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The Top 5 Places Real Estate Agents Should Spend Their Lead Generation Budget

If you want a return on investment, you’ve got to be making the right investments!


Featured Download: Access a checklist of the most recommended places to spend your lead generation budget here.


Wouldn’t it be nice if you could make a wish about where the best place is to spend your lead generation budget, and the answer would magically appear?

Wouldn’t it be nice to be guaranteed a strong return on investment and never waste your money?

Well, there is an answer and I’m going to share it with you…but…

First of all, in order to have a guaranteed return, you must understand this…

There are two different ways to spend money… one is on lead generation (lead capture & conversion) and the other is on “branding” also known as “exposure” or “name recognition.”

Any money you spend online needs to be focused on capturing leads.  Online lead generation is not about branding.  It’s not about “getting your name out there”. It’s not about “exposure.” It’s about lead capture and conversion. That’s it. Lead capture and conversion.

Any money spent on sponsorships, scholarships, charity involvement, should be focused on giving back to your community… knowing that there is a benefit in people seeing you involved in your community. You will reap some “exposure” but this form of spending is absolutely not about lead capture and conversion.

Once you understand this simple concept – the difference between spending for lead capture and spending to give back, your results will change. Drastically.

Here’s where to spend your lead generation money in 2018…

  1. Facebook Budget 

    A Facebook budget is imperative in 2018. In other words, if you want to generate high quality, action taking, real estate leads in 2018, you must implement a Facebook strategy. I’m not talking about running basic “home value” ads. I’m talking about an entire Facebook strategy.

    This goes far beyond Facebook ads. If you want something that works all the time, without fail… that consistently brings in high quality leads, you must implement a Facebook

  2. Training

    Training is important and insanely valuable. You definitely want to always be learning. Even if you are delegating most of the tasks to assistants, you want to have a strategic understanding of what you are about to implement into your business. Don’t outsource strategy and understanding. Outsource tasks.

    Take some time to figure out where your knowledge “holes” are… and seek out training that fills in those holes. Don’t keep taking the same types of trainings over and over again. Be proactive and focus on your deficiencies. Budget money to get the training you need and then be action focused and implement the training you should spent time and money on.

  3.  Landing page software

    Yes, you need landing page specific software. If you want to step out of the proverbial “industry box” of terrible conversion rates, you must have landing page software that truly converts the traffic that you drive to it.

    Dropping traffic on a page on your website that has a “sign up form” on it is not a landing page. Well, it may seem like it is a landing page, but it’s not a conversion focused landing page. In fact, in the majority of cases, it’s a useless waste of space.

    Your goal is to grab traffic by their throats and compel them to opt-in… they’ll know, without a doubt that you have the solution to all of their problems and they’ll basically throw their contact information at y

  4.  Website

    Wait! Don’t skip over this one. You’re probably thinking “I’ve already got a web presence so I’m good to go…” I’m here to say… you are probably not good to go.

    You need a website that is a couple of things…

    * Mobile responsive

    * Lead capture optimized

    * Content marketing focused

    Every single one of these is high priority. If you want to leverage your website to capture real estate leads AND to leverage it to build know / like / trust relationships, you must have all three of these in your website.

    If your “web presence” is dependent upon your brokerage or franchise, you do not have a website. You have a “place card.” Grow your business up. Get your own website.

  5. Email marketing software 

    Your email marketing software is the foundational piece to your entire lead capture and conversion process.

    No, I’m not talking about a real estate CRM. I’m talking about software (not outlook or gmail) whose sole job, is to focus on your email marketing… and no I don’t mean a vendor who writes and sends your emails for you. I’m talking about a software like MailChimp that sets you up for email marketing success.

    As an industry, we are so focused on “delegating and outsourcing” that we think we can outsource relationship building. We focus on only the “ripe apples” hanging from the tree forgetting that all of the rest of the apples will ripen as well.

    We think that building relationships only comes after we’ve either talked with or met in person with someone. That is a lie.

    Know, like & trust relationships begin the moment a lead takes action – whether that action is visible by you or not. If a lead takes enough steps towards you and gives you their email address… you need to keep building that relationship… and that comes not through “touching the lead” but through you revealing you, over time, via email.

    If you want a strong, consistent and stable real estate business you must be both capturing short term and nurturing long term leads.


