboundREM
https://inboundrem.com
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Welcome back to episode number 367 of the Mail Right podcast. John and I are incredibly excited to be back on the show to talk to all of you. And we’re going to talk about something that John has brought up using different terminology in 2022. But the name of the show is redefining your Digital Lead Generation. Goals and Expectations for 2023. This is something that we’ve talked about in pieces, and I thought that it would be a really good idea to kick off the new year and start our own do the whole episode. Now, before we get into that, I would love it if all of the audience could be introduced to you, john, I would also love for you to explain to them why there’s a wptonic.com up in the upper right-hand side of the show.
That’s a very good question because you’re lucky that we’re here at Audience. I’ve had some car troubles, flat tire, so I’m 15 minutes late. And Roberts just got over Covert-19 The virus got him in the end. So that is why you got that. But I will remove it right now. And that’s it. I have the technology.
John isn’t kidding, ladies and gentlemen, we made it here by the skin of our chinny chin chin. And I’m I am personally so happy not to be feeling terrible. Like, I am very excited. I’m basically just excited to be capable of speaking because I really got kicked in the proverbial, you know what, for this last round of COVID. So here we go. With no further ado, why are we talking about redefining digital lead generation goals in 2023? All right, so let’s get into the numbers so far. For 2022, we’ve watched the real estate market decreased by about 20%. Most realtors that I know are looking back at their income versus 2000 and 22,021, and 2022 and recognizing the fact that they’ve seen a decrease in many cases for the first time in years, this decrease is going to carry over into lead generation. The logic is there. Most people understand that. So you should be redefining your goals. But what most people don’t understand is what a normal lead generation market looks like. Even people that have been advertising for years don’t remember three years ago. Unless they’re really good at tracking their numbers, they don’t remember what they were getting three years ago.
John, do you remember what you were what results you were getting from your marketing three years ago?
Yeah, kind of. Yeah. Not very. Looking back, it’s improved quite a lot. But I am not as religious about my tracking like you.
Which comes down to what we’re going to talk about, which is what should your goals be, what should your expectations be? What should they be of individual companies, depending upon their strategy? So I’m going to make a bold statement. I’m going to ask for John to follow up with it. Excuse me, everybody. And the bold statement is going to be this. If you are using a paid advertising service, that is, anybody that’s using paid advertising to drive people to a destination, okay? So anybody that’s advertising on Facebook on your behalf, anybody’s advertising on Google on your behalf and you’re sending them to a website, your expectation should be for lead count to drop by 30% to 50% in 2023. Right. Take it away, John, with your thoughts.
Well, yeah, I agree with that, basically.
Okay, so number one, you have that expectation, lead count is going to drop. Okay, so we check that box. We’ve already said it in other shows. What’s going to make this show unique for you? Well, here’s something that hasn’t been talked about a lot that I’m going to talk about a little. I’m doing my deep dive analysis. So John, I haven’t had a chance to talk to you about this yet, but for the first time in many, many years, sometimes in some cases ten years, some of the real estate marketing companies out there that I have obsessively religiously told everybody they don’t really update much. There’s nothing new for me to report on my review from four years ago, so I’m not going to say anything new. They’re updating, all of them. Leading the pack is Walopo. Right behind Walopo, shockingly, is KV corps, who hasn’t updated a single thing since 2016. So now they’re, they’ve got a massive list of updates that are coming out on KV Core and there, there are other systems that are following in suit, but here’s what most of you don’t know. KV core wailopo sync boomtown. They are massively oversold.
Okay? So even though I’m giving you all of these numbers right now, something that I don’t think occurs to the average agent to ask is, when you buy a service from any of these people, how many other people in this marketplace are you doing business with? It’s a reasonable question, because John, would you agree with me as a fellow real estate marketing professional, that the more people doing the exact same thing inside an enclosed demographic, let’s just say reno, okay? Would you not say that the more people doing the same thing lessens your personal chance? Like if you’re doing the same thing as ten other people, do, you not lessen your chance for success based on the fact there are ten other people doing the exact same thing as you?
Yeah, well, I think that would be logical, wouldn’t it? Obviously, I think the only parameters that might affect it slightly is if you’re in a very large urban area, like if you’re in the Bay Area or San Francisco or you’re in Dallas or Seattle that could have been the size of the market, the effect. But then it would just depend on I just instinctively would suggest that it’s slightly not. But any kind of average market, depending on how many they allow in per area, will have an effect yet here’s.
What my boots on the ground information has been for a long time and I got tired of talking about it. Just listen. You just said something critical without realizing it, depending on how many customers they allow. Guess what, John? Would it surprise you if I told you that most real estate marketing companies do not actually cap the number of customers that they take in per area?
Not really. But I would have hoped that on the upper end of the price bracket, I think I would have expected it to be regulated by the sheer cost of the system. So the percentage of possible clients that would be interested in that particular platform would be self regulating. Is that making any sense?
Yeah. And sadly, I’m here to say that that is not correct. Now way back in the day, when Wailopo had founded Tiger Leads, tiger Leads was pretty good about selling X number of people into X number of zip codes. They actually had a fairly regulated way of managing the system. Now when they decided to use Facebook, which does not leverage zip codes, they lost that ability to manage clients based on zip codes. So they’re using some murky internal system, probably based on city name or neighborhood name, to try to put a number of people into a marketplace. I have had many calls, many, many calls where clients are like I’m tired of receiving, like sending out a text to a client and them telling me that I am the fourth real estate agent that has sent them exact same text. Because just like everybody else, while system, the system is the same no matter who’s using it. So if a person responded to an advertisement in one place, responded to another advertisement someplace else, they’re going to get the exact same message, the exact same. And they’re going to know for sure that whatever you’re doing, you’re using the same marketing as competitor B or C or whatever.
Which definitely does not make you look like unique little snowflake in the marketing world. So I’ve been hearing these reports, of course, from the reason I mentioned Wailpa is I’m surprised. I usually have a very high opinion of the team over there. And I am not saying that I still don’t have a high opinion of the team. I do actually. But I think that they missed a major thing because there’s no doubt, none whatsoever, that their system is oversold. And I could have guessed that because they’ve got 1114 thousand people as part of their success community. Now, if you or I or any other real estate marketing company had 14,000 active recurring clients, we would have to really have sorted those clients out correctly in order to not have oversold our territories. Same thing goes for Zillow and Trulia. These platform companies, they have oversold their territories. Generally speaking too, their solution is simple. The more people that we put into the system, the more. We scale back how much leads each individual agent gets and we keep increasing our profit margin. It’s nuts. We will just literally take the same market segment. We’re producing 100 leads inside it.
You’re paying us $800 for however long we’ve been giving you 50 leads. But guess what? Three other people signed up for also $800. So now we’re going to give you 25 leads, them 25 leads, the other guy, 25 leads. And that’s how we’re going to setture that problem, though you use different language surrounding it, but that’s ultimately what they do. And so whether or not your lead system has been oversold should impact your expectations. And I recommend that every actually, I’m going to get John’s buy in. I think that as I tighten my belt and I’m watching my dollars more closely, I think this is deserving of a phone call to my existing lead provider to ask them how many other people are targeting this exact same market. What do you think, John? Do you think that’s reasonable? Unreasonable? Do you think that’s something that you would take the time to do? Or you think I’m just being anal?
I’m sorry, I’m a bit silent, which is a bit tricky on a podcast. I really don’t know if you’re going to get anywhere. Basically, I suppose it really depends on your contract length with that particular provider, the size of the client you are with them. You got much larger customer base than me. We’ve only got a very small customer base, but I actually think my product is a lot more sorted out the last 18 months than any time I’ve been running mail. Right. So that’s a tricky one, because, like I said, it really depends. I know most for understandable reasons, most of them on year contract. I suppose it really depends. I think it’s probably worthwhile it just depends on how they value as a client, what kind of answer you’re going to get from that phone call.
And I think that John is raising some good points. Let’s just say that you call your provider and they refuse to give you an answer, or they give you a vague answer or a workaround answer, but it’s not a specific answer. It’s not like we have four clients in the same area targeting the same thing. Let’s just say it’s a run around answer, I’ll get back to you. And they never do. That should show most of you where your level of priority is with your lead provider. And I would say that has to be in my opinion, that has to be an important conversation for all of you. We are no longer in a boom market. Now, I don’t think that we slowed down or I don’t think the market is crashing in the way that even I predicted that it might. So please don’t misread me, but I do think the market is slowing. The numbers say it’s slowing, it’s not. Robert newman saying it, though, there is a number out there. I think it’s 20 or 30%. The market is slow, maybe not for every single person listening to the show, but it has slowed.
So what does that mean that some of you should be doing? In order to do lead generation goals? You should be questioning your existing lead provider. Even if you have no intention of giving them up. Find out how important you are to them. You should be very important, I promise you. Companies like Yelpo Sync Boomtown. They’re Hemorrhaging clients. One thing that you might be able to do is you might be able to get increased priority with existing marketing spend by placing a call to your lead generation provider moving into a shaky market. How do you think about that piece of advice, John?
Well, it’s very linked to my previous answer, really. That conversation. Depending on the size of customer you are, you got every right to ask that. You got every right to have a conversation, a serious business conversation. How responsive that provider is going to be is really going to be really driven by how important they see your custom, aren’t they?
Yeah.
And so we’re going to go to a break, ladies and gentlemen. And when we come back, we’re going to keep feeding you a couple of this is a mixed show. We’re going to give you some advice about what you should be doing. But all of this ultimately should be affecting the conversation of lead generation goals in 2023. Maybe one of the lead generation goals that you’re going to have is to change lead generation providers based upon the kind of prioritization that they’re giving you, which is reasonable considering the fact that no longer are you just a number. You have been for a long time. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a marketing budget in 2023 and you’re spending it, you’re no longer a number. Trust me. All right, we’ll be right back. Do us a favor. Wherever you’re hearing the show, if you’re watching the show, do us a favor. Give us a thumbs up. Give us a comment. Tell John that you love his haircut. Something, anything. All right, thank you. We’ll be right back.
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Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right podcast. We are talking about redefining your lead generation goals in 2023. So far in the show, John and I have been discussing lead providers in specific territories being oversold in two 1212-021-2022 idea of reexamining your relationship with your lead generation provider. In 2023. And we’re not saying to ditch them or get rid of them. We are saying call them up and get back in touch with them and start to re explore how important you are as a customer to them, is what I felt like we said. Would you agree?
Yes, I think what you outlined is fair. I think a very small percentage of clients are going to do that. I think a lot of them, they’re not going to do anything or if their contract is getting close to ending or it’s month to month, which some of the companies it just really depends because some of the price points of some of the not KV core, but some of the other companies over there really aimed at a very successful individual, small team or brokerage level. And they’re going to be annual contracts. But I suppose maybe you’re on because I was thinking that a lot of people are just going to either cancel or not bother. But even if you got quite a bit on your contract, having that conversation really should be a leading primary if you’re going to renew that contract when it comes up.
Correct. And some rock solid advice as you’re discussing and renegotiating your contract. So guys, forever. I have been talking about on my personal website, on this podcast, how you are oftentimes entered into golden handcuffs with your real estate marketing company during boom markets, which we have been in for ten years. Getting your real estate marketing company to negotiate with you is going to be dependent solely on how much you’re spending with them. Most of the time, like 90% of the time. Guess what? As panic sets in at these real estate marketing companies, even for those of you who are not going to move providers, and you’re looking at your goals in 2023, one of the ways that you can increase lead generation effectiveness is by making sure that you’re getting the maximum value out of the money that you’re spending. How do you do that? Well, one of the things that bugs the hell out of me when it comes to some of these other providers like Boomtown Sync, they make it difficult to move your leads from one place to the next. Okay. If you’re going to renew your contract with them, a really sneaky way to make sure that you’re maintaining and increasing value out of your current lead generation provider is to get access to all your existing leads to say, all right, I’ll sign another agreement.
I’ll extend the one I’ll continue on and not exercise an early exit out of this contract. But I want complete and total access to all the names and numbers I’ve generated in the form of a CSV spreadsheet, which is an Excel document for those of you who do not know, and we’re going to download all that information and take control of it. That’s a good way for you to get a lot of extra value out of your provider. Now, some of you already have access to your leads. Those who are using follow up boss, you do. Those who are using a lot of other systems. KV Core, I think, does allow leads to be uploaded and downloaded. It will. Boomtown is the worst and most egregious people that don’t allow access to your data sync, I’m not sure. It’s probably complicated because everything on sync is complicated. So I’m not 100% sure. But I can promise you it’s probably complicated because everything is complicated. Chime, I’m unsure about what the rules are in terms of uploading and downloading on Chime, and I am fairly certain that lion desk is incredibly easy and I could go on and on.
So really you’re probably talking about a couple of the really expensive platforms and you want to make sure that you’ve accessed your data. Now John, you said you had a whole copious amount of notes. Why don’t you hit me with some of those before I use up all of our time?
Copious because I was leaving it for you.
I can keep going. No problem. Okay, so having said all that so let’s just say, ladies and gentlemen, that you’re looking at scaling back your goals or expectations by 30% to 50%. Now here’s the exercise. If you’re looking at your numbers and saying, I’m going to make 30% less GCI or 40% less GCI, and I’m spending X amount on lead generation, let’s call it $3,000 a month. So I’m spending $3,000 at $36,000 a year. I made $750,000 last year. I’m going to make 550 this year. You need to compare those two math, those things, and then you need to make sure that the margin between what you’re spending on leads and what you’re expecting to make makes sense. In many cases it might not. In some cases it might. There’s pros and cons to keeping your goals at the same place that they were in terms of your lead generation spend this year. Now, a pro is increased importance to your vendors. You can negotiate better contracts, better extras, better everything. If you take the time, as John said, I don’t believe most of you are going to take the time to reach out to your vendors, but that handful of you that do, you might have extra negotiating power if you should do that.
Okay, number two, and he’s agreeing, he’s nodding, and he’s even said yes. I think he really thinks that that’s a thumbs up. Well, I’ll let him tell you.
I think it’s the way you do it. None. Is it business like and just business like? Basically. I think you got every right to ask those questions. I just feel a lot of the times I was going to say that you’re probably not going to get a lot of information back. I can’t really base that on any knowledge, really. So it’s not right for me to say that. Is it.
Okay? Sure. I got no comment. You’ve got a valid opinion. So what’s the remaining bits here? So you look at the math, you go, Can I or can I afford? So you may need to adjust your spend down. But here is what most of you should know. I am honestly on my blog and everywhere else, in most cases, I’m advising that people re examine their math. Because if you are looking at your marketing spend and you understand that you’re looking at best at a two to one or three to one ROI, this is the time, ladies and gentlemen, that you focus on longer term strategies that have higher ROI. Because even in the long term world of inbound marketing, or information age marketing, as I’m starting to call it, even in that world where we’re sitting here going, oh, it’s going to be longer than direct, like paid advertising, it’s not right now. The timeline is roughly the same. So you’ve got roughly the same with one type of marketing giving you an incredibly deeper upside, like way deeper upside. Instead of two to one to three one, you could still be looking at 20 to 130 to one way.
Would you be interested in how Malwight dealt with this question? Sure, yeah. Because I believe in being totally honest with the audience, basically, it’s been up a five year journey plus. But I’d say really only in the past three years, three to four years, that I’ve been able to really work on the system, got it to a level that I was happy with. But the way we dealt with it, we had to make a decision, and we did this. We have a DIY product that has a library of landing pages and PDFs, and we have a weekly zoom where we advise anybody that joins the zoom. And we’re giving some insight and some group training about how to set up a Facebook marketing campaign, but it’s a DIY level. And then we up to all the prices to a much higher level on the campaigns that we will run for a client to a kind of bestoke level, which is on the mail. Right? And I still think it’s great value, but it’s a much higher price than something like Bold Leads. And that’s how then we can spend the time in producing individual campaigns that will get some results, which also normally includes a high level of video marketing on Facebook, but they’re at a much higher price level.
So that’s how we dealt with some of the issues that you’ve outlined in this podcast.
Perfect. And I agree with that. And for those of you who don’t know, because I didn’t know like six or seven months ago, I knew vaguely what that bespoke meant custom, but I have discovered that it came from the custom tailoring world is where that term came from and now is applied to the digital world. And it means custom, it means that somebody will design something to your specifications, essentially. So one way or the other, when we’re talking about lead generation goals in 2023, I think that one. This is a great time to start saying you’re willing to double down if you have the budget. This is a time for you to be looking at long term. Long term, in my opinion, is 100% in the information age arena. What is that? That is where you give detailed answers to questions that people can find on your website, on your Facebook page, on whatever platform that you’re going to use to disseminate information. In my opinion, obviously, and John’s probably as well, is that a website is the best possible central hub for all of that information. Now, we make these things, we’re in that business, so maybe you got to take what we say with a grain of salt.
