Are you tired of hearing about the latest “secret” to getting clients on social media, only to find out it doesn’t really work for your real estate business? The truth is, success on social media isn’t about accumulating followers, likes, and comments. It’s about having meaningful conversations with potential clients.
So let’s talk about proven strategies that Realtors can use to consistently attract and engage clients through social media. These aren’t one-size-fits-all solutions, but adaptable processes you can tailor to your unique business style—whether you rely on referrals, cold calling, or other methods.
Setting Up for Success
The first step to success on social media is choosing the right platform. But which one is best for you? The answer depends on where your ideal clients are spending their time and where you’re comfortable engaging with them.
Every major social media platform has enough users to support a thriving real estate business, but currently, Instagram is delivering the best organic results for most Realtors.
Once you’ve selected your platform, setting up a professional and engaging profile is crucial. Here’s how to make sure your profile works for you:
Profile Photo: Use a clear, close-up photo of your face. It should be recognizable enough that someone could spot you on the street. Even if you’re part of a team, use a headshot of the team leader. People connect with people, not logos.
Bio: Clearly state your profession, target market, and location. Include a call to action with a link to your website or a specific landing page. Make it obvious who you serve, the area(s) you cover, and the next step for them to take.
Your profile is your digital storefront, and it should instantly communicate who you are, what you do, and how potential clients can get in touch.
Attracting Clients with Consistent Content
To drive real business consistently, you need to create content regularly.
Without consistent content, you might get a few clients here and there, but it won’t become a reliable pillar of your business.
Start by considering your ideal client. What questions do they have? What piques their interest?
What makes them stop and engage with your content? Your content should aim to answer these questions and address their needs.
Generating sales starts with generating conversations. Before creating content, plan what action you want your audience to take. For instance, if you want people to reach out for a list of properties that would make good flips, your call to action might be, “DM me FLIP to get the list of the best flips on the market today.”
Next, think about what you could say that would make them want that list. For example, a quick video on the top three things to look for when identifying a potential flip would be engaging and informative.
When planning your content, consider the Know, Like, and Trust framework:
Know: Content that introduces you to your audience.
Like: Content that shows your personality and helps your audience connect with you.
Trust: Content that demonstrates your expertise and reliability.
Using Instagram as an example, Reels are fantastic for getting people to know you because they can reach a wide audience, including non-followers.
Regular feed posts and stories can then help your audience like and trust you.
Trust is built when people see you as a complete person, not just a salesperson. Avoid the stereotype of the slick, pushy Realtor who disappears after the deal is done. Instead, share content that reflects your interests and hobbies outside of real estate. This doesn’t mean you have to share private details—just things that show you as a well-rounded individual.
Creating Content Buckets
To make content creation easier, organize your topics into three content buckets. One of these should always be real estate-related. The other two can be related to your interests, hobbies, or values.
For example:
Real estate, family, and fitness
Real estate, community involvement, and personal development
Real estate, cooking, and travel
By rotating through these topics, you present yourself as a relatable, interesting person while still reinforcing your professional identity.
Each day, aim to post something on your feed that tells a short story, a reel that educates or offers an interesting perspective, and 3-5 stories to engage your audience.
Engaging Your Audience
Consistency is key to maintaining an engaging social media presence. To make this easier, establish a content theme. For example, you could post a real estate tip every Monday, community highlights every Wednesday, and a listing of the week every Friday.
Stories are particularly powerful because they allow for immediate engagement. For example, you could share five stories each day:
Motivational content
A behind-the-scenes look at how you’re improving your business
A story about a positive habit (like exercising)
A real estate story that highlights a challenge and the solution you provided
Client testimonials or previews of what it’s like to work with you
At the end of your real estate-themed posts, include a simple call to action, such as “DM me [INSERT WORD] for [INSERT SPECIFIC ACTION].”
For example, you might post a view from the deck of a new listing and say, “DM me 123MAIN to get the link and full details of this listing.”
When someone messages you, qualify them right in the DMs. Don’t rush to move the conversation to phone or email until you’ve gathered enough information to determine if they’re a viable prospect.
Additionally, initiate conversations with new followers. Think of a new follower as a new lead. Send them a simple message like, “Hi [NAME], thanks for following me! Are you interested in learning more about real estate in [YOUR AREA] or planning a move soon?”
This approach helps you start qualifying them right away, learning about their motivations, and determining how you can assist them.
Another strategy is to engage with people who viewed your stories but haven’t yet interacted with you. Send a message like, “Hi [NAME], I noticed you viewed my stories today—thanks for following along! Are you keeping up with what’s happening in the area, or are you planning a move soon?”
Set a goal to send at least five DMs to new people every day. The more conversations you have, the more opportunities you’ll uncover, leading to more sales.
Finally, spend time each day responding to other people’s stories and commenting on their posts.
