Webinars, A Powerful Prospecting Tool For REALTORS
Mar 03
A leading marketing research firm recently published their small business guide to lead and customer demand generation. While all of the content in this report is not necessarily pertinent to the real estate industry, there are many lessons that can be implemented by real estate agents and brokers to rapidly accelerate their sales.
One of the primary conclusions of the report was that aside from social networking, utilizing live webinars are one of the most effective ways to attract leads online. This information is great for hungry agents because while not difficult, the technology for webinar is very underutilized in the real estate space. As a result, there is a huge opportunity for differentiation for the REALTOR that includes webinar in their bag of tools.
As a point of differentiation, video and webinar are great, but how would you use them as a real estate professional? Well, for those of you that host local meetings to teach you community and in turn gather leads, going online may present an easy way to reach a much broader section of your community. For those agents that don’t use this method of lead generation, creating a brief webinar to promote a specific segment of buyers or sellers in your area may allow you to connect with many prospective clients that you would otherwise not be able to touch. In addition, by using the webinar as a lead capture tool, you can significantly reduce your overall cost per lead as online marketing costs a fraction of direct mail or area farming.
So how would you go about creating and promoting a webinar, and how would it fit into your other lead generation activities?
To provide an explicit example, suppose that you currently serve an area where values are depressed, but property is being sold by short sales. What you could do is create a thirty minute PowerPoint presentation that goes over the short sale process, what the steps are to create a short sale package, and the relative risks to credit and capital sellers may face.
Next, you would choose a webinar service on which to present the webinar. I recommend GoToMeeting. However, if you are looking for low cost, DimDim is free. Schedule your webinar and begin promoting the event. Be sure that you add the link to the invitation to your website, and have your web page manager add the invitation to your home page. If you have a list of contacts you are already supporting, invite them to the event.
After you have created the webinar, or at least finalized the topic, contact a few local businesses and see if they will place flyers promoting the webinar in exchange for you offering coupons or other discounts for their service on either the thank you page of your webinar registration. The ideal situation is if your local businesses can provide something of value that you can give away to webinar attendees as it adds value to your presentation and cross promotes other businesses in the community.
In addition, either create door hangers or a direct mail piece that goes out to the area that you are currently farming inviting homeowners to the event. This aspect of the promotion may sound expensive, but keep in mind that if you can capture their digital information, your cost for drip marketing goes down exponentially. Most of your prospects are in the market to sell at this very moment, but almost all of them will be trying to sell sooner or later. If you capture their information now, you can use online marketing tools to remain top of mind until they are ready to sell.
Send multiple emails inviting prospects to attend your presentation, and remind those who registered to show up.
On the day of the presentation, be sure to login early and address any bugs in the system. Go through your presentation and address any questions that may arise through online chat or email. At the conclusion of the presentation, have a clear and concise offer and call to action so that your prospects know what the next steps are to use your services.
Finally, be sure that you create a follow up email for those who attended as well as those who did not. Include your call to action and an offer that will help your prospects take the next steps to contact you in both of these and remind everybody where online they may view the archived video.
A few days later, send out your newsletter letting everybody in your email list know that your recent webinar was a success. Include a review of the topic discussed, a link to the archive, and an overview of what you offered in the presentation. By going through this process, you will most likely attract a number of new clients as well as hundreds of new prospects that you can court until they are ready to buy or sell.
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