But I have put all of my time, energy, and money into that category. But once that information is there, you have to get people there. Now, you can do that through organic marketing, otherwise known as SEO. You can do it through social marketing. You can do that by simply brute effort where you’re posting stuff all the time, but you’re probably paying somebody to post. So it’s still paid advertising to a degree, except if you own the content, if it’s your answers to questions that people are asking, nobody gets to take that away from you. Once you’ve produced it digitally, it’s yours. You’re protected by two or three different types of copyright laws. Take a picture. Same thing applies. You’ve got a digital copyright whether you know it or not, especially if you have a DMCA badge on your site. This is what I constantly refer to as taking charge of your marketing destiny. Stop relying upon others. When you own the content, you own the answers, you own the website, you own the result. And even if Google was to go out of business, you still retain all of the work that you’ve done in the past, very similar to people who created really deep sales manuals 20 years ago.
Go ahead.
Yeah, can I ask a question? Because I’ve been dying to ask you, as you were saying this in the second half of this show, do you think it’s the right question to ask you? Because if I was looking at one of these higher platforms like Boomtown, if I was looking either to change ship or I was looking at that higher level of provider, I don’t know if they’re aware of this. I really would be looking at a custom WordPress website, follow up boss and hiring a team. If I was looking for paid advertisement over on Facebook, Google, I’d be looking to hire agency a team. If I couldn’t run it in house, I’ll be looking just a higher team to run and utilize something like Follow up boss with my own website solution. The reason why they look at something like one of these higher end solutions is it they just offer Swiss Army knife in one can in one place, and that’s the real attraction. That’s why they go there. But they don’t understand some of the drawbacks which you’ve outlined in this show.
Actually, usually it’s ease of use is the idea that they’re sold on. Almost always it’s ease of use. We have a mechanism. You use our mechanism. It’s a guided mechanism. You’ll get business that’s simple. But it isn’t. It isn’t that simple. There is actually no provider that does a very good job of selling somebody correctly when they walk through the door. And everybody learns that the hard way, which is why we have a podcast, why I have a business, likely why you have a business. They’re not knowledgeable enough on the sales side to educate people when they come through the door about how big of a gap there is between a tool like Boomtown and making a profit off it. You must have a disciplined salesforce using that tool correctly to get value out of $1,000 a month CRM, full stop. And you got to train everybody on it. Now, I will say this. Boomtown is easier to learn than KVCore and most other tools. But is Boomtown easier to learn than follow up boss? No. So guess what? You have a better option at one 10th the price. That’s where these big teams don’t know that they don’t know that.
They don’t know. And follow up boss is not in the business of marketing themselves that way. Their I market follow up boss better than follow up boss markets follow up boss. Follow up is just like, hey, we’re CRM. Come check us out. We do good for real estate, right? They don’t say no. We can effectively step up to the plate and be as just as good of a CRM as Boomtown. We can effectively step up to the plate and take your team of 50 and give them a dashboard to look at. And you can watch everybody placing calls out of follow up boss. Same thing as Boomtown. You don’t really get told that there’s nowhere that their marketing really clearly identifies that. Whereas with Boomtown, they clearly are in your face all the time saying, all the best and biggest teams use our system. It’s so easy. It’s so nice. Give us $1,500 a month just to start.
To be honest, you probably got more experience of this, I don’t know recently, how difficult or how easy is the follow up API to integrate with a WordPress website? Then one more time, how easy is it to integrate follow up boss with a WordPress website?
Super simple. They give you like a pixel. The same way that Facebook does help if you have a team like to do it, because people get confused about inserting pixels and headers on websites. That’s just the way of it. That little. Piece might daunt like 50% of the people. So if you want to spend $100 and have somebody off fiber install the Pixel for you, do that. It’s still easier and still cheaper by far. I will say this, there are systems out there like Sync and KV Core. Here’s what KV Core has going for it. KV Core now has the largest open source digital library of training of any system I’ve ever seen. You can find so many different training videos on how to use KVCore. It raises my estimation of the platform. Not because the platform has changed or any of my technical reviews have changed, but because if you get enough help, you can be successful in even bad systems. If you just have somebody pointing out every pitfall and everything that they had to work around and giving you the solution and bite sized pieces, it becomes much easier. Like anybody could be successful no matter how complicated or difficult the system, because other people have gone out, tried, failed, learn from it, and then educated you without you going out, having to try and fail.
All you got to do is do the learning. That’s kind of true of any platform, really. Now, maybe some platforms have a higher learning curve than others, but KV Core has hundreds of videos that I’ve been able to identify, at least 20 or 30 of which are being done by qualified people using the platform, achieving success out of it. So they’re giving you tutorials. They’re giving you tutorials now Boomtown doesn’t have that. Follow Bus doesn’t have that. Sync doesn’t have that. KV Core stands alone because all the guys and gals from EXP who are making recruiting money are using KV Core because it’s an easy platform to install. Like they can give it to you for $25 a month. KV Core is going to continue to be their go to platform until somebody else creates just as good of a platform and allows you to add agents to it for an inexpensive amount of money. Sorry, I went off on one there, didn’t I? My bad. John.
No, it’s just interesting because I truly mean this list of some views. If I was got to the stage where I had a reasonable budget, I would honestly look at WordPress, Fire up Boss and then just running the campaigns. There are some specialized agencies that will run the campaigns for you through Google or through Facebook that specialize in working with brokerages and power teams. There’s about three or four of them out there where you’re not being locked into a specific platform. I’m a bit puzzled, but I’m puzzled, but also I totally understand because it’s just a more it’s just the ease of use argument supposedly, isn’t it? Which you outlined, right?
Which is not a real argument. But that’s why I do the videos that I do. That’s why I do the education I do, is that people don’t realize that. So I’m slowly god, it takes a lot of time, John, but I’m slowly chipping away at that old block, letting people know you’ve been sold a bill of goods. My friends and the people making these platforms like Boomtown has been doing this for ten years. They know what they made. They made something way ahead of its time. Ten years ago, they’re way behind the times now, ten years later, they’ve updated. Almost not at all. They understand that their market momentum is what propels them.
Well, I think it just depends because, basically, we’ve done these reviews. I think what you would say about Boomtown is the actual website is the same template, it’s the same solution. They don’t really customize it very much. And then the back end, I think you’ve said, and I would agree, that it’s one of the easier ones to use. And the normal functionality, which is around texting, and sending out emails, so you can keep in contact with the list that’s inside it, gathering information. But the bit that’s extra that they can help you run in that is the actual campaigns, isn’t it? Having the CRM platform isn’t going to produce a client paying a commission check. It provides the organization. But the campaigns, if you’re going to go down the paid route, it’s a campaign that can provide the traffic, which then hopefully will be converted into the system and then converted into a commission check, isn’t it? I don’t really think a lot of people understand the different bits, do they?
I would agree with that. But, ladies and gentlemen, we can deep dive into some of this on another episode. Just so that you know, the idea behind this was the market is changing. Your lead generation and marketing goals should definitely be looked at now, this year. Right now, as you listen to the podcast, I am unsure of that. There’s no doubt that you should re-examine it. I’m not telling you to take action. I’m not poopooing your existing marketing company. I am saying, dear God, everybody else is re-evaluating. You should be too. All right, thank you so much for tuning in for us. For those of you who made it for your first show ever, god, what a great show for you to fall on. Thank you. For those of you who are tried and trued and loyal listeners who tune into John and I, I know you guys are out there, you’re very quiet, but there are thousands upon thousands of you. So thank you so much. We really appreciate it. We’re excited about 2023. I’m speaking for John. John, if you do want anybody, if you’d like to close out the show in your own way, or if you’d like people to reach out to you, find you, whatever, how would they do that?
The best way is just to go to the website mailhyfenwright.com, and you can book a chat with me or add them through the website we’d love to help you out. Back. Over to you, Rob.
And I am the same answer, except that my website is the same thing as what’s behind me right here. It’s inboundrem.com. You can go to my about page and learn a little bit more about me. And if you’d like to inquire about some of our services, feel free to use the contact form. But I do recommend that you read all the content that we’ve produced or read my landing pages before you do so because we are not the company for everybody. We’re different. There’s only one of us. So be sure to read the stuff on my site before you book an appointment with me. All right. Having said all that, thank you so much. We’re going to go. Give us a thumbs up. Give us a like, tell us we suck, and we don’t care. Just communicate with us. We appreciate it. Have a good one. Bye, you.
We discuss with our special guest Greg McDaniels the importance of quality photography connected to being a successful real estate Read more
Agents need to do more than blogging to get results in 2016. We discuss this during this show with our two Read more
Greg McDaniel literally began his career at his father’s knee. It would not be an exaggeration to say he has Read more
Personal agent photography is really important but usually semi-forgotten. We have a great guest "Preston Zeller" on the show who recently Read more
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Real estate agents, did you know that communication is evolving fast and over 89% of consumers want to 2-way message with your business? Now you can leverage a business text messaging app that combines SMS and multiple messaging services. You can even enable your existing business phone number to send and receive text messages.
Aaron Weiche (WHY-KEY) is the co-founder and CEO of Leadferno, a text messaging platform for businesses to close more leads faster. Aaron is an entrepreneur founding and led multiple software companies and digital marketing agencies over the past 20 years.
Prior to Leadferno he was CEO of GatherUp, growing it to serving over 25,000 businesses and appearing in the INC 5000. Aaron lead GatherUp to an acquisition in 2019. Aaron speaks internationally on digital marketing, customer experience, conversion, and messaging.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right podcast. This is episode number 366. Three six six. Those are magical numbers, and I mean that literally. We are here today with Aaron Weiss, who is the CEO and co founder of of Lead Furno, which is not even the only thing that Aaron has done. It’s just the latest thing that Aaron has done. He has got an epic track record. We’re super excited to have him on the show. Aaron, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience?
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. An easy way to describe it, I’m a lifelong digital marketing addict. Luckily, I found the industry as it was starting to mature in the mid to late 90s, started building websites, started building digital marketing agencies, building websites and search campaigns, and along came social and mobile and all of those kind of things. And then after 15 years in that, I got into the software business and ran a company called Gather Up, which focused on customer feedback and online reviews. Brought that company to a great place, and we were able to sell it and exit in 2019, just before that little pandemic thing. And that freed me up to the next thing I wanted to get in trouble with, and that was starting a tool focused on conversion and text messaging. And that leads us to today In Lead.
And for anybody that might be tuning into the show, either a recurring visitor or somebody who’s brand new. John, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Yeah. Thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mail Right. We build beautiful websites on WordPress. Plus we offer a suite of marketing digital tools that gathers and gets you more leads.
Back over to you, Rob, and your field of host here is Robert Newman. I am the founder of Inbound REM and arguably the most experienced real estate marketing SEO consultant that’s working in this space today. So without any further ado, let’s get into a conversation with Aaron. And so, first of all, I want to actually ask you a little bit about text messaging and real estate, because at the pre interview part, you acknowledge to me and John that your wife was a real estate agent of 15 years. So I’m not sure if she still is or was previously, but how do you think the text messaging is impacting real estate digital marketing?
Yeah, so she retired a handful of years back. My schedule, four kids, everything else. And as you guys know, the schedule of a real estate agent, those things didn’t line up very well after a while. So to keep sanity, she sunset that after a very, very successful career. She kicked my butt in the earnings place for many years as an entrepreneur and was fabulous at it. And I always say I modeled myself an entrepreneur or real estate assistant. Right. If you’re married to an agent. I always call it my wife’s name is Marcy. I called it driving, Miss Marcy where I’m driving. She’s on her phone, talking emailing, sending stuff, jumping out, putting in yard signs, hanging sold signs, the whole gamut. You live and breathe that industry when it’s a part of the career of your partner in life. So, yeah, within that, one thing I can say is texting has been very early into the real estate field because realtors have been using that as their primary communication. Their best days are not behind a desk. They’re out on the move and talking with clients and getting things done and meeting with people and everything else.
And they made that traverse from a personal channel to a business channel extremely early. And consumers, I think, really wanted it too, because that real estate purchase is one of the biggest, most stressful purchases for most people in their life. So they want that communication, they want that personal relationship with their agent. And so they were very quick and fast to adopt that. The area where I see that it’s really kind of grown is how you can keep that connection going and the different things that can be done kind of prerelationship and even post relationship with texting. And that’s where I think things have really evolved. So as we’ll get into and probably talk about as we’re focused on conversion, we really see this. Like, what better than be able to ask a question over text, right, from a real estate website, right from a listing page, right from a digital piece of content that they have out there and be able to ask initial questions, something that might be really detailed, really quirky. You’re just trying to get a feel for how they communicate, if they’re the right fit for you with an agent and things like that.
That’s definitely one area and then the other, just being a way to stay in touch with your customers down the road and find out how things are still going, when they ever might be in the market to make a move again. You probably have notes on maybe what their dream property might be. So when you come across a new listing or something new you want to do, you want a great way to reach back out and be like, hey, I have something I think you might want to see or know about. So those are really the two ways that I see it, pre process and post transaction, and process being a really great tool to land new customers and to keep repeat business coming your way.
I’ve made a ton of notes, but before I dive into any of that John yeah, sure.
Thanks, Rob. Aaron, I don’t know if you agree what I’m just going to outline. I think there was a lot of interest, but also I think it was in some ways overplayed about when somebody goes on a website, they would be engaged in conversation messenger, facebook messenger, that you’d be able to almost automate the onboarding of new clients. And then it would be almost all kind of automated. And there seemed to be a kind of message that the agent would be almost excluded. The personal communication element, first of all, would you agree with that? And secondly, how do you see your particular product and service helping agent? But not if you agree what I’ve just outlined. How do you avoid some of the miscommunication?
Yeah, there’s definitely some good points in there. I think one thing, right, any of us that are a business owner, we run a business like time is the commodity, right? So we’re always interested in tools that can bring efficiency or even things that can be doing the work for us, right? The magic elves making shoes for us at night, leads being landed and matured and brought to the table with knowing all the details and everything else behind it. But interestingly enough, when we flip over to the consumer side, as consumers, we actually want the opposite of that. We actually want a personal relationship, we want personal touch. So what we’ve looked to do is kind of blend that. So to one extent, right, we’ve had years now of the promises of what Chat bots can do and automated processes. Obviously we’ve had some new developments with Chat GPT and some of the other AI things coming out there that are definitely taking a step forward. But I’ve still yet to engage and I’ve engaged with many chats as a consumer and then also in just doing research, always looking at conversion elements and I’m still yet to have any type of a wild feeling, right?
A lot of them I think, are there to placate the user and hey, where can we send you? Where there’s already content on the site or how can we just gather information about you? It’s not actually maturing a relationship, it’s not building trust and it’s not creating a personal one to one connection, especially in an industry like real estate where that’s what you want to have. You want to have trust with your agent. You want to feel great about their skill set and what they’re able to do and how well they understand your needs. So I think from that standpoint, it’s a lot of like hollow promise and we see a lot of people making the move, they’ve tried it and they’re going away from it because they couldn’t manage it the right way. It was difficult and tricky and so when they look at a solution like ours that offers business text messaging, they already understand how to text because they do that in their personal life, right? It’s for most people the top app that they use on their phone. And now you give them some of that promise of efficiency and a better working process because you have an app that automatically does replies to new leads.
So it’s not trying to have a conversation, it’s just saying, hey, thanks for contacting us. We’re currently with a customer and we’re going to text you back as soon as we’re free and we’re glad you’re here. Here’s a link to view some of our listings or if you’re looking to sell, here’s some information on some of the things that we do. And then that agent is able to pick up the conversation and personalize it and take it from there. You also can have saved message templates, so you already have questions, answers, links to things pre saved, so you can call those up in just a couple of taps. So instead of having to type out an email, point them in a direction, answer a question, ask a question. You already have that built out. Maybe you need to edit it just a little bit. But you already have hundreds of characters typed out and you can send it within a matter of 2 seconds instead of two minutes to type all of that out. So we’re really still focused. We want to make that human connection happen. We want to make it pleasurable for both sides, efficient for both sides, and make people feel like they’re really being taken care of in the personal channel that texting is, instead of a robot is trying to help me jump through these hoops and collect all my information as just a kind of a glorified lead form.
