Why do broker issued websites suck for you? There are several problems with not having your own domain like ‘www.sandrasmithrealestate.com‘ vs ‘sandra.brokersite.com‘ (not real sites).

Branding, Branding, Branding

One thing is you don’t have much control of what your website looks like as well as the functionality of it. As a real estate agent, being able to brand yourself is key when trying to separate yourself in a crowded market of real estate agents.

Most broker issued website either have one design or a few options that don’t allow much change. Other than your logo and/cover image, there is not much flexibility on what the website will look like for your brand. I believe that real estate agent website should not be over-powering and minimalist, but having a clean design is important for look and usability. Because what’s the point of having a website if no one uses it right?

Your Website Domain Is Your Own

When you register your domain name online, that domain is yours and yours alone. So if you decided to leave your current brokerage, you don’t have to worry about changing much when it comes to links to content that you have posted on your social media and other websites. Many times, real estate agents have a decision to make when it comes to deciding if they want to move on to another brokerage because everything has been linked to the brokerage issued website.

When you have your domain name go to your own website and not just redirect to the brokerage site, you also don’t have to worry about if you decide to either move on or just change up the website. You have the control you need to redirect the traffic to the new changes on the website. Using platforms like WordPress will allow you to get a beautiful website that includes all of the functionality that you need (IDX, Newsletter, Landing Pages).

Also, you own the email address for your brand. So when you issue your email address for clients and leads, you can provide them with ‘sandy@sandrasmithrealestate.com’ instead of a Gmail account (I do love my Gmail account). By having your own domain and using that domain for your email, it will help you with continuing to brand yourself. So when someone emails you, they automatically have your website, so all they have to do is just copy the domain name and paste it in their browser to find out more about you.

Shows Authority and Credibility

There is nothing stronger with branding than showing authority and credibility in your space, and by having your own website you will show that. Just think about how you decide to work with a new company. You will first go to Google to see if you can find, you guessed it, their website. And many times if they don’t have a website or a poor one, you may not decide to work with them. But a business with a professional looking website, you instantly think that they know what they are doing and have credibility.

Leads are doing that every day when thinking about working with a real estate agent that they don’t know. They are looking to find your website and if you don’t have one or using the generic broker issued website, they may be passing your over for the next agent who does have one. Of course, they will look for reviews on Google and Zillow, and also check out what’s going on with your social media accounts, but having that professional website helps to show your authority and credibility.

Having a website that you own allows you to have a place to link to content that you create on your blog that will help online leads looking for a solution to their problems in real estate. Having that content will also help you when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I talk about SEO some, but besides keeping fresh content and structuring your content with the right tags, it is difficult to get SEO to work for you unless you are consistently putting out good content.

When you post links to your blog posts from a website that you own, you don’t have to worry about if the broker issued website decides to change their link structure or sunset a feature that you were using that could affect to the links that you have out on your social media channels and other blogs.

Should Be Your Traffic Hub

I tell my clients that if you have resources or lead magnets, they need to use their website to send the traffic through. Why? Because you can use a Facebook Pixel to retarget these people later to continue to stay in front of this audience. And I will explain more about retargeting at a later time.

You can also use a Google Snippet of code so that you can remarket to this audience of people. This is similar to retargeting in Facebook, but what’s great about Google Remarketing as a real estate agent is instead of just staying in front of this audience who visits your website on Facebook and Instagram, you can stay in front of this audience all over the web, including Google Search.

Using your own website as a real estate agent allows you to have multiple landing pages that provide a way to capture lead information when using lead magnets. What’s a lead magnet? It’s a highly attractive offer (free online guide, resource, or properties) that people will want to exchange their contact information for (Name, Email, Phone).

For our team, we like to run ads that send leads to our IDX for properties so that we can retarget them on Facebook and Remarket them on Google. And soon we will begin to expand to doing the same thing in LinkedIn. Being able to have a place where we know the link structure and content as well as having the control to change what we need to, when we need to has helped us tremendously. You just don’t know how helpful it is to tell someone go to a specific link to get to a particular search on our own website.

The important thing is to have a place that you own where you are playing traffic cop and you control what information is collected, what information is given, and for you to not be out in the dark when you are ready to expand.

