March 2018 - iDashboard Blog

Avoid That Awkward Close to Your Listing Pitch with These 4 Tips

The majority of real estate agents fall at the last hurdle when it comes to signing a new client – the close.

Experts believe this is likely down to one common reason – regardless of the level of experience they have, agents fear being rejected.

That’s completely understandable, as nobody likes rejection, and the close is the part of the listing discussion where the clients can turn around and say no. All of your hard work, research and selling prowess boils down to those final ten seconds and if you haven’t presented yourself effectively, those moments can be truly intimidating.

Some of the biggest mistakes agents can make at the close of their listing presentation are not reading signs from their clients, rushing through the process, and trying to close on the sale far too early. The close should be used as a summary of the presentation to go over details that have already been agreed, making it easier not only for you, but also for the client.

If you want to increase the chances of getting signatures on the dotted lines of all the contracts you put in front of potential clients, you need to know these 4 tips. Read on to find out more:

1) Become Your Client’s Friend in the Real Estate Industry

You might feel awkward and weird about making the presentation, but if you make it awkward and weird, your potential clients will feel awkward and weird too. Nobody wants that.

They want you to be their trusted real estate advisor, so you need to become their friend in the business. You can gauge your client’s thoughts and feelings by running trial closes throughout the presentation. This will give you a good insight as to any objections they might have.

2) Don’t Just Ask Questions – Ask the Right Questions

Your style and tone throughout the listing presentation should be friendly and approachable, not overly formal. With this tone, you’ll be able to keep your clients engaged and get insightful responses from questions you ask.

However, these need to be the right questions. You shouldn’t put pressure on your clients, you should lead them into outcomes and decisions they make themselves.

Asking questions like “What do you need from me?” and “What can I do to make you feel comfortable moving forward?” will give them the confidence to take the next step.

3) Act Like Achieving Success is Normal for You

When you close your deal, don’t overdo it. You need to make it look like something you do every day. Move forward by signing your agency agreement, thanking them for their time and their instruction, and stating that you look forward to helping them sell their property.

From here, talk them through what the next steps will be. Explain how you’ll communicate with them, what you’re be doing to market their property, and when they can expect to hear from you.

4) Don’t Despair if You Don’t Win Their Business

In real estate, a short-term loss can become a long-term win. You need to be gracious regardless, and this can be done by sending them a simple card thanking them for their time. In this, include your contact details and let them know that if they ever have any questions, they can get in touch with you for an informal, friendly chat.

Understanding that the business relationship is still intact will make your lost client feel comfortable with you. This could lead to referral business from them, or even a future sale from them further down the line.

5 Top Tactics for Landing More Social Media Leads

Social media is one of the most powerful marketing channels out there. Not only does it give you the opportunity to interact with your target audience on a personal, informal level, it also lets you target them based on their interests, age, location and much, much more.

However, getting it right can take months. Read on to discover 5 proven methods for quickly boosting your sales pipeline with fresh social media leads.

1) Add Social Proof to Your Strategy

One of the biggest weapons in your marketing arsenal is social proof. 10 years ago, buyers might have believed you if you said you were the best in your area. Now, they need to see and hear you’re the best before they’re ready to make a purchasing decision.

By adding in testimonials and case studies of clients you’ve helped in the past, you’ll be able to prove your worth and dispel any fears that you won’t be able to effectively sell their property.

2) Let Your Experience Show

You can let your audience know how knowledgeable you are without it sounding like you’re bragging. Do this by showing them your experience, instead of flat-out telling them.

Create engaging, high-value content to share on your social media channels. Make it educational and informative and teach your target audience something they don’t necessarily know. For example, you could run a report on your local market, or provide insights on how a new infrastructure project could influence property prices in the area.

3) Use Calls to Action

It’s one of the simplest, oldest sales tactics, but it works. Try simply asking your target audience for the sale. Finish your social media posts with Calls to Action such as “Book Your Free Property Valuation Now.”