So that’s how we see that a little bit different. Can those things change and will they possibly take more steps forward? Yes, but still, at the end of the day, and I’m sure every agent would agree, like, getting me in touch and giving me a line in that prospect is really going to be the best bet for me to show off my expertise, customize the experience for them and help them achieve the outcome that they’re looking for.
Frank Sarah, that’s a fantastic answer.
So your skill and experience as an entrepreneur is really showing in this call because when we first set this interview up, I thought you were just another sequential text messaging sender, which I got to be honest, I am not a fan of, nor am I a fan of what I’m seeing. It due to the prospects inside the real estate space and just for those people listening, because Aaron’s smiling and he’s laughing, but you may not like if you’re listening to the show, you can’t see that. But for everybody listening to the show, there’s plenty of people out there, like using Wailopo type services where you sign somebody up for something and then you basically get entered into a behavioral sequence of text messages that get sent to you. If you trigger the right responses from the system, you can actually get as many as 30 of these messages in as little as one to four weeks. To me personally, as a guy that lives and breathes off his cell phone. Anybody that’s going to send me 30 messages, including the DNC and everybody else, I hate them. I flat out hate them. There is no other way to describe my feelings on the subject other than hate because I have to respond to my phone.
Some of these guys I don’t quite feel comfortable blocking, but at the same time, they send me so many messages, I’m like, what are you thinking? So that’s not what you’re describing here. And I’m curious to know you’re laughing and you’re smiling. So just briefly, what do you think about those services that are doing behavioral or mass testing as part of a sales process?
Yeah, so this is like one of those areas where I definitely have a soapbox that I’ve stood on and continue to stand on with this. So, yeah, you’ve done a great job upon hitting that. So here’s the high level thing. I’ll frame this up again from both sides because number one, I just always believe in that software should be a win win for both the business and the customer, right. Not one sided because that’s ultimately not going to work. So when we look at it from the business side and this means no on a fence, but the simple phrase sums it up for me, a fool with a tool is still a fool. Right. And if you don’t have the right strategy and you’re not looking at this for the right way and the right reason, you’re going to do the wrong things with it. So businesses get a hold of, let’s just call it a text marketing or SMS marketing tool like this and they’re like, great, I can pound people with buy now, you need to work with me, do this, do that, everything else. And what they’re failing to realize is you have a connection to them by having their cell phone number.
That is their most personal communication channel. And you’re willing to go through and burn that and get blocked because you have this automated series you want to put in front of them or you want to let them know about something. Right. Not in real estate, but in retail business. We see this with 10% off, 15% off, this sale, that sale, everything else. And so this could be a customer that if you nurtured them the right way and you had strategic one to one touch points and conversations you were smart about, could be an extremely valuable customer to you. But you’re going to trade that for burning them over being able to fire them off a bunch of messages and you convert 1% or 2% of that entire base that you’re sending out to. So that on the business side, I think is ridiculous. And then on the consumer side, all you’re doing is, if anything, you’re going to make them feel like, I felt good enough to give you my number and I thought I was going to get value out of this. And now you’ve completely sunk that value, right? You’ve made me feel like you’re only after sales.
You’re only after to kind of hound me. It’s going too far now. And now I’m going to block you. So now even if you came to me with something great, the same, whatever else, I blocked your number because I was tired of receiving these and that was the easiest way for me to stop hearing about you. So I totally agree with you on these things. And businesses just have to be smart in treating their customers the same way they want to be treated as a consumer themselves. And if you follow that rule, you’ll likely avoid a lot of these pitfalls that are there. That being said, there are ways and the right ways to do some of these things with automation. But again, you really need to be smart about how the customer is going to receive it. And you need to think smart about not just getting that one sale you’re really after, but making this a lifetime customer, making this person a brand advocate that’s going to refer other people to me or write great online reviews for me. That’s your multi headed goal there, not to be able to fastly funnel them through a sales process and try to get them to buy now.
So when we come back, we’re going to go to our break. Aaron, that was incredible. So incredible. I have some things I’d like to say and I am going to get on the soapbox for a second.
We’ll rant away.
Before I do, we’re going to go to our break. And when we come back, some of the reports that I am going to have is the idea of the centric idea for all real estate agents everywhere about how we need to start valuing our data differently. Okay. It’s so incredibly important that everybody do this. It’s actually in every service industry, not just real estate. But since John and I focus on real estate on this show, we’re just going to talk about real estate. But I cannot begin to explain to all never mind. I’m going to do it when we come back. All right. So without any further ado, we’re going to go to our break. We’re going to be back in what’s going to be about 2 seconds for you and we’re looking forward to it.
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?
Welcome back to the mail. Right, show. We’re at episode number 366. And for once, I don’t actually have to ask john, what the show number is, because those are magic numbers. Numbers divisible by three actually have placed in numerology. So this is going to be a lucky show for us and a lucky show for you, Aaron. I am convinced of it, John.
He has to be very lucky for me to die. Is it?
You bunked your head before the show, which is true, everybody. And and now he’s got his little British cup in his hand. All right, so for those people, before we went to break, we were talking about aaron was kind enough to share his thoughts about sequential marketing, or text message marketing, and Mass, which is a marketing service that I strongly don’t advocate for. And here’s the reason why Aaron said it in his way. I would like to say it in my way, which is we are getting better and better. So for every guy out there like Aaron, there’s another guy out there that’s creating an app or a service or a piece of technology that’s screening your email, screening your phone screening. And when you get a message from somebody that you want to communicate to, text messaging is really great. And when you’re getting messages and lots of them on your phone, which you feel you’ve got to manage and nurture in a very concentrated way, there’s nothing that says irritating text messaging has become the new telemarketing, like where you’re getting these interruptive messages to you. I came from telemarketing. Aaron. I used to run some of the biggest call centers in the world.
I have seen what happens to an industry when the industry ignores the consumer. We all think to ourselves, oh, I’ve got a million names, like, if you live in a big city and I can text all those people if I buy that data right? And 1% response rate is a lot of business, so let’s do that. What you don’t realize is that you are taking a very big audience, like 99% of them, and they’re becoming people that you can like, if you burn them enough, you’ll never get the chance to use that as a marketing tool again. They will simply block every message from anybody that they don’t know. And when that happens, the value, which is what I felt like you described, Aaron, and I do feel like you have a very incredibly valuable approach is going to be gone. We can’t use the tool responsibly if a whole bunch of other people have used it. So irresponsibly because, trust me, everybody, if you think that the federal government won’t eventually step in and start to create laws surrounding this, please do your homework and go back and look at what they’ve done with Telemarketing.
Because it’s illegal for me to call you. It’s illegal. I can get sued and fined by the FTC if I call you on a mobile phone. Just most people don’t know it. They just don’t realize that that’s the rule. And text messaging is still in that gray area. So as real estate agents, when you get your customers information, when you get somebody who registered maybe through a low value paid advertising strategy and they landed on a landing page, you force them to register for your site. For the love of God, treat that number responsibly. Do not enter them into a 30 text message cycle if you can avoid it, maybe ask a question or two respectfully and then don’t text them again if they so if they don’t indicate interest. John is dying to add something to this. Thank you for not jumping in and interrupting me. I appreciate it. John, give it to us. Give it to us.
I think it really links a signaling, isn’t it? I think what the key is, and I’d be interesting to see if you agree with this, if you put the right message in front of the right customer at the right time. That’s what really effective marketing is about, isn’t it? You know, I must receive hundreds of cold email, but on the other hand, there’s been a couple of subcontractors, that a couple of them still with me almost six, seven years. And the truth is, they contacted me through cold email, but they just done it. It was the right email at the right time, so it worked. And I think that’s what you and Robert just spewing out stuff and hoping it will stick isn’t probably going to work in 203, in the coming years, but sending the right message to the right person. So I suppose it’s really having a website or a system that provides enough signals so then you can send the right message out. Am I roughly on the right track there, Aaron?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s why we’ve really focused on the qualities of using text as an inbound tool for the business, right? Not an outbound, not a blast, but how do we procure more one to one conversations? And it’s why we place these floating buttons that are always visible on the site, on the screen. It’s on your about pages, it’s on your listing pages. If you have an IDX solution and you’re able to configure these buttons to say, like, have a question, we’re just a text away and it maybe has your review rating on there, any other type of social proof. But the combination of the elements in our buttons are really to convert you, as we call it, from being a lurker on the website to being a lead. And so the main point of that is having that right message of we’re approachable and we offer multiple ways to contact us, because you can also connect our buttons into click the call or email us or fill out a request form. But we see by far and away people want to text. It’s the lowest barrier to entry to start asking small, specific questions that don’t get you anywhere more committed in the process until you’ve built your trust up high enough so that right message at the right time.
The right message is showing you’re approachable, you’re trusted, you’re easy to work with, you have the channels that they want to communicate with you. And the right time is those buttons are always there on the screen, right? In building hundreds of websites over the years, I can’t believe how bad people mess up with just placing easy call to actions for the customer. There so many small business websites, the only call to action is just a contact link in their navigation. It’s such a waste of persuading or marketing to that customer to start a conversation with you. So, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And tying it in full circle to what we’re ranting about, instead of always looking at how do I do a one to many conversation that businesses think is so great and interested in how do I just crush up my one to ones? And how do I build that funnel right, so that I’m getting these one to one conversations? And as you guys hit upon, I’ve listened to some of your episodes, you were just talking about conversion and landing pages. Like you should be moving traffic from all these borrowed channels and all the other things out there into a property that you own right into your digital assets.
And then once you get them there, you need to have the right tools to convert them, right? Getting them there is half the battle and for a lot of people trying to double or triple or quadruple your web traffic is very expensive, takes time, there’s a lot that goes into that. And so you need to make sure you are milking every ounce out of that traffic. You are driving to your digital properties and being easy to talk to, being easy to work with and putting that front and center is exactly how you want to do that.
For the record, I agree with this. And I do think on my notes, I did put something down that I thought was kind of interesting, which is a text me now format, which I have actually not tried. Oddly, as a call to action on Inbound REM’s products. I’m you 20 years ago, I have a company, I do a few different things, but one of my inbound REM, the company that I am most well known for is that company still builds real estate website, still has these calls to action on it. I’ve noticed that what we are seeing a drift towards is people wanting to do more. Like let’s calendar a call. The same way that I schedule appointments with my prospects, like here’s calendar link, let’s do a call. People are actually more inclined to go through a longer process. I don’t have to email you, I’m going to schedule a call. But an interesting idea somewhere in the middle is text messaging. John and I have talked ad nauseam about chat bots. He’s for them. I’ve never had any good experience with him.
He has well, most of my leads run two businesses, Aaron. And I was saying to Rob, while the business, almost 90% of the lead come through a chat, but I answer all of them if not one of my team is available. We make it clear that you’re not going to get a reply if you put a question in at 03:00, a.m. Pacific Standard Time, because there’s none of us around, so we make it clear. But when they do put a question in, they get a reply from me or another member of my team. It’s a person. In other words, it’s not a list of unsuitable questions that we’ve all been there, haven’t we? I was going to say my question. The other thing I’ve noticed, which is really important, is people are pre screening themselves before they even contacted you. They’re reading all the pages on the website, they’re reading the competitors websites. And I think they do that with real estate agents. They get some recommendations, they go to the website to find out about the agent, they pre identify the one that they’re going to do the initial outreach, and it’s up to that real estate agent to either get that first meeting or not.
And I don’t think there’s a lot of people in the industry that understand the clients are screening a lot more before they approach. What do you think about that, Aaron?
Yeah, I mean, I’m of the opinion that you have to use every advantage you can, and content, I think, is one of the biggest weapons. I have been an inbound marketer my entire time. I’m building my second SaaS company without ever running a paid ad. I am not a paid acquisition guy. I am a write content, educate people, be there with answers and help build them up so that when they learn and they fully understand it, they’re going to go right to the person who helped them learn. Now, the real estate process is so important, and again, we’ve already talked about the trust with it that you absolutely need to be showing how you’re unique. What is it about your personal side, how well you know the area if you’re in a bigger city, how well you know specific neighborhoods and things like that. You need to find the unique content angles to really have yourself show up and be out there. Because, let’s face it, there’s enough tools out there where there can be thousands of real estate agent sites that all look the same. Some of them even use the same stock photography.
So you need to personalize it and you need to show that for yourself. I’m also amazed. I was always thrown off and it wasn’t even as much when my wife got into it. But there are so many real estate sites that come up in searches ahead of that. Realtor is their own site. Right. And they haven’t completed the profiles on any of them. Those profiles aren’t linking to the site they currently own. They’re jumping domains every time they change a website provider. You just have this host of things where it’s like you need to be updating any possible inroad with the exact reflection of who you are and when they come to your site, not only should you have tools to understand what they do and everything else, but what’s your unique local knowledge? What do you bring to the relationship? Who are you as a person, family person, everything else that will make them identify with you? Right. It’s amazing to me. My wife was she was into triathlons. We had four kids, like all these things, right. And a customer would just say like, oh, when I read this about you, that’s what made me want to work with you.
I knew that you were the right person for me. So it’s not going to land you every lead, but you’re absolutely right. When we have so much content and so many things on demand, you have to put out what your unique advantage is and market that and allow them to take it in and make a decision.
Great. Sorry guys, I’m guessing you can hear me because I’m sorry, John’s, expression change. Okay. But my screen froze again. We would like to keep you on for an additional five, maybe ten minutes, but I have kind of a curveball question because you’re speaking my language. If John will allow me the I.
Would be go ahead.
I would just like to ask you one broad question that isn’t specific to Lead Inferno, isn’t specific to me and isn’t specific to John. I am curious if we could use the bonus section to talk about what your vision for digital marketing in general is going to be for the next year or two as we enter into a changing economic environment. Would you mind kind of just free riffing and sharing your thoughts? Sure.
I don’t know where that stream of consciousness will go, but let’s put it together.
Okay, hold on. So John, do we want to separate out the show and do yeah, the.
Podcast and we go on to buy this so I can watch on the YouTube channel.
Okay, so for everybody listening to the show, we’re going to move the last ten minutes to the show. We’re going to get Aaron’s thoughts on this very broad topic and we’re going to put it on the mail hyphen, right? YouTube channel and maybe the inbound REM YouTube channel as well. So either one of those places you can check it out. In the meantime, Aaron, if you would like somebody to find you or your incredible company, how would you like them to do that?
Yeah, head to Lead for no. Probably one of your best moves, as I hinted at, we write a ton, so click on our blog. There’s 50 plus articles. We’ve done surveys you can understand, data on how people view response times, where people are spending their time, why they like text messaging, all those kinds of things, getting to know our features. So that’s the best place. And still, currently, as of us recording this, I haven’t jumped the Elon ship. I’m very active on Twitter, so ask Aaron Wiki on Twitter. Happy to engage, respond to questions and everything else there. Beautiful.
All right, so, John, how would you like people to find you?
I’ll just go to the mail right? Website. You can book a chat with me or my co founder Adam, and we’ll be more than happy to try and help you out. Back over to you.
Rob and Inboundrem.com is my handle. Most of you already know that you can start on the about page or the Home page. Either way, you will find a very long video explaining who I am and what my position inside the real estate marketing space is. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. We deeply appreciate it. We hope that you’ll come back and give us another listen. We’ll catch you the next time.
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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman
jonathan@mail-right.com
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
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Robert Newman
InboundREM
https://inboundrem.com
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We discuss with our special guest Greg McDaniels the importance of quality photography connected to being a successful real estate Read more
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Scott Agnew has dedicated his life to helping leaders discover their most significant potential inside themselves.
His passion is leveraging personal leadership dynamics to make a positive impact on the people around him.
The owner of multiple businesses, including several Keller Williams real estate market centers, Scott consistently ranks in the top 1⁄4 of 1% of profit share earners in Keller Williams Realty International.
Scott is a founding member of MAPS Coaching and was a key advisor in the deployment of the Recruit Select Training Learning Mastery into the KW system. And the author of Long-Term Leader: The Hidden Secrets of the Power of Soft Skills to Go From CEO To Successful Business Owner.
Welcome back to the mail. Right, Podcast? Ladies and gentlemen, today we’re extraordinarily excited. We have an incredible guest this afternoon, so I’m going just to read the title of this guest. It’s Scott Agnew, who is the CEO and operating partner at Keller Williams Realty, east Valley, Tempe, Arizona Park City, Utah, and KW, Utah region leadership and motivational training agent, business coaching, and life advancement. And the man has a list of achievements in a warm longer than my arm. So if you want to highlight any of those, Scott, feel free to do so. But that was my introduction, so why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience?