Your goal is to stay within as many people’s last 50 interactions as possible. The more you appear in their recent interactions, the more likely they are to see your content going forward. Asking questions is particularly effective for sparking conversations—questions lead to discussions, while simple reactions often do not.
Building Long-Term Connections
Social media isn’t just about generating new business—it’s also a powerful tool for growing your repeat and referral business. That’s why it’s essential that your social profile isn’t entirely focused on real estate.
You want your past clients, who may not be in the market for years, to still engage with your content.
Here are some ways to build deeper connections:
Live Videos: Host live sessions where you interview local business owners, conduct Q&A sessions, or champion a cause in your community.
Success Stories: Share stories that showcase how you help clients prepare their homes for sale or guide buyers through the purchase process. Don’t treat anything you do as a secret—share your knowledge in bite-sized portions.
Home Hacks: Offer tips on how homeowners can improve their living spaces or keep up with the latest trends. Aim to be the most useful person a homeowner could follow.
The key is to know your ideal client and create content that is both relevant and useful to them. When there’s news in the community, talk about how it impacts them. Discuss new developments, the pros and cons of certain areas, and other topics that would interest your target audience.
Measuring Your Success
Finally, how do you know if your social media strategies are working? Here are some key metrics to track:
Number of Saves and Shares: How often are people saving and sharing your content? This indicates how valuable your content is to your audience.
Number of New Followers from Your Area: Growth in local followers shows that your content is reaching the right audience.
Number of New Conversations Started: How many new conversations are you initiating each day? The more conversations you have, the more opportunities you’ll find.
By focusing on these metrics, you can fine-tune your strategies and ensure that your social media efforts are driving real business results.
Success on social media for Realtors is about more than just posting regularly. It’s about building meaningful relationships, providing value, and consistently engaging with your audience. By implementing the strategies outlined in this post, you can start generating more conversations, uncovering more opportunities, and ultimately, closing more sales. Remember, it’s not about the quantity of your interactions, but the quality of the relationships you build.
You’ve heard it before, I hear it all the time. It’s one of the most common objections we hear at Just Sell Homes with prospective clients. Is it fair?
Yes and No. Those who say it are getting MQLs and expecting SQLs. I know what you’re thinking. “The what and the what? What are you talking about with your fancy acronyms? Just because you’re ruggedly handsome it doesn’t mean you can just make up terms.”
You said that verbatim in your head, right?
Relax, I’m married.
The terms are popular in Business to Business (B2B – Another fancy acronym) marketing but we don’t really talk about them in real estate.
MQL = Marketing Qualified Lead
SQL = Sales Qualified Lead
These are very important to distinguish between in a successful strategy and where we see the biggest disconnect in most agents’ marketing. Establishing differences between a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead.
At Just Sell Homes we generally use the term Lead and Prospect instead of MQL and SQL.
MQL = Lead
SQL = Prospect
When we talk about leads and prospects in real estate, it’s all about understanding who’s just browsing and who’s really ready to take the next step towards buying or selling a property.
Let’s imagine this scenario; you’re in a room with 100 people. You go and grab a chair, stand up on top of it and yell “Hey everybody, I’m a Realtor, who wants to know what their home is worth?”
Totally plausible scenario, right? We’ve all done it, right?!?
Now of those 100 people, 10 put up their hands. You’re thinking “This is great, I got 10 potential clients right here, at least half will need to buy a home around here, too. I got at least 15 deals in the pipeline potentially.”
Except of those 10, 5 just asked out of general curiosity and have no intention of moving, 2 want to refinance for a renovation, 1 wants to challenge the new tax assessment on their home, and 2 are thinking of selling their home. You don’t know this yet of course.
So what do you do? You start trying to talk to those ten. Some thought they could get the answer without talking to you, and have already walked away. Others tell you to just give them the information and leave them alone. A few start actually engaging with you in conversation.
As you’re talking to them you realize 2 are serious about moving. 1 has said they’re hiring their neighbours sister-in-law’s best friend and another doesn’t have an agent.
Now you’re down to 1-2 potential clients and 1-4 deals max.
When people are saying online leads are crap, they were expecting all 10 leads to be those 1-2 people, sometimes even just that one person who’s moving and doesn’t have an agent yet.
But that’s not how online marketing works.
Let’s take a spectrum, on one end is the coldest lead imaginable, the other end are the ones who call you, tell you to send the contract and then get out of your way so you can get to work because they trust you.
Where you set your marketing up to get their contact information on that spectrum determines the quality of your leads. The further to the side of those golden high quality leads, the more content, education, time, and money you have to invest before they get to you. On the other side, the cold lead side, you push ads out, get their information, and then you let your systems filter through to find the good ones.
There’s not a right or wrong way to approach this in your business. Knowing where you collect their information in the process from lead to prospect to client and setting up your systems accordingly is the difference between saying online leads are crap and building a real pipeline of business online.