Featured Download: Access a checklist of the most recommended places to spend your lead generation budget here.


Filed Under: Lead Generation Tagged With: facebook lead generation, real estate lead generation

by Christina Ethridge 8 Comments

Want to generate real estate leads on Facebook? Here are 6 things to make that happen…

Do you have a strategy for using Facebook? A strategy that brings in business?

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Featured Download: The Facebook Page Setup Checklist. The step-by-step guide you need to get your Facebook page up and running and bringing in real estate leads. (Download Now)


So, you are setting up your Facebook business page for your real estate business — awesome!

I do have a question for you, though…

“Do you know why you are setting up a Facebook business page?”

What? Why on earth would I ask you why? Isn’t the “why” obvious? You want a Facebook presence. You want to be everywhere and give your real estate business legitimacy.

But again, I ask you why. What is your end goal?

“Duh, my end goal is real estate transactions,” you might be thinking. “Besides, everyone else is there; I guess I need to be there, too.”

 All too often, if not most of the time, we jump into things without understanding what we are jumping into. 

What’s your strategy for using it? What’s your plan for generating leads from it? Is it a place you should be versus a place you think you need to be?

Will your time and energy spent on this produce viable fruit? In other words, will it result in closings?

And no, “hope marketing” is not a viable reason for being somewhere or doing something.

What’s that?

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What’s hope marketing?

It’s the place we go in our minds when we think, “Well, doing this can’t hurt” or, “If I can get my name out there, the hope is that the right person, in the right frame of mind, will see my name and remember it when they are ready to buy or sell real estate.”

Guys, that is a ridiculous reason for doing anything. We must have clear, precise, distinct goals when using Facebook.

We need to understand how Facebook works. We need to have a plan, and that plan needs to include how we set up our Facebook business page from the very beginning. Our foundation.

Here’s the deal —
Facebook business pages exist so that you can connect with your “unmets.” You know, people you’ve never met before.

It’s called lead generation. Bringing in leads that you don’t know yet. Bringing them into your sphere (also known as your database) and then nurturing those leads into clients and closings.

To that end, you definitely need to set up your Facebook business page in a way that nurtures that strategy and that produces the end result and connects you with people you’ve never met before. And it’s to that end that I give you these best practices for setting up your business page.

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1. Funnel Your Un-Mets

Ignore what you see everyone else doing because they are doing it wrong.

Remember, your goal is to use Facebook for funneling your un-mets into your database.

The kicker is, most real estate agents are not using their Facebook business pages to connect with their unmets. They are using their pages as yet another online brochure about themselves.

They ask all of their friends and family to “like” their page. They treat it like a second personal profile, and then they’re confused and wonder why they should even have a Facebook business page if they’ve got a personal profile.

If you want clients and closings, don’t follow the crowd. Ignore them and proceed to do the opposite.

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2. Your Facebook business page isn’t about branding or exposure or presence — it’s about lead capture

Now, before you get all up in arms and fight this concept, consider this: When you focus on branding and exposure, that’s all you get.

It takes a whole lot of time and money to get to a point where people think only and always of your brand. In fact, it’s a lot of money down the toilet.

But when you have a strategy in place — when you have a plan focused on lead generation — you not only reap the results of that focus but also you get the benefits of presence.

In other words, focusing on lead generation will get your name in front of multitudes of people. You’ll get the exposure you desire while simultaneously putting food on your table because you’ve got closings.

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3. No, you don’t want to put your IDX on your Facebook business page.

Did I just say that out loud? I’m positioning myself to be dismissed by vendors and real estate agents alike here.

You see, vendors have a product to sell you, and they like that you are thinking in terms of your business page as just another Web presence. They can sell you something!

Something that doesn’t work. Something we think works, but it doesn’t. Something that is actually a shiny object or billed as the next silver bullet.

And still, your colleagues will insist putting IDX on their Facebook business page changed their businesses overnight. OK, maybe not that extreme — but they will tell you that they’ve gotten leads from it.

But when you dig deeper and ask how many, how often, who, what, when, where, why — they don’t have a factual answer for you. That’s because they didn’t track it. So what they tell you is anecdotal at best.

You don’t want IDX on your Facebook business page for a number of reasons.

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First and foremost, it’s a waste of time and money.