Well, sure, I appreciate that, and I’m glad I’m able to talk with you guys a little bit about myself. I don’t talk about myself very often, so it’s kind of almost a little bit uncomfortable at times. But I’ll tell you what; I guess if you could summarize it, nobody, especially myself, would ever have believed I would accomplish what I’ve accomplished. But I owe it a lot. I owe so much of it to the amazing leadership that I’ve been able to learn from over the years with people like Gary Keller, of course, mo Anderson, a guy named Robert Kalinsky, bob Kalinsky, a good friend, David Osborne, Linda and Jim McKissick, Beverly Steiner. I mean, there’s just a long litany of people that have helped contribute to the overall success of this company, and I’m pretty honored to be part of it.
Beautiful. And John, for anybody that might not already know who you are, would you introduce yourself to the audience?
Dan?
Thanks, Rob. I’m the co-founder of Mailhyphen Right. We build beautiful real estate websites on WordPress, and we have a suite of marketing tools that will help the agent get some great digital deeds back over to you, Rob.
And honestly, I don’t usually actually introduce myself, but Scott, I don’t think you know who I am, so I will tell introduce myself to you as opposed to the audience. So I’m an SEO guy who’s been specializing in residential real estate for 14 years and as far as I know, I might very well be the most experienced real estate residential SEO consultant founder that exists. I have a marketing company that I founded called Inboundrem.com. You can see it right behind me. And I educate agents, lots of them, tons of them, but for free. I do inbound marketing style content where I give them the free digital tips and advice that they need to rank and Google my business, change their mindset as it relates to inbound marketing and real estate and a whole bevy of other things. So that’s who I am. Without any further ado, ladies and gentlemen, for the first part of the show, we are really excited to talk to Scott because Scott, after all these years in real estate, you decided, I’m guessing that you decided to put your knowledge down in book form. And you wrote a book called The Top Ten Mistakes That Prevent You From Being a Long Term Leader.
Before you tell us about the book itself, might you tell us why, after all these years, you decided to write? And especially a guy who just self identified, you don’t like to promote yourself or you don’t like talking about yourself, so why write a book?
Sure. Well, it was during the pandemic and I didn’t have anything else to do because I was grounded, I couldn’t travel. So just by virtue of having extra time on my hands, I joined a group of entrepreneurs. And I found one thing in common between all these amazing, successful, what I call fulfilled entrepreneurs in a network that I joined called Genius Network. And I saw so many human beings that were not thinking about their own profits or their own success or their own fulfillment, but rather they’re more focused on what they can do to help other people achieve what they’ve achieved and kind of what’s in it for them type of attitude. In fact, the founder of the network just wrote a book and I’m going to promote it because it’s an incredible book. It’s called? What’s in it for them? You’ve heard of the book called how to Win Friends and Influence People? Well, this book is about how to win the right friends and influence the right people. And based on some of what I’ve learned from the gentleman Joe Polish that wrote that book, I decided and I was inspired to write my own book.
And the main theme around leadership, I wanted to take a much different approach. That approach was more about how to interact as a long term leader in the moment, rather than focusing on all the hard skills, the tools, the objectives, the plans and all those kinds of things. One of the things I have learned over the years, almost a plan almost never gets executed the way you write the plan. And so you’re always pivoting, you’re always making adjustments. You might even scrap a strategy and have to go back to your team and say, we’re not going to do that. And so long term leadership is about how you do that so that your team doesn’t put a noose around your neck or walk out the room. Right, right. Those are some key elements of being in the game for the long term.
So that leads me to another question, and then I’m going to hand one over to John. I’m curious. You are a man that appears to be, from everything I can see, at the high side of your career. So you are also talking about having joined a networking group while you’re at the top of that mountain and saying, I’m going to join a group of like minded individuals. How important has, like, mentorship been throughout the entirety of your you’ve now twice mentioned it in the first part and now here. So how important has mentorship been to you inside your career, would you say?
It’s been incredibly important. It’s probably been the main contributor to helping me keep my head on straight, stay focused, and more importantly, help me get in touch with the things that I really want and help me get in touch with the human being that I want to be. When I was my father passed away when I was eight years old. The book says I was ten, but the truth is, it’s eight, okay? And I grew up without somebody to kick me in the butt, somebody to hold me accountable, somebody to challenge me, somebody to, you know, what dads do? I didn’t really have that. But I had many figures in my life that filled that role for me and starting all the way back to Little League. And Mr. Frigy, who was my first coach, and then in high school after that, mr. Fulton, who was my basketball coach. And these gentlemen helped shape my work ethic and helped me understand what was, you know you know, there were times when I thought I was, you know, a four on a scale of one to ten, and they would say, no, Agnew, you’re an eight or a nine, you know?
And they they helped me be more realistic about my, you know, what I was actually achieving, because I never really felt like I was good enough. That’s part of the reason I think people become entrepreneurs. They’ve got something inside them that they need to prove. And so mentorship has played a huge role in helping me get comfortable with who I am. It helped me write the book. I mean, that’s crazy, right? Writing a book on leadership? There’s been thousands of books written about leadership, and yet I wanted to write something that I thought was different about the how of leadership, not the what. And so the soft skills, I think, were incredibly important to me because I was taught by mentors. I was given a lot of mentorship. Dr. Jack Vandewowda helped me, and of course, one of the premier people that helped me was Gary Keller. He’s the guy that taught me how to not write scathing emails to people.
Hey, you need to teach John that. No, I’m just kidding. I’m just joking. I’m totally everybody, that was a total joke. All right, John, take it away, sir.
I’m so hurt, Robert. I really am so hurt. It’s been a rough year. You just finished it off so well.
Rob.
There we go. Scott, from all the things that you probably cover in the book, what would be one that comes straight into your mind here and now that you would like somebody to learn from the book, read after reading it?
Yeah, well, I think the message of the book is very basic, it’s very simple, and that is, how do you increase your potency as a leader? And what I mean by potency is when you make a suggestion or when you give some guidance or when you offer some perspective. How do you get your people in a place where they’re anxious to hear what you have to say as a leader? I had a wonderful coach many years ago who taught me this, and it made sense to me. He said, in most accountability sessions or reviews or quarterly summaries, when you’re having those kinds of meetings with your team, and in my case, leadership team, because everybody that reports to me, they’re all leaders in their own right. He says he’s told me, he said 99% of the time, those meetings leave people feeling worse than when they came into the meeting. And it made sense to me because yes. And why did it feel worse? A lot of times you feel worse because you just feel like you’re not doing enough. And that’s when you go home and you start kicking the dog and your kids aren’t good enough and your wife isn’t supporting you enough, because you’ve just come out of this interaction that you feel like, gosh, there’s so much more that I can do.
And what it does, it creates anxiety and it creates stress. And as a leader, it’s important not to have that kind of anxiety and not to have that stress. It’s certainly not to let that bleed into your interactions with your leaders because it flows downhill, right? Whatever you start, it will continue to pay itself forward. So it’s more about being inquisitive, and instead of being as a leader, being in a directive mode I’m going to use this word being a Requestive mode. One of the one of the superpowers of Gary Keller is all he does is ask great questions, and he’s there to learn. And as a leader, I’m there to learn. And what am I there to learn? I’m there to learn what my people are feeling, what their obstacles are, what their challenges are. And I’m also there to learn what their real victories are. What are they really proud of? They might be proud of something that isn’t part of my objective plan or their objective plan, but they’re proud of a win or they’re proud of how they move the ball forward. And it might seem small, but to them, it could be big enough to actually fulfill them and give them a motivation to really go out there and bust their tail at the end of the day because they realize that they’re cared for as human beings, not just for what they can accomplish.
And I think in business today, especially today, you’ve got a scenario where the typical younger leader, if you will, they’re more wired around the emotional and psychological side of the business than they are around the competitive side of the business. And so competition versus collaboration is something I talk about in the book. It’s a very interesting topic to me.
Well, it’s a bit of a balance, isn’t it, depending on personality, style, isn’t it? Some people, especially on the sales side, they are really driven by the competitive element in office or a scenario where other types, they can sometimes be just as effective in sales, but they’ve got a very different style and they don’t particularly like that competitive side. Would you agree with that, or do you think I’m off track?
Yeah. I mean, when you look at the top productive agents in real estate, they’re task driven. We call them taskers. They do one thing, they accomplish one thing. They take about 1 second to enjoy their accomplishment and they’re ready to accomplish the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And they achieve at a very high level. They’re the they’re the type of folks that, you know, they’re in the top two 3% and they do, you know, 50% of the business. And that’s just the way it is. I mean, that’s the way it is in sport, professional athletics. Unfortunately, it’s probably not that way in politics. We can’t even find a one or 2% in politics these days. But if you really look at the difference in how they’re motivated, that level of agent is motivated by challenge. They want to be challenged. They want to be called out on their imperfections. They just have super high expectations for themselves. They have high expectations for others around them. And my book is ideal for this kind of achiever because the challenge that those top one, two and three percenters have is that while they make a tremendous amount of cash flow revenue, they tend to suffer quite a bit.
And the suffering comes from having high turnover on their team. And so they’re constantly retraining. They’re rehiring and it feels to them, I think in many cases somewhat like a hamster wheel, right? The more they do, the more they’ve got to take care of everything. And they don’t have a sense of who they can bring into their business that could actually replace them so that they could still own a majority interest of the business and have a life. This is the kind of stuff I talk about in my book. Because anybody that has the will to build a big real estate business or any big business, the challenge they have is to be able to change their mindset and be able to enjoy it and be able to let other people have opportunities inside their business and then open the door for them to do it. And do it in a way where people trust each other and do it in a way where people get great results without a lot of friction or anxiety. Because after all, you can only go to so many restaurants. You can only buy so many pairs of shorts and have so many cars and so many homes and all that.
What’s left after that? After that is you want to have a life and you want to have something that you can enjoy. Maybe you want to have a family and enjoy your family. So that’s why leadership is so important, because it gives you great leverage over your business.
That’s fantastic.
Well, ladies and gentlemen and Scott, we’re going to go for a break. When we come back, Scott, I’m going to give you an opportunity to talk about talking to the world at large. Our audience is 100% real estate professionals. So what would you want? The top three things that you’d want to point out to somebody about maybe the top three lesson deliverables you feel like your book might be able to help somebody with. Let’s call it that. What are the top three lessons that you might learn from your book? When we come back from break, I’m going to ask you to serve those up. And then if it’s okay with you, I’m going to ask some questions about Keller Williams.
Great.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for staying tuned as always. Do us a favor, please, and give us a like wherever you’re watching this video, whether that be YouTube or your favorite podcasting service, we would really appreciate it. Leave us a comment. John and I always read them and always appreciate them. We will be right back.
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Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right podcast. John and I have done this well, not me, but we’ve done this 365 times in total, which is crazy. So it’s episode number 365. And today we’re here with Scott Agnew, who is many things. But what we’re talking about today in at least part is his book, the Top Ten Mistakes That Prevent You From Being a Long Term Leader. And then we’re going to spend a much smaller part of the podcast talking about what made him qualified to write the book in the first place, which is experiences at Keller Williams. So without any further ado, before we went to break, I said I asked the question of if you were talking to somebody who’s never read the book and maybe doesn’t even know who Scott Agnew is. What are the top three lesson type deliverables that you feel somebody might be able to pull from the book? Should they read it?
Well, there’s really just one message, right? And yes, there are some lessons in there, but the one message is really communicate. Communicate with your people. Most people think they’re great communicators. However, when you talk to a lot of people and you ask them, hey, do you think your boss gets you? Do you think your boss understands you? Or do you think your mom and dad understand you if they’re a teenager, right? Or when you ask that question on the other side, most people don’t feel heard. They don’t feel appreciated. They don’t feel understood. And in fact, many really powerful relationships between colleagues and even between people that end up getting married, one of the common things that you will hear is, will they get me? They understand me. They know where I’m coming from before I even speak. They finish my sentences for me because they’re honestly listening. And so that’s the real message, is when your people have that, when you have that relationship with your people and they know that you get them, then the walls come down. And when the walls come down, then you start learning what you need to learn as a leader.
You learn what’s going on in the front lines. I can’t tell you how many meetings that he was in as a young professional where we would all get after the meeting, we’d go, God, they don’t know what they’re doing. Upper management doesn’t know what’s going on. Gosh, they’d have no idea what it’s like out there on the streets and blah, blah, blah. And that’s because the model for leadership then was the leader got up and had to be the smartest guy in the room and pontificate for an hour about what everybody needed to do, what their objectives ought to be, what their plans ought to be, and how they ought to execute. Well, that doesn’t work anymore. If you really want a team to be bought in, part of the execution, part of the plan has to be from them, and it has to be well thought through. And most of the time, you see leaders make decisions, and they don’t even think about the unintended consequences of their decisions. And I would say that’s probably one of my superpowers, is, look at all the different angles. Put yourself in the other guy’s shoes when you’re talking to him.
What are their fears? What are their aspirations? As Jonathan say, what is their communication style? And put yourself in their shoes so that you can communicate on the same wavelength. And it’s like FM 101 versus FM 95. Get on the same frequency, and then your potency as a leader is so dramatically increased that it’s almost like you hit the beautiful notes instead of just singing loudly, if you will.
Okay, that was beautiful. I have a follow up question, John, but before I do, do you have.
Anything that you no offer was a fantastic answer.
Honestly, so do I. And the question that I have is, anytime somebody’s written a book and I’ve done the same, but I feel like there’s this long road that leads you up to a point where you feel like you have something to say that you’re going to put down in a book, right? It’s a long road. So I’m going to kind of try to touch a couple of what might be milestones upon that long road for you, which would be my questions would be, so you’re in charge of it or you’re a leader within this very large territory for Keller Williams. Do I understand that? Basically. So if you had to guess, how many people ostensibly are you responsible for leading or talking or coaching or whatever the right language is for that?
So that’s one of the mistakes leaders make, is they think they have to lead everybody, and really you don’t. What you’ve got to do is you’ve got to lead five to ten key people and then they lead everybody else. And so we have a saying, success through your best and brightest, right? Success through them. And those five to ten people might change over the years. You might have different people that come in and out of that. But that’s one of the things I’m very careful to do, and that is that I lead to what I call my span of influence, direct influence and direct potency. So I don’t try to lead everybody. I let my leaders there are people in Keller Williams in Utah that don’t know who I am. They might know my name, but they might not even associate with me at all. And that’s completely okay. My goal or my objective is not to know everybody and be the center of attention or be their hero. My goal is to make sure that I’m creating an environment where they can absolutely thrive. And if I get the right people in place and I give them the right support through direction, through effective questioning, through great consulting, through making sure they get the right training and have the right tools, if I support them, then I know they’ll go out and pay it forward into their environment.
And so that’s how we’ve grown. We’re number one in Utah. We have number one market share, number one agent count, number one production level. And we are not a discount brokerage. We are a full service brokerage, which means that we are not the cheapest. That being said, I’m pretty proud of the fact that while we don’t go in cheaply, but we do go in with tremendous value, we kind of position ourselves in a way as the costco, if you will, brand name, great quality, but at a very competitive price. And so I’m pretty proud of that. When I started there, I took over a failing brokerage that had 21 agents. And today we have almost close to 1700 agents in Utah. And I didn’t do that by myself. I did that through getting in business with some amazing, incredible people. I could start naming names, but the problem is I’ll probably forget somebody. But they were incredible. Yeah, beautiful.
I think that answers my question. And I appreciate it, but let me just make sure that I do understand how long ago was starting. You said the word start. So when I started, how long ago was that?
Well, it was actually in 2001. That was when I first went up there. And I didn’t really get a strong foothold until about 2002. Took me about a year of interviewing different I went to different vendors and my question was, who do you know that’s quite influential in real estate? And what happened was I would get the same name over and over again from different places. And so then I made appointments with those people. And I remember the first meeting I had with one of my most successful legendary leaders in Utah of all time. Her name is Lee Stern. Anybody in real estate in Utah knows that name. And I was fortunate enough to have an appointment with her. And she sat down with me and she says, okay sonny, you got ten minutes. What do you got? And 3 hours later, right when our discussion finally ended, I made some promises and commitments to her. And I think if you would talk to her today, I think she would say that I lived up to every one of those promises and commitments, which was kind of tough at the time because at the time I promised being the entrepreneur that I am, right?