An MQL/lead is just a lead on a potential SQL/prospect. You don’t yet know if they have intention of moving in the next 25 years even. Your job, in your follow up, is to identify the leads that could become prospects. Then the prospects you can turn into clients.
Real Estate Lead Magnets are an incredibly useful tool. When you’re building out a marketing strategy for real estate, in the Join section of the Wheel House Marketing Framework. As in, how do you get people to join your database, you need some lead magnets.
All a real estate lead magnet is, is something of value you can give to a consumer in exchange for their contact details. It just has to overcome the pain barrier between “I want this information” and “this information seems to be valuable enough that I’m willing to have a sales person reach out to me.”
For some that barrier is higher than others. Your lead magnet should be as much value as you can pack into something short. Most people getting a lead magnet don’t know you yet so they’re less likely to engage in something long.
That’s not a hard and fast rule, if you can pack great value into content that could be 40-50 pages or even 45-60 minutes as a video, people will consume. This only works if you sell the value of it really well and then jam pack it with value.
The great part about a lead magnet for your business is always having something to invite people to. Wherever you are meeting people, whether it’s a paid ad, an open house, or at the grocery store, you have assets you can offer anyone at any time so you can easily follow up with them.
The most common you see in real estate are the list of homes and home evaluations. Those aren’t the only ones. There’s a lot of ways you can create lead magnets of value. Here’s some of most popular options with examples:
Types of Real Estate Lead Magnets for REALTORS
Checklists
A simple printable checklist that will help them accomplish a goal. Does not need to be more than 1-3 pages. Here are some examples of checklists you could create:
Moving Checklist: A detailed checklist for people who are planning to move.
Home Inspection Checklist: A list of things to check in a home before buying.
Home Staging Checklist: A checklist for sellers to help stage their homes for showings
Ebook
Ebooks are what most people think of when they think of lead magnets for REALTORS. A simple PDF with great information. You could go in a million directions with this one but here’s some simple ideas for you:
Home Buying 101: An ebook guiding first-time homebuyers through the process.
The Art of Selling Your Home: An ebook with tips and tricks on how to sell homes faster.
Investing in Real Estate: An ebook about the basics of real estate investment.
Webinar
Webinars aren’t always easy to pull off well but they’re a great tool on the conversion side. Some do live webinars and others do pre-recorded that play continuously. We recommend doing them live at least until you have the process nailed and conversions from it. Then once you have it dialed in, you can start promoting recorded webinars.
Here are some webinar topics you could try:
First Time Home Buyer Mistakes: A webinar discussing common mistakes and how to avoid them.
How to Price Your Home: A webinar for sellers on how to price their homes competitively.
Real Estate Investment Strategies: A webinar exploring different real estate investment strategies.
Mini-Course
A mini-course is often very similar to a webinar but usually multiple videos broken up into segments.
Home Buying for Beginners: A mini-course guiding potential buyers through the home buying process.
Selling Your Home: A mini-course providing practical tips for home sellers.
Real Estate Investment: A mini-course on the basics of investing in real estate.
Template
Give people templates to help them with either understanding something better OR to help them accomplish a specific goal.
Home Evaluation Template: A template to help sellers evaluate their homes before listing.
Home Offer Template: A template to help buyers understand how offers are put together.
Home Inspection Template: A template to help buyers conduct a home inspection.
Toolkit
These toolkits are made up of multiple pieces of content, much of which can be templates that we just spoke about above. Real estate lead magnets are easier when you’re leveraging pieces you already have to create more.
Home Seller’s Toolkit: A collection of resources for sellers including staging tips, pricing guides, and marketing materials.
Home Buyer’s Toolkit: A toolkit for buyers including a list of common terms, negotiation strategies, and mortgage planning resources.
Property Investor’s Toolkit: A collection of resources for property investors including market trend analyses, property evaluation tools, and investment strategy guides.
Quiz
Quizzes can take longer to build out but they’re a great way to get people to engage. You have them answering questions, they’re more engaged, and looking for a specific outcome that can help them.
Home Buying Readiness Quiz: A quiz to assess a potential buyer’s readiness and knowledge about the home buying process.
Home Selling Savvy Quiz: A quiz for sellers to test their knowledge about the home selling process.
Real Estate Investment IQ Quiz: A quiz to test knowledge and readiness for real estate investment.
Cheat Sheet
Think of cheat sheets on something they could print out on their wall or leave on their desktop to reference. Something that helps them as a useful reminder from time to time.
Home Buying Cheat Sheet: A quick reference guide on the key steps in the home buying process.
Home Selling Cheat Sheet: A compact guide on essential tips for selling a home.
Real Estate Investment Cheat Sheet: A handy reference on important considerations and strategies for real estate investment.
Case Study
Case studies are great for people looking for a specific outcome but aren’t confident in how to achieve it. They can look at how someone else in the same position was able to go from where they are now to where they want to be. Every Realtor should have a few of these made for the common client types they work with.
