As a seasoned real estate broker, you already understand that your brand and reputation are not just based on your performance in real estate, but the role you play within the community. One of the most powerful ways to stay involved in the community and propel positive feelings associated with your brokerage is to participate in charitable activities and showcase those efforts. But like anything, it’s good to have a plan going in. Here are some tips to help.
Choose The Right Activities The first thing you need to do is be sure that you are partnering yourself with the right charity. It is important that you are passionate about the local cause that you choose and that it is in alignment with your brand. In fact, the more meaningful the cause is to you the more inclined you will be to stay active in your efforts. For example, if you are a woman building your own brokerage, you may feel passionate about getting involved with the local women’s resource center so that you can help empower other women in their careers–and of course promote the excitement and value of becoming a real estate agent. Promote The Cause When the time comes to promote your altruistic work with the local charity that you have chosen, it is essential that you promote the charity and the cause itself rather than just your work with that charity. One way of doing this is to use your blog and social media to tell stories about the people that have been impacted by the charity. You may also want to do video or audio interviews with administrative members of the charity to help give a voice to the cause through your brand. This will help generate a stronger emotional connection between your followers and your business, raise awareness about the accomplishments being made by the charity, and hopefully inspire more people to get involved. Determine The Best Times To Be Active As you lay out your community service plans for the year, make sure you are picking activities or times to hold events when you and your team can dedicate your time. If you are very busy in the Spring with the selling market, maybe more involved activities are better planned for the Summer or Fall months, for example. This way you can devote ample attention to making it a success, plus you can get your agents and office staff involved. Getting your agents involved in projects helps foster a stronger team culture and makes everyone feel good! Altruism Always Pays Off Putting your best foot forward to help the community will remind people that you are more than just a brokerage, but a member of the community that cares. When the time comes for a fellow community member to use a brokerage, they will be in search of a company that they trust to work selflessly for them. This is when your generous work with your chosen charity will pay off the most. At Weichert, we live a people-first philosophy. We coach our brokers to be active and positive forces in their community. This is good for business for sure, but the true reward for lending yourself to the betterment of others is the positive impact you will have on those that need it most. That’s the right way to do business. That’s the Weichert Way. For more information about how the Weichert brand helps you to build valuable relationships between your brokerage and your community, go to https://Weichertfranchise.com. Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/when-you-show-you-care-people-take-notice/
0 Comments
It’s a given that you place your brokerage listings on your website and enter them into your local multiple-listing service to gain visibility and get buyers. Maybe your agents also use other online platforms to showcase listings. But one place many brokers and agents undervalue is the use of Craigslist as yet another place to visibly saturate the internet with your listings.
Craigslist has been around for over 20 years. It’s reliable and widely used with over 60 billion monthly users and 50 billion page views a month. For a free way to get in front of a potentially different segment of buyers, posting on Craigslist is a solid tactic to add to your marketing arsenal. As with everything related to online marketing, there is a right way and a wrong way to use Craigslist. To help your listings stand out in the sea of 80 million Craigslist classified ads, here are a few of best practices: 1. Add An Odd Number In Your Heading Headings matter. In fact, recent studies of social media show that most online users share a post because of a compelling heading. Sharing a post is one thing, but actually reading it is another. According to the Content Marketing Institute (CRM), “Odd numbers in list posts have a click-through rate 20% higher than even-number lists.” Be creative around your odd-number usage to gain the most clicks and don’t just write “3-bedroom house for sale” as the heading. That’s what everyone else is writing, and you need to stand out among the slew of other home sales ads. Try “3 reasons you should come to this open house on July 7”. 2. Catch Viewers’ Attention With a Visual Chute and Digiday’s visual marketing report found that an eye-catching visual is at least 20% more effective than text, with a chart or infographic preferable. Naturally, your visuals will be quality photos of the rooms and outside of the property, not focused on any one thing. But it may be interesting to do an infographic of what this listing has over others in the area. Remove and date and time stamp and keep the home photos no more than 600 pixels wide for easy loading or potential buyers will get impatient and move on. Craigslist enlarges the first photo you upload and shows it with the heading. That first photo should be chosen for its high impact on buyers. The remaining photos will be displayed only when a viewer clicks on the heading to open the home posting. 3. Showcase Features as a List Viewers want an easy, bite-size way to learn about a home’s features. Put features or other special attractions in a bulleted list for easy viewing breaking it up with subheadings, such as interior/exterior or kids/adults. Too much text is a distraction and will scare away viewers. 4. Post Sunday and Monday Between the real estate organization Rent Juice and the authors of “Cracking the Craigslist Code”, it appears that Sunday and Monday mornings are the optimal days for posting ads based on collective studies of over 800,000 Craigslist real estate postings. Best hours are between 10:00 a.m. and noon or 5:00 p.m. 5. Keep Your Ad On Top As anyone who has used Craigslist knows, your ad eventually gets buried in the feed by newer ads that come in later. The further down this long list it gets, the less attention it gets. It’s important that you have a regular schedule of reposting your listings so they stay current and on top. Craigslist has limits on how many times you can repost and so a best practice is to repost your listing every 48 hours. If you do it that way it’s just a button push inside your Craigslist account. Doing it this way requires a minimal investment in time and keeps your property front and center every day. Using Craigslist to Market Homes Getting your listings out there is not always easy and can be costly. Craigslist provides a simple, effective and affordable way to market a home, especially when using the correct real estate marketing strategiesfor the platform. This is just one of many marketing channels you can leverage in real estate. With so many options, it can be confusing to know where to start or what’s most effective. If you think your business could benefit from information-sharing and coaching on real estate marketing strategies, consider teaming up with Weichert. Your affiliation plugs you in to a host of programs, services and peer networking to power your business and allows you to provide more to your agents. For more information on proven marketing tools and strategies to help grow your brokerage, consider becoming a Weichert Affiliate. Go to weichertfranchise.com or call 877-746-2067. Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/5-ways-to-use-craigslist-to-market-homes/ When competing for a listing, every Agent wants to maximize their commission. However, in an age of discount brokerages and easily-accessible online information, clients are often left wondering whether they are getting the best value. “What exactly am I getting for my money?” they may ask. This is where having a solid listing presentation can be as good as gold. By clearly demonstrating to your clients the services you will be providing, outlining a clear marketing plan for their home and the expertise you bring to the transaction, any questions in their mind over the commission go away and the only question left is “where do I sign?”