Our business pages are actually viewed by less than 2 percent of our audience. That means out of 100 people who come in contact with our actual page (not just a News Feed post), fewer than two of them actually visit our page (and, quite frankly, those two are probably our competitors or a vendor who wants to sell us something).

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The second reason? You want to leverage Facebook.

If you don’t drive visitors who are interested in seeing homes to a page that you can pixel (your IDX on your website, as an example), you are wasting a whole lot of time and money.

And, if you aren’t taking advantage of required registration, stop running ads on Facebook immediately. You must be focused on capturing leads, not on pushing crap out to the random masses.

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4. Your Facebook business page isn’t about you.

This one is the biggest one.

We think that since we are putting “our business” onto Facebook, we need to share as much as possible about our business. But we treat our pages like an online brochure.

Quite frankly, no one is interested in you. They are interested in what you can give or do for them. We filter out the sales crap and seek out resources. Give them resources.

Your Facebook business page is about your future client. It’s about them. It’s about their wants, desires, hopes, needs, problems, dreams — it’s about them.

Don’t treat your page like a brochure. Treat it like a dynamic resource funnel that your future clients are accessing.

Have your contact information there. Learn how to drive traffic to resources. Learn how to sell without selling.

Let your future client discover just how awesome you are through your actions and deeds. These hold much more power than your words.

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5. You aren’t a local business.

Most agents hop on the local business category for their Facebook business page, and this is usually their first mistake in the actual hands-on creation process.

You aren’t a local business. You are a real estate agent.

Think about it. Who or what is your business?

Your business is you. You are selling your services. You aren’t selling retail products. You aren’t looking for walk-ins (in fact, if you are a busy agent, you are rarely even in the office), so why on earth do you want to waste valuable space on Facebook with a massive “map and address?”

Instead, choose the Brand/Product category and the Service/Real Estate Agent subcategory and utilize the space now available for calls-to-action and lead-capture links rather than a map of your brokerage.

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6. Do not make Facebook your home base.

You need to have an online home base — your own website.

By your own, I mean yours, not your broker’s. You need your own domain that you bought and registered yourself. You need your own website that you built or had built yourself, and it should allow you to embed Facebook pixels.

As agents, we like when things are done for us, but the problem is, most things done for you aren’t in your best interest. So you’ve got to understand the why and then outsource appropriately.

With Facebook now promoting a form of blogging on its platform, many people will spend the time and energy just using Facebook as their home base, and when something happens (like Facebook shuts down your account or changes the rules), you lose out. You threw out every moment of time and penny spent.

Own your home base and leverage Facebook as a resource to drive traffic to your home base.

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Featured Download

The Facebook Page Setup Checklist. The step-by-step guide you need to get your Facebook page up and running and bringing in real estate leads. (Download Now)


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Filed Under: Facebook Tagged With: facebook for real estate, facebook lead generation, facebook marketing, real estate lead generation, real estate marketing

by Christina Ethridge 2 Comments

So, You Want To Generate Real Estate Leads? Then Use These Resources.

Well… you’ve gone and done it.

You’ve shown me your all-time favorite training articles I wrote for you in 2015.

Now, I’m compiling them all here… just for you. Enjoy!

First, the 5 most read training articles from 2015 on the LeadsAndLeverage.com blog.

I wrote these to help you take your real estate lead generation to a whole new level… and these 5 are your most favorite. 

  1. The Facebook Funnel – The Real Estate Lead Generation Process Using Facebook
  2. 7 Mistakes You’re Making On Facebook… That Are Killing Your Real Estate Lead Generation
  3. The Ultimage Guide To Boosting Your Facebook Posts, Exclusively For Real Estate Agents
  4. How To Generate Lots Of Good Real Estate Content For Your Facebook Business Page
  5. The 4 Essential Elements You Must Have So You Can Generate Real Estate Seller Leads From Facebook

Was there another training article that was your all-time favorite?

The second thing I have for you…

The top most accessed (free) resources I’ve created for you in 2015. Did you miss one?

  1. Facebook for Real Estate Agents Group
  2. Facebook Page Setup Checklist
  3. Facebook Ads Cheatsheet
  4. Facebook Seller Lead Funnel Template

So…. enjoy these resources and most importantly, enjoy the journey into 2016!!

Filed Under: Lead Generation Tagged With: facebook for real estate, real estate lead generation

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