Successful Home Buying Case Study: A detailed analysis of a successful home buying process, highlighting key decisions made along the way.
Home Selling Success Story: A case study of a successful home selling process, with insights into effective marketing and negotiation strategies.
Property Investment Case Study: A detailed review of a successful real estate investment, exploring strategy, execution, and returns.
Exclusive Video Content
Simple videos they can’t get anywhere else that are packed with value. No marketing fluff. Just straight value for as much of the video as possible.
Home Buying Guide Video: A series of exclusive video content guiding first-time homebuyers through the process.
Home Selling Tips Video: Exclusive videos with tips and tricks on how to sell homes faster.
Real Estate Investment Strategies Video: A series of exclusive videos exploring different real estate investment strategies.
Resource List
Super simple to create, a list of things that can help them. Resource lists are valuable to people in specific situations. There’s a lot of ways to approach it so we listed a few examples below.
Essential Real Estate Websites: A list of useful websites for both buyers and sellers for market trends, property listings, and home improvement tips.
Real Estate Book Recommendations: A list of must-read books for understanding the real estate market, investment strategies, and property laws.
Local Home Services Providers: A list of trustworthy service providers in the area, such as home inspectors, movers, and renovation contractors.
Calculator or Tool
The Zestimate was one of the best real estate lead magnet examples you can see. It drove a ton of success for Zillow early on.
Mortgage Calculator: A tool for potential buyers to calculate their mortgage payments, considering the principal, interest rate, and loan term.
Home Affordability Calculator: A tool for buyers to determine how much they can afford to spend on a property.
Return on Investment (ROI) Calculator: A tool for property investors to calculate the ROI on their real estate investments.
Swipe File
Put a small collection of pieces that are valuable for the consumer for a specific situation. This isn’t advice. This is something specific they can take and use today.
Negotiation Emails: A collection of emails that have successfully led to a decrease in the property asking price.
Want to Buy Your House: A collection of effective real estate emails and letters for inspiration on reaching out to homeowners not on the market to consider selling..
Behind-the-scenes look
In depth behind the scenes look at specific processes and situations. How you do something. You’re basically promising a backstage pass to your “secret sauce.”
Home Staging Process: A behind-the-scenes look at how professional home stagers transform a property for viewings.
Real Estate Investment Analysis: A behind-the-scenes look at how an investor analyses a property for investment.
Event Tickets
Got tickets for something? Home shows are really popular. Local events. You offer tickets in exchange for their contact information to speak with them further.
Local Real Estate Networking Event Tickets: Offering tickets to a local real estate networking event where potential buyers or sellers can meet professionals and learn more about the market.
Home Staging Workshop Tickets: Offering tickets to a home staging workshop where sellers can learn how to present their home in the best way possible.
Real Estate Investment Seminar Tickets: Offering tickets to a seminar where potential investors can learn about different investment strategies.
Expert Interview
Reach out to an expert that your core audience would want to hear from and have them register to attend. These can be in-person or online.
Interview with a Successful Home Seller: An interview with a seller who successfully sold their home sharing their experiences and tips.
Interview with a Real Estate Investment Expert: An interview with an expert in real estate investment, discussing strategies and common mistakes to avoid.
Interview with a Home Staging Professional: An interview with a professional home stager, sharing their tips and tricks.
Real estate lead magnets come in many different shapes and sizes. As you can see above you can take a ton of different approaches. You can leverage tools like ChatGPT to help you create them faster but don’t rely on AI for the final content. You want your lead magnet to be unique to you. Something they can get anywhere else.
They have a tactical place in different aspects of your real estate marketing but a successful business isn’t a single funnel. More and more marketers are talking about the switch from Funnels to Flywheels.
Instead of a funnel that pushes everyone down, the Wheel House approach to real estate has all the pieces feeding into the next, going around and around. If you approach it like a funnel you’ll have to keep pushing more and more money into the top of the funnel.
The Wheel House approach we use at Just Sell Homes has the different stages working together and feeding into one another to make it spin faster and faster. Instead of thinking about “Is this top of funnel content?” you can look at repurposing across all of your marketing.
This concept isn’t new. In 1957, Walt Disney showcased his version of a flywheel. Showing how all the different pieces of Disney can contribute to each other to build a massive business. This is not a concept specific to real estate marketing.
How does it work?
This post is going to break down the 6 spokes in your Wheel House Real Estate Marketing Strategy. You don’t need all of them on day one.. You can have a successful business only excelling at a couple. As you add them all together, your business will grow even more.
So let’s get into it.
Real Estate Marketing Spoke 1: Discover
The first stage of real estate marketing is to get people to discover that you exist. With so many choices of real estate agents out there, if they have never heard of you, they’re not hiring you.