You Have More Flexibility

As technology continues to expand, you will need to be able to expand as well with your offerings. Think about a few years ago, everyone was talking about Twitter as the place to be for real estate agents, now it’s Instagram. Who knows where the place to be will be in the next few years, but if you own your own website, you are flexible enough to expand as technology expands.

Earlier I was talking about using pixels and code snippets and as more technologies come on board, you will need to have a way to include them easily on your website and also phase out outdated technologies on your website.

You won’t have to wait on updates to come to the broker issued website, and that may not even happen. I can’t tell you how many broker issued websites I have reviewed that don’t allow you to add the necessary code snippets needed to gather analytics and also understand the audience you have coming in to continue to stay in front of them.

Your Website Follows You

No one likes moving brokerages, but it happens and it doesn’t have to always be where the old brokerage was bad. It could be for something as simple as you are moving to a new area that your old brokerage doesn’t have a presence. But when those times come where some real estate agents have to move to a new brokerage, they are stuck because all of the links, SEO juice, and knowledge of them are tied to the old brokerage. So when they have to move to the new brokerage, they are essentially starting back from scratch.

But if you owned your own website, all you would need to do is update the brokerage info and logo and you are done. Anyone looking for you will still use your same domain name. If you were getting traffic from social media or search engines, that would still continue. So you pretty much wouldn’t miss a beat. And the real estate agent who didn’t own their own website would be dead in the water as soon as their old brokerage turns off their account.

But What About The Cost

Sure, having a free website is good, but if you aren’t getting a return on its use, then it isn’t helping you any. The investment in having your own website is worth it in the long run. It is a marathon and not a sprint, so as your business grows, so will your website reach. Getting a domain can cost as little as $3 a year, hosting $15 per month, IDX $40 – $80 per month, a nice WordPress template $59 one-time.

If you can’t install WordPress and the template, you can find people to do it for you for a one time cost from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars.

And being a professional real estate agent, we know that there will be a cost to operating and you know that if things are free, you get what you pay for. And if you aren’t getting everything that you need from your broker issued website, you need to take control and get your own branded website.

If you would like to discuss how this all works and how this fits into our R.E.M.E. (Real Estate Marketing Ecosystem) System for closing more deals, be sure to schedule some time for us to chat –
https://calendly.com/getexecutable/30-minute-1-on-1-strategy-call-christopher-walker/

Getting seller leads usually involve providing leads with lead magnets like seller guides but a lot of time providing a way to show a seller what their ‘Home Is Worth’. What I am working on rolling out in the coming days is making this possible through a chatbot. So when someone wants to know what their home is worth, they can get this information instantly through the chatbot and be prompted to provide their contact info to get a more accurate price from you, the agent.

By using the chatbot, you pick up a chatbot subscriber which gives you a way to instantly ‘chat’ with the lead and have more conversations as opposed to email which is very one way. Even if they don’t leave their email, you can ping them through messenger and do other cool automation that will free you up until you have time to have a longer conversation. This typically leads to a phone call and eventually clients. How cool is that?

Make sure to join my list (just send an email to My List Subscription) and LIKE my Facebook page to stay up to date.

I wanted to make sure that it was super simple and powerful for real estate agents. As a licensed real estate agent, I understand that agents don’t have much time to try to figure out and build their own chatbot.

Check out the screen share below:

There is a huge need for real estate agents to step up their marketing efforts to be able to remain relevant in today’s digital age. Gone are the days where just signing up for Zillow or Realtor.com ads and watching the leads pour in. And techniques like Cold Calling, Door Knocking, and Direct Mail, still have its place, but the effectiveness is not where it used to be as people have become more closed off with their doorbell cameras and solicitation blockers on their mobile phones.

But there are so many tools and systems out there it is easy to get confused and going online in groups, everyone has their favorites to use. In order for real estate teams to be able to compete today, they will need to have a core system in place that works together. By having this system, once it is running as it should, your team will only need to focus on one thing, that’s contacting and keeping track of who’s in your CRM.
I like to call this system the Real Estate Marketing Ecosystem (R.E.M.E.) and it’s one that is a must for real estate teams to use in order to grow and compete with all of the noise and distractions your next clients have to go through just to remember that you exist and how you can help them. I break down the core components of this ecosystem and break down their purposes. Please let me know if you have any questions on how all of this fits together.

