For the 395th episode of Mail Right Show, Jonathan Denwood and Robert Newman invited Sarah Noel Block, founder of Tiny Marketing and a marketing strategist who has worked with many small real estate teams to achieve significant results. Robert Newman is the CEO of Inbound REM, an inbound marketing firm specializing in real estate SEO for over a decade. On the other hand, Jonathan Denwood is the founder and CEO of Mail-Right, an organization that streamlines and simplifies a wide range of digital technologies into one convenient, user-friendly package. This episode discusses the techniques and strategies to effectively create marketing plans and social media content that will set you apart from competitors as a real estate agent.
The Social Media Platform that Agents Should Focus On in 2023
The social media you will use depends on your real estate niche. But Instagram and TikTok have been ideal for real estate. But people in the commercial space, commercial real estate, or investing are all on LinkedIn.
It is recommended to get a consultation because it’s always different and depends on your goals and who you’re trying to reach. You need to start with a customer-first approach when identifying the platform you want to use.
What is Marketing Mad Libs?
Marketing Mad Libs is a workshop by Sarah Block with the stakeholders within a business, bringing people in the company together to build out the business’ brand messaging on a page where everybody agrees.
A lot of times, the problem when there’s a bunch of people working within a business is they talk about the business differently. There’s almost always a disconnect if you tell people this is how we talk about it rather than involving them in the process. But with Marketing Mad Libs, you get everybody on the same page, and they buy into it, and you have it documented. So, when you hire new people, you can easily explain how you talk about the business, who you are, your personality, and your why.
What is a Strategic Story
It is building an entire marketing strategy from beginning to end. Strategic Story starts with that marketing Mad Libs workshop, getting a good idea of what people think they are, what’s different about their business through that stakeholder workshop, and what the messaging should be. And then, after that, build out a customer Avatar, their journey, how they can clone their favorite customer through their journey, and then messaging content and a marketing action plan so that the business knows exactly what they need to do to reach their favorite people.
Utilization of Social Media that is Linked to Marketing Mad Libs and Strategic Story
There’s a real estate company called Kinship, and they identified that they tend to work with people buying their second home— this is their ideal customer. When building strategies, one of the mistakes they found is they mainly talk about themselves on social media, making things seem “too me” focused. However, a better approach is to focus on your customers. It is much more effective when you share their stories, such as case studies showing how you’ve assisted them or stories from users or clients you’ve worked with. They also use reels better than anybody else. They do an amazing job of telling stories through reels and just documenting those initial walkthroughs of houses and the experiences people go through when they buy that house.
Social Media Tools that Segment Out and Target Influencers Who Are Relevant Within the Real Estate Field
SparkToro is ideal for identifying the right people for partnerships. You can also utilize LinkedIn with the MeetAlfred tool to find many people to connect with and partner with. There’s also a community called Ready Set Collab, a database of people open to collaborations and the perfect alternative route other than SparkToro and LinkedIn.
However, using influencers for marketing is already overused. You don’t need to connect with influencers but with subject matter experts with their niche audience and the same audience as you; those people make sense to do collaborative content with.
Viability of Tiktok and Strategies for Traditional Real Estate Brand Building and Lead Generation
Many real estate agents generate leads from Instagram. When it comes to Instagram, research your customer first. Then, look at their journey at every touch point, not just on social media. Social media is just one part of the whole journey. And there’s a strategy around that, but it’s completely customized depending on the customer. There’s also a lot of success with reels on Instagram, getting as much video content out there as possible, and repurposing. If you are doing podcasts, for example, taking the video content from your podcast and repurposing it into Reels will get a lot more eyes on it.
Brand awareness is the biggest thing with TikTok because you don’t need a huge following to get many views and get people to know who you are. Lead generation, not necessarily in real estate, has been quite profitable for some. One such example is authors who utilize TikTok. If you have over a thousand followers on TikTok, you can include a link in your profile, and TikTok users are quite willing to support you. So it has been easy to monetize in that capacity. For real estate agents, it’s advisable to adopt a similar approach. As soon as possible, aim to gather around 1,000 followers attached to your LinkedIn bio so you can transfer them to your email list. Subsequently, you can initiate marketing efforts to promote your sales.
Social Media Content Planning: Everything can be a Content
People tend to underestimate the volume of content that needs to be produced to get a result. And if you’re busy real estate brokerage, a boutique brokerage, or a small power team, you’re busy with other things, and you have the budget or the capacity to get people to help you do that, do it because it is so beneficial.
Change your mindset into a content-producing mindset because, for example, you can use your phone to create videos and drive your car to do real estate businesses, such as house inspections, open houses, and so on; any of those are opportunities to create something clever in the content space. People who do best with social media and real estate think there can be content in every scenario where they are filming those walkthroughs. They’re filming that day that they hand over the key to their client or filming the open houses. If you have a mindset everything is content and you’re filming, then it’s a lot easier to create content. Think that everything is content and then pass it on to your VA (Virtual Assistant) and they can put it together into a Reel and schedule it for you.
Connection is also created specifically through video more than the written word, even more than with images. It is the only way that you can meet people in person online. And you can only get that effect of who this person is with video. It creates a stronger bond. And in the content marketing space where trust is essential, that’s what video does, and much faster. It gets them to know you more quickly, like you faster because your personality shines through, and trust you because you’re teaching something.
Furthermore, the people you are selling to are probably not thinking of buying a house or selling a house right now, but when they’re researching it and it’s tickling in their minds, your contents will move them quicker to you. It shortens the sales cycle by creating content and showing up consistently. So only some people who go on your platform will immediately look to buy a house, but when they are, they will think of you.
