As real estate sales professionals -- I find that too many REALTORS just aren't spending enough time marketing themselves. Many do not know how.
When I consult with new prospects -- I'm told that they're going to fix that next week. Or next month. "I'm gonna bull doze my website and do this." Or do that.
It's the same statement all the time. They will make the *big marketing change* AFTER they come back from RainCamp. Or Inman Connect.
Then when I catch up to them (often a year later) I ask how well they used the information they learned at last year's event and 90% of them give me the same answer.
"Oh, I didn't get to it yet. But this year I'm going to get another dose of Ben Kinney or Guy Kawasaki..." or some another speaker.
It's good to get inspiration. It's good to get fired up.
But when you get back from the show -- what's the point of spending $795 at Inman Connect if you're not going to do anything new with the information you just learned? The same thing applies to the books, seminars and webinars. If you don't DO anything with the information you just learned -- what's the point of spending the money to rebrand yourself in the first place?
And more importantly -- are you even qualified to create your own marketing plan? Are you able to build a brand and create a huge viral buzz so you can get hundreds of leads?
Do you have the skills and money to brand yourself to an audience that is fractionated and like a social bar fly, zooms from Twitter to Facebook to Google five to fifteen times a day?
Very few REALTORS are experts at marketing themselves and even fewer still know anything about "branding."
Can these two very important things be learned? For most REALTORS -- probably not.
Branding and marketing is not something they teach at GRI. When i took the real estate exam for New Mexico and California -- I noticed there were no chapters on branding or marketing.
Now, I'm studying to get my license in Colorado. Nothing in the Colorado books have anything about marketing or branding, either.
For a handful of REALTORS that have the drive and determination to do this on their own -- we need to think about a professional looking website, supported with a five-point marketing and PR plan if we want to be successful.
This PR plan needs to include;
1.) Press Releases on PRWeb.com or 1888PRessRelease.com
2.) Offline marketing. Direct mail, post cards and radio spots.
3.) Lead capture and tracking systems.
4.) A Website with a killer IDX and a blog.
5.) Getting Social. What you must do on Facebook tomorrow.
Any small PR firm or digital advertising agency can help you with the 5 points above. Z57, AdvancedAccess, AgentImage and countless others... can't.
They're just web shops. They sell you the same McWebsite that broker Bob at Amazing Realty bought for $295. They're not PR or advertising agencies.
Marketing yourself and rebranding yourself isn't very easy to do. Which is why you might want to go with a professional outside firm that specializes in these areas. There's a lot of really good companies out there that know how to solve your marketing and branding problems for you. And this will free up hundreds of hours for you to do what you're really GOOD at.
But if you DO want to get started on your own, then you simply need to know the five rules of success.
Just email me and I'll send you over my MS Word Marketing Plan wizard. It's FREE.
And it's what I've used to get my last 17 customers on page one, and with a killer blog and a Facebook marketing presence.
Timothy Ferris is the author of the Four Hour Workweek. While nobody I know in real estate today actually works a 4-hour work week, Tim has some valuable tips that I'm using which has allowed me to hire virtual assistants @ $12 to $22 an hour to do things for me that I am not good at.
That frees me up to write, to consult and spend more time with my family while I'm still making lots of money.
The fact is -- too many REALTORS need to wake up and realize the same thing when it comes to marketing and branding you. Sure, you're good with people. Sure, you know the neighborhood and you might be faster on your HP Calculator than anybody else in your brokerage.
But if your online marketing talent sucks, and you're not a PR wizard and you're all thumbs with marketing and branding -- it's time to stop going to the inspirational workshops and seminars because until you act -- nothing is going to change.
The problem in branding YOU whether you're a REALTOR or an agent has two fundamental problems.
1.) Our target audience (both buyers and sellers) are shopping around for the best price, best value, best service. If everybody wanted to pay full retail price, God would never created Help U Sell, Assist 2 Sell or Walmart.
2.) There's too many of us saying the same thing. And thanks to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, the noise and the sheer number of channels you can bombard buyers and sellers with is as infinite as there are galaxies in our Universe.
To build YOU as a brand -- you first need a purpose. Let me show you what a few lousy brands and equally un-inspring tagline examples are;
We move people,
We sell homes,
Our REALTORS make the difference,
We know (fin in your town name here) like nobody else,
The (Short Sale / Foreclosure) Experts,
Etc., etc.
Purpose drives ingenuity. Purpose can result in memorable tag lines that cut through an ocean of white noise, me-too real estate websites, blogs, wall posts on Facebook and chirps on Twitter.