You want content that gets you in front of people who don’t know you yet. For example, with our marketing here at Just Sell Homes, we have our show Over a Pint. In the beginning, we picked guests that agents would be interested in listening to. That way we’d get in front of those who knew of them but not necessarily of us, yet.
You can do that with local businesses. Pick popular places people would want to know more about, hear from the owner, etc… Leverage their name recognition to boost your own. Over time you’ll notice a switch where people are coming to you for the name recognition boost.
This doesn’t mean you HAVE to do a show to be successful at the Discover stage. It could be doing great blogging that gets you discovered on Google. SEO is one of the best ways to get discovered if you have the time to do it right.
Think about what people are searching for and provide the best answer for them. You can try and compete on terms like “Homes for Sale” but that’s going to be expensive and take a long time. At that level, you’re competing with people putting seven figure investments annually unless you get into paid advertising.
Paid advertising is definitely a shortcut to the Discover phase. Take a piece of content, put money behind it, and you can make sure you show up in front of people in the area you want. With a big enough budget, you can make yourself locally famous in only a few months from scratch.
What’s another easy way for people to discover you?
At the end of the day, people are looking for their next home or investment. Listings are the main currency. Leverage them and people will see you. Put Signs in the ground, create videos, post on social media, etc. Listings are a great way to get discovered.
If you have a steady stream of listings every month, it gives you a massive advantage over your competitors in your real estate marketing.
Once they discover you, you need to have conversations with them. Which leads to…
Spoke 2: Conversations
You got discovered, now the next step is to get conversations going.
The initial conversations don’t have to be real estate-focused. You just want people to have conversations with you to start. These can be on social, in person, or anywhere else. Don’t put less weight behind an online conversation, arguably a public conversation online can be just as or more valuable than an in-person because other people can see it and can lead to even more discovery.
On social, that means putting out posts that lead people to leave an actual comment. It means replying to stories. Sharing it with others. It means you are replying to other people’s content so that they’ll see you there.
Look for accounts that target your ideal clients and engage with them. [Do NOT do this on another real estate agent’s real estate marketing content, that’s poor form.]
Offline, open houses can be great for conversations as people start walking through and are more willing to engage in conversation with you. They’re already there, they’ll have questions. Startup a conversation. Don’t just sit at the kitchen table and ignore them.
Now, it’s important in this phase to leave the right impression. You want people to leave the conversation thinking “Now THAT is a true professional.”
As Phil Jones, author of Exactly What to Say says, you should go into every conversation with 3 things.
Curiosity: If the goal is to create certainty you have to show up with curiosity. Ask carefully crafted questions. Empathy: Genuinely seeing it through the other person’s views. Empathy is to care about what people you care about care about. Courage: The courage to ask bold questions.
Get them talking about themselves. Don’t talk about you, don’t sell yourself, just learn about their situation. Then once you have the full picture you can take the next step.
Have them join your “list”.
Spoke 3: Join
Early in my career, I heard the advice “always have something to invite them to.”
This is incredibly important for effective real estate marketing. Every time you have a conversation you should be prepared to give them something of value. For many real estate agents that means either regular emails with new properties or a home valuation.
Since every agent offers that, think about what else you can do that would be of higher value?
Our preferred method is a weekly (or more frequently if you’re willing) newsletter. Something filled with value. They won’t mind a weekly email if it’s of value to them. The reason most don’t send more often is their emails suck and deep down, they know it. If you’re sending monthly, newer people to your database might forget about you before the next one arrives.
At this stage, you want to consider what you *need* from them. If you’re willing to put the time in with good email marketing you don’t need their phone number yet. Without requiring a phone number you’ll get more people joining. If you don’t have a great email marketing system you’ll need their phone number to follow up to turn into new clients.
There’s a lot of ways that people do this from the simplistic forced registration to different lead magnets and a million other potential ways to collect their information.
Let’s break down a few of the simple ones you can do:
Newsletter: It has to answer a clear ‘what’s in it for me”. That could be deal of the week, hot new listings, sold information, or something along those lines. These should go out weekly. An effective call to action is not “Join Our Newsletter.” For example, with our newsletter for Real Estate Agents our call to action is “Become the smartest Realtor in the room in 10 minutes once a week.”
Listing Alerts: They say what type of home they’re looking for, you send them regular emails with new ones. Most MLS platforms will do this for you automatically each day.
Listing Updates: This is one more people should do when they have a listing. Give people the ability to sign up for updates about specific listings. From new offers, open houses, conditional deals, and final firm deal followed by the sold price. Neighbours especially want to know what’s happening with a home for sale, giving them the ability to easily stay up to date.
Forced Registration: A lot of consumers hate websites that do forced registration so keep that in mind BUT it’s an effective way to generate leads. There’s a lot of pros and cons to going this route so I highly recommend understanding the implications of putting forced registration on your website before doing it.
