Month: November 2022

What Is Better For Real Estate Lead Generation: Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads vs. Zillow Ads?

Post author By Emmanuel Lao
Post date 11/24/2022
No Comments on What Is Better For Real Estate Lead Generation: Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads vs. Zillow Ads?

Understanding and effectively utilizing the sales funnel is crucial for the success of any marketing campaign. In this blog, I’ll break down the three essential stages of the sales funnel and explain their significance:

#1 Top of the Funnel
#2 Middle of the Funnel
#3 Bottom of the Funnel

There are a lot of options when it comes to paid advertisements for realtors nowadays. Among the most popular ones are Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Zillow Ads. It’s crucial to understand them and know which one will work best for your real estate business.

I’ve helped many realtors identify their expertise and help them scale their real estate business using systems. This includes creating real estate web design, creating a unique strategy for their business and lead generation through ads. Speaking from years of experience, we break down the difference between these popular digital marketing advertisements to help you understand what would be best applied to your business and your target market.

Let’s start with a quick story about two of the clients we worked with. Both of these clients are dealing with selling property for a deceased loved one. The first one was averaging about 3-5 transactions a year. They came to us because they ran ads and it doesn’t seem to work They were frustrated looking for a solution.

The second one was averaging 40-50 transactions a year and they wanted us to help install systems with 2 goals. Get them up to 80 transactions yearly and do it without adding more effort.

We’ve been able to help them both and I want to share with you the big difference between the 3-5 transaction approach and the 40-50 transaction approach.

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The Role of Sales Funnel in Your Marketing Campaign

The journey prospective customers take to make a purchase is referred to in marketing as a sales funnel. This is where the two agents made huge distinctions in their marketing approach. The second agent understands that consumers have different levels of awareness on each part of the sales funnel. While the other one thinks all leads are the same.

#1 Top of the Funnel – The problem aware

#2 Middle of the Funnel – The solution aware

#3 Bottom of the Funnel – The product or service aware

The majority of agents, including agent number 1, frequently assume that all generated leads, regardless of the source, will be at the bottom of the funnel. But to their dismay, it isn’t or they may get leads from the bottom of the funnel but they’re very expensive or very difficult to convert. So, they end up getting disappointed and think all leads are too expensive or garbage.

The agent with a 3-5 yearly transaction strategy was trying to target the executors of the estate. This is where the property owner already died and the property in charge is in a rush to find someone to help liquidate the asset. The problem with this is, there are a ton of variables thrown into the mix. For example, dealing with siblings, if there is no will, or if they need to get an attorney involved. In short, they’re trying to touch the bottom part of the funnel. The intent was higher but it also costs a lot to target this part of the funnel. That’s because costs increase as you move down the funnel, and costs decrease as you move up.

If you’re trying to build a scalable business with this type of lead, it is extremely expensive. This is why Zillow leads cost a lot. This type of lead is at the bottom of the funnel, thus intent is higher, and trying to hit them with an advertisement will normally cost more.

The other agent, with 40-50 yearly transactions, focuses on leads at the top of the funnel. The leads they’re trying to get have lower intent, but they have a process behind this strategy. It was to capture the lead and implant themselves as the solution before the bad thing happens. They made sure that if a lead was not problem aware yet, they educated them on becoming problem aware. Or if they were already problem aware, they made them solution aware long before the finish line was coming for a loved one. That simply drives them to be the first in mind in the decision-making process when the lead is finally looking for an agent for help.

LEARN HOW WE’VE GENERATED OVER 100,000 LEADS FOR OUR REAL ESTATE CLIENTS LAST YEAR

Marketing Strategy – create inbound strategies to better position you for the long game.

Systems Implementation – we design and implement systems for you to buy back your time.

Brand Building – position you as the thought leader and authority in your community.

Choosing The Right Advertising Campaign

What does this all mean and how does it relate to Facebook Ads vs Google Ads vs Zillow Ads?

Depending on your strategy, all of these platforms for generating leads will work for you. You just need to understand the strengths of each and align them with your budget and your time horizon.

Imagine a graph where X is time and Y is cost. Then there’s a delta, a line going up to the right that indicates sales

If you’re looking for transactions now, expect to be paying a high price for them because they are lower in the funnel or have higher intent. But if you can increase your time horizon to working with people higher in the funnel, you will be able to scale easier in the long run.

If we break the graph into 3 columns and label them with the 3 stages of the Sales Funnel ( Top, Middle, and Bottom) will be able to align the 3 advertisement campaigns on each column.

If you need leads and transactions now, expect to spend a lot and the solution would be Zillow leads. If you can delay the need for a transaction, and want to work the Middle of the Funnel, then Google Ads is a great match. This is where leads are already problem aware and are searching for a solution.

