The 5-Point Marketing Plan For Standing Out And Getting More Leads And Listings
These days, being a real estate agent is rough. Every buyer wants more home for less money and every seller wants more than market value for their house, despite comps, appraisals and recommendations to the contrary. As an agent working both sides of these deals, you are stuck in the middle of a tug-of-war that makes life and business complicated, stressful and tough.
In the next few minutes, you’ll learn how to streamline your business and stop hunting for customers. Now, that’s not to say that there won’t be work involved, but we’ll show you a formula for establishing yourself as a CATEGORY OF ONE that will have prospects knocking on your door, seeking you out and wanting to do business with you.
We’ll also show you how to answer the two most important questions everyone is asking themselves before they buy or sell a home and three simple elements that are guaranteed to generate rapid response, so you can start attracting more clients today.
Plus we’ll give you a strategy that will help you tap into prospects before they even land on sites like Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com.
Ultimately, you’ll learn how to gain control over your business and life, how to reduce the time you spend on ineffective marketing and how you can start having fun in the real estate business.
This is not just a plan for success. It’s not just a plan for making more money. It’s a plan that will make your life and business Enjoyable, Simple and Prosperous–ESP®.
By using the strategies laid out in this guide, you can increase your Gravitational Potential and start naturally attracting new prospects with scientific precision.
This guide will give you a formula for creating your own success, so you can stand out and sell more today.
In this guide, you’ll discover:
- A little-known way to make the real estate business fun.
- A simple way to differentiate yourself, so buyers and sellers are drawn to you.
- A complete system for marketing yourself, so prospects want to work with you and no one else.
- How to become a respected and influential member of your community.
- How to supersize your sphere of influence.
- How to build a business and life that are ESP—Enjoyable, Simple and Prosperous®.
But First, Why Should You Listen To Us?
Jimmy Vee & Travis Miller
Founders of Gravitational Marketing®.
Hi, we’re Jimmy Vee & Travis Miller. And 14 years ago we were just a couple of guys with a BIG idea. That big idea is actually quite simple—it’s ESP®.
No, not the mind reading stuff.
For us, ESP® is a mission. Our goal is to inspire and encourage people and companies to think differently, be better and achieve more by breaking norms and making life and business ESP—Enjoyable, Simple and Prosperous®.
And so since 2004, we’ve been hard at work turning that mission into a reality by focusing all our efforts on helping people design a life and business worth living. In that time, we’ve been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, Investors Business Daily, Businessweek, Brandweek, Advertising Age, Direct Marketing News, Forbes, Inc. Magazine and even Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.
We’ve also helped our clients generate more than $12 billion in sales, and we’ve managed over $100 million in advertising.
You might say that we wrote the book on attracting customers, as our bestselling book Gravitational Marketing: The Science Of Attracting Customers has helped countless businesses across six continents attract more customers without spending more on advertising.
In the end, our mission remains the same. We want to help you make your life and business ESP®. And what we’ve found makes all the difference is the ability to captivate more customers and get them to take action today. We know how to generate leads. So if you think you could benefit from more interested prospects and more customers, then this eBook is for you. And our promise to you is that the recommendations we make will be doable, sustainable and scalable. So let’s dig in…
The Big Problem With The Real Estate Business
Right now there’s a big problem with the real estate business.
You see, Lots of agents and brokers are coached to use their sphere of influence and the immediate resulting referrals to win clients and listings, and this is a strong approach. But once you work through your existing sphere and the referrals they can give you, many agents are left wondering how they can continue to grow their business and make more money.
Ultimately, if you want to close more deals, you need more leads. So the question becomes: how do you get leads?
The answer is simple: Marketing.
Unfortunately, this seemingly simple answer is becoming increasingly unclear in the real estate business every day. That’s because each day the market is flooded with new vendors, new options and new “solutions” to try. While many people believe that more options are better, we know that it actually makes things more confusing.
That’s because each one of these solutions raises more questions for you. Where to start? What works? What delivers a real ROI? What’s worth the investment of your time and money?
We understand that you have a limited budget and a limited amount of time, so you need to be strategic about which services you adopt. That means the glut of supposed “solutions” crowding the market makes your job harder instead of easier, especially when the wrong choice could drain all your resources, leaving you overworked and strapped for cash.
In short, choosing which marketing system to adopt becomes confusing and frustrating, even paralyzing.
On top of all that, Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com are becoming the first point of contact for prospective homebuyers and sellers. This causes regular people to think they are real estate experts, even though that’s unlikely because it’s such a complex business. And it ultimately devalues the service you provide as a real estate agent.
Think about it this way: recent reports are showing that prospects are doing 30+ days worth of research online, by themselves, before contacting an agent. By the time they actually ask you for help, they’re loaded with questionable information, like estimates on how much their house is worth or how much their dream home should cost. And let’s be honest, online estimates are pretty much always wrong.
That means that your prospective customers believe they know how the homebuying/selling process works and that they know how much their house is worth or how much they will have to pay for a property, but that it’s all based on inaccurate information.
That immediately puts you at a disadvantage because you have to argue against a website. It pits you against your customers. You become the enemy, so instead of educating, helping, guiding and solving problems—those things you are best at—you are stuck battling them.
An adversarial relationship with someone who should be a trusted advisor only makes the stressful and expensive process of buying or selling a home worse. You see, in between every customer and every sale is a wall. We call it The Mighty Wall Of Mistrust.
