The #1 priority of a real estate agent is to generate leads. If you do not generate leads you are out of business. This is critical to the livelihood of a real estate agent. If you don’t know how to generate leads you are going to have a really tough time making money.
So let’s talk about the best ways real estate agents get leads.
An effective way real estate agents get leads is using Direct Response Marketing. There is almost no other way to get leads. Before we continue, let’s define two types of leads. A lead is a person who is thinking about doing a transaction at some point. You follow up with a lead to connect with them in an effort to get in front of them. The second type of lead, which I am going to call a “hot prospect,” is someone who calls you up to do a transaction. Think about the “Come list me now!” phone calls. Or the “Will you help be buy a home now?” phone calls. Those types of leads are generated differently than the first type of leads. For the purpose of this blog, I’m going to focus on how you generate a list of people who are likely interested in doing a transaction (either a seller or buyer transaction) so you can have an ongoing source and pipeline of potential sales. Again, the most effective way real estate agents get leads is by using direct response marketing. Direct response generates a direct response to your marketing as the name implies. And the marketing that you are doing is looking for someone thinking about buying or thinking about selling a home.
How do you identify someone thinking about buying or selling a home?
The formula is formula. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.
- A is ATTENTION – Anytime you do direct response marketing, the most important part of your marketing is attention. You need to grab prospects’ attention so they take notice of your marketing. This is typically done with the headline. The headline needs to be strong and curiosity seeking. It needs to identify the prospect so the prospect will read the rest of your ad.
- I is INTEREST- Interest is usually a sub-headline. It plays off of the headline and gives a little more information that creates more curiosity to get the prospect reading the rest of your marketing piece.
- D is DESIRE – This is where you start to share the benefits of what you are offering.
- A is ACTION – Action is a call to action that gets prospects responding. For example, let’s talk about generating home seller leads, which is what we teach our clients to do. Your ad may read like this: “Are you thinking about selling your home?” That’s the A. It grabs their attention and they take notice. I (the sub-headline) – How do you create interest? “Learn four secrets that can increase the sales price of your home up to 18% more than its current value.” D is where you start to share a little about how this is done, such as: “I’ve been a real estate agent for 12 years and I’ve learned powerful secrets on how to sell your home better than typical agent.” These secrets all have to do with how you prepare the home, what causes people to spend more money on it and, most importantly, what causes people who are willing to spend more money to be interested in your home in the first place. All of these secrets must be done before the home goes on the market. You might add, “So if you are thinking of selling your home, I created a short report that outlines each of these four secrets.” This creates desire. How do you create action? Action is telling them what to do. You could end, “If you want this report, if you want to get more money on the sale of your home, go to my website now and download it for free.”
The final step in how real estate agents get leads is that you must use a lead capture device.
A lead capture device is something that allows you to capture the information of who is responding. Most agents use a standard lead capture form. A lead capture form is where a homeowner will go to the website, fill out the form to give their information so they can get a free report. This is effective and inexpensive, but it does not work as well as another method we developed. Here is the problem with that method. Statistically, on average only 1 out of 20 people visiting a website will fill out the form. Why is that? Because if they are only thinking about selling but are not ready to sell right now they don’t want a sales person calling them and trying to push them to go on the market before they are ready. So many people will hold off. At ListingGrabber, we developed a different approach for our clients. By using proprietary technology wrote, we actually pinpoint the exact address of the homeowner responding to that postcard so they never have to fill out a form. Simply the fact that they go to the website allows us to know exactly who they are. This allows our clients get more leads. If you want to create your own website with a lead capture form, an easy please to go is WIX. If you want to look at what we do for our clients to identify leads through stealth technology, go to ListingGrabber
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