The COVID-19 outbreak has sent shockwaves through the entire world, putting nearly everything at a standstill—including the economy. With so much economic uncertainty, this event has left the majority of business owners concerned for what the future may hold. The ReminderMedia team has received so many questions from customers, and we wanted to dedicate a special edition of Stay Paid to answering them, hopefully providing you with insight into how to best navigate this challenging time—and come out stronger because of it.
Key Points:
- It’s more important than ever to be checking in with your sphere
- Being relevant is key to the success of your sales and marketing efforts
- Staying the course during ups and downs will put you on top in the end
#1. Now is the time to double down on your relationships.
If you do nothing else during this time, every single day you should be texting, reaching out, doing videos, for the people in your community. Make the calls just to check in on them and show them that you care.
Now is going to be such an interesting time in real estate. Things are so unknown. They could literally change, you just never know. But this is the perfect time, when you know the market is shifting, and what’s going to happen here is you have great mortgage rates. It’s a great time to refinance, and a great time to buy. So it’s a great time to call all your old buyer leads and reach out. Give them an educational piece and get yourself top of mind. We’re going to head into a huge opportunity. What I’m hearing from our top producing agents, from the Tom Ferry’s of the world, the Rick Caruso’s, now is the time to double down on your lead gen. People are framing it in terms of relationships, and it should be value based because that’s what lead gen is all about. But Gary Keller put out four hours minimum a day is what you should be doing.
We had a ton of Keller Williams agents, “I have to cut back all my expenses.” And I get it, cut back on your expenses, but it’s the coffee, going out to eat, maybe don’t buy that extra pair of clothes you wanted to buy. I talked to an agent yesterday on the phone. She had a housing project she was going to start, but she’s not going to do that housing project. It’s the same for our business. I have every member of the executive team looking at all nonessential costs. I’m not making a move yet, but you want to have the info. You want to be prepared. You should examine where you should spend your money in lead gen and where you should not.
For us, it’s conferences. We had been doing really well as a business but we never really did conferences hardcore. There’s a lot of expenses, a lot of intangible value you can’t measure, which is why we didn’t really do them. But we upped our spend on conferences to 40 plus this year. Obviously, they’re not happening anyway. But that’s where we decided to cut back and we want to take that money and double down on our spend. If everybody is cutting back and putting their head in the sand, my hope would be there’s less advertising and less noise, which means I can be out in front of more people.
#2. You have to look at what the industry is doing, and who is online and what they’re looking at.
Start thinking out of the box, and this has to be your market and your industry. That’s when you have to start leading with items of value. We talk about content marketing so much on here. Start putting together your ideas for what is going on right now, what it means for the market, and your opinion on that, and then offer it up as an item of value that people can get if they put in their email address or sign up for your email list, or another type of lead magnet idea.
Don’t always go straight for doubling down on, “Oh, I need to boost my listings.” That might be the wrong call. Think about other types of ways to get people into your funnel, test small, and then if it’s working, spend more. At the end of this, you now have somebody in your pipeline that likes you and is beginning to trust you because you’re giving them the information they need right now. When this ends you’ll have momentum.
For us, our cost per lead is going up. So we’re watching those things and realizing we need to shift our messaging. You need to attack it head on. If you’re not mentioning the coronavirus you’re irrelevant. You might be hearing from industry leaders saying you should be on the phones and thinking, “Do people want phone calls right now?” We had a bunch of agents sign up for our program yesterday and the day before, but it’s about 50/50. Half think you’re nuts.
Being effective in marketing and sales is being relevant. You have to address that right up front because if you don’t it’s like, what is the context? Are you not paying attention to what’s happening? There’s going to be a lot of people that don’t make it out of this. That’s not doom and gloom, that’s mostly because they’ve over-leveraged themselves, but most people will fail because they stick their head in the sand.
#3. Staying the course during difficult times will put you on top.
We’ve literally watched this, because we’ve been in business in real estate since 2004. The ones who stuck with it are the ones who came out on top in 2010 because they kept their pipelines full and their relationships solid because when the market picks up, you’re going to be there poised for success. We’re sharing with people the Warren Buffet quote: “When everybody is greedy, that’s when you should be fearful. But when everybody is fearful, that’s when you should be greedy.” Mark Cuban says the same thing, when everybody is running toward an industry, he runs away because there is prime opportunity now.
I’m not sugarcoating it. Our own sales people are freaking out too. But I have to keep my wits about me as well. I know it’s going to be harder. But the reality is, there are still going to be people who want to buy and sell real estate. There are still people who are going to want to invest. We’re actually having so much success with financial advisors on the phone because they know this is their moment to grab market share. But I want to encourage people, it is going to be harder. You are going to have to work harder or double or triple the work for the same listing it would have taken you ten calls to do last time, or whatever your stats are. But those who double down are going to come out on top.
There are people that want to thrive in this, whether you’re an insurance agent, financial advisor, or a real estate agent, there are people who still want to buy homes, who still want to invest, and who still want to move forward—it just might be a little harder to find them. The strong are going to survive. Do not retreat. Engage.
#4. Make time for training and personal development.
If you’ve been saying, “I don’t have time to set up that Facebook business page” or “I don’t have time to learn that digital marketing technique,” go do that now. We have some amazing resources on our blog, that show you how to do things like set up a Facebook business page. We have a video that will walk you through exactly how to set that up, and that will allow you to start running these ads and start building that content on a regular basis. So be sure if you’re going live on Facebook or you’re posting articles that they’re relevant to what people are going through right now. We have some amazing articles on starthealthy.com and americanlifestylemag.com that actually talk about a lot of this stuff: how to work from home effectively, exercises you can do at home because all the gyms are shut down.
It’s also the perfect opportunity to clean your list, because as you clean it you can reach out to them. Sit down with your CRM or Excel doc, clean the names, call them or text them. If you use our Digital Edition, shoot them a text of the digital edition. Really clean it up and put them into different buckets.
#5. Take advantage of ReminderMedia’s new digital products.
If you’ve been on any of our webinars or following us you know we have a local events email newsletter. We pivoted superfast because we are a content machine. We have thousands of blog posts that we’ve been creating and we’re actually pulling those and changed the way our local events emails are posting. It’s now more of a content newsletter. In there, there are things you can do at home with kids, 15-minute workouts. It’s so relevant right now. Be the one who provides that value to your clients.
We’ve also given all of our clients our Social Media Shares Premium product for FREE for the next 60 days. When you click on the article and share it, it’s actually branded to you with your photo, your contact info, your logo, and a way to get in touch with you. This is good for texting, sharing in email, or sharing on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Everybody is looking for that stabilization point. That’s going to come, and we all have to do our part right now to lock this thing down. But when it comes, be ready, because there will be so much opportunity there.
Action Item:
- Think about what you can do to stand beside the people in your community.
Resources:
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