4) Don’t Forget Your Warm Leads

Not everyone is ready to make a commitment first time around. In fact, for some people, it can take multiple interactions with your brand before they’re ready to move forward.

Retargeting is an excellent way to use this to your advantage. Set up Facebook ads for your interested audiences and offer them valuable content in exchange for their data. You can then use this data to market to them via email, gradually warming them to the idea of your services. Include an offer in this and you’ll see your conversion rates increase.

5) Consider Using an Ads Funnel

This isn’t something you should try if you’re inexperienced with Facebook ads, as you could spend a lot of your budget. However, it is an incredibly effective means of driving ads through social media.

Ads funnels are a set of ads designed to gradually introduce your audience to your services, instead of going for the hard sell straight away. A standard ad sequence could be:

1) Brand awareness– build out your audience’s awareness of your brand. A video ad could be a great option here.

2) Consideration – separate those who are interested in your services from your colder audience members and use a retargeting ad to get your brand in front of them once again. For example, you could do this by only displaying the ad to people who’ve watched your video for longer than 20 seconds.

3) Conversion – Use another ad, or an email if you’ve used a previous ad to capture data to get that conversion. This could be booking a call, visiting your offices or registering for a seminar.

How to Manage Stress and Maintain a Work-Life Balance

Feeling the pressure at work? Chances are that, if it’s been this way for a while, you’ll eventually burn out. And that’s no good for anyone. Not your agency, not your clients, not you.

In an environment as fast-paced as real estate, however, it’s common for the lines between work life and personal life to get blurred. And nailing the right work-life balance can be a real challenge, especially when you could be working 24/7 and there’d still be more to do.

Working yourself to the bone might produce boosted results for a while, but after continued efforts, you’ll become a diminishing asset. The more work you put in, the less value you’ll provide to your clients, and you’ll end up just going through the motions. Fortunately, there are several tips you can follow to make sure work doesn’t take over. Read on to find out more.

1) Set Clear Priorities

How much time do you actually invest in your absolute priorities? Aside from work, make sure you spend time each week on the things that make you feel good about yourself.

2) Manage Your Time Effectively

It might seem obvious, but at the start (or end) of the week, plan the next 5 working days out in your calendar. Knowing exactly what you have to do each hour of each day will help you to cut back on time wastage, rule out unnecessary tasks, and become fully accountable for your responsibilities each day.

3) Maintain Working Boundaries

Regardless of how much or how little work you have to do, set boundaries on how long you’re going to work for. This will help you to find time for other areas of your life.

For example, once the clock hits 6pm, turn off your phone and head straight for that door. After that time, you need to learn to say no to work requirements. Put the hours in during the day and make anything outside of working hours your time.

4) Enjoy What You Do

You need to love your job. If you don’t enjoy, or even hate, what you do, it’s not going to be worth it in the long run. Consider a change of role within your agency, or if you really can’t stand it, think about a change of career.

5) Practice Financial Fitness

Do you really need that new 54” 3D TV? Could you be happier living in a smaller home with less financial commitment?

Seek professional advice on how to manage your finances. This will take a huge burden off your shoulders. By spending less money, you’ll also be able to work shorter hours and find more time for a fulfilling personal life.

6) Remember to Breathe

Stress is the non-specific response of the body to any demand made upon it. This means that it doesn’t necessarily directly drive you to do anything. It just takes a toll on your physical and mental health in the long-run.

When we’re stressed, we tend to hold our breath. And when the brain absorbs 20% of the oxygen we inhale, stress could indirectly lead to you making less educated decisions.

If you’re feeling stressed, take time to step back and breathe. It will help you to gain perspective on a situation and make more rational decisions.

Find out more on How to Nail a Real Estate Work-Life Balance

How to Play to Your Strengths and Understand Your Weaknesses

So, you’ve completed your training and have become a fully-licensed real estate salesperson. You understand your market, you get on well with the locals in your area and you’re in love with your work. Despite this, however, are you really playing to your strengths?