I wasn’t even sure I could deliver on a couple of things that I promised. But I got in over my skis a little bit and I had to come up with some money and capital that I didn’t really have, all those kinds of things. I would just say that anything of great significance, the only way you’re going to accomplish it is if you find a way to get with and be part of other people’s vision too, and buy into what they want. And so often our visions are so aligned anyway, so it doesn’t have to come from the leader. I don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room, and I’m certainly not and I don’t want to be. I’d much rather be surrounded by people that are just excited and committed. Sometimes it’s for a cause. I mean, in Lee’s case, she was an absolute advocate for the welfare of her real estate agents. She thought of them as her family, like her kids almost. And she wanted to do everything she possibly could to set the stage for them to be successful and fulfilled. And that’s my kind of person. And not only did she have that rhetoric or that talk, but she had a track record to demonstrate that that’s what she actually could accomplish.
And so to this day, I’m just so blessed that Lee and I were able to find each other and do what we did.
Holy cow. That is the kind of gold that I look for when we do these podcasts and I deeply appreciate it. I’ve only got 14 years behind me in the industry, but I have had the chance to work with legendary names like Joyce Ray and people like that. And so you become part of the fabric, like the story of the industry that you’re within. Jeffrey Highland, who is unfortunately past people, you meet them, and I have always found that once you meet them, who they are is not ever who you thought they were going to be. Like, nobody ever prepared me for the fact that Jeffrey Highland was literally probably one of the smartest, most well educated building historians and architectural historians that to my knowledge, has ever worked in the real estate industry. I’ve never met anybody with the depth and breadth of knowledge that he had. So when you meet with him, you’re thinking, oh, I’m going to meet with this extraordinary sales guy, right? That’s what you’ve got in your head, the founder of Hilton and island. Then you meet this guy who’s just like a professor of this thing, and you’re like, holy cow.
That’s not what I was expecting. What you said about Lee Stern, I don’t know her, but I know her. But I know the repute, and I’ve never met her, never met her team. But I have heard through the grapevine, through Keller Williams. I’ve heard that name before. It doesn’t surprise me that she’d be like mama bear as it relates to her agents. Scott so John and I usually ask our guests if they I pushed off the questions I have about Keller Williams. He’s been providing so much great information. But I would love to do, if you’re willing. Ten minutes of a little bonus section and just I’m going to let John serve up the first question, which we talked about before the podcast, but I’d kind of like to key it up for the audience if you’re willing to give us the extra time to say we would like to ask your opinion about how Keller Williams is positioned, moving into the future, things like that. From more of a tech and marketing standpoint, which is what our show tends to be about. Is that okay with you?
Absolutely. Yeah. Wonderful.
Okay. John, do you have anything? We’re going to go to the final break and move everybody over to the YouTube channel. Actually, you know what? Now I think about it. How would you like people to look you up? Like, if somebody wants to research you, want to research your book, Scott, how would you like them to do that?
The easiest way they can email me is Scott A@kw.com, and then I can get them a direct link to check out the book. Or if they don’t want to email me, they can just go on to Longterm Leader. Very easy to remember. So either way, Scott A@kw.com or longterm leader.
Actually, I haven’t done this before, actually, but I think Scott is such a fascinating we just extend the podcast. Show Robert for another ten. We just extend it.
Okay, so we won’t do these at the outro yet. Beautiful. Great. So, John, if you wouldn’t mind, if you remember the question that we talked about prior to the show, why don’t you serve it up? Because you are a little bit more graceful than I am, which literally is a rarity. Usually it’s opposite, but in this case, so everybody knows I kind of got shut down and John kind of got the green light, so.
That’S okay.
So, Scott, what’s your fault? Were you surprised about what has happened to Zillow to Open Door and to some extent Redfin? They all to some extent, went into wholesaling. It seemed to be what they thought was going to be, especially with redfin going to be the future, that there was going to be a hybrid wholesaling landscape that was going to be the driver of their growth. Also Zillow obviously open door. That is their business model. But to all extent, to say that it hasn’t worked out, was you surprised or did you have a feeling that this was going to be the outcome when the market became more of more realistic? Put it that way. Shall I?
Well, I’m not going to sit here and pretend like, oh, yeah, I knew that it was going to fail. But I will tell you, every year as we kept looking at analyze the financial, the financials of these companies, and they were losing millions of dollars. Gosh. Another one you didn’t mention is Compass. I mean, these guys have burned through $700 million. And basically the whole concept of trying to either displace or to go directly to the consumer without having a real estate agent involved is a very tenuous. I can see the aspiration because they see the dollars and the money. But as far as real estate itself, man, it’s an intimate business. When you buy and sell real estate, when you buy and sell property, when you invest, you want somebody you can call and talk to and you want to be able to trust that person. I mean, I don’t want to sound old school here because I totally believe that technology has its place. All of my clients look on Zillow for what their property is worth. Great, wonderful. I don’t have to send them the CMAs, and I don’t have to do all that stuff anymore.
But when it comes down to them wanting to buy or sell property, who do you think they call? They want to call somebody that knows what they’re talking about, that knows the pitfalls and the landmines and the unforeseen challenges and problems. And it’s a big decision whether you’re investing, whether you’re buying real estate for yourself, whether you’re in the commercial world. Everybody wants certainty. They want to know what landmines are around them that they either can avoid or walk away from. And that’s where professional real estate agents play such a vital role and all these companies that made the attempt to displace that, I think it was just a bad strategy overall, and it was certainly a case where it was profits over value in terms of the client experience. They poured tons of money into marketing where they had the we have a marketing company in Phoenix right now that’s taken the world by storm. They’re everywhere. And it turns out they have a 40% fallout rate in their transactions. They claim to have 11% of the market. They only have about four and a half percent because it’s all marketing. I had an agent the other day call me up and she goes, I’m going up against this big behemoth company.
What should I do? And I said, we’ll just tell them you do the same thing they do. You just don’t misrepresent yourself about it. And they don’t. And she walked away with the listing and was happy and got it sold and did a great job for the client. And the bird still chirped and the air was still clean. Everything was fine. And that’s exactly what we’re faced with Wall Street. A lot of big bucks behind these companies. The amount of venture capital that’s been poured into these companies is mind boggling. It’s because they see the profitability, they see the numbers. But to access those numbers, we believe very strongly that the way to access that is through professional real estate agents who are fiduciary, who wake up every morning with their clients best interest at heart, who are there to serve as servant leaders, not as salespeople, who educate first and help their clients make great decisions. That’s what we believe. And I think that for the long haul, I think that strategy is probably going to prove to be pretty solid. I don’t see it any other way.
Copy you well, a small adjustment, and I am only regurgitating stuff that I’ve read, but I think you were actually overly generous in the amount of money that you said that was lost. I believe the number with compass alone is actually in the billions. But I appreciate, as another leader who is oftentimes speaking on platforms, it’s always better and wiser to just say the least possible thing. You can’t get yourself in trouble usually, so I get it. But I will put myself out there, not you, and I will say, I think the number is much higher than the one that you gave. So having said that, I think the only John kind of skipped the question. But that’s okay. We’re going to leave it alone. If John didn’t want to do it, then I’m going to lean in on his wisdom and say, we’re not going to do it. But I do want to ask one other question, which is a burning one from me. I’m asking you one Robert Newman question. I’m curious to know how you feel. Keller Williams is positioned against more, and maybe this is a marketing thing, but more digitally focused real estate brokerages such as Realty One, EXP.
There has been a shift, a newer trend that is not compass, which is trying to do the same thing with a little bit better branding and a mobile app, in my opinion. So that’s what they were trying to do, right?
Yeah.
You do have a couple of companies with new ideas out there that are trying to do things in a somewhat different way. And some of those ways are almost entirely digital. Virtual offices, virtual, virtual everything. I’m curious to know how you feel if you can say no, if you’re willing to weigh in and kind of say, how do you think is Keller Williams is positioned against these other digital companies and why?
Yeah, sure. Well, things have a way of finding an equilibrium. EXP came out, and their big thing was there was two things. Number one is we have one statewide brokerage, which means if you have a team, you can have identical marketing throughout the state. You don’t have to have different signs, work out a different offices and all that kind of stuff. That was a point of friction that they removed for the agent, which for the top agents, the people building teams and those kind of things. And that was really a good move, and we kind of missed that one a little bit. We were hearing it, but we weren’t really listening. We were hearing it, but we weren’t listening. So that was one thing that they did really well. They also came out with an opposite position on physical space. Right. Their position was, we don’t need to have offices. We don’t need to have physical space. You can work out of a rented executive office or whatever you want to do. And that seemed kind of sexy and appealing in the beginning, but you know how I say things have a way of creating equilibrium and coming back together.
I have a 20,000 square foot office building in East Valley. I have an 18,000 square foot office building in Park City, Utah, with three satellite offices up there, and we’re full. Agents like having an office space. They like being able to walk down the hall and ask another agent a question about a transaction or get some advice or pop into a training room or get on. Heck, if you just maybe you just want to have maybe at the end of the day, glass of wine with your fellow colleagues and you create a culture around agents being connected to each other. And that happens because it’s facilitated by somebody in that physical space who’s a leader, and that leader creates a tribe, and that tribe becomes strong. And that and and you have, you know, you have I have 60, 70, 80 agents in the same office. You think they’re a little smarter than every single agent out there thinking on their own, who are maybe they’re only texting back and forth. Or maybe the only time they get smart is when they’re in a Mastermind. What’s it like if you could basically have a mini Mastermind every day, right?
Because all you do is walk across the hall or meet somebody in your office, say, hey, let’s go to lunch. And I don’t think that’s the end all answer. I think you still have to have an amazing presence in the digital space, but it has to be physically enhanced. I believe that. I don’t believe it’s one or the other. I think it’s both. And you’ve seen Amazon. Apple isn’t virtual. Apple has stores. Amazon has stores. Now you’re going to see that trend, I think, go back to digital space with physical enhancement and that Keller Williams is positioned beautifully for that. We’ve got a technology platform called Command that had a little bit of a rocky start when it was launched, but we’ve been busting our tail for the last 18 months, and Gary Keller just flat came out and said, listen, we’re not even going to talk about Command until we’ve earned the right to. And he’s poured so many resources into this, and he has so many smart people working on it. We have two people, Matt Green and Chris Cox, who are just I mean, they have been dedicated to nothing but making Command completely stable, completely functional.
And at the upper end, there’s a small portion of upper end limitation, but for 98% of our agents, command is a beautiful platform and it can do everything they needed to do. So we’re excited about our digital future, for sure.
Well, I will say this I’m a transparent person, so transparency, I raised some doubts at the beginning of the show, which I’m not going to go into, but I will say that I raised some doubts and I wanted to also say, contrary to that, to you. And while we’re live, I do think that in terms of what I’ve seen, because I have seen command and what I’ve seen, and that’s what people follow me for. Scott, you don’t know me, but I do deep dives into everybody’s platform on my website, like, use the platform and show it KVCore, which you guys used to use before you got Command, and just boomtown and sync and install the big platform. So I go deep down, I haven’t been able to do that online yet with Command, but I have seen it. And so I will say that in terms of the tools that are being provided by an actual brokerage, it is somewhat out ahead of everything else that I’ve seen. I haven’t seen anything similar coming out of Compass or any of the other big name brokerages. Keller Williams, not to my surprise, is the only brokerage that I know of for certain has invested the kind of time and resources that you’re alluding to.
Well, yeah, everybody else has thrown in the towel. They’ve all gone to contract technology. We’re the last one that has our own technology. I don’t say that every piece of technology is our own. I mean, what we’ve done, though, I think it was brilliant. And this was the pivot we made a couple of years ago with Command. Instead of trying to be the all inclusive, now we partner and we utilize all the best partnerships with companies like Sync and Boomtown, and now that’s integrated. And Command is like the central command center with all these companies that are very good in their niches. And we’re marrying those niches into the central hub of Command and then using the cloud and AI to help come out with better marketing strategies, better customer service follow up, better anticipation of what makes a house sell or how you can buy a house better. All these kinds of things are what the AI function of. Command is eventually going to give many really good insights to the agents. And with our consumer platform, the consumers are going to benefit from that also. And we’re not trying to be the only place you go, but we do want to be the place.
If you do go, you want to stay there. We provide this platform to our agents for a nominal fee every month, and it’s very powerful. So again think of costco. And not everybody wants to shop at Costco, right? I mean, that’s that’s not that’s they’re not the end all, be all, but I think you could say Costco is the number one distributor of blueberries and strawberries and bananas in the world, and that’s because they provide a great value, and there are many other things Costco is famous for. Gary Keller’s always had the strategy of bringing the most value he can at the lowest possible price that he can. But he won’t sacrifice value, he won’t sacrifice quality, but in many cases, he will sacrifice his own profit. If real estate agents out there knew Gary like I know Gary, I think, man, I think it’d be game over. He’s one of those guys like the guy you were talking about, who you met that was one of the wisest guys in the developing world. Yeah, that’s exactly my feeling around Gary I’ve ever met.
Yeah, I’ve listened to his Red book three times, and I forgot when he published that. But I still feel it has a great deal of value and relevance, even in 2022.
Yeah. The strategies are the same. The tactics are different. You no longer pop a cassette tape in and listen to it. Right. The tactics are now different, but the strategies have not changed. It’s staying connected with your clients. It’s working. You haven’t met turning them into Mets, turning them into advocates. That is a strategy that will be forever and ever. And where Keller Williams is starting to shine now is, in a higher level way, is the execution of those things. Because it’s one thing to have the theory, the strategy, but it’s another thing to have the tools and the expertise and the intelligence to execute and the discipline to execute. We’ve got so many programs that we can just plug and play with our agents now. So they’ve been vetted. We know it works. We know they’re going to waste a bunch of money because there’s so many programs out there. We’d like to kind of be like the place you go where you know that everything on the shelf is really quality.
Well, Scott, I got to say, I have had the incredibly good fortune of meeting a couple of people that are close to Gary, and you are similar in all of them to that. I’d follow you into battlemen and I’ve seen that drip down from Gary to his people. I’ve seen Gary speak. I’ve been to Keller Williams reunions. But you know those sticks, he’s got 10,000 people trying to come up and say hi to him. So I’ve never met the man. I’ve seen the man, I’ve seen him speak, I’ve listened to his stuff, I’ve watched him on video. Same thing as John, but I’ve never met him. I have met a couple of people like you who have been close to him and they all say the same thing. Every single person says the same thing, which is a one of a kind leader, a one of a kind thinker, and he values his people like almost nobody does inside the real estate space.
Yeah, I appreciate you saying that and I think podcasts or shows like yours that help get the word out are fantastic and I appreciate the opportunity to be part of it today. I enjoy you guys a lot and thanks for giving me such great questions and giving me a little bit of a platform to pontificate a little bit, but I hope it didn’t come across that way.
Oh, no, not at all. Scott, you must come back. Hopefully you will come back in the new year because you’ve been a great guest. I’m sure Robert agrees.
Yeah, that would be nice.
A lot of fun. John will tell you. Never mind. I do these things for these moments where somebody like, lights my fire and gets me really excited and you’ve done that. But let’s wrap the show up, gentlemen. So, John, if people would we skipped this part a little bit earlier. I’m going to circle back around to you, Scott. But John, if somebody would like to reach out to you or ask you any questions, ask you your feelings on this particular show, how would they do any of that?
Yeah, please leave us a review on iTunes or give us an email, Robert, or myself; it’s always great to hear from the listeners and viewers of this show. If there are any topics or anybody that you specifically want us to interview, suggest them. Both me and Robert would love that. And if you’re interested in Mail Wright and a chat with me or my co-founder Adam, go over to Mail Hyphen Wright, and you can book a demo or a chat with me, and we’ll be more than happy to help you.
Over to you, Rob, actually, one more time, Scott, for how you’d like people to reach out to you should they want to converse with you about your book, maybe just about Keller Williams. I don’t know.
Sure, you can find me on LinkedIn, and you can find me on Facebook. You can find me in all those places. Just Scott Agnew realtor or Scott Agnew KW. Whatever. But if you want to email me directly, it’s Scotta@kw.com, and I check my email 15 times a day. So I’ll get back to you, I promise, and send you a link to the book, a direct link if you want to do it that way. I’m on Amazon. Long-term leader. Scott Agnew on Amazon. Or you can go on the long term. Leader. There are a lot of ways you can access the book. It’s a fantastic read. I would hope that there was a book I read many, many years ago that I just kind of keep beside my desk and refer to it, even though I think I’ve got it memorized. And it’s a book called The Four Agreements, and it’s a very simple read. But whenever I’m communicating or getting it, and whenever I’m in a leadership challenge or the heat of the moment, I think back to that book, and I think back to how it helps me stay in this cool spot, this okay place.