Lead Magnets: These are extra resources they can download in exchange for providing their contact information. We follow the SAGE principle when creating lead Magnets. That means they should be Short, Actionable, Goal Oriented, and Easy to Consume. 2-3 page PDFs that focus on a specific outcome are our preferred method.
The short version is just having something valuable enough for them to want to give their contact information. Don’t overthink it. You just need something that has enough value to them you can invite them to join that makes it worth giving their contact information for.
You get them to join your list, then comes the fun part, getting them to convert into clients.
Spoke 4: Convert
This stage is where most struggle with their real estate marketing, converting people who have reached out at some point into actual clients. To oversimplify this process, you need a two-part system.
Part 1: Identify the “ready-now” people and convert them
Part 2: Everybody Else
Only a small percentage of people you have on your list are going to be ready to move soon.
This is the group that most agents focus on with their lead conversion strategies. It’s also the smallest group of people in your leads.
How many calls to make, texts to send, emails to send, and talking about speed to lead. All of that matters but it can be too heavily relied on by many. They follow up, follow up, follow up, and then if someone isn’t ready to go in the next 30-90 days they let them go. Some coaches will even say to throw away leads that aren’t ready in the next 90 days.
We’ll create another post about the initial sequences for reaching out to leads but it’s also the most covered part of content outside of lead generation. There’s a lot of great information out there about it.
People who reach out, on average, can be 12-18 months away from moving. You need a system in place for long-term follow-up.
In your newsletter you’re going to start sending every week, add some content to it that encourages conversions. Get people to put up their hands to talk about real estate. That could be about specific properties, education, or advice.
Webinars and in-person workshops are great for this. It gives people a no-pressure environment to get more information and convert into clients.
Strategically sending emails out to your list with opportunities is great for conversion. If you have a buyer looking in an area a simple “Hi , we have a buyer looking for a home in your neighbourhood but nothing on the market is right for them, have you heard of any neighbours thinking about moving? SIGNATURE”
Short, sweet, and easy to start a conversation with. You can flip that and say you have an upcoming listing and would they like to help choose their next neighbour?
The goal with the convert stage is to get them to take the next step, an in-person meeting where you’ll be able to get a signature on the dotted line.
Spoke 5: Trust
Signed or not, people need to trust you. This means you want to keep marketing to them at every stage of the relationship.
When someone is a client, you should start doubling down on it. You need to give them complete confidence they made the right decision.
Similar to how some experts say you should never stop dating your spouse after you get married. You never stop marketing to them. Your goal here is to build trust. The best part of the Trust content is it can be used, repurposed, and distributed at almost every single stage. It’s incredibly important to have for every spoke.
The most important part of the Trust spoke is showing them how to do things the right way. Helping them avoid common pitfalls, solving problems, and communicating with them. They need to have confidence in you. Could be how to buy their first investment property or as simple as “How to Get Pre-qualified for a Mortgage.” It needs to address their specific situation and should give them the feeling of “(s)he gets me.”
Our recommendation, whether it’s video, written, audio, etc… is to create content that answers the 10 most common questions you hear from clients. When I sold real estate, “What is a Bully Offer?” drove a ton of traffic to my website.
After you have that, answer the 10 most common questions people SHOULD ask but don’t know to ask. For example, if someone is buying a cottage in Muskoka, they need to know about road shore allowances but most would do not know to ask about that.
Your expert analysis is what will set you apart and build trust. Anyone can regurgitate the stats your board puts out every month. You can help them understand what those stats mean to them. In an ideal world, they’d consume your content and think “Ohhhh I didn’t know that’s how it worked!”
Another great example of this, are just sold ads. Most agents will post something along the lines of “I sold this in 3 days for way over asking!”
Does that build trust or does it make you look like you’re just bragging about how much money you just made in no time at all?
Instead, focus on the consumer and educate them. “How John & Sarah sold their home in 3 days for $20,000 more than they thought possible”
Now it’s about them. You want prospective clients to see it and be like “I want to be like John & Sarah, I was where they were back then, I want to be where they are now!”
Do you know how they can get to where they are now? Hiring you.
The other big trust-building activity is to lean heavily into getting reviews from your clients. Our recommendation is to push towards Google Reviews or a tool like RankMyAgent, then repurpose those for your marketing.
Whether you’re doing case studies, how-to content, gathering reviews, or any other trust-building content, try to include as many specifics as possible. Instead of saying “We sell homes faster” try “We sell homes 12.3% faster than the average REALTOR”
People tend to believe statistics and assume vague claims of being better are likely to be fake or over-exaggerated.
Trust is important, earning it matters, and you can use these pieces of content throughout your marketing.
Spoke 6: Loyalty
Just because someone has hired you once, doesn’t mean they are guaranteed to hire you again. You have to work on earning their loyalty and staying top of mind. You want them to think about you like their favourite sports team. There’s no question of who they support and they’ll be coming back to you time and time again. They’ll defend you in group chats and promote you as much as possible.