If your agency has a system set up for collecting feedback (which it should), you’ve more than likely noticed that the majority of your feedback will be negative. Understandably, this shouldn’t be treated as an issue – it should be seen as an opportunity for improvement.

Whilst negative feedback serves its purpose in any industry, you need to learn to play to your strengths. Responding to praise is good and well, but sadly, as agents, there isn’t much to learn from it.

So, what impact does this have on you as a professional? Well, as a manager, it’ll help you to build out your team’s strengths instead of ironing over weaknesses. If you’re an agent within your agency, you can tweak your own job to weigh on your strengths.

Doing so doesn’t have to be hard. Take a look at this step-by-step guide on how to identify strengths, as well as how to leverage them to boost both organisational and individual results.

1) Gain Feedback from Several Sources

Let’s use an example agent to make the process clearer. We’ll call him John to keep things simple.

Speak with John, his colleagues, past colleagues, teachers, clients and family if possible. Give each of them a questionnaire relating to his strengths, weaknesses, traits, patterns and general contributions to tasks he’s been given in the past.

When you ask someone like John what their strengths are directly, it’s common for them to downplay them or make them seem greater than they actually are. This largely depends on the individual, but it’s always better to get the opinions of others. Self-reflection can be a challenging task for many people.

2) Learn to Recognise any Patterns

Listen to the feedback that others have given you and use it to recognise patterns in their behaviour, such as:

“John is quick to help others”
“John works better alone than as part of a team”

Certain emotional patterns can also give an excellent insight into an individual’s strengths and weaknesses:

“John is always working on something new”
“John seems a bit afraid of technology”

3) Build a Portrait of that Person

This is an incredibly useful tool, as it takes both outside perspectives and self-analysis and combines them into an insightful format. It’s not intended to be a basic list of strengths and weaknesses.

Open the portrait with a few sentences of self-analysis:

“When I’m at my worst, I…” and “When I’m at my best, I…”. Combine the self-analysis with any insights you get from third party feedback.

From this, you’ll build a bigger picture with actionable information:

“John is great with both new and current clients and loves to produce creative marketing plans for properties. He’s at his best when he has the opportunity to thrive in a creative environment. However, John is at his worst when he’s put under pressure, such as when he has to negotiate deals with tight timeframes.”

As your portrait takes shape, you’ll start to understand situations where John will either sink or swim. More importantly, however, you’ll also discover situations where John will blow the socks off tasks with relative ease and high enthusiasm.

4) Recreate the Role and Associated Tasks

When hiring new team members, there’s usually a good deal of leeway you’ll be granted to tailor the job description to the type of person you want within your real estate team.

At the moment, John is working as a buyer’s agent. However, the role he’s best suited to is as a seller’s agent, where he’s able to rely on his creative strengths to craft detailed marketing plans that stand out from the crowd.

So, put it to the test. Give John some clients who are looking to sell their properties and see how he gets on.

Understanding and playing to strengths also gives you the power to tackle your weaknesses. Instead of focussing on them straight away, building out areas agents are already excelling in will give them the confidence to admit things like “I’m good with numbers, but not great with negotiating”, or “I’m great speaking with clients one-to-one, but group discussions are stressful for me”.

With this knowledge in hand, you’ll be able to ensure you and your agents are in the right areas of your agency to boost their workplace engagement and maximise over

Grow Your Real Estate Agency with These 10 Social Media Marketing Tips

Looking to increase your real estate agency’s social media presence and boost your online reach? Read on to discover 10 key tips you need to fuel your social media marketing strategy and drive new clients and buyer leads to your business.

1) Learn to Outsource

Giving someone else full control over your social media marketing can be tough to do, but it can also be one of the best decisions you make. You’ve got enough on your plate already with running your agency, and social media marketing requires continued, dedicated attention in order to see results.

This is exactly why so many agencies don’t see the results they need from their marketing activities – they simply don’t have the time to put in the work they need to.

