In the 347th episode of the Mail Right Show, Jonathan Denwood and Robert Newman discuss how you can use digital marketing as a lead generation strategy to make $100,000 in the first year of your real estate venture. Robert Newman is the founder of Inbound REM, an inbound marketing agency, and a real estate SEO specialist with over 14 years of experience. On the other hand, Jonathan Denwood is the founder and CEO of Mail Right, a company that combines multiple digital tools into a single, simple-to-use package. When starting as a real estate agent, you may make little money, especially during the first year, which can be challenging. However, making $100k as a new realtor is possible! This episode highlights simple and inexpensive ways of generating leads in the first year of your real estate agent career.
Establish Presence Online
Showcase your business on online platforms like Google or Zillow. As a real estate agent, your digital space will hold credibility; it will be your initial digital marketing tool, supported by an email or anything else you may send to spread the word about your new business.
Character References
Testimonials are significant since they showcase your credibility as a realtor. In the industry, ethics is essential; testimonies reflect and showcase your reliability. You can request a review by saying during a call or sending the person a paragraph that says, “if you could leave me a review following this guide but in your own words, I would greatly appreciate it.” Structuring your reviews is vital as a marketing process to showcase social proof and customer reviews.
Subscribe To vidIQ and Use Social Media Platforms
After establishing an online presence for your business, consider subscribing to a vidIQ account, a YouTube plugin that costs $10 per month. VidIQ optimizes videos to create more leads and provides location tags, keywords, titles, descriptions, and video indexes. Although video optimization requires much work, it will help you obtain more leads and calls.
Another platform you can get more leads is Instagram. Instagram is more on hashtags. If you are creating a YouTube video, consider uploading it on Instagram and using relevant hashtags. To get a decent amount of audience on Instagram, you should have the following strategies:
- Pick the area, neighborhood, or type of real estate that you want to sell.
- Do some research or interviews to provide further information about the real estate you choose, as the information you will give potential buyers will boost your credibility as a real estate agent.
- Combine the information gathered, how many homes were selling, how many homes were currently listed in the neighborhood, and what is the current mortgage rate, basically information that will answer all the questions that somebody might ask if purchasing a house.
- Record a video of the real estate for sale and upload it on youtube.
Research The Realtors You Are Competing With
You may be getting some calls, or you may not; regardless, you might want to do some research about other realtors. Watch anybody on youtube that creates videos in the same areas as yours. And if anybody on the internet has a website targeting the same areas as yours, read their reviews. Because when you are informed as to who your competition is, you will know how to compete against them; you will find weaknesses in their offering and leverage them to generate leads.
Learn How To Respond
Once again, ethics is essential. As a realtor, you should respond calmly and professionally, whether taking sales calls or replying to reviews. There will be a time you will get less-than-perfect reviews; however, you can take that as an opportunity to practice what to say, what tone to use if someone gives a negative or positive review.
Every interaction with a person—every handshake, every conversation—is an opportunity to gather customer reviews. When you are a new realtor and have no social proof, your job is to get as much as possible and quickly as possible because it’s the number one thing clients look for. Your goal should shift once you get 20 or 30 reviews, and you should start asking your clients to leave reviews.