If you can delay the next transaction and work on top of the funnel, then the Facebook advertisement is the way to go. The cost per lead is a lot cheaper. It’s the secret sauce to building consistency and predictability in terms of lead acquisition. If you play the long game, this is your way to see a lot more real estate transactions in the long run.

Final Thoughts

Lead acquisition is not an easy process, it takes a lot of studies and the right strategy for you to succeed. While opting for digital marketing is highly accessible, you need to have the right knowledge to avoid wasting your money on efforts that don’t work.

If you’re thinking about lead generation, the first two things to figure out are your budget and your time horizon. This way, you’ll be able to choose a marketing campaign that is aligned with your goal.

Find out more tips to help you scale your business and build predictability. Join our free Square 1 Facebook Group today. If you need help building out your real estate website, we’re just a call away! We’re experts so feel free to reach out to us and we’ll be more than happy to help you out.

Branding Business Intelligence Digital Marketing e-marketing Facebook Marketing Strategy Real Estate Marketing Small Business Marketing Trends

Creating Real Estate Short Form Videos

Post author By Emmanuel Lao
Post date 11/17/2022
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In my business of helping real estate clients scale their business using systems, which include real estate web design, social media content creation, and more, I’ve learned that most realtors struggle with content creation. Given that today’s media consumers have shorter attention spans, short-form video material is ideal. In comparison to long-form videos, short-form videos are considerably easier to consume. It smoothly and widely became one of the most effective strategies to generate and nurture real estate leads and convert them into clients.

Although these videos only take 60 seconds, it becomes a challenge because of all the effort that goes into making them. One of the biggest issues that we’ve seen most agents wrestle with when it comes to starting or creating short-form videos is the script or creating what you need to be talking about. Without a system, ideas will just be all over the place.

In this article, we share how to create super fast short-form videos like Facebook or Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, and TikTok. It is a very simple strategy that we use to help our real estate clients create content quickly and consistently.

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The Sentence Modeling Strategy

It’s pretty difficult if you don’t have any direction or inspiration for writing your short-form video script. The good news is, there’s a very simple strategy that writers use that you can utilize and take advantage of. This will help you solve the whole blank canvas issue and will equip you to create content.

This strategy is called sentence modeling.

It’s the idea that you create a sentence using a word pattern. Another way to describe this technique is with the old game called Mad Libs where you fill in the blanks to a premade sentence. This strategy is widely used and very popular amongst many expert content creators, online influencers, gurus, and successful entrepreneurs.

If you pay attention to the sentence structure and not the actual value or the content of big names like Alex Hormozi, Grant Cardone, or Ryan Serhant you’ll notice a pattern. They usually start their sentence with the same word structure when it comes to the content that they create. This is actually by design and the logic behind this is very simple. If you can take out 30% to 40% of the content creation process by simply following a sentence structure and then filling in the blank, then it makes the process of creating content super easy and so much faster.

Going back to that blank canvas metaphor mentioned earlier. Let’s imagine that instead of having a blank canvas, you have to think about a problem that your ideal client is facing. All you have to do now is fill in the blanks of this sample Mad Libs: “Last ____, I ____ that was facing ____ and ____ happened.”

These Mad Libs and the script don’t need to be very long. The typical short-form video is roughly around 120 to 150 words. So in the big scheme of things, this isn’t a lot to write. Just look at a sentence structure, think about something that happened that you can plug into those blanks, and then you’re off to the races.

LEARN HOW WE’VE GENERATED OVER 100,000 LEADS FOR OUR REAL ESTATE CLIENTS LAST YEAR

Marketing Strategy – create inbound strategies to better position you for the long game.

Systems Implementation – we design and implement systems for you to buy back your time.

Brand Building – position you as the thought leader and authority in your community.

Final Thoughts

As a real estate professional who wishes to succeed with digital marketing, it’s essential to take advantage of short-form videos. It’s one of the most effective ways to connect with your audience nowadays. The busy and fast-paced world makes it difficult to catch people’s attention, and these videos are a great remedy for that.

Don’t let them skim your videos! Grab their interest by starting your video script with the problem they’re dealing with. We created 50 Mad Libs or sentence models for you that you can use for your real estate business.

Looking for more real estate strategies to grow your business? Join our free Square 1 Facebook Group for similar content that can help you in your Real Estate journey. If you are interested in one-on-one coaching, then schedule a strategy session with me today, and let’s talk about how I can help you move your business forward.