Because leaders have a lot of pressure on them. They get pent up, and they have financial issues; they have cash flow issues. They might make tons of money, but they might have cash flow issues, they might have people issues, they might have vendor issues, they might have technical issues. They get hit with all these things. It’s hard to stay happy and go lucky and easygoing when you’ve got all these things shooting at you all the time. But my book is a book that I think would help. I probably should not have called it Long Term Leader and called it how to Keep Your Head on Straight because that’s really what it is.
All right, if anybody would like to look me up, you can do so@inboundrem.com. My name is Robert Newman. If you’re wondering how a long-haired, hippie-looking dude manages to get into conversations with notable real estate types like Scott Agnew, you can find out all of that on inboundream.com. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. We deeply appreciate your listening and viewership, and we’ll see you on the next show.
https://www.longtermleader.com/free-gift
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-agnew-1733a32/
https://www.kw.com/
————————————–
The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman
jonathan@mail-right.com
775-372-6322
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
————————————–
Robert Newman
InboundREM
https://inboundrem.com
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Wishing your website could do a better job capturing leads? The perfect real estate landing page captures short attention spans and takes advantage of that tiny window available to convert a visitor into a lead. But what kinds of page elements, content offerings, and designs encourage visitors to offer up their contact information?
Start the show with general discussion points connected to the global key things that make great landing pages.
#1 – Home Valuation Landing Page
Home valuation landing pages give property owners an estimate of their home’s value for free. To be fair, a small cost is involved: Site visitors must share their contact information. These leads are especially valuable because now you know these site visitors are at least considering selling their homes.
#2 – Property Search Landing Page
Prospective buyers use property search landing pages, help leads look for available properties, and set up custom alerts. What is the cost of accessing these tools? Contact inf
#3 -.Coming Soon Landing Page
Coming soon landing pages are ideal for buyers, especially in a hot market. Buyers give you their contact information in exchange for early access to the photos, details, and pricing of a property about to hit the market.
#4 – Community Guide Landing Page
Like this one by Luxury Presence, the community guide landing page is one of our favorites because it conveys your value proposition to your farming area.
#5 – Exclusive Buyer or Seller Content Landing Page
Offering helpful guidance in exchange for contact information is a tried-and-true approach for a reason. Real estate transactions are complicated, which is why offering a resource that hits on consumers’ pain points is a great way to start a client relationship and highlight your value as a trusted adviser.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We’re here with episode number 364, the Mail-Right Show. My gosh, we’ve done so many of these. John and I have done so many of these together. Today, we’re going to take you on a little journey and try to explain landing pages. Now, John has separated out the subject by landing page types. I would like to talk a little bit about the premise of a landing page because I feel like the language is way overused, and we’re not going to help that in this description. But before we get into any of that, I would love it, John, if you would do both me and everybody else the favor of introducing yourself and letting us know who you are before you explain landing pages.
That’s great. Robin. Rob’s been very nice to me because I’ll be late for this episode of late, and I’m normally not late.
Normally, you are.
The co-founder. We build lovely-looking websites on WordPress for the real estate semi-luxury market, and we offer a suite of marketing tools that help you generate leads from your lovely-looking website. Over to you, Rob.
So, first of all, I’d like to talk about that language for landing pages. The simplest definition of a landing page is a page that people land on. That’s it. What’s confusing for everybody is the many messages that you can get to have somebody land on a specific page on your website. You can have an email landing page because you can direct people to it from an email campaign. You can get somebody to land on a page in all sorts of ways. Recently, landing pages have started to have additional language attached to them, such as squeeze pages, and click funnel pages, as different people put different branding associated with something that is effectively still a landing page. It’s just a landing page that people land on. John and I are going to confuse the topic more by explaining different types of landing pages to you, which is ideas of pages that people can land on your site. And John’s premise for the show, which I agree with 100%, runs right along with all of my premises about digital marketing. How do we get an ROI from a page that people land on or a landing page?
And John’s going to take us away and really show his stuff because he did the research, and he did. And I have what I do as an agency, so I’m the founder of my own marketing agency, and we use landing pages extensively, but we use them directionally, not to get the conversion. We use landing pages to send people to other places on the website. So that’s how I’m using a landing page. I’m not using it the same way we’re about to talk about, and I’ll explain that a little somewhere along the way. But John, the first example.
Yeah, I just want to quickly respond to what you just outlined, because I’m in total agreement, which normally is the case, not always, but I see this, Rob. It’s very similar to the language utilized around real estate CRMs, because it’s just a general term CRM. There’s marketing CRMs, there’s sales orientated CRMs, there’s lightweight CRMs, there’s heavy duty CRMs. It’s just a very general term. And the same with landing pages, squeeze pages. Landing pages, very generalistic term. A lot of people abuse. It a bit like CRMs. If you’re going to use the landing page as a kind of conversion tool, then that’s the classical term. The other way is the layout, the landing page. Classically doesn’t always apply. But classically the landing page, you don’t have your normal navigation in the head or the footer. You only have one call for action. You don’t have multiple. But you could apply that to, well, optimized normal pages that you don’t have two to three different messages on the page. So there’s a lot of overlap. So let’s start with number one valuation landing page. So you’re offering either a cane system or a better solution, a more customized home valuation.
This, to me, is the real kind of classic landing squeeze page that’s utilized a lot in the industry. I’ve got such mixed feelings about it because people say they still get great results, but I feel it’s been slightly used and abused. What’s your feelings, Rob?
So, as usual, I’m going to give off I’m going to write a lot of some stuff here. Home evaluation pages, where you’re using an automated tool, they still work. That’s basically what you’re saying when people come to them. Do they still work to generate leads and give you ad names to your database? And the answer is yes. Do they work for high value, high intent leads? Not that I’m seeing like I’m not seeing it somebody selling the home in a few years that gets trapped into your form, that reluctantly takes a communication from you. Sure. But I am seeing people using a variation of this that I really love, which is probably because I follow so many inbound marketers and inbound marketers, everybody, they add a lot more value than your average marketer does to a page. And I’m watching more and more people brace videos, something that John and I have talked about for ages, but now it’s actually happening. We’re finally watching a full embrace of video happening. And part of that is that somebody is leaving a trail like, this is my home evaluation process. And step number one, if you’re interested in involving it, like, you outline seven steps, a little video, and then at the very end of that, they’re still the same form, and then you input your information.
But I am seeing a mix where home evaluation is part of a longer, deeper, targeted strategy, and I’m seeing a lot of value coming out of that longer, deeper, targeted strategy. John, that involves the home evaluation tool.
Yeah, I see where you’re coming from. I can see how that could work if it’s presented in the right way. On to number two, property search landing pages. Well, I think it’s going to be linked to what you just said about home. I think it can still work, but you just got to be a bit more creative and offer a bit more value. What do you think?
I’ve taken them off my websites entirely, that’s what I think. I don’t use them anymore. I don’t use them on home pages. I usually tell my clients to take them off. I’m not seeing them on a lot of high performing sites that I’m looking at that are starting to do really well. The day and age of property search sites, they’re diminishing. Like they’re not gone. But you probably need to have a site as good as a real estate webmasters here, attractive in that category. WordPress. If somebody said, I’m going to do a property search site on WordPress, I’m going to be okay. If you really want to, I’m just going to say I don’t believe in them. John. That’s the simplest way I can put it.
How would you classify a search landing page first? How would you describe it to our audience?
Well, the way that we do searches, we do guided search. We drive you into neighborhoods and show all the listings for those neighborhoods and you’re getting a guided search experience on site. So if you’re doing a guided search experience or neighborhood search, like you’re seeing property search, when you say property search landing page, that is to me a bar where you can search for property. I’ve taken those off my site entirely. They don’t exist. So if you’re going to ask, how are you leveraging? The answer is really, truly, I am not. I have a single search function on my site, which is an advanced search function where somebody can fill out an entire form and not a bar and do a search. Not that many of my sites have that even in the top 50 pages that’s visited. Like, it’s usually an almost inconsequential feature on the sites that we’re building. So how would I define it? I mean, I don’t know, just like I did search bar, but I wouldn’t use it. That’s just me. If you’re using WordPress, I wouldn’t use it. If you’re using something really cool like Share Interactive and you’ve got everything on the site boiled down to neighborhoods or buildings or you’ve done something really specific with the site so that somebody can get a very drilled down piece of information, it might be interesting to have a search bar connected to that experience in some way.
Yeah, I agree with you. On to the next one. Coming soon, landing pages. I’ve seen more Facebook advertising where people really dependent on the condition of the market. Last couple of years, just getting something to sell was the problem. You could put it up and you’d be in a date in a lot of areas. You would have multiple people queries in other areas. So it just depends on market conditions and other factors. What’s your thoughts about Coming Soon landing pages?
Well, again, I’m really glad that you put this one on your list because I have a case study. One of my clients in Los Cabos has development with a Coming Soon page on it, and it’s a top performing page. It is also a top frustration for them because they have they are getting leads. They’re getting a list of name and they’re talking to they’re calling these people up. They’re legit. So you putting it on this list is a very I couldn’t agree with it more. There’s just some marketing positioning, things that I think everybody would need to realize if you are successful with this strategy, understand that a certain number of people might be very excited for whatever development or building or thing that you’ve decided to put up. If your page is performing well, that is going to be because there’s some excitement about the community or the building or whatever it is that you’ve posted on your site that says Coming Soon. Sign up now to make your reservations or to get updates or whatever, however you’re going to position yourself. So my clients have dealt with a deferred development on the shore of Los Cabos.
It’s going to be millions and millions of dollars. It’s a super exciting project, but of course, as with many luxury things, it’s getting pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. And every time there’s a pushback, they’re reaching out to the entirety of their development list and communicating with these people. Then they’re getting calls because the level of excitement is so high. So they have spent a tremendous amount of time without even having anything to sell. There’s no unit to walk through or sell or do anything with. But from a marketing perspective, though, it worked. So, like I said, it has a place on this list. Just understand that with what you said, John, some people are not prepared mentally or marketing wise, like with how well the strategy will work and where the market is at. Even my client, who’s two extremely skilled entrepreneurs, and they haven’t said it to me directly, but I hear it in their voice. They’re, like, a little frustrated with how much time and energy that they’ve been spending on a thing that they can’t.
Even yeah, it’s unfortunate. Understandable, but unfortunate because Kelly Williams and the Bread Book, you know, the money is in your database. How do you know you’re going to drop a certain percentage of a year out of your database? So you need to keep filling that database with new possible connections. And that’s what you’re doing in one way with what has been established with this landing page. So it does have value, even though you can understand the frustration. But in my experience, and I think you would agree that’s hard for a lot of people to understand that, isn’t it?
It is indeed. Wow. Do you mind if I introduce this next one?
Yeah, sure.
So the next page John interestingly, had found somewhere a Luxury Presence page. Then he said a community guide landing page like this one by Luxury Presence. A Community Guide Landing Page is one of our favorites because it conveys value proposition to your farming area. Everybody does this differently. And the reason I asked to read this one is I use these pages on my site. This would be the closest thing to that gateway page that I mentioned to you. It is a community page that covers in broad a larger swath of territory, separates it out by smaller categoric areas, and directs people to those smaller categoric areas while still being very informative. And I use custom maps, I use custom images. I go very deep into what could very easily be called a Community Guide Landing page. That’s why I asked to intro this one. Luxury presence does it, too. We each spend, actually, a fairly large amount of development time because the quality of this page might connect somebody a little bit deeper into the lifestyle premise that you’re selling if they’re not already familiar with the area that you’re communicating to them about.
Yeah, there’s a bit of just before we go for our break, Rob, there’s a bit of overlap with this being Evergreen page, isn’t it? And we’ve spoken about Evergreen pages as well, haven’t we? To my mind, there’s a little bit of overlap. Would you agree with that?
I would. So we’re going to go over our break, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to take a couple of minutes here. Do us a favor. Wherever you see us, wherever you hear us, give us a like share. I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from people that I’ve been getting shared meetings and that some of this podcast has occasionally been getting shared in real estate sales meetings for all those people who are brokers and are looking for ways to educate your sales team. Do John and I a favor. Drop us a line and let us know what you want us to talk about. Message John and say that you would really love to see XYZ digital marketing subject on the show, because I think that I could speak for both of us that we would love to get some feedback and help you out, right?
Yeah, we might.
Okay, so we’ll be right back. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in.
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Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. I am here with my amazing co host Jonathan Dinwood. We’re super excited to be here with you today. We are talking about landing pages, which is a misunderstood term and if I had to stick with what the traditional term of landing pages, I wouldn’t be very excited about talking about it. Fortunately, John was really lovely in the beginning of the call or the beginning of the podcast and said, please take some time, explain all the different things that can mean. And some of those meaning types I really gravitate into, one of them was community landing page. But we’re going to move on. That was what we covered right before the break. Coming back from the break, we’re going to talk about exclusive buyer, seller content landing pages. Why don’t you take us through the journey of what you meant by that, John?
Well, it’s kind of linked to the last topic before you went to break because in my mind there’s a lot of overlap between this particular section and evergreen pages. They overlap because you’re offering guidance, exchange, consumer pain points. So it’s kind of quasi evergreen blog kind of scenario set up. Would you agree with that.
Blog set up?
Well, because in my mind, probably not right more the Evergreen, the blogging, it’s time related, isn’t it? So I probably push that bit too far. So it’s probably the Evergreen in it evergreen page maybe.
So, Evergreen is a page that you write out and that you don’t change or don’t change often for many of you listening to the show, because some of you are. And I know this because I’ve gotten a chance to talk to a few of you over the years, which has been great. And I know that some of you are already in your own ways dedicated content marketer. So let’s just say that you have a 20 point sellers plan that you’ve mapped out over a 20 year career. That’s probably an Evergreen page, which is what John is talking about. You have to take the time to transpose it digitally and maybe you use some cool graphics or some cool white spacing to make it really like digestible. But you should have your own seller and buyer’s road map that is custom to you, to your sales approach, to your team’s approach, to your approach. It’s an Evergreen page on your site, right John? Yes. So that’s what John was talking about. Exclusive buyer, seller content, landing page. That could also mean in my head, exclusive could mean that you have an exclusive offer that gets a little trickier, a little hairy, just depending upon what state you are in, what the law is as it relates to your MLS.
But some places, including, I think California, have a cooldown period when you take on a listing. We have X amount of time to get between taking the listing and then listing it with your contracted MLS system. Right. So you could theoretically send an email out to all of your customers and before the thing is even fully digested into the MLS, you could already have offers on the property. Technically speaking, I’ve seen that work that way many different times in many different states. That’s definitely an exclusive offer. Like, pay attention to me today we have this house. Yeah, it gets listed in the MLS in two days from now. You’ve got a 48 hours exclusive. Right?
Well, when you were saying that you got this scenario in a more normal market where you could say, well, we’ve had great success in a particular area, here are some examples and we’re offering this exclusive package to those in this area and you can also prove that you got some prior success, that type of scenario. Do you reckon about that?
I think that’s true. So that’s our final thing on landing pages. And I want to throw John and everybody else a curveball on the show, if he’s up for it. I didn’t think of this in advance and I apologize, John. That’s why I didn’t write to you about it. It just came up super recently. And here’s the thing that I want to point out to everybody that’s going to sound like a sales pitch. It’s really not. So something that I’ve been noticing. The second that the interest rates stopped rising, my agency got really stupidly busy. All my competitors that are dealing with direct marketing are slowing down and laying off employees. Everybody’s in trouble. They over committed. They’re offering these massive deals and discounts, trying to get sign ups, trying to keep their workforce busy. And I’ll explain why I think that is to everybody on the show. And this impacts you too, John. So I think that the reason for all of this is that when the market slows and direct marketing stops working and many of the people that are calling me right now are people that have significant budgets in direct marketing efforts, those budgets are not working, or they’re not working in like they’re coming back with maybe an even money return.
They’re just not working. They’re barely working. And in many cases they’re not working and they are literally losing money. So instead of throwing that money away, they’re deciding, now is the time to take control of my marketing. I can’t spend it anywhere else anyway and get a result. I might as well turn around and go to owning a product, getting rid of that really expensive golden handcuff thing that I’ve had for so long. And I want to say that that logic is 100% accurate, whether you call a guy like John or a guy like me. Now is the time. For all of you listening to the show, now is the time. The slowing market, the toughness with direct marketing trying to figure out where to put your money, where to put your time. Now is definitely 100% the time that you should be making moves in your strategy. Like I said, it sounds like a sales pitch, but I firmly, strongly believe it. John is looking really confused. Like, he’s looking super confused.