Hosting events for your past clients is always recommended. Most top producers who focus on their database host regular client events. These can range from renting out a movie theatre to hosting a BBQ at their home, or even hiring a photographer and a Santa at the holidays and doing family photos.
The key to a great event is to make it appeal to as many of your clients as possible. If you work with a lot of families, make it family-friendly. If you’re mostly dealing with young childless couples you may be better doing events at local breweries for example. If a lot of your clients have pets, do a pet photography session.
Pro Tip: Everyone who RSVPs yes, send them a follow-up saying “It’s always more fun to have fun with a friend, if you’d like to invite a friend just let us know and we’ll make room for them, too!”
You also want to become their resource for local help. If they need a contractor, you should have a local list ready to supply people of those you trust. You can even take this a step further and go negotiate discounts or benefits to your clients with your preferred vendors. Make it so that anything home-related they want to do, they know they can come to you for help.
One agent we’ve spoken to even goes as far as to have a full time handyman on staff and past clients are allowed to have a full day with him each year to do whatever projects around the house they want. That’s a great way to build loyalty, your clients will never go anywhere and it’s such an easy way to stay top of mind by having someone on your team be in the house every year.
On top of that, on the anniversary of their purchase every year, send them an updated personalized home value. Let them know where they stand in terms of what their home is worth now. If it’s gone up quite a bit, it’s the perfect time to also ask them if they’ve ever considered getting into investing by leveraging the equity in their home. Now the wheel can start over again as they’re discovering the potential for investment properties, have a conversation with you about it, join your investment opportunities list, and then convert into clients who buy investments.
There’s studies that show “Surprise & Delights” can be one of the most effective ways to build client loyalty. Instead of Christmas gifts, you can do gifts at other times of the year. Everyone is expecting something at Christmas but a random gift in September? No one sees that coming and they’re more likely to talk about it. The best gifts cause them to have conversations about it.
With gifts, it’s great to leave your name and logo off of them. Give them something with THEIR name on it, something they’d want to display in their home.
When people ask where they got it, they get to talk about you now. If your logo is on it they’re less likely to display it and no need for that conversation since the person already knows where they got it. You want to create conversations with everything you do. Having someone ask them about that great unique gift means you’re giving them the opportunity to talk about you glowingly.
This allows more people to discover you, starting the whole process over with new people.
Real Estate Marketing Redefined
Building a solid real estate business is hard. It takes a lot of work. You can have a great business without having all 6 spokes in place but you need at least a couple. As you get them perfected, start adding the next one, and keep going until you have them all running.
Once you have your real estate marketing systems in place, it will feed itself and grow bigger and bigger. The different spokes can all feed into one another. No single spoke should be looked at as an island unto itself. You can refine it as things change but having all of this in place means when new platforms and shiny tools you can evaluate it to see if it fits and where it might work for your business. If it doesn’t fit, you don’t need to pursue it.
Traditional funnels focus too much on “This stage leads to this stage leads to this stage.” When you focus on funnel vs the wheel you get trapped into the traditional chasing business model instead of attracting business.
Stop chasing, start attracting.
Implement the Just Sell Homes Wheel House Marketing Blueprint and grow your business.
Want our help with your real estate marketing? Book a call with our team to see how we can help you implement.
Many REALTORS run ad campaigns to get online leads and make this one simple mistake that can cost them a lot of money in the long run.
When a person opts to receive something of value from you, whether it’s information on a listing, a free home valuation, a buying/selling guide, etc.… they want something from you to become an online lead.
The majority of real estate agents, if they even have a thank you page, say, “Thanks, we’ll be in touch” or some equally dull language that ends the process right there.
Guess what? This is just the START of your relationship with this person. Don’t just leave them sitting there alone after they expressed interest. Keep being awesome.
You can set the tone for your relationship going forward, tell them what to expect, show off your personality, and have a little fun with it even!
Side Note: Personality is the most significant thing missing from 99% of real estate marketing. I’ve been in the real estate industry long enough, and I know you guys have it, so show it off!
The Double Dip Offer for Online Leads
“You double-dipped the chip. You took a chip, had a bite, then dipped it again”.
The Double Dip Offer allows you to offer them something of value related to what they just did.
As I mentioned in this post about real estate seller ads, I only call it a Double Dip Offer because I’m a big Seinfeld fan.
George Costanza is arguably the best sitcom character of all time. The 🐐 if you will.
Here’s how it works. Let’s pretend the person opted-in on an ad about getting a list of homes for sale that matches their criteria. Right there, you have a couple key pieces of information.
They want to buy a home and depending on how you structured your ad about the type of home, you even know the price point and type of home they’re looking for.
What type of home did you offer them a list of? If it’s a move-up home then you also know they probably need to sell their current home to get it. So let’s take advantage of this and turn this buyer lead also into a seller lead.