But having a good listing presentation shouldn’t stop at your own listings. Creating a solid listing presentation is an important tool to have in your brokerage to be used by all your agents. Not only does it avoid each agent having to recreate the wheel, but it ensures all the agents within your brokerage are communicating a consistent message to the clients in your market and gives you something to provide brand new agents to help ensure their success. So how does your listing presentation stack up? The Keys to Overcoming Objections It is up to the listing agent to present themselves in a way that makes it clear that there is a world of service a client gets with a full-service brokerage. There is also a world of things that can go wrong with companies selling properties on cut-rate commissions. It is up to your agents to really lay it out for them. Here are some ideas to incorporate into a listing presentation template that clearly show the client all your agent brings to the process:
Agents appreciate having a listing presentation template that incorporates this type of information to help sell their services and is packaged in an easy-to-follow, attractive format. At Weichert, one of the most highly regarded tools used by its affiliates is the DOORS listing presentation. The Weichert presentation can be easily customized online and creates a powerful visual presentation that showcases a client’s home through photography, outlines all the support resources from the brokerage available to support the seller, provides a comprehensive plan to market and promote the home online and in the community and more. In addition, it promotes the agent, demonstrates their value in the process and helps them maximize their commission. The agent can have the presentation bound or present it electronically depending on what will be best received by the client. When put up against competitive listing presentations by other agents, the Weichert agent walks away with the listing more often than not. It’s a big step in getting potential sellers to understand what a full-service brokerage is all about. Maximize the Agent Commission. Maximize Your Brokerage’s Bottom Line.Sellers want a deal, but they also want to make sure their biggest asset is in the best hands. Give your agents the tools to give them confidence in their worth by demonstrating extraordinary market knowledge and the ability to provide high-quality service. By helping your agents maximize their commission, you help your bottom line. It can be difficult for you to find time to develop the right tools for your agents, such as an effective listing presentation. As a Weichert Affiliate, you get access to a suite of proven marketing and sales tools which are always being refreshed, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. This leaves you with more time to manage your brokerage. If this sounds like something your business could benefit from, find out more. Call 877-567-3350 or visit weichertfranchise.com. Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/demonstrating-value-the-power-of-a-good-listing-presentation/ There’s one thing for certain about the real estate industry–there is no shortage of gadgets, downloads, software tools, or marketing services targeted to brokerages. And as a broker, it’s easy to get distracted – you’re afraid you’ll be left behind if you don’t take advantage of the latest and greatest thing out there. At Weichert®, we call this “The Shiny Penny Syndrome”.
Essentially, this occurs when a company jumps to chase a shiny, new opportunity, service or product instead of focusing on mastering the basics of running a business. Often, these products and services offer to make your lives easier by saving time, helping to maximize efficiency, effectively marketing your brokerage, getting more listings or even helping your business survive the latest economic crisis. It’s important to learn to navigate this minefield, if you are a broker looking to grow in a challenging housing market. There are so many shiny pennies out there that it’s easy to end up jumping from one promising new real estate tool or marketing idea to the next in an increasingly rapid and costly cycle, while the core elements of the business like how to recruit, write an effective business plan, maximize agent production and monitor key performance indicators get less attention than they deserve. These shiny pennies are marketed so well and with such urgency that brokers often forget to ask pivotal questions like “How will it fit in with my current business goals?”, “What real results will it bring?”, “Where will I go for support?” and “What operational changes will be required in order to actually get the benefits of the product?”. Most Brokers know they must adapt and innovate to stay current and effective in an ever changing landscape. The real challenge is knowing how to balance innovation with the basic activities and systems needed to run a successful brokerage and build a business. Innovation With Purpose A key to successful innovation is to focus on the benefits to your core customer and core operations, rather than innovating for multiple seemingly attractive, trendy options. Important questions to ask when considering a new product, technology or marketing service include:
Strategic growth through planned and proven marketing for brokers One of the things an affiliation with a credible Real Estate Franchise Company can provide is a guide who can steer you to the best of real estate innovations while keeping your business plan on track. The Weichert System gives you proven, productive systems, technology and activities to implement for nearly every aspect of your real estate business, including real estate marketing, selling systems, recruiting, a lead system and business management. With comprehensive training, ongoing support and expert coaching from our real estate professionals and a parent company with first-hand brokerage experience, you’ll feel relieved knowing you have people in your corner. You’ll never have to go it alone again. Our support staff will work with you to map out a road to growth. At Weichert, we’ve already paved a road for success. All you have to do is take it. Visit us today at https://www.weichertfranchise.com. Originally posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/real-estate-broker-marketing/dont-let-brokerage-get-caught-shiny-penny-syndrome/ |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
July 2020
Categories
All
|