Outsourcing your social media will give you time to focus on your tasks at hand, whilst still maintaining a strong, continuous online presence. There are several ways you can do this:

Hire an agency to take over your account management
Delegate your social media workload to an employee within your agency
Hire a new, experienced social media manager
Contract a remote worker or freelancer

2) Maintain a Schedule

Although you don’t need to be posting at exactly 12pm every single day, creating and sticking to a social media schedule will help to ensure you get your posts out. If you don’t have one, you’ve got nothing to hold you accountable for passing off posting in favour of another task.

It’s all about prioritising and planning your time. With a social media schedule, you’ll be able to block out time in advance to get it done.

3) Automate the Social Media Marketing Process

You shouldn’t have to spend hours of your time focused on social media marketing. In fact, the less time you have to spend on it, the better. And whilst finding content from other online sources to share with your followers is great, it’s not always easy to do.

Tools like Quuu can help with this. They crawl the internet and automatically share relevant content with your fans. This can also be fed into Buffer to combine it with set posting schedules.

4) Create and Curate Content

Let’s face it – your customers are only following you on social media because they like your business and enjoy hearing what you have to say. So, give them what they want to see. If you don’t, they’ll tune out and you’ll start to lose followers.

Even though your page is about real estate, your followers obviously have other interests. Play on this, and curate content from around the web on a variety of topics to maintain their interest levels.

Topics worth looking into include:

Industry articles
Educational, instructional and funny videos
Emotional content
Current local news
Memes and images relevant to real estate

5) Keep Your Audience Engaged

You need to interact with your fans. Posting content isn’t enough. A large part of your social media presence should be focused on customer engagement.

Each day (or even multiple times a day), check your feeds to see if you’ve got any outstanding comments or messages you need to reply to. Be careful with this, as your followers will expect to receive responses to their messages quickly.

6) Cross-Promote Between Your Different Channels

On top of maintaining each individual channel, you need to focus your social media marketing efforts where a relevant audience is most likely to be found. Whilst doing this, you should also focus your efforts on cross-promoting your different channels.

For example, on Facebook, you should invite your fans to follow you on Instagram for more visual content. If you’ve got a robust social profile, your business is going to look stronger in the eyes of potential new customers.

7) Keep an Eye on Your Insights

Once a week, either on a Monday or a Friday, check your social media insights. These will give you a large amount of data, letting you know whether you’re moving in the right direction or need to change things up. You’ll be able to see:

If any of your posts are trending
Which posts are getting the most engagement
Your audience demographics

From these, you’ll be able to see when your fans are most active, as well as which content types they’re most likely to be interested in. Take this information on board and use it to improve your content strategy.

8) Keep Your Content Varied

Your audience might like blog posts, but if you only post this type of content, you’re going to lose traction quickly. As a result, it’s important you mix up your content types on a regular basis.

Build this into your social media schedule and organise different types of content in advance. For example:

Monday – Blog post

Tuesday – Image

Wednesday – Customer testimonial

Thursday – Video

Friday – Local news/curated content

Create a plan unique to your business and review your insights at the end of the week to see what’s been the most successful.

9) Pay to Boost Your Posts

You can help your Facebook page gain extra traction online by paying to promote it. This boost will help your content get seen by your audience. This doesn’t have to be just to your current audience, either. Boosted content on Facebook is treated like an ad, so you can choose exactly who you’d like to see your ad.

It isn’t going to break the bank, either. A $20 budget can get your real estate agency in front of thousands of local people.

You don’t have to put money behind every single post. At the end of the week, take a look at the ones which have performed the best, as this is a strong indicator they’ll respond well to being promoted.

10) Focus on Your Calls to Action

A Call to Action (CTA) is the answer to your audience’s question, “What next?”. Since every post you’re making on Facebook will have a purpose, you need to use a CTA to push your audience towards your desired outcome.

