On Today’s Electric Avenue Show– I shared an insight into Becoming A ‘Stand-Out’ Real Estate Agent, and why a lot of the Traditional Real Estate Marketing is no longer working as effectively as it used to.
“We’ve gone from being exposed to about 500 ads/day back in the 1970’s to as many as 5,000 a day today.”
Jay Walker-Smith, Yankelovich Consumer Research
Trying to grab people’s attention and get your advertising message seen amongst all of the marketing clutter is now much harder than ever before and it will only become more difficult now with iPads, Apps, the Mobile web, Google TV, Apple TV, etc, etc.
Yet at a lot of real estate agents are simply throwing good money down the drain on real estate marketing that no longer works.
Right Now is the market place where the innovative, ‘Stand-Out’ agents will prosper.
Below is an excerpt from Seth Godin’s book ‘The Purple Cow’
Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
“You’re either a Purple Cow or you’re not. You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.”
Let’s face it, the tired checklist of P’s that marketers have leaned on for decades – Pricing, Positioning, Promotion, Publicity, to name a few – just don’t work anymore.
There’s an important and exceptional P that has been missing. That P is the Purple Cow.
Cows, after you’ve seen one or two or ten, are boring.
They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, but they’re still boring, and that makes them invisible.
A Purple Cow, though… now that would be interesting, at least for a while.
Purple Cow describes something phenomenal and exciting and flat-out unbelievable.
Every day consumers face a lot of boring, invisible, forgettable stuff – a lot of brown cows.
But you can be sure they won’t forget a Purple Cow.
It’s not a marketing gimmick or function that you can do to your product or service.
Purple Cow is built in. It’s inherent or it’s not there at all.
Messages and advertisements broadcast through mass media are consistently ignored.
The way we have sold for the last 50 years is dead.
The Purple Cow is all we’ve got – it’s our only hope.
With the Major Portals becoming like Agent Cloning sites and a lot of real estate agents adopting a very similar marketing stencil across the board, I’m very interested to hear any suggestions/thoughts from the B2 community around how an agent could become a Stand-Out (that Purple Cow) in their marketplace.
Electric Ave Wrap-Up
Monday’s Electric Avenue Show featured an Introduction to Web 1.0 v’s Web 2.0 for Agents.
Tuesday was about an insight into an email I received recently from the world’s leading professional Social Media platform, Linkedin that ‘Tweets Are No Longer Displayed On Linked’
Wednesday’s episode generated a lot of interest amongst real estate agents because I shared an insight into ‘What Is Your Greatest Cost In Real Estate?’ and it’s NOT Advertising/Marketing or Wages/Commissions???
After having posed the question “What is your greatest cost in real estate?” amongst my Facebook Fans, I was very interested to see some of the agent’s responses…
On yesterday’s Electric Avenue Show I answered the important question ‘What Is The Number 1 Reason Why People Go Onto The Internet?’
Thanks for tuning-in. 🙂
3 Comments
Jen
“With the Major Portals becoming like Agent Cloning sites”
What do you mean by this comment? All listings are in a similar format? What do you suggest differently that a portal should do?
Greg Vincent
Jen, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this 20 second clip from Matrix Reloaded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyNyHark4xk but the Major Property Portals have now made agents look very similar & it’s now become like Agent Smith v’s Agent Smith to consumers as they go in search for an agent whom they feel they can trust.
I have already suggested this to a number of portal providers but the agents should have an area where they can share some personal information/bio,etc.
Currently, consumers are looking at the properties, seeing the name attached to the listing & to find out more background information about the agent they are Googling their name (which directs people away form the portal)
Potential Sellers will probably continue to Google the agents anyway but at least by providing an individual agent profile page the agent has a chance to put forward something about themselves within the major portal rather than just a thumbnail image, contact details, logo and a link to the company home page (which then means that the consumer has to search for their profile page on the company website).
When the portals launch this (which I have no doubt that they will), the individual agent should be able to have a link to their own personal website/blog, Twitter account, Facebook, Linkedin, etc, etc.
Ben Stockdale
Hi Greg,
We’ve been talking about this for a while and slowly rolling out this feature.
It’s now live for all agents, agencies and franchises to update their profiles.
Not only do we encourage links to Twitter account, Facebook, Linkedin, etc, etc but we also allow VIDEO!!!!!!
See a great example here –> http://www.thehomepage.com.au/agent/peter-taliangis
To edit the details you just need the office admin login details and go to http://dashboard.thehomepage.com.au/
We’re looking for feedback on how we can do better so please contact me on [email protected]
Cheers
Ben