Branding Business Intelligence Digital Marketing e-marketing Facebook Marketing Strategy Real Estate Marketing Small Business Marketing Social Media For Realtors Trends

Real Estate Lead Generation Strategies That Work

Post author By Emmanuel Lao
Post date 11/10/2022
No Comments on Real Estate Lead Generation Strategies That Work

I’ve worked with many agents to help them with their marketing, real estate web design and other strategies that can help their business. Many of them tried digital marketing on their own before they reached out to me, but they just cannot seem to get it to work. They’ve tried Facebook or Google Ads, but do not really know what to do. And the results turn into either little or no leads in return, leaving them the impression that these platforms don’t work. So they gave up thinking it was all garbage until they knew the important process of creating a lead flow.

One of the most important factors of lead magnets and the lead generation process is empathy. You need to be empathetic to what the lead is looking for to be able for you to capture them. Empathy can be broken down into two different spectrums, time and risk. This is where a lot of agents get mistakes in the very early stages of online lead generation.

Many agents when they’re diving into paid advertising or paid marketing online tend to ask the question, “What can I do as an agent, to make things easy for me to generate some new business?” However, this is not the correct way to think, and this usually ends with minimal or zero results.

Time VS. Risk Grid

Now to help you understand the process I am about to explain, imagine the two different spectrums of empathy into interconnecting lines. On the X axis is “Time” and on the Y is “Risk”. Then we start on one end of Time’s axis with a low time investment and on the other a high time investment. And then on the Risk’s axis, we’re going to start with low at the top and then high on the bottom.

High Investment – High Risk

Usually most agents offer a free consultation which is both high on the time investment and high on the risk investment. Thus, a prospect would usually not want a free consultation because that’s simply an hour-long conversation where they think they’re just going to end up getting pitched. For them, It’s a complete waste of time so they won’t buy the idea.

Low Investment – High Risk

Now imagine the other end of the spectrum, most agents tend to think that if a free consultation doesn’t work then maybe a free newsletter will. Granted, it’s a low-time investment because they don’t have to sit through a conversation with you but it’s high on risk simply because they don’t want these random emails. They already get spammed enough from stuff that they’ve signed up for. They don’t want to receive more spam from a complete stranger. So that’s the reason an agent’s email newsletter generally doesn’t work too.

High Investment – Low Risk

On the other quadrant where low-risk and high-time investment is, many agents try to generate leads through video sales letters or also known as webinars. Now in terms of risk, it’s low because this is something that a lead or prospect can watch on demand. But it’s a very high time investment because essentially they’re going to be sitting through a 20-minute webinar video. So this is unlikely to be something that’s going to make a prospect of being captured.

Low Investment – Low Risk

Now if these things don’t work. We can start to think about what strategy can be that’s a low-time investment and at the same time low on risk investment. What type of marketing can we use to try to capture as many leads as quickly as possible? Something that’s going to be a low-time investment and a low-risk investment.

The good news is, there are 3 strategies that are proven and tested that work on this. These are able to easily generate leads online, specifically real estate leads.

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Lead Generation Strategies

#1 Creating A Community

A good example of this is a Facebook group or a Discord channel. If they join this community you’ll have the opportunity to just drop in and provide pieces of value. They can listen to it or watch it on their own time. That means it’s a very low time investment because they can do it whenever they want. And very low-risk investment because they know they’re not going to get pitched to or anything like that. It’s something that they can look at whenever they’re free.

#2 Lead Magnet

A lead magnet can be a PDF document or any long-form resource that is essential to your lead that you can offer them. This is something that is very easy for them to opt into because they’re not going to get sold to or it’s something that they can get to later.

#3 Post A Listing

Simply post one of your listings on where your target market is. This is simply because things that you do is the future casting of “What could be?”. And most leads always like to look at what they possibly could live in.

These three sweet spots that have proven to work when generating leads online: build a community, create a lead magnet, or feature one of your listings. Knowing these strategees, the next question becomes, what can be incredibly valuable to a stranger that they would feel incentivized to trade their personal contact information for these things?

The easy answer is to drill down on your future client’s intent and put yourself in their shoes. Once you understand the intent, it’s going to be super fast and easy for you to scale your lead generation inside of your real estate business.

Break down their decision-making process as well as the steps that they internalize while making that decision. Now here’s the kicker, you are going to be required to niche down to a very particular problem that you’re trying to solve. Because just creating generic advertisements like “I can help buyers “or “I can help sellers” are too broad. You’re not speaking to anybody with this type of strategy. When it’s too broad, it’s the same thing as not speaking to anyone. Unfortunately, it’s never going to work, thus you need to be specific.

As an example, consider the issues facing first-time homebuyers. We can build a group dedicated to providing education for first-time home buyers or create a PDF checklist for the step-by-step process for a lead to complete the pre-approval phase to start shopping for a home.

LEARN HOW WE’VE GENERATED OVER 100,000 LEADS FOR OUR REAL ESTATE CLIENTS LAST YEAR

Marketing Strategy – create inbound strategies to better position you for the long game.

