Doubling sales is an exciting proposition for most agents.
Doubling sales by using only half of your annual marketing budget to do so is mindblowing.
But or those who are willing to take the steps necessary to make it happen...it’s also completely realistic.
By looking at how you do your marketing a little differently and being open to some simple but effective ways to generate and convert leads, you can have a whole lot more sales at the end of next year than this year.
And the best part is that you’ll have a whole lot more money in your pocket not only from what you make, but also from what you keep by not spending it on all on marketing and advertising.
Here are a few strategies that you can employ to double your sales results and use only half your marketing budget in the process.
Cleaner, cheaper, more effective marketing
At the end of the day, it’s a simple outcome you choose: convert the leads you generate into happy, paying customers.
That’s it.
And when you’re paying a boatload of money to generate leads to raise their hands and say their interested in getting your help, you want conversions to be as high as possible
The challenge for most agents is that they think they need to actually need to unload a large amount of cash on expensive marketing like direct mail and high-end, paid-lead services to secure a steady stream of qualified inbound leads.
The truth is that there are more effective, less expensive and simpler ways to attract and then engage your prospects and turn them into loyal consumers:
Blogs
Blogs are super, budget-friendly ways to build an audience for yourself and generate amazing relationships with prospects who can become consistent subscribers to the content you produce.
For a few dollars and less than 10 hours a month, you can regularly providing top-notch, educational content to your blog-reading subscribers.
In doing this, you can establish yourself as the expert - the go-to listing agent - in your marketplace and set yourself up to get a steady stream of listing opportunities from consumers who love you, what you do and what you stand for.
Once your blog posts are up, they stay on the Internet and provide you with low-cost branding and lead generation for months and years to come.
Videos
If you have a smartphone and a USB cable, you can create and disseminate as much video content as you want - anywhere you want.
Using video as part of your marketing and lead generation efforts is about as inexpensive as it gets, but with a tremendous amount of impact at the same time.
Not only does video have a stronger impact on your ability to communicate with, and influence, your audience, but also it gives you the chance to get your message across faster and more effectively.
On average, video is processed by the human brain 60,000 times faster than text.
This is a good thing, especially when you consider how the average person’s attention span has substantially diminished over the last decade.
Without a doubt, quickly getting your message across is key.
Consider these statistics provided from inbound sales and marketing giant, Hubspot, about the impact and power of video:
-
According to Vidyard, companies that primarily use video grow 49% faster than those who do not.
-
98% of professionals have watched an informational video to learn more about a product or service.
-
YouTube is the second most popular search engine behind Google. No, not Bing, and not Yahoo -- YouTube.
-
Snapchat now averages more than 10 billion video views a day.
With the ever-growing presence of video and the staying power of any video content you put on the Internet, video presents an amazing way to generate lots of leads without investing a ton of your hard-earned cash.
Nurturing Leads
The largest source of bleeding in most agent’s businesses is leads that are either poorly followed up with or not followed up with at all.
Many agents have spent thousands on leads that they’ve never worked as diligently or extensively as the could have.
Not only is that lost opportunity, but it’s also lost money, which drives up their dollar cost per acquisition (DCA) on a lead.
In addition to that, with a simple nurturing strategy, there are often many sales that could easily be plucked from the databases of agents across the country as the majority of leads we generate at often at least 90 days away from making a move from the moment we find out about them.
Lead nurturing is the number one strategy you can implement to convert more leads, get more sales and lower your DCA dramatically.
To nurture your leads properly, you need to combine strategies like emails, text messages, blogs, videos, sly-dial voicemails, phone calls, etc. to create and then strengthen relationships with them.
As time progresses, your consistent branding and contact efforts will lead to a larger group of subscribers who are highly inclined to choose you as their agent when it comes time to sell.
The best part is that once you generate the lead, the cost of nurturing leads properly is fairly inexpensive while being extremely powerful in getting you more sales.
You must have a mature lead nurturing strategy in place if you want to get amazing sales results without spending a ton of money to make it happen.