No, I think it’s very insightful. I think one thing you got to clarify, not for me, but for the Listers, what you mean by direct marketing, you’re talking about paid advertising.
Paid advertising. You go direct to the source. Direct marketing is where you go direct to where the audience is or you paid. Yeah, you’re right. Another way to say is paid marketing, search marketing. If you want to get in front of directly get in front of somebody, you’re going to pay YouTube, Pay, Instagram, pay Google, pay somebody, right. You’re going to pay them. And I can put an advertising in front of you tomorrow that’s paid advertising, search advertising, direct marketing. Direct marketing can also be other things. So you’re right, not the best language. So I apologize. But the idea is this. We all want to say that if we spend $1,000, we get X amount of return. Now, even in a good marketplace, you spend $1,000 a month with, like a whileobo or somebody like that, and 90 to 90 days to six months is when you should expect a return. That is not happening right now. I’m hearing case studies that are like 13 months, 14 months. When you start saying you’re going to wait a year to see a return on a new direct marketing or sorry, a new page search initiative. Man, that’s actually probably longer than an inbound marketing campaign or something that John and I would tell you to do, like blogging or getting your own website.
That’s longer. You’re looking at a longer timeline right now and a significantly larger amount of money, and you won’t own it, which is the nutty bananas part of that whole conversation to me. Sure, spend $12,000, don’t get a deal for 13 months. And by the way, you don’t own Diddley Squad.
We haven’t discussed it for a long while. It’s also linked to the dirty thing that was known that wasn’t really explained, and that lead inflation, I call it the platforms. There was scarce at the beginning, but there was because of lead inflation. The actual quality of the lead was getting more worse, wasn’t it? The digital lead, wasn’t it?
Correct. And now they’re just not happening. They’re still bad, but you’re not getting that many of them. So there is a whole different shift, John, like a massive shift, and everybody’s noticing it, which is why I’ve tagged it onto the show. The shift happens fast. It happens very fast. And the shift is happening lightning fast right now. And this was luck. I think my original prediction about the way the market was going to work, I think it’s just going to turn out that way. I think we’re going to see the rest of the heat escape really high sales prices through the first quarter and then the marriage go round ends. And for all those people who are writing the last of that marriage go round, not seeing that many leads, but still getting a couple really high price deals off your paid advertising campaigns, great. Expect that to dry up. If I was all of you, I would be at least considering a backup option and dividing my budget barest minimum. Have a backup. Like, okay, maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m wrong, and I would be love to be wrong for a lot of people.
But you know what? Divide your money up.
Well, if I had a decent budget, I would really look at improving the website. I’m bound to say that. But I’m saying it from a quasar truthful place because I do honestly believe that. But I would really look at video, really look at my investment in equipment, but also a consistent way of producing video for my social media platforms and for my YouTube. Just getting as much video out there and having a production plan and having some basic equipment in my organization, my boutique brokerage, my power team, but really having understanding about how many videos we’re going to produce every week, every month, and really having a go at it. What do you think about that?
I couldn’t agree more. Like I said, there is truly a groundswell happening where realtors have come to the realization that marketing has changed. It’s finally happened. The only strongly performing section of marketing that I see is messages passed through Kinesthetic, learning things that’s all really fancy language for saying that people are embracing the idea that they want to see you before they call you. Video not just a picture of you, not just a resume. They would like to see what you have to say. They’re getting spoiled with it as it takes hold across throughout the market. In almost every market, somebody doing searches or somebody looking around does have the option of running across. Somebody using video as a tool to explain the neighborhood, to explain a lifestyle, to explain themselves. And if that person makes a connection with them, they’re getting the call, man. That’s it. Full stop. To get in the call. I get calls off my profile for real estate stuff. I’ve sent out two referrals this month alone. All right, because people like, oh, you seem like a cool guy. I can tell that you are a marketing company. I know you’re not a real estate agent, but you must know a few.
So let’s call you. I shit you not, John. I get them. I’m not a real estate agent. I clearly say it everywhere. But no, still get the call because they like me. And trust me, that’s the message for all of you who’s listening to the show. You’re going to have to embrace video if you want to really separate out, like, break the mold a bit.
And I think just to finish off, I’m not going to be blase about what next year is going to be like if you’re a real estate agent. But the good part of it is that I think the days of somebody thinking, oh, I can hire my uncle that just got his license six months ago, or Auntie Gerald, or this friend of a friend, and I don’t care, it’s just a friend, and they be able to sell it. I think when people have got a property and they’re looking to sell it, they’re going to do a bit more research and a little bit effort about who the agent is that’s going to represent them. Do you think I’m on the right role there a little bit, or am I deleting?
I agree with there’s an element of what you say that I couldn’t agree with more. And I’ve used the analogy many times in a call, and my dad just proved this to be somebody in our family passed the property, went into probate. My dad had to sell it, and he ended up doing a shit ton of research on the person that he was hiring the family. He’s getting pressure from his brothers. Everybody’s pressuring them to sell the property fast because they just want the money and they want to do something with the money. My dad is like, that’s not going to stop me from calling referrals. Like, I’m talking he drilled deep down into it, John, and the reason that he drilled so deep into it is he’s like, hey, we’re going into a bad economy. I can tell that this is going to be difficult. So I want to find a Realtor that’s really going to fight for every last penny of value, and I’m going to do the extra work to find that person. And he read reviews, he fucking ran real estate licenses and then looked at what they said. I hadn’t even thought of that.
No, I haven’t. I’m amazed at the moment. I just thought it was market conditions, really. Rob I’ve always been a little bit but statistically, it wasn’t only market conditions. I’ve always been a little bit surprised about this industry, that people aren’t a bit, but I think it’s going to change. I think that’s a good thing. But people need to be a little bit fussy about the agents that they hire.
They really do. And for those of you that did not live through 2007 to 2009, here’s a number for you that is a real number. The last time the market slowed, we had 2.2 million licensed agents. At the beginning, at the height of the real estate market, before the market slow stopped and things reversed, we got down to 1.4 million. Putting that into perspective for everybody that’s listening to the show, 50% of the people that were out there that had a real estate license surrendered. It. You are going to watch a lot of people get out of the real estate game. And for those of you who know that you’re committed and you’re going to stay in it, you have to ask yourself the question, how do you want to position the next leg of your career? Because there was 2007 to 2009 and then there was after that, and before that. You can ask anybody that’s been in the business, you made a mint, especially if you’re in mortgages. Before that, then you lost a lot and had to be committed to your career. And then slowly but surely, many people have been banking like a lot of money for a long time.
And now that we’re going into a harder market with not such easy advertising directions for people, and the referrals have stopped coming in and every aunt, uncle, mother, sister stopped calling you for a piece of property. Yeah, some people are going to surrender and other people are going to figure out the ways to connect with people that they want to be connected with. And I deeply believe that whether it’s video on YouTube or video on Instagram or video is the way to go. Everybody should have videos on the website, on all those other channels.
And just to wrap it up, I know it’s self-serving, but honestly, honestly believe these folks. You really want to listen to the backlog of podcasts and videos that Rob’s got. You want to go to Rob’s website and have a deep dive, and you really want to listen to the 100-plus of podcasts because it’s just a fountain of knowledge from our guests, from you, about how to market yourself in this new coming-up period. I really believe that, Rob.
Thank you very much, John. That’s very nice. And by the way, everybody, if you’re starting your career and you’re scared to death by some of the things I just said, john is a good place to start having a conversation to get you on the track. I believe that there can be an evolution of owning your own websites. I am a done-for-you service that takes on a very small number of clients who are very well-established and are basically ready and willing to spend a reasonable amount of money to achieve success. And I do everything for them, almost everything. But you don’t start there. Full stop. You don’t start there. You start someplace else. And if you got used to WordPress and you got used to blogging and you took all the same advice that you’re hearing from me, but you took it from John, because he’ll say the same thing 80% to 90% of the time, you will have a huge platform of success to then to call a guy like me.
Yes, I do honestly believe that. And that’s why I think we can still work together on this podcast because that’s how I see it totally as well, Rob, completely.
All right, well, listen, everybody, we’re going to wrap it up. We’re going to take us off. Aaron here in a second. Happy Thanksgiving. I hope everybody had a good day of things spent with family and friends, no matter where in the world you are. We appreciate you listening to the show. You can email me at Robert at inbound REM. And John, how would you like people to get in touch with you?
Oh, just go to the Mailwrite.com website, and you can book a demo discussion with me or my partner, Adam. And one other thing, we have an amazing guest next week. I haven’t told Robert. I probably won’t let you’re going to be blown away, Rob. Well, you might not be, but I’ll be surprised if you’re not blown away. And it’s great I’ve had a chat with him; I’ll give you a hymn. And he seems to be he’s really interesting stuff to say, and he seems a great guy. And I think you and the audience are going to be blown away.
Can’t wait. Can’t wait. Thanks for doing that, John. Alright, everybody, have a good one. John, take us offline. Bye.
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Farming is the future! That is the mantra that Ryan Smith full-heartedly lives by. Ryan is on a mission to share his new project, “Launch Your Farm,” with the real estate world and to ignite the same excitement in other agents.
Ryan became passionate about geographic farming after relocating several times over his 14-year real estate career, forcing him to rebuild his business multiple times. Having tried almost every strategy in the book, he quickly realized that combining your strategies and tactics in a hyper-local fashion was the best way to build momentum and success in real estate. That was when he became a real farming fanatic.
After coaching, training, and interviewing some of the top agents across North America, Ryan realized his true passion was helping other agents reach their full potential by helping them develop systems and tools to build the best geographic farming foundations in their real estate businesses.
To learn more about geographic farming and how to grow your business, head over to www.LaunchYourFarm.com to access the show, marketing ideas, resources, and more.
Welcome back to the Mail-Right podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, we are super excited. We know that you are tired of having heard John and just talk amongst ourselves for the last few times. Ryan Smith from Launcher Farm was gracious enough to join us today on the show. I don’t want to take you steal his thunder. Ryan, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience.
Awesome. Thanks for having me here. I’m really excited to share my love of geographic farming with your audience. I know that from my own experience and the agents that I’ve trained that when they learn to implement geography in their business, they can really take the business next level. So I’ll kind of share a quick backstory of who I am and then why I’m here and then what I want to share with you. So I am a licensed agent myself. I’ve been in the business for about 15 years. My kind of not claim to fame, but is this geographic farming? But the reason I became successful at geographic farming was because I moved multiple times. So I started the business my very first time I got started, I moved three and a half hours away from where I lived. I knew nobody other than my aunts and uncles that lived in the area. I had no idea what I was doing and I kind of bumbled my way through the business. And then I moved again. After a couple of years, I met someone and I moved to be with her and I didn’t know anyone other than her.
And I kind of refigured it out again. And then I kind of got some momentum going. Then I moved again and I started taking the things I’ve learned and I realized I had failed along the way. And then I took kind of what didn’t work. I started compiling what did work. And I’m someone who loves to learn and I learned and learned and learned and learned and I also learned through failure and I failed so many times and I started realizing that there were some patterns and things that were successful that other agents were doing that I wasn’t doing. And then I became really obsessed with geographic farming. So my third move, I basically started this farm with a business partner of mine and we kind of like say we crack the code on kind of what was working. I took all the failures left out of the business and took the kind of the best practices and really started focusing on becoming a hyperlocal expert and becoming that go to agent in the area. And really that launched my business even further. After a few years, I sold that off to my business partner and then I started doing more coaching and training and I was working as a productivity coach in the office.
And I realized that I had a real passion for helping other agents grow and miss the mistakes or skip the mistakes that I was making. And I wanted to help agents kind of speed up the process and not have to go through all the money and the time and the headaches and the heartaches of failing on your own. And I wanted to share that with other agents. So I started doing this just before Cobid started. It was getting it started and Cobid hit, and it was actually kind of a blessing. This guys. And it really helped me really focus on what I’m doing. And so the last couple of years, I’ve been really helping agents grow their geographic farms and become more passionate about it. That’s a long window.
That’s a hell of a journey. Before I hand it over to John, let me make sure that I understand what you’re doing today, right now. Are you a coach, are you a writer, are you a blogger? Are you all of the above?
A little bit of everything. So I mostly focus on education and training, so I’ve got some courses and programs. I also have a podcast as well. So I interview agents who are doing hyperlocal geographic farming in their business, and I’ve sharing their love and passion and strategies that work with other agents and helping bring that love of geographic farming to the world.
Beautiful. All right, John, my man, my Englishman with the plan, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself for those people that are lucky enough to be joining us for the first time.
Yeah, you always make me laugh. Robert I’m the joint founder Mail-Right, we build beautiful WordPress websites that you own you won’t lease. If you’re looking to get into the luxury side of the market, we can build you a beautiful custom solution. And we have a suite of marketing tools that will help you get some quality digital leads. Back. Over to you, Robert.
Ladies and gentlemen, for those handful of you that may not know me already, I am probably the most experienced real estate online marketing consultant that currently works in the US. Doing it for 14 years. I founded a technology company that focuses on websites and SEO for real estate agents. And if you want to learn more about anything that I am doing after you watch this stellar job that I’m about ready to do on this podcast, feel free to go to inboundriem.com. All right, so without any further ado, I certainly have quite a few questions, but as per his usual, it is John who has done all the groundwork for the show. He is the one who communicated with you. You two coordinated with each other and came up with the guests. So John, usually he’s magnificent, usually has a series of prepared questions that you like. So before I get into my shit, John, is there something that you’d like to kick us off with?
Yeah. Thanks for that, Rob. So, Ryan, I think a great place to start the conversation based on our off air chat. Is that your emphasis? And I think you totally agree with this in mixing what I’ve called the pathini mythology of building, like 300 people in your community that will refer clients to you and building a really local focus referral engine. But you also link that with advice and consultation about you should combine that with digital marketing. And I’ve noticed in almost five years of doing this podcast, which blows me away, is a lot of agents can do one or the other, but a lot of agents struggle doing both and doing both well. First of all, would you agree with that statement? And second, have you got one or two insights why you think that is?
Yeah, I think it’s totally true. And I think, like you mentioned, that the buffini method, I love his stuff, but I find that a lot of people who have used something like the Buffini method, if you don’t have a database to work, you don’t have people to follow up with and build relationships with. And again, from my own experience moving and starting over in a place that I had knew nobody, that method wouldn’t work for me. So I had to start with online marketing to start to fill my funnel with leads. And what I’ve learned is that when you do that at a hyper local level and you get real focus with it, you become that community ambassador. It becomes even easier when you’re the specialist in the area. So that’s where I started combining my offline marketing and really doing taking that from adding the online marketing to the relationship side of things. And that’s where I talk about CPR is something I coin. It’s community positioning and relationships. And you have to start with a community first. You have to put them ahead of the transaction. You have to have that community that you’re going to serve.
Then you learn to position yourself as an expert and an ambassador, and then you build relationships. And so many agents are focused on the transaction and not the actual relationship itself. And in my experience, the ultimate goal of real estate is really to build and strengthen relationships. The kind of byproduct of it is selling homes. But you need to learn to build relationships. Now, how do you fill that funnel? How do you build that pipeline? That’s where you can start getting into digital marketing strategies, online and offline marketing and different things like that. But you have to ultimately think relationship at the end, at the end of the goal. And that’s kind of where when you refocus that way, it becomes a lot easier to find opportunities to do marketing when you’re thinking about hyper local and then building that relationship long term.
So when you still had your license and you were responsible for building your business up again, can you give us a couple of examples of maybe the third move or the fourth move, what did you do? What was your specific hyper local strategy?
Perfect. Yeah. So the thing that when we built that farm that first time, or the time where we kind of cracked it, was we did what we call the neighborhood a home prices report. And we did a monthly report. And what we did was we created a sales report each month. And what we did was we had a binder. I don’t have it here, but we got binders from the dollar store. And we had a binder and we had a hard copy. We had a little cover on the front. And we would go around and we’d ask people if they want to get a copy of the report. And we would send the report out each month. And then each month we would update it. So we’d print out actual hard copy of the sales. We’d have a newsletter and we’d have some information each month. And we had all hole punched and ready to go. So we would go out and we would doorknock it each month, and it would be only to the people that would put their hand up. And that’s where creating that. Our farm was about 3600 people, and then we ended up having about 450 people in our database in a report that we’re getting in, and we would drop it off each month.
