Do you struggle with creating engagement on your Facebook business page? Then do this…

Do you struggle with creating engagement on your Facebook business page? Let me just say… you are not alone.

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Real estate agents are always telling me that they struggle with creating engagement on their Facebook businesses pages and they are looking for help.

I host a Facebook for Real Estate agents group and I asked members what they would like to see me train on… and the most requested training was creating engagement on my Facebook business page.

This was both a surprise and not a surprise to me.

A surprise because I thought agents would want to learn more about lead generation and not a surprise because I realized that real estate agents think that creating engagement will result in leads.

In other words, it seems as though it is believed that stirring up engagement on our Facebook business pages will result in capturing more leads.

The truth is, this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Focusing on creating engagement on our business pages does not mean we capture more leads. In fact, it often means the opposite.

A highly “engaged” Facebook business page is all-too-often the front to a very busy, stressed-out, and poor, Facebook business page admin.

If your real goal is to build a better business… to create a consistent flow of real estate leads… then here are a few things you need to keep in mind when it comes to using your Facebook business page to generate business.

1) Your page is a conduit, not a destination

Here’s where the paradigm shift begins. We need to pivot from “trying to create engagement” on our business pages to realizing that our page is a conduit between people we’ve never met and our database.

Your Facebook business page is not a destination. It is not a community. It is a funnel. A conduit. It’s the slide between the masses on Facebook and your database.

In other words, stop trying to create a “community” on your page and focus instead on creating a valuable conduit between Facebook and your database.

In reality, you want to create your community within your database, not on a “rented” platform.

2) Stop trying to create engagement and start focusing on providing value

What does that look like? It looks like giving the answers to your prospects problems.

When you try to only give them home searches or CMA’s, you are seen as a salesman, irrelevant to them, and someone who doesn’t understand their journey.

Stop being self-serving and start actually serving. Consumers don’t care why they shouldn’t sell FSBO. They dismiss articles and such that promote using real estate agents. In other words, don’t fall for the industry thought on “teaching the public how valuable real estate agents are” because you will get no where, fast.

Instead, show them how valuable you are. Show them they mean something beyond the transaction. And if they don’t actually mean something beyond the transaction to you – take your smarmy salesman tactics to the local used car dealership and push your wares there.

Remember, you need to help them, with their real problems… not what you perceive their problems to be.

Our industry is never short of advice on what the they think the consumer wants or needs. Unfortunately, we’re wrong. Pretty much all the time. Just look at the offerings that are out there for consumers… “get your home value instantly” and “check out these homes for sale” and “get this home buyers guide” etc. etc. etc.

Find out what their real problems are… problems and challenges they face along their entire homeownership journey. Then, give them solutions. And no, “use a real estate agent” is not a solution.

Let’s face it. Problems aren’t solved simply because a consumer uses a real estate agent. In fact, problems are often created when another person gets involved, so don’t resort to sales tactics that the consumer sees right through.

Start solving their real problems along their home ownership journey without attaching a “sale” to it.

3) Ignore the “engagement numbers” and focus on the “audience” numbers

Always remember, that 99% of your tribe are simply going to lurk. They will not engage and trying to change their behavior is virtually impossible.

There is actually a 1% rule when it comes to Internet culture. Rather than fight the rule, leverage the rule.

Know that engagement is not the goal, but acquirement is. You want to acquire audiences that are highly targeted and you want to nurture them so that when you do “ask for the sale” they respond to you. Your audiences include targeted page likes, website visitors, your email database and your snail mail database.

Your offline audiences must be included in this as well. Add your offline audiences into your email database as quickly as possible. Your goal is to bring all audiences into your email database.

In truth, there is nothing wrong with engagement, it’s just that we need to stop focusing on it. Stop looking at that metric. Focus on your audience numbers rather than your engagement numbers.

Your Facebook business page must be setup as a lead generating conduit, a funnel, and that’s why I’m giving you access to my Facebook Page Setup Checklist… it’s free and it’s yours, just click here.

by Christina Ethridge 6 Comments

Is your email marketing dying? Here’s how to revive it in 5 steps

I find it interesting how we, as an industry, utilize email. Mostly what I find interesting is how we are failing miserably at using such a powerful tool. The real estate industry, as a whole, sucks at leveraging email.

We use free personal email addresses and expect people to take us seriously.
We email randomly, infrequently, and can’t figure out why it’s not working to convert people.
We send out canned crap and wonder why nobody actually reads what we are sending them.

We are afraid of being a nuisance, and rightly so! What we are emailing, how we are emailing, why we are emailing, when we are emailing, and who we are emailing are all out of whack. We don’t know what we are doing and we refuse to take the time to learn how to use email.

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We have got to turn our thought process upside down. We need to change our mindset. We need to look outside of the real estate industry and watch the businesses that are using email. Businesses that are having phenomenal success while others, like the real estate industry, languish.

The real estate industry, as a whole, sucks at leveraging email @CEthridge

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One of the key pieces when it comes to leveraging email is that you have to realize that you aren’t “email marketing.” This isn’t about sending out your real estate newsletter, or sending an email every three weeks in hopes of staying “top-of-mind.”