Systems Implementation – we design and implement systems for you to buy back your time.

Brand Building – position you as the thought leader and authority in your community.

Final Thoughts

The idea here is to keep it simple. Think about the next step of your ideal client’s decision-making process and then create a piece of value to solve for that next step. Through this process of solving that next step, trust is built. Over time, the stranger will then turn into a lead, which will then turn into a prospect and then of course, eventually turn into a client!

The bottom line is that lead generation will be effective when we learn to understand more of our target market and learn to speak their language. Knowing their pain points makes it easier for us to create strategies that capture them and turn them into clients.

Branding Business Intelligence Digital Marketing e-marketing Facebook Marketing Strategy Real Estate Marketing Small Business Marketing Trends

Strategy To Come Up With Real Estate Social Media Content

Post author By Emmanuel Lao
Post date 11/03/2022
No Comments on Strategy To Come Up With Real Estate Social Media Content

Creating engaging social media content for real estate can be challenging, but breaking it down into manageable steps can make the process smoother. Here are four big ideas to help you develop an effective content strategy:

Big Idea #1: Think About Decomposing Steps
Big Idea #2: Identifying The Five Core Problems
Big Idea #3: Identifying Topics Under Each Category
Big Idea #4: Say It, Don’t Type It

The creation of social media content can be a daunting task. If you think about it, it’s difficult to come up with daily content ideas that are unique and relevant to your audience. I have experienced this firsthand, it was also one of the biggest struggles that I had when I started my business providing realtors with great real estate web design and systems to help grow their business.

One of the biggest challenges that real estate agents face in building consistency in their business is content creation. Nowadays, we are in the currency of collecting eyeballs. Content plays a huge part in it. We have to continuously produce content that is relevant and at the same time engaging. If we don’t draw in enough audience, then convert them to leads and eventually clients, our business will fail.

I’ve outlined 4 big ideas that can help you with content creation. This straightforward strategy to create social media content is incredibly simple and can easily be applied to your business.

Big Idea #1 Think About Decomposing Steps

The content creation process if you look at it in its totality, it’s pretty overwhelming. The process of creating an Instagram reel or a YouTube video, for example, has a lot of moving parts and steps involved. However, if we compartmentalize those steps into small tasks, the process of creating these videos becomes a lot easier.

If you’ve ever seen these huge buildings built out of Legos, think of this the same way. If you wanted to try to build these buildings just on the fly by yourself, it’s pretty intimidating. You wouldn’t even know where to start. But if you break this down into steps, like for example, coming up with a vision of the building, then kind of figuring out the schematics first, it becomes a lot easier to build.

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Big Idea #2 Identifying The Five Core Problems

I learned this concept from Dan Martel that real estate clients suffer from five main core problems. A great example of this is first-time home buyers. There are 5 main things that get stuck in their mind that hold them back from moving forward with a real estate purchase. These can be understanding loans, understanding how much they can afford, understanding the pre-qualification and approval process, understanding what escrow is, and lastly, buyer’s remorse.

These five core problems are subjective. You’ll have to identify them for each client and their circumstances. You can easily recognize and categorize these core problems through the questions or struggles the client asks you.

Big Idea #3 Identifying Topics Under Each Category

After identifying the problems, identifying topics under each one of these categories would also be a good place to start for content. For example on lending, some of the easy top-of-mind issues a first-time home buyer might face or struggle with is understanding the different types of loans available for them, what points mean, or how to find a lender.

If you take a second to think about it, you’ll find that there are a bunch of topics that you could come up with in just one of these categories.

LEARN HOW WE’VE GENERATED OVER 100,000 LEADS FOR OUR REAL ESTATE CLIENTS LAST YEAR

Marketing Strategy – create inbound strategies to better position you for the long game.

Systems Implementation – we design and implement systems for you to buy back your time.

Brand Building – position you as the thought leader and authority in your community.

Big Idea #4 Say It, Don’t Type It

The last big idea is that you should say it, don’t type it. Trying to come up with content is difficult, especially if you’re looking at a blank document and a blinking cursor. One of the easiest strategies to do is simply to just pick up your phone and just say your thoughts.

Now that you have a category and you have a topic, speaking about this particular thing for about one or two minutes is pretty easy. But here’s a little bit of a pro tip, all of our phones have this ability to transcribe voice to text. If you think about the category and topic, all you need to do is talk about it for a minute or two and your phone can transcribe it. That gives you a raw piece of content that only needs polishing.

Our job at this point is to take those ideas and sculpt them into a script. Then turn it into a social media post or an email that you can send out. Just like that, you now have a piece of content!

Final Thoughts

Creating content is difficult without a system to follow. With the technique I shared in this article, you’ll be able to create relevant social media content with ease so you can stay consistent in the game.

Table of Contents

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