What’s wrong with social media strategies?
Sales has changed. Awhile ago, blatant sales pitches stopped working because the pitch-ers had nothing of quality to sell or lied about the quality of their products. This is true in the Real Estate industry where very few agents could actually claim and prove that they could sell homes for more or help clients buy for less better than other agents.
So instead of helping agents to focus on their Unique Value Proposition which has to do with Product Selection, Quality, Service, Price, Likability/Trust and reflecting that via a good copywriter and a little work collecting statistics and testimonials – vendors first sold people on lousy technology gizmos.
Now vendors are selling agents on Social Media strategies.
Most of what I see is not “respect” for the consumer – that should be about improving the quality of your product/service – but rather fooling the consumer by focusing on the “Likability” part of the UVP and/or communicating things that have nothing to do with why an agent’s service is better.
For example, Agents are told to post about local market statistics. That’s fine for generating traffic, but doesn’t say a thing (usually) about how the agent will use those statistics to help, for example, a seller realistically price their houses, or proof that the agent knows how to do this better than her competition.
It used to be that your friends were your friends and the sales guys were sales guys and you could tell the difference. Now courses are being taught on “how to pretend to be friendly and helpful so you can sell your junk.”
I understand it and even have advised on people how to do it when I couldn’t get them to improve their product/service…but it’s a little distasteful. (BTW, my last home sale after 1.5 years of being an “agent” was a 1.25 million home but I soon quit working as an agent because I thought my taking business away from really experienced/great agents was a crappy deal for consumers i..e my product wasn’t the BEST and I didn’t have time to improve it, so I Stopped Selling It.)
If you are not doing at least 6 transactions per month – stop worrying about Wuffie and Twitter and Blogging. Learn how to improve what you offer so it is better than your competition, how to succinctly communicate that (hire a copywriter), and get yourself a Home Search site “that captures leads,” and then follow-up instantly and constantly.
I like Matt Jones Favorite Agent “Listing Presentation” and a few of his Calculators that can help you show Sellers why other agents are lying about the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and when they say the home will sell.
Ari Galper, who is not a real estate guy, has the best way to offer a service or product in a straight-forward way without either False-Relationship Building or coming off as a sleazy salesman.
And yes, pick up a book or too on Usability in website design like “Keep it Simple”, subscribe to Marketing Experiments, hire a $15 php programmer out of India, and download the ListingPress plugin and design your own search website.