Online Marketing is for Sellers, Recruiting, and Retention

It's November, the beginning of budgeting and planning for a successful 2016. WAV Group studies the online effectiveness of many of today's leading brokers and provides audits and advisory services on optimizing these programs. The true measure of online effectiveness is closing a transaction. Unfortunately, we have observed that closing a transaction is coincidental to online marketing and not a direct correlation.

The relationship between an agent and a consumer is akin to dating. Both parties must be attracted to one another. There needs to be a connection and the development of things like trust and confidence. It's a dating game where decisions are based upon emotion rather than facts and numbers.

If I were to build a lead conversion team for a real estate brokerage today, I would start by doing a personality profile to find the types of agents who are easiest to like and trust. Smoke that in your lead management pipeline. Obviously, this does not work for real estate because of the democracy of a brokerage culture. We are all equally qualified, right?

If you agree that you cannot force a relationship between a willing buyer and a random agent who gets a lead, then you can position the process of online marketing differently. Online marketing is for sellers, recruiting, and retention.

Online Marketing is for Sellers

During a listing presentation, the agent explains that buyers always use the Internet in the process of looking for property. Your firm will place the property on all of those popular-kid sites. This is so easy to do and I doubt any seller would say, "Wow! That's amazing." So you need to do something different than blast listing syndication because everyone does that. Heck, it's a free service from every MLS in the nation.