Retargeting on Facebook
In 2017, businesses spent more than $40 billion dollars advertising on Facebook to generate leads and sales.
Through the first quarter of this year, ad spend was up 50% with almost $12 billion being spent over just three months.
The great news is that through a strategy called retargeting or remarketing, you can have multiple shots at converting leads you’ve generated - from Facebook or not - that have not chosen to do business with you, giving you a budget-friendly way to get more sales.
Through retargeting, you utilize a strong content strategy to reconnect with and re-energize people in your audience that have yet to make a purchase or sale with you. Retargeting keeps you top of mind so that those who are waiting to do business with you or who haven’t made a decision yet stay connected with - and excited about - you and what you do.
It’s extremely effective and a smart financial decision for your business as you’re simply approaching leads.
According to Social Media Examiner, there are four custom audiences you can retarget on Facebook to squeeze even more opportunity from leads that you generate without spending a whole lot of money.
Here’s a segment from their site and what they recommend, with some tips and tricks to implement, so you can do it yourself with ease.:
#1: Website Visitors
The most common remarketing tactic is targeting relevant ads at people who have already visited your website (usually a specific landing page).
To create a targeted audience based on website visitors, you must have a Facebook website custom audience in place.
Overall, retargeting website visitors is a simple concept: When someone visits a page with your custom audience code (i.e., an offsite pixel), they’re added to your custom audience list in your Facebook Ads Manager.
You can include those visitors (and the custom audience they’re part of) as a target audience in a Facebook ad retargeting campaign.
Custom audiences are important to Facebook retargeting campaigns.
There may be a case where you want to retarget only a portion of the traffic that has visited a landing page on your website. No problem. You can do that by creating a personalized custom audience:
1. Go to your Facebook Ads Manager and choose Audience.
2. Click on Create a Custom Audience.
3. Under Website Traffic, select People Visiting Specific Pages.
3. Next to the Visited field, customize the URL elements to match the pages you want to retarget.
4. Click on Create.
You don’t have to retarget everyone who visits your website.
After you create your personalized custom audience, it’s ready to use. However, keep in mind that it may take a few hours for the new audience to have the final user count.
#2: Facebook Fans
Retargeting to existing Facebook fans is incredibly easy: When you set up your Facebook ad, choose to target people who are already fans of your page.
Narrow your retargeting audience to include only people who are fans of your page.
Does it seem odd to advertise to existing Facebook fans? Consider that acquiring sales from existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new leads (and many of your fans are probably customers). You can also upsell those existing customers with new or better products and services.
Additionally, your fans may not be seeing all of your Facebook updates. If you retarget your most important content to them via a Facebook ad, they’re more likely to see it.
#3: Email Subscribers
You can actually strengthen the power of your newsletter by serving Facebook ads to existing email subscribers.
To set up this custom audience, you need an Excel file with a column that includes all of your subscriber email addresses. Once you have that, go to Audiences in your Facebook Ads Manager, click Create Audience and choose Custom Audience.
Click on Data File Custom Audience and follow the instructions for the setup. Make sure to indicate that you’re updating email addresses.
Create a custom audience based on your email subscriber list.
Retargeting to email subscribers can increase the chance of conversion exponentially. It’s worth the extra effort to set it all up.
#4: Similar Audiences
Many of your users—whether website visitors, Facebook fans or list subscribers—have overlapping demographics, interests and behaviors. Wouldn’t it be great to find more people like them? Well, you can.
You can create a custom audience targeting people who share similar characteristics to your existing connections—people who are very likely to be interested in your products, services and content.
The custom audiences you create to retarget to by similarity are called lookalike audiences and they expose your ads to a more vast and relevant audience.
To create a custom audience based on similarities to website visitors, go to the Audience section of your Ads Manager and choose the custom audience installed on your website (see #1). Click Create Lookalike Audience at the bottom of the page and choose the desired audience reach.
To create a custom audience based similarities to your current Facebook fans’ personal data (e.g., behavior, interests, etc.), go to the Audience section of your Ads Manager, click Create Audience and choose Lookalike Audience from the menu.
Posted by Mike Oddo