So we were getting face to face, we were creating conversations, we were building relationships, and then they were holding onto it and they were keeping that and keeping the value of that. And they would come back and we’d go to an appointment and they’d have it on the desk and they’d have it either with them. What it did was it created an educational piece. It created a marketing piece because we were promoting ourselves. We were partnering with local businesses, they were helping sponsor it, we were doing community events and we were putting that into our newsletter and things like that. So it was a way to stand out and create value that people wanted each month. And they actually were looking forward to it. And if we even missed a day or two, people were like, hey, we haven’t got a report. What’s going on? So it created something that people would want to get and get consistently. And I use example with books all the time. Is that a tangible hardcover? A hard copy thing is perceived, sorry, it has a higher perceived value than digital copy. I sell the time. I’ve downloaded all kinds of ebooks.
They’re sitting in my download section. I have full intentions of reading them, and I just don’t have the same value. But when I have a book that I can actually pick up, I can read it on the train, in the bath, in bed, whatever. There’s a more perceived value. So what we did was we did online marketing. We would run some online ads to drive people to get the report, and then we would use that to then create more values as we went along. That was one thing we did. Another thing we did was we would borrow listings from other agents who were in the area. And so if another agent had a listing in their farm area that we’re focusing on, we would ask if we could borrow the listing, and we would try to promote their listing and try to get buyer leads from that. And that’s something I’ve really honed down and really mastered. And I got really good at classified ads and online ads like facebook marketplace. So what we would do is we would compound our efforts because now we’re doing marketing in the area, and now we’re getting these listings that we’re promoting in the area, and we are generating leads by promoting those listings.
But then what happens is people in the community start to see these listings, even though they’re not our own listings, but they create this perception that we’re a lot more successful in the area. And then we started getting leads, and then we had buyers. And then we would go to a listing appointment, and we would say, hey, mrs. Seller, we’ve got 150 buyers in our database right now looking for homes in your area. So if you list with us, we bring a listing sheet with all the buyers that we had. And we created demand before we even had the listings. And we showed up at the appointment, and the listing of the clients were like, wow, this is amazing. No one’s ever showed up with this many leads in our specific area. So we catapulted that way. And I think one of the other big parts of the success that we did was we branded ourselves around the neighborhood rather than branding ourselves around ourselves. So our team at the time was the orchard real estate team, and the orchard was the area that we were focusing on, and we branded ourselves as the orchard real estate team.
So right out of the gate, you could tell that we were specialists. This is what we do. This is the area we focus on. And we would show up to an appointment, and people would say, well, you guys are the expert, so you tell me what I should do. And the next appointment was, you’re the expert, so you tell me. And we created that perception of success. And now, mind you, I never even sold a home in that area before that. But once that started, then we leverage the success we had, and then it became even easier once we started getting even more listings. We then use more advertising and more marketing and create the kind of a self perpetuating machine.
Got you, john, I’m just blown away. I think you provided more insight and value in five minutes. Then we’ve been blessed with some fantastic guests, ryan, but sometimes it’s hard to really get to crux of value, but you’ve just done a fantastic job there. I don’t know where you want to take this, Robert.
Well, I would say what John just very ablely did is he broke down. He got into some specifics and those specifics would have specifics. I mean, one of the things that jumped out at me is that you partnered with local businesses in order to get the original reports because let’s say you’re going to do a dollar as the cost, hard cost for every binder that you created, right?
Yes.
Well, I don’t know how many homes are in Orchard, but let’s just use in a neighborhood I am familiar with. Let’s just go with there’s a place called well, no Aviara. There’s an aviar in Richmond, Texas. It’s got about 575 homes. So just to completely blanket that one subdivision in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, it’s $575, not counting the time it takes to deliver or however you’re going to get it there. So I’m curious to know, how do you do partnership? Do you insert a leaf for the businesses, have a list of businesses at the front say, hey, this report is sponsored by these guys, and if so, what’s that pitch to those businesses? Is it like, hey, give me $200 and I’ll include your name at the front of my binder, but I’m going to hand these out one by one to everybody in this neighborhood. Like, how does that work?
Start at the beginning. One of the things that we did was we didn’t send this to everyone. And that was part of the thing that we did. And this is where the mistake that a lot of agents make, I think, is they try to send valuable things to everyone. And this is where traditional farming was. You just send out a bunch of stuff to the same people over and over. We went out and we got people to put their hand up and ask for the report. So we went out and we doorknocked it and we cold called the area and said, we’re putting together report, would you like to get a copy? So the initial upfront cost was a lot of money. I fronted the money myself. It was thousands of dollars because it cost about $10 for the initial binder with their initial printing and everything after that. And that was about a dollar per month after that. So I paid out of my pocket for that initial upfront. Then once we had that, then we went to the businesses and said, listen, we’re sending this out to x amount of people in the area.
We already had proof of concept, so we showed them, hey, we’re already sending this out to this many people that are getting in the area. So some of the things we did, we would have a sponsorship page in the back of the binder, and then we would start partnering with events as well. And then we would co brand stuff. So we did some offline marketing. We did some postcards. We would co-brand some stuff together. We did a lot of community events. And that was one of the ways that we co-worked together. And I think one of the things that agents need to consider is that there are other ways other than just cash that you can do to leverage and partner. So sometimes people may not have cash, or sometimes businesses may not have the cash up front, but you can do cross-promotion. And that’s one of the big things that I’m a big believer in, is that you can work together with local businesses and community groups and organizations to work together. So, for example, hold on, we’re going to pause there.
So we’re going to pause working with local businesses together. And then you’re going to continue. We’re going to come back for part two. But ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to go for our break. We will be right back.
Welcome back to the mail. Right, Podcast? This episode is number 363. We were just talking about some specifics. Ryan was sharing with us a very specific case study about how he used a hyper-local strategy is what I would call it. He’s calling it geographic farming. Either way, it’s how do you get in front of a targeted market and get that market excited about being targeted. He’s talking about a lot of value, a binder he’s creating. He’s talking about how he was creating this partnership with local businesses. He was about ready to give us the specifics before I rudely interrupted him and told him he had to go to a break. So if you could take it where.
You rob Robbie; they offered you, well.
Three years and 300 some odd episodes or however many it’s been, it’s bound to happen at some point. So Ryan, go ahead, please pick up where you left off.
Yeah, so perfect. I’m glad you asked that because as mentioned before, is that we created the value up front so that we could sell it to the businesses a lot easier. So we had to show that there were people interested in that. We already had an audience doing that. So one of the things like I said we did was we had a sponsorship page in the back. We also put an insert in there. We would do a blog or an article about them, so we’d feature them. And we had a newsletter that went out as well. And we would feature them in the newsletters. That was part of the things that they would help with. And then I said community events were a big part of what we were doing and we would co partner with some of these things. So one of the things we did was we partnered with a local bank, and the bank was fantastic at getting us support. We went into the bank and they got us a table. We got to set up and talk to people. We had our listings and stuff up in the bank. They had a wall full of real estate listings that we could put up.
We got to do a presentation for the employees that were there. So we were explaining what we’re doing in the community. And one of our biggest I think my things I’m most proud of was we partnered with a local organization in the community. And they was a father and son team and they would build birdhouses out of recycled wood and then they would sell the bird houses and every dollar went to the hospital. So there was in Burlington and there was a big hospital being built or being built on to. And at the time, I think they had raised it was like four, $5,000 maybe. It was actually a bit more than that. But I just fell in love with what they were doing because it tied in so well with what we were doing, which is we’re in real estate. We sell houses and bird houses go well, it was an awesome thing. The kid was eight years old at the time, and him and his dad were doing this. So what I want to do is help promote them. So I started promoting them. I did an interview with them. I took some pictures of them.
We put them on our social media. And then I got him to come into our office, and then he did a spiel at the office and a bunch of agents in our office bought a bunch of birdhouses. Think he sold like $1300 worth of birdhouses to our office. And then the bank that we partnered with, we got together and did a giant sale at the bank. So we partnered with the bank. We got the news was there. We had a bunch of outlets were there. There was some local politicians were there. We got some other businesses to sponsor this event. And I think there was almost $5,000 worth of sales that we had done for this organization. And for us, it was a win win for everybody because it got us publicity. We were on the front cover of our local newspaper, and I would say if I had to pay for that kind of coverage, it would cost me thousands of dollars for that front cover. So we got on the front cover of the paper, we got in all these news outlets and things like that. And it was a great partnership and it worked really well together.
We then got involved with there was a local, like a Montessori school. It was a Waldorf school. It was kind of an alternative kids school. And we created a community event. And then again, we brought our business partners into that and did some sponsorship that way. So it was really just tying the people that were serving the community already together and bringing them together to help create more relationships and really expand and reach more people.
Got you. Well, that sounds like a lot of work. I think my question would be, ultimately, work doesn’t matter because John and I both occasionally present ideas to clients that would ultimately be a lot of work. The idea behind it is, what is the potential ROI? So do you ever case study, like, when you finally do get a lead or somebody calling you out, do you have a close ratio for that lead? Do you have numbers that you could share with the audience about what that yielded you in terms of your total amount of business that you produced off this?
So at that time, this is a few years ago, our total cost spent was about $11,000. And so we started farming in September. Our first listing came in in January, and from January for the next 15 months, we ended up doing 17 transactions over those 15 months. At the time, we made 235,000. I made money since then from spin off and other things, but it’s $235,000. So our return on investment was like 21 times return on investment plus our time, obviously, to do that. Our numbers were worked out to be about for every 40, plus about 40, give or take, people in our database, getting a report would turn into a transaction. So then for us, it was just, how do we get more people onto the report? How do we get more people in our database, and how do we build those better relationships? So it was easy to track. And then for us, I’m a numbers guy. I love to track things. I got spreadsheets for all kinds of stuff, and I was tracking how many people we needed to get, how many people could we get out of there and kind of extract.
And then what happened was, once we started doing that, we then moved on to another area and then expanded into that. And then we started another kind of different plan around. But then at that time, I ended up selling part of the business off to my business partner. And then I’ve since moved on, and I can share from other agents who’ve used things that I’ve taught them. And coaching. I’ve had one gentleman that was one of my first coaching clients. He does multiple six figures from his farm in over three years. He did about 500,000 GCI doing the same thing with the report and the binder. And he didn’t do the community events. He didn’t do the other things we were doing. He was basically just getting out there and building relationships. So that came down to choosing the right farm area, the right price point, and the consistency with that was huge.
So I seem to hear a little bit of Canadian in your accent. Do you mind if I ask what part of North America you’re working in?
I am in Canada, so I’m just outside Toronto, about an hour and a half outside of Toronto, depending on traffic.
Beautiful. John, I’ve been hogging the mic, so to speak. So I’m sure you’ve been sitting on at least a single question, if not more. Why don’t you take it away?
Thanks, Rob. So I think one of the themes that I love with what you’re saying, Ryan, is what me and Robert have been hammering away consistently is what we call becoming the unofficial digital mayor of your community. And it’s linked to another one of my phrases, that you can’t be a successful real estate agent in 2022 and being visible agent. Yeah, but I just got a quick question. You really laid out a really fantastic gorilla marketing plan. How do you link that with effective digital marketing?
That’s a great question. And one of the things I would say when it comes down to if you’re going to if you’re trying to stay hyper local, is think like a local person and create your marketing around value that would add to that community. So one of the first things I would say is start with video is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing in today’s society. I think one of the best ways to do that and stand out and be different is to do community based video. Instead of just being all about me and all about real estate is, again, create content for the community that you’re serving. So one of the things I would start with, and one of the things I teach agents is to do local business interviews. So get out there and do some quick, easy videos that you can go out there and there’s so many businesses you can do that serve your area. They don’t have to be directly in your area. They may be a pool company, they may be on the other side of town, but as long as they serve the area that you’re working in, do an interview with them, it literally costs you nothing.
You have a cell phone, you have Zoom, or you have some type of internet connection, you can do an interview. Then I would use that and leverage that to then build an audience. And the great thing with doing something like that is you can leverage that video in multiple ways. One, you obviously have content for your audience and that’s one of the biggest things. You want to create good quality content that they’re going to appreciate, but then it also gets you in front of that local businesses audience. As well. And I always say that when you interview someone else, you are going to get an audience built into that. And I use the term one to many marketing. When I get interviewed by someone, I’m way more likely to share that with my audience when I’m being interviewed. And it’s a lot easier for me to go out and tell everyone that I was interviewed on something, then share that I did a hey mom and dad, I ran a Facebook ad today. Like my friends and family don’t care that I created a Facebook ad. If I’m featured on something, I’m going to be more likely to share that and tell my friends and family because I feel good about it.
And it makes me feel nice that someone featured it just like this interview. I’m going to share this once it goes out and I’ll let people know. So what happens is those local businesses are going to have that same effect. And when you interview them, they’re going to want to share it with their audience. And if they’re in business, they obviously have an audience. They’ve got clients that they’re probably going to share it with. So you can find businesses that are well connected in the community and do some interviews with them. Then you want to learn then to distribute that. And this is where I think that some of the work takes that you can do that is good, that doesn’t take a lot of work, is get involved in local Facebook groups. And that’s, again, one of the most underutilized mediums that people are not leveraging, especially at that hyperlocal level, is there’s so many different Facebook groups. And if there aren’t, start one. And the great thing with those local Facebook groups is it’s the people living in the area you’re serving, and then they’re focusing on hyperlocal content.
They’re there because they’re part of that community. They want to know what’s going on. They’re hyper-aware of the local things that are happening in the news that is happening in literally street by street. So you can share that message and content with them, and then you can become that digital mayor by being that ambassador and really building relationships. And with Facebook groups, the amazing thing is you’re literally having conversations. And this is a big difference between Facebook pages a lot of people that they don’t know is that Facebook pages is more of like a push marketing. Facebook groups is literally conversations. It’s just like being at a party with someone. You’re able to jump into conversations. You can start conversations; you can connect with people, and build relationships that you would never ever have on traditional type marketing if you’re just sending out a bunch of postcards. So I would leverage the community groups because you’re able to connect with people completely differently. And it allows you to fly under the radar, build trust with people, and see that you’re a person who cares and bringing value to the community you serve.
I love everything that you’re saying, Ryan. So I’ve noticed that you manage to get online with Tristan Amatta, which is awesome. So John and I always like to add a little something to our show that you may not have spun in another digital area. So I’m curious to know, is there a little tip or trick that you can’t recollect having shared recently with any other podcast or any other person that you’ve done an interview with that it could be very small, but something you can share with our audience here? Actually, you know, what are you going to be? We’re 27 minutes into the show. We ask for 30. Do you have an extra ten minutes that you can share with us so that John and I can do some bonus content?
Yeah, absolutely.
So perfect. So why don’t you think about it? I don’t want to sucker punch you here on the show and see if you can think of something for us. And in the meantime, we’re going to spend another minute or two wrapping up the actual podcast part of the show, and then anybody that would like to stay with us, we’re going to do ten extra minutes, and we’re going to throw that ten extra minutes up on the mail right. YouTube channel for anybody that would be interested in going over there. So, Ryan, this is the part of the show where I ask you if there are people that would like to look you up, contact you, or try to research your lessons in any particular way. Where would you send them?
The easiest place is launchyourfarm.com. That’s kind of my main hub. You can find my podcasts there. The courses, my blog, and my social media. If you’re just searching, you can search Launch, your Farm, and Google, and basically all the major platforms you’ll find me. That’s kind of the main place. You’ll see it when you get there. If you want to follow the podcast, you can click the podcast link, and all the links to the locations are there. Easy to find on social media as well. You can find me on with Ryan Smith. It’s a little harder than Ryan Smith because there are a million of us. So I would find you through the launch of Farm Channel, and you’ll be able to connect with me that way.
Beautiful. And John, who’s been far less Ignatius and usual and much quieter. If somebody was going to want to leverage your incredible expertise in either WordPress or building a website or owning the website, any of those things that you mentioned at the beginning of the show, where would you like them to go?
Yeah, go over to the Mail-Right. You can book a free discussion with either me or Adam, my partner, or work with us. We got over twelve to 15 years of building beautiful WordPress websites on your website. Don’t lease it, and let us build help. Be your partner in building your business. And I didn’t feel I needed to interrupt this. Interviews are very easy to ride about you, aren’t he, Robert?
He sure has. No doubt about it. All right, ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to learn more about me, reach out to me, contact me, or talk to me. 2022 is probably your last year to do that. Maybe the first part of 2023. Then after that, I’m going to hang up the headset, so to speak, and let other people do that for my business. Inboundriem.com is the place that you go. That’s the word inboundrabitwardmichael.com. And without any further ado, for those of you who are left who are interested in the bonus content and Ryan’s, just for us, tip that I am trying to into giving us, you can find that on the YouTube channel. We’ll be right back.
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