Website

A fully functional website is just the beginning of getting things set up for a successful Real Estate Marketing Ecosystem. A website with built-in IDX, tracking pixels for building custom audiences to retarget on Facebook, integration with your CRM, and an analytics tool to understand where things need improving is where you need to be.

It’s a place for you to produce content that you can use and repurpose on social media and to send out to your mailing list to stay top of mind. The content on your website is a great way to get traffic to your website so that you can retarget this traffic so that you can remain in front of them in the place (Facebook and Google) where they are.

There are many options when it comes to websites and you shouldn’t get too caught up with the platform, as long as you are able to install your tracking pixel, and include an IDX so that you can use this as a lead magnet for your social media advertising.

Social Media Advertising (Facebook Ads/Google Ads)

Facebook since the beginning of 2018 has become more of a ‘Pay To Play’ model. It is vital for real estate teams to use their ad platform to acquire new leads, nurture leads who haven’t contacted you yet but interested in your services, and stay top of mind with past clients.
Facebook ads are more than boosting posts. Building a proper marketing funnel (Top of Funnel [Cold Audience], Middle of Funnel [Warm Audience], Bottom of Funnel [Past Clients]) with a focus on retargeting is how you win with Facebook. Your next clients are on Facebook and if you don’t have a presence there, more and more real estate teams are there who are and it’s important for these clients to continue to see your presence. And Facebook loves video and this will allow you to reach more people as well as stay in front of your audience in a medium that people like more than pictures and text. So utilizing videos will help with building your presence online and gaining more leads.

If you are not using Facebook Ads in the proper way, you won’t get results. And for those saying that they didn’t work for them, I would ask them, did you provide a compelling offer for them to engage with you? Did you retarget this audience with relevant content marketing and videos of yourself? If you aren’t retargeting, you are just wasting money and you aren’t getting that when you use lead sources like Zillow and Realtor.com. Did you include a chatbot to provide you with a way to directly communicate with leads through chat which is becoming a must for businesses to use to connect with leads and clients?

CRM

Having a CRM that’s integrated with your lead sources is what is necessary to keep you and your team happy. The CRM is the only place you and your team need to focus your attention as the rest of the components of the marketing ecosystem. This is probably the most important piece of the ecosystem because you need a place to keep track with who you should contact, and how often you have contacted them.

There are so many CRMs, that your head would spin. The best CRM is the one that you and your team use consistently. Once your CRM is configured and integrated with the rest of your ecosystem, lead nurturing becomes much easier for your team and for you to focus.

IDX

Having a website is great, but having a website with an IDX is the best because you can direct lead magnet traffic to your website IDX and when they visit your site, you can now retarget them on Facebook so you can stay in front of them with your content marketing. Having an IDX will help with SEO, but with all of the search engine changes, don’t bank on getting a flood of organic traffic, but you will get traffic if you combine fresh blog content with links to your IDX.

Chatbots (Digital Personal Assistants)

Chatbots (Facebook Messenger Automation) has become one of the best methods for creating a one-on-one direct line of communication with leads and clients. It is frictionless as this avenue of communication is instantly established once a person interacts with the chatbot.

It will allow for your business to have a conversation with a person that they wouldn’t have, had they not had a chatbot in place. It allows for 24/7 automation so that the chatbot will be able to work on your behalf until someone from your team is able to continue the conversation. Chatbots help qualify leads by asking questions (Have you been qualified, what’s your timeline, etc) that help retrieve more information about a person and their needs before you are able to contact them. And because chatbots are a product of Facebook, it makes it simple for someone to provide their real phone number and real email instead of fake information that occurs many times on landing pages.

You can also use chatbots to send broadcasts out to everyone who’s interacted with your chatbot and segment messages as well. Facebook is continuously expanding this platform for businesses as they will be integrating their Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram Direct Messages into one integrated Inbox. And the success of using chatbots to deliver listing information will allow you to obtain more buyers and buyer leads who may be looking for a different home than you have ever done in the past.

If you have any questions about how all of this works, don’t hesitate to contact me. Christopher M. Walker
Digital Marketing Architect ‘I help ‘non-techie’ Real Estate Agents close more deals using Digital Marketing Skills.’

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