For example, if you share a video, sign off with “For more content, subscribe to our YouTube channel.”.

10 Sure-Fire Ways to Grow Your Rent Roll

Whether you’re just starting out as a property manager or have a strong, well-established portfolio of clients, you need to be continuously thinking about how you can further increase your monthly rent roll and income.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways you can do this yourself, and it involves being proactive with your brand building, marketing and forging strong relationships with current and potential new clients.

Some ideas will suit certain property managers better than others, depending on how much time, budget and whether you work alone or as part of a real estate agency. Regardless, it’s well worth taking a look at them and deciding on which ones work for you. Read on to find out more.

1) Continuously Research Your Target Market

Markets change, so it’s important you stay on the ball. Research the market by looking at your existing clients and conducting basic surveys including questions such as:

Why did you go with us?
How long did it take you to make a decision?
How many other agents did you consider?
What are the main points you consider when choosing an agent?
Was there anything that worried you when making your choice?

2) Listen to Conversations on Social Media

LinkedIn, Facebook groups and online forums are all great places to give you information on the landlord community. On top of this, you’ll also be presented with an excellent platform from which to share your industry knowledge and get your name out there as a subject authority.

3) Know Your Different Client Types

There are different types of landlords and the same marketing approach isn’t going to work on all of them. For example, professional investors with large portfolios will require different services from you than amateur investors will. As a result, it’s important to understand the different types of clients you’re currently working with or are trying to target, as it will help you to drive inbound enquiries.

4) Actively Market Your Services to the Right People

Once you understand your target market, employ strategies to attract both tenants and new investor/landlord clients.

Have a meeting with your team and produce a detailed strategy involving which channels you’ll use to target which client types, as well as where you’ll spend your budget.

5) Publish Case Studies to Attract New Clients

Social proof is a powerful concept in marketing. By publishing case studies of success stories you’ve had with previous clients, you’ll be able to display value to future clients and boost your lead generation and conversion rates.

6) Design Infographics Around Your Market Statistics

Instead of handing new clients a flat case study document, convert it into a more engaging format and supply them with an infographic containing detailed statistics instead.

Hire a talented graphic designer and share your infographics on your social media channels in order to show potential clients how you’ll be able to help them in the future.

7) Build a YouTube Following

If you’re not afraid of getting your face on camera, why not invest some time into YouTube? Make it a place where you share property market updates and build a following of local landlords and investors.

Once you’ve produced your videos, share the YouTube links on your various social media channels to encourage those audiences to subscribe.

Why Isn’t Your Real Estate Website Ranking in Google?

In today’s digital market, 70% of your potential customers check a website before even getting in touch with you, or one of your competitors. And, as a result, it’s clear to see that if your site isn’t ranking in Google, you’re putting yourself at a significant disadvantage.

If you look back 10 years in real estate, the opposite was the case, as all the information potential leads needed was contained within your real estate office. If people wanted information on your services, they had no choice but to ask friends or family or call you and find out for themselves.

In 2018, however, Google means that very few people need to leave the comfort of their sofa to get the answers they need, and research has shown that 10 million Australians use the search engine every month to answer popular questions including:

How to sell a property fast
Legal steps to selling a house
How much does selling a house cost?
How can I advertise my property without an agent?

It’s these types of questions involving people simply looking for answers that make up around 80% of Google’s total searches. That means that less than 20% of searches your website could show up for will be from people ready to make a buying decision.

So, as a result, you’d think there would be thousands of agents publishing content to help potential leads find answers to these questions. Sadly, Google doesn’t see it that way. Depending on where you live within Australia, your search engine results pages are likely to be dominated by property portals, not agencies or real estate businesses.

However, the best people to be answering hands-on questions about the real estate industry are you. You eat, sleep and breathe real estate on a daily basis. You’ve got years of experience backing your answers. But Google doesn’t know this – unless you display your knowledge online.

How Can You Compete with Online Property Portals?