And make no mistake, brands are never created -- they are BORN.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did it with Apple. You can test this by asking your friends if they have an MP3 player.
5 out of 6 people will immediately think; iPod, not Microsoft's ZUNE MP3 player.
Then there's iMac and iPhone. More brands from Apple.
Coca-Cola did it with their tagline of, "The Real Thing."
And Frank Borges is about to do it with "Wheel Estate."
You remember Frank, right? He's the broker in Virginia that made a big splash with his Wheel Estate Cam blog. Frank is a real testament to the real estate community because he's shown all of us what you can do with an original idea and ingenuity.
Way to go, Frank. I salute you, sir. You are an inspiration to us all.
Let's pick apart and analyze Frank's success for a minute.
Frank has a purpose. Educate the customer. And Frank does it through his blog and linked YouTube videos. What also helps Frank is a small marketing budget for Inman.com, too. Every few weeks Frank has another youTube video on Inman's newsletter. And Frank's paid for a semi-custom IDX which has organic URL's on his website. Which is very SEO friendly for Google.
He's done all the right things here. Frank has made a nearly perfect loaf of bread -- from scratch.
You can add all the right ingredients, but unless you knead the bread just so -- you end up getting a giant, inedible brick instead of a nice, warm loaf of wheat bread when it comes out of the oven.
And this is the problem for a lot of you who try to duplicate Frank's recipe -- because when you fail, you only have yourselves to blame. Achieving sales nirvana on line with the number of leads Frank is probably getting isn't an easy recipe to duplicate for a lot of you.
To make a big splash, and to create a brand that people will remember you for is going to take some work. You have to burn up some brain cells and come up with another "original idea." Because copying what Frank has done won't do anything for people to remember you.
You can buy all the self help books you want. You can go to all the RainCamps and Inman Connects that you want.
But if you have no clue what marketing is -- if you have zero talent at building brands -- then you have one option left: Get a good advertising or PR agency to do the job for you. And be willing to spend some money to do it right.
Let's try an exercise to see if you're even capable of building your own brand.
Q: What is the definition of Marketing?
a.) The art of selling something.
b.) The ability to create a condition or environment that allows the customer to sell themselves on your product or service.
If you chose B, then I salute you. Because there's hope for you. If you chose A, then it's pretty clear you need help from an advertising agency.
If you only think of you as "selling homes," -- then you're simply wasting what could be a wonderful sales and marketing career.
Note that I said marketing.
Because the art of marketing homes is what translates into getting buyers. You cannot have one without the other. Homes don't SELL themselves. Which means if you don't package your website properly, if you don't have killer videos, virtual tours or slides shows that look as good as the movie; Avatar or Terminator 3 -- then you're going to be consistently losing out to the competition that does these things.
Why bother building a brand?
Because good brands, once established are nearly impossible to kill. Let me give you three examples of this;
1.) Tylenol
2.) Tiger Woods
3.) Toyota
It's ironic that all three examples I'm giving you here start with the letter " T " but it's just a coincidence.
Tylenol's brand nearly died along with a handful of people who were poisoned in September 1982. Remember the cyanide laced Extra Strength Tylenol? The news media prophetically cried "doomsday," for the brand.
BusinessWeek carried a headline: A Death Blow for Tylenol?
The media was wrong. Tylenol today is a very strong brand and millions of bottles of the pain killer are sold every year. And if we believe the TV commercials -- apparently it's the brand used most in hospitals.
Tiger Woods. His sex addiction made front news headlines and resulted in a bitter (and expensive) divorce and lost the support of Gatorade, Gilette and Accenture. But Nike maintained their support and today, Tiger Woods the man and the brand is back and stronger than ever.
Toyota. Plagued with mechanical and electrical problems and fueled by the media hype over the death of a handful of people -- Toyota is back, too.
If you want two more examples, how about President Bill Clinton? Or Martha Stewart?
Bill lied to America and *did* have an affair with Monica. Martha lied and was caught red handed with information that allowed her to benefit from insider trading on the ImClone stock.
My point is that once you have an established brand, bad news isn't going to kill it. And sometimes, good news might not resurrect it.
You can't beat "somebody," by being another "nobody." This is especially true now that more than 90% of our business is coming from the Internet. This applies to branding and marketing and both of them are going to be critical to your success or failure in the months to come.
For more help on branding and marketing, drop me a email and I'll give you a short list of my favorite books on the subject you can find at Amazon.
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