This is about a relationship and relationships grow when we have conversations. With real people. You’ve got to stop throwing emails at your list and start having conversations with the people on your list.

Here are 5 things you can change in your email marketing that will immediately double your results.

First – Stop thinking about your email list as a global whole.

Stop thinking (and acting) as though they are just subscribers. As if they are headless, faceless leads. Start thinking about them as your community, as your tribe. As people who want, and need, your help in their journey.

This means you need to be writing your emails as if you are emailing to one single person. Your emails need to be personal. Your emails need to be an actual conversation. And no, I’m not talking about making sure their name is in the email. While this is good, it’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about one-on-one and building know, like, and trust relationships with a single person. You need to be writing your emails as if you were standing in front of someone and having a conversation with them. A conversation, not a lecture.

Second – Stop touching and start connecting.

An image I keep seeing in my mind about how the real estate industry uses email marketing is this: A person is standing out in the middle of nothing. Suddenly you come up and start throwing paper at them. On that paper is the canned crap you buy from whatever vendor you are getting canned email crap from.

Then, another real estate agent comes up and starts doing the same thing to the same person with the same canned crap. And then another agent comes up, does the same thing, with the same canned crap. And another and another and another.

In other words, we are just throwing crap at people. We aren’t making a connection. Would you do that in-person, in real life? Then why do we think it’s ok to do that virtually?

I believe it’s because we are disconnected from the idea that “virtual” is real. We erect this amazing wall of stone between what we do with people while we are face-to-face with them and can’t seem to figure out how to do the exact same thing, virtually.

Stop throwing emails at your list and start having conversations @CEthridge

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I also believe it’s because we are so pushed to “systematize” and “assembly line” our business that we forget how to create and build relationships. We think of email as just another assembly line tool when in fact, it’s a relationship building tool. A tool that allows us to build one-to-many relationships. A tool that allows us to leverage our time. A tool that enhances our ability to connect with as many people as possible. But we draw a blank on how to effectively use email as a tool.

Third – Be a real person!

Yes, I know you are real person, but we don’t come across that way when we are sending email to our list. We come across as a robotic commercial when we send out emails in a fancy template newsletter format.

Let’s be real here, do you send one-on-one emails in an image heavy newsletter format? Really? Why? Because it’s got the logo and colors of your brand?

Focusing on “branding” is ruining your email marketing results @CEthridge

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Knock it off. You don’t send an email to your friend that includes all of your branding so stop trying to focus on branding and start focusing on being a real person. Real people send text only emails. Real people send single thought, single topic emails. Real people don’t try to stuff an email full of every conceivable thought they want to share. Real people aren’t focused on the closing table. Real people go through a journey.

Real people are real, with themselves and each other. They reveal themselves to others. People relate to people, not businesses. Reveal your own struggles, your own journey, whether that is directly related to buying or selling a house or not. Relate pieces of your life. Become real to the people on your list.

Fourth – Be useful.

You don’t want to email only when you need something, like a closing in the next month. You need to be helpful and generous all the time.

It’s painfully obvious when real estate agents need more listings or buyers… they send out an email that is usually some fancy looking email with lots of images and tons of canned crap or promotion of their listings.

Guys, this isn’t useful. This is obvious. There is no value in it and your email community simply isn’t interested, which is why you aren’t able to leverage your email list into a forceful piece of lead conversion in your business.

When you are focused on being useful, you aren’t trying to be all things to all people. Remember above when I said to think of the people on your list as an individual you are face-to-face with? Well, do you try to fix all of their problems every conceivable way or do you help them with one thing at a time?

Don’t try to push your agenda onto your email community. Instead, figure out what they are struggling with and help them, a little at a time, in each email.

Be strategic with email, focus on the long-term, here’s how @CEthridge

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Fifth – Be strategic.

Why are you sending an email? What are your expectations?

Listen, the first goal is not to get a “come sell my house” phone call, although this will happen when you do email marketing right. Your goal is to move people along their journey, their journey with you.

That means you’ve got to be strategic. You’ve got to understand that each email you send is a piece of your relationship with them, it’s not the end game. You want to create and build a relationship with them and that only happens with consistency in connecting with them. Notice I said connecting, not touching? Yeah, check out step two above.

Strategy focuses on the long-term outcome, not the short term. To strategically use email in your real estate business, you’ve got to be focused on the long-term outcome.

Again, why are you sending an email? Are your expectations absurd or are they long-term focused? Email marketing is amazing for creating and building relationships, powerful and loyal relationships. But without a long-term strategy, you’ll just be throwing canned crap, randomly, at your list and you’ll accomplish exactly nothing.

When you know who you are emailing, when you intimately understand your avatar, it changes everything.

These 5 things I just talked about become easy. Almost ridiculously easy. That’s why I created an Avatar Creator Template just for you. Click here and I’ll give it to you, free.

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?

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? 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.

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

Remember, your goal is to use Facebook for funneling your unmets 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.

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.

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.

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 NewsFeed 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.