When it comes monthly advertising budget, the truth is you probably can’t, but we’re not talking about advertising. We’re talking about organic ranking on Google. And if you can handle it effectively, it can be incredibly cost-effective, as 95% of Australian consumers skip the ads at the top of search engine results pages anyway.

There are thousands of factors that Google takes into account when deciding whether or not to rank your website, but searcher proximity is the most important today. This means that if a searcher is 30km from a property portal site location but only 5km from you, you stand a good chance of ranking.

Both Facebook and Google have made it incredibly clear that their rankings are based around forging connections between searchers and local businesses, so this is your chance to stand out. Do your keyword research and start building a library of blog content around the popular questions your audience are looking for answers to. It’s a long-term strategy, but the effort you put in will be visible in your ROI.

Tips for How to Rank High in Google Search Results

6 Clever Techniques Proven to Boost Your Social Media Conversions

Is your real estate agency looking to drive additional conversions from social media? The short answer is most probably yes.

If that’s the case, good news – in this article, we’re going to take you step by step through 6 of the top tips you need to consider if you want to get those high-quality social media leads rolling into your inbox.

1) Ensure Your Writing is Clear

There’s a whole lot of noise on the internet. And if you want to stand out, you need to make sure your writing is clear and succinct.
With so much content available for your audience to digest, you need to make yours easy to read. You’ve only got a few seconds to grab their attention, so before posting, run your content through the following checks:

Simplify it – re-read and take out unnecessarily long words and sentences.
Make edits – you should edit an article at least twice before posting it, regardless of whether you’re just starting out, or have been writing for years.
Take out jargon – it might make sense to you, but jargon wouldn’t be jargon if it was for everyone. Take it out and replace it with simpler prose.
Tailor your content – you have a target audience, so make your content about them. Write it with them in mind.

Twelve Steps to Writing a Great Real Estate Blog

2) Give Your Best Content a Budget

Social media managers are likely to be running multiple ad campaigns at once, and that can make it difficult to stay on top of things.

A great time-saving tool is AdEspresso’s Automatic Page Post Promotion, which allows you to instantly boost posts that are already performing well organically.

This feature allows you to boost posts that are already gaining traction, as well as select which types of posts you want to boost, the maximum daily budget you’re willing to assign to them, and how long you want the campaigns to last.

3) Give Instagram Stories a Go

Real estate marketing is all about giving your fans a look behind the scenes – and Instagram stories are a great way to do just that.

Instagram stories are taking the social networking scene by storm, so why not join in? Use them to showcase what you get up to on a daily basis. It’s a great way to quickly build a loyal following, as well as drive enquiries.

4) Get Stuck into Social Video

If 2016 and 2017 were the year of the video, 2018 probably isn’t going to be much different. Instead of blocking out news and updates in text format, try out video. It’s been shown to be up to 4x as engaging as a content medium, and it’s a great way to showcase your brand message in a very short period of time.

Take a look at your blog posts that are already performing well and trial them in video format too. A high-performing blog post is usually a good indication that the content will perform well as video.

5 Top Tips For Nailing Your Social Media Videos

5) Put Effort into Your Visuals

You could have the best content in the world, but if you don’t catch your audience’s attention, you’re not going to get any visuals.

Use imagery from your latest listings on social media to grab the attention of your readers and convince them to click through. Here are some key tips to bear in mind:

Stay consistent with colour choices – keep certain colours for certain content types and remain consistent across all platforms. This will help to build your brand identity and increase your audience’s familiarity.
Steer clear of cheap or free stock images – they worked in the 90’s, but cheap stock photos are likely to put your audience off.
Trial GIFs and moving videos – these are great ways to grab your audience’s attention.

How to Select the Right Social Media Images for Your Content

6) Try Out Infographics

Infographics are easy-to-digest content formats that display a large amount of information in a visually-appealing way.

Using an infographic will be a great way of teasing the content you’re linking to, and it’ll motivate your audience to click through and learn more.

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