Effective Marketing for the LO and REA – Are You The Rule Or The Exception?

There’s an interesting phenomenon happening lately regarding the façade of online marketing for Agents and Loan Officers.

More and more people are realizing that the promise of the digital world just doesn’t seem to work for them. The fascinating part is that in speaking to LOs and REAs who are coming to this conclusion, they all seem to think that it’s just them. The rest of the real estate world is doing great with digital marketing, yet they ALL say the same thing.

There are digital and online tools that are useful, convenient, and time-saving. However, they don’t actually generate revenue. If you’re working with a borrower and you direct them to your website to upload documents or correspond and answer questions, they’re going to do as you say and go there. After all, they’re in the middle of a refi or a home purchase and you have enormous power. However, this will be the only time they spend on your website. They are in the midst of a deal and, therefore, have to be there per your instruction. Otherwise, it’s the last place online they’ll want to be.

The goal of this blog post isn’t to denigrate the different marketing options available in the real estate arena, but rather to draw attention to the impact that online marketing has had on the individual user or buyer of these programs, services, and products. You might have been convinced, or, dare I say, “sold” on fancy CRMs and “marketing” packages in the past.

A day doesn’t go by are here at Exodus where an LO or REA doesn’t hear the following question: “What type of marketing are you doing now?” Their answer is almost verbatim: “Well, I’m sending out 300 emails using – INSERT ANY POPULAR MARKETING PACKAGE HERE – to which I normally ask:  “And what type of results are you seeing?” As if from a pre-written script, the response is usually, “Well, about 10% open the email, but less than 1% click-through….” Or worse, “I don’t get any response, although the reports show that 10% open them.”

If you could track how long they spent reading your email, you’d find that it was long enough to realize that they weren’t interested in reading what you were sending or they save it for later with good intentions, but never actually get back to it. After the emails stack up 5 or 6 deep, they eventually just get deleted.

If they were in the process of a loan and you sent them an email pertinent to their loan, that’s one thing. To the detriment of the LO or REA’s ego, emails that you send as part of a marketing strategy simply are not of interest to someone whose loan is already closed. It’s just not something that catches the average consumer’s interest.

And this is just email marketing; Facebook and Twitter are even worse. Since the Internet is so present in everyday life, it seems ludicrous to not have an online marketing strategy. After all, that’s what all the marketing companies say, right?

In a nutshell, marketing for the LO and REA using canned scripts and industry-wonky content is what separates you from your referrals. The promise of set-it-and-forget-it marketing designed to save you time and make you more efficient only widens that chasm.

But let’s return to the perceived phenomenon mentioned earlier. The point isn’t that digital marketing doesn’t work for this industry; we knew that years ago. And many LOs and REAs who have spent literally thousands of dollars per year are finally seeing the truth. But, instead of blaming the creators of those programs that failed, they gladly embrace the responsibility for the failure and hold themselves to blame as if it’s just them; to think that the only reason it’s not working for you is somehow your fault. Some of the self-deprecating excuses we’ve heard are…

“Hey it’s working for everyone else, just not for me”
“I have bad luck…”
“I’ll never have time to get it right”
“Marketing just isn’t for me…”

And, everyone you hire to help you comes up with the same result, so somehow YOU are deficient in marketing. Maybe a little Factitious Disorder sets in, not to draw attention, but rather to explain away and justify the fake ailment of “I’m just bad at marketing” or “I have bad luck….”

The truth of the matter is this: It doesn’t work for LOs or REAs. It’s simply the wrong approach. Failure using digital marketing in this industry is not an exception. It’s the rule! But the marketing company isn’t going to tell you that. Why would they? It’s like 1,000 monkeys with 1,000 typewriters.

You have to realize that it’s not only what you are doing that’s wrong, but how you’re doing it. There’s a myriad of mediums available and while we all know that a monkey wrench isn’t going to work for some jobs as the right tool, it’s not going to work well with wood. A scroll saw shouldn’t be used to re-saw laminate and while you can tune a piano, you can’t tuna fish. But seriously, everyone’s worldview on marketing winds up being different, because of the failures of different attempts tried over time. Since your situation is unique to you or so you might think, we offer a solution that’s free. It’s called the Marketing Needs Assessment. We’ll spend about 20 minutes looking at what you’re doing, and what you’ve done, and show you where you need to make changes to turn ineffective marketing into effective or successful marketing.

You can schedule a free Discovery Call and learn more about these points and how to best turn your past clients into a referral source that lasts a lifetime!