On the thank you page or even the thank you screen of a Facebook Lead Ad Form you can say “Your list of homes will be in your inbox
shortly,” then follow it up with “Do you need to sell your current home to buy your next one? Click below to find out what you would get if you were to sell your current home.” then change the button from “View Website” to “Order Custom Home Valuation Report,” then it just forwards them to your home value landing page.
They opt-in to that landing page? Send them to a page about downloading a guide on how to prepare their home for sale. They opt-in to that? Send them to another piece of value.
Overwhelm them with great value. Show how much you’re willing to do for them for free, imagine if they hired you!
Run out of ideas of things to have them opt-in to again? Send them to client testimonials or the search listings pages of your website and let them take it from there.
Double, triple, even quadruple dip. Just go elbow deep right into that dip.
Every time someone opts in to become an online lead, it shows how much better of a lead they are and gives you even more information about them when you follow up.
Pro Tip: If you’re sending them something and it’s going to arrive in their inbox automatically, set it to delay sending. If the form you’re asking them to fill out would take 5 minutes, have the email arrive 7 minutes later, so they don’t leave the page to check the new mail.
On top of that, you can double down on the double-dip (Wait, does that count as quadrupling down? I don’t know, math isn’t an exact science) and run Facebook ads to people who made it that far to get the double-dip offer if they don’t opt-in.
You can treat your Facebook ads like a drip campaign, just like you can with email. It’s just a little more complicated to set up, but once you do, it’s a beautiful thing.
Am I weird for thinking a Facebook ad is a beautiful thing? Nope, I think it’s normal. It IS a beautiful thing.
The Godfather Offer
I’m going to come clean; I didn’t come up with the Godfather. Not my idea at all. It comes from one of the top Facebook advertisers out there at generating online leads, Nicholas Kusmich. One of those online marketing experts who actually knows what he’s talking about.
He introduced me to the idea of the Godfather offer. Why is it called the Godfather offer? Pretty sure he’s a fan of that movie. I’m sensing a trend here.
What does everyone want to know about the leads they’re generating? It’s simple. They want to know who is looking to buy or sell in the next 30-90 days. Those hot leads that are ready to go.
Those leads that make you believe again. That make the sunshine a little brighter and you high five Karen in your office because you just found that beautiful, ready to go customer and don’t care about the fact that Karen keeps stealing your coffee pods.
Instead of calling them all and trying to find that little slice of heaven, have them put their own hands up. We do that with the Godfather offer by making them an offer they can’t refuse.
If someone was thinking of selling their home very soon, what could you offer them that would make them put their hand up and be like “YES! I want that! LET” S DO THIS!!! AAHHHHH!!!”
Here’s how it works; they opt-in to your “what’s my home worth” campaign, or another similar offer to become an online lead, and you say:
“Thank you. Your home value report will be in your inbox in about 10 minutes, thanks to the magic of email automation!”
“Are you planning on selling your home soon? We have a special offer just for you!
If you book a call with our team about selling your home by clicking below we’ll give you everything you see here to get your home sold faster:
HD Photos (The two HD letters are important, we’ve actually seen an increase in conversion just by adding those two little letters)
HD Video Walkthrough Tour
3D Dollhouse Tour (Don’t say Matterport, the consumer doesn’t know what a Matterport Tour is)
Staging or Staging Consultation
Send cleaners to your home before it hits the market
And whatever other great pieces of service you’re offering your seller clients.”
Here’s the beauty of the Godfather Offer, for the most part, you do not need to offer any more than you already offer every single client. You just need to write it all down and show them how much they’re getting.
You can certainly offer more, and there’s no reason you can’t. We’ve seen everything from cash back, reduced commission, and anything else you can think of. It’s your business. Just think about everything you can realistically offer, then offer it.
My personal recommendation is to run it at the beginning with the things you’re already offering everyone.
We’ve seen opt-in rates on those between 2-19% – the 2%, and the entire Godfather offer was just “HD Photos.”
That means that anywhere from 2-19% of the leads could potentially put up their hand and say “Yes, I’ll take that offer! Let’s talk about listing our home!”
The thank-you page is such a powerful tool that so many overlook. Whether its a double-dip offer or the more direct godfather offer, use the page to provide even more value to your potential customers.
Make sure to repeat the offers in your follow up email and retargeted Facebook ads. This way, you can make sure they see it!
Thanks for reading this post!
Do you want to start getting better results from your online marketing? If you book a 15-minute call with me about how we can do it, I’ll even waive your entire set up fee. That’s right. I’m Godfather offering this blog post 🤯.
Is that like an Inception level Godfather offer?
Ok, enough movie references. Get out there and just sell homes!
Our words will never be able to do justice to the challenges and discrimination Black REALTORS deal with on a daily basis.
In this episode of Over A Pint, we invited four members of the Black REALTOR community in Canada to discuss and share their experiences.One of the most important things we can do right now is educate ourselves and listen.