And the bigger the purchase, the bigger the wall. That means in the real estate business that wall is pretty high. In order to truly help your customers and get to the sale, you must slowly break this wall down. This is already hard. But when you are positioned as an opponent from the get-go, arguing with their trusted internet-curated information, it becomes nearly impossible.
But there is a better way. The secret to standing out and selling more is to start generating your own leads by becoming an expert and reaching your prospects before they get to a listing website. This means you’ll be creating your own leads out of thin air, instead of purchasing them from a third party. It means you’ll become the sole agent that these people will want to work with. And it means that you will be able to join your client’s team, becoming a trusted advisor who can help them get what they want. This is more fun, more valuable and more ESP® for you and your clients.
So how do you do this?
The Secret To Standing Out And Selling More
Let’s back up just a minute. Only a tiny fraction of the total number of people in your area are interested in buying or selling their home at any given time—our estimate has it at about 2%.
But that leaves 98% of the market untapped, full of opportunity and waiting for an agent to step in and help them.
The secret to tapping into this hidden market starts with two simple questions.
The First Question You Must Answer
The first question you must answer if you want to start attracting more customers is, “why should someone choose to do business with you over all the other agents and brokers out there?”
The reason this question is so powerful, so important, so potent is because more than anything else in the world, people are desperately seeking a buying preference.
Just about every agent out there claims they can guide you through the home buying process, that they can help you sell your home fast or that they’ve specialized in helping first time home buyers for years. But let me ask you, without mentioning any of these things, why should someone choose you to be their real estate agent?
One problem that agents and brokers frequently face is that they don’t have a clear answer to this question. And by and large, the public doesn’t know what makes you different. They don’t know the difference between Century21, ReMax and Keller Williams. It’s all the same to them, especially if they aren’t a referral from a friend or family member.
That’s because Same Is Lame®. If you look up lame in the dictionary, it means “pathetically lacking in force and effectiveness.” Think about that. If you, and by that we mean your marketing, your online presence, and your listings, look the same, and if same is lame, then why would a prospect want to do business with you? If you’ve ever wondered why your marketing isn’t pulling, this may be a big part of it.
Ultimately, this becomes even more of a problem as the economy and market improves and the number of available agents increases. That means it’s even harder to stand out.
It’s also the very reason why most agents are left to rely on their sphere of influence to generate new business. When you are recommended by a past customer, friend or family member, that gives the prospective customer a reason to choose you.
But if you want to start winning more listings, you must differentiate yourself and stand out.
But how? Here’s the first key…
Stop selling HOUSES. Start selling SOLUTIONS.
Solutions are something that everyone is seeking. Our lives are hectic, stressed and over-extended. Layer on this the time it takes to do the research necessary to be prepared to buy a home, and you’ve got one big mess, and it’s a huge problem.
And what people are looking for more than anything else is a solution to these problems. That’s right, more than a 4/3 split floor plan or a newly renovated kitchen or an open floor plan with plenty of natural light, they want to work with someone who is going to help them, make them feel better, make their pain go away.
And when you start providing these solutions, and positioning your marketing around and selling these solutions, you can tap into that 98%.
This is the whole key to winning a lot more customers.
An added bonus of becoming a solutions provider is that you will simultaneously become a trusted advisor in the process.
Being a trusted advisor means being there for your customers whether they are ready to buy or sell or not. It means being there with answers, solutions, and help. One of the ways to do this is to create helpful information that addresses fears, concerns and problems that people have when buying or selling their homes. That information is what people are looking for when they are doing research online for 30 days before contacting an agent.
We encourage you to start relying on content that provides solutions to drive your business. Doing so will position you as a respected, influential expert in your community. And by becoming an expert, you increase your credibility and the value you provide.
Everyone wants to work with an expert. People wait in line to talk to experts. Why? Because experts inherently know more than we do about their field of expertise. And we want someone who is going to advise us and help us make a decision, especially when the decision is as big as buying or selling a property.
That’s how people operate. They hate making tough decisions, and they’re always looking for an expert who can help them solve their problems. That’s because finding an expert allows them to offload the stress, fear, and risk associated with making a decision on their own, which is far more valuable than hosting an open house. An expert is the ultimate shortcut.
The Second Question You Must Answer
Ultimately, all of this is useless unless you can get prospective buyers and sellers to work with you right now. But to motivate them to take this action now, isn’t always easy. You see, most people are comfortable putting off until tomorrow what they could be enjoying today. Dr. Maxwell Maltz called this the deferred life plan—meaning, most people are generally happy to wait until later to act on their desires.
Why do they wait? We may never know. But the secret to pulling in more leads now is overcoming the “wait until later” mindset.
The secret formula is constructing offers that have three very specific components:
- Scarcity—there’s a limited quantity
- Urgency—it’s only available for a limited time
- Believability—there’s credibility to the offer
When these three things come together and are backed by your position as an expert and trusted advisor, you’ll experience immediate, dramatic and rapid response.
There’s a tremendous opportunity for real estate agents who forget about single-property offers and start finding real solutions and real reasons to make really special offers. If you do this on your own, you have to get creative about the offers you make, come up with a real reason why, with enough scarcity and urgency to get prospects to take action now and not after they’ve spent 30 days or 6 months doing research online.
