Real Estate Marketing: It’s Not You, It’s Me
Today’s home buyers and home sellers are self-educating before they pick up the phone or type out an email to contact a real estate agent. What’s in your realtor bio may well determine whether they choose you.
At the height of the housing bubble, it wasn’t uncommon to see four or five billboards featuring the faces of local realtors on my drive home from work. But today’s realtor needs to hold a mirror up to the home buyer or seller they want to attract, especially when it comes to the realtor bio.
The realtor bio – and this goes for the lending agent bio, title agent bio or the biography or ‘about us’ or social network profile information used in print and web-based marketing – is important precisely because it’s one of the first bits of information home buyers and home sellers review when they are deciding whether or not they want to do business with you.
A realtor, home loan agent or title agent bio that reads like a hard-sales pitch or tries too hard to convince them you are awesome (or worst of all: lists building your business as a goal!) is likely to be a turn off for today’s home buyers and home sellers. Today’s consumers – and that includes people that need real estate services – are extremely savvy and cynical when it comes to advertising.
And they’re certainly not in it for you!
A bio that tells them what they already know (that you are a realtor, title agent or mortgage lender) that you can do all the paperwork, that you will get things done on time, that you are there to help, etc., also does little on your behalf because home buyers and home sellers expect you to be able to do all those things.
So if you shouldn’t be listing your awards and achievements or telling them what they already know, what should your real estate bio be saying?
3 Real Estate Marketing Musts for Your Real Estate Bio
1. Turn the Mirror Around
It’s understandable that if you are writing up a bio or writing the text that will go into an ‘about us’ section on a website or blog or be featured in a social media profile for a realtor, title agent, mortgage lending agent (or agency) and so on, you’re focused on the object of your affection, right?
For successful real estate pros, the object of affection isn’t themselves; it’s the home buyer or home seller they want to work with. From target markets to ideal buyer types, what goes into your bio should be speaking to – and about – them.
2. Speak their Language
What you put into your bio section, or biographical text that you include at the end of a blog article or on a specific page of your website should call out the particular point of pain, the challenge, the desire, etc., relative to the home buyer or home seller, that you are well-suited to resolve. In other words, it’s not how many homes you have sold, or even how quickly; it’s about how frustrating or fearful the process can be for buyers and sellers, and the commitment, extra steps or particular points of specialization you can bring to the table to overcome the problem.
To put it simply, it’s not about how great you are at your job, it’s about how great you are at fixing the things that buyers or sellers fear will go wrong in their case.
3. Make it Search-Worthy
There’s no way to get away from the fact that the real estate marketing playing field has a new arena. I pulled information from Realtor.org for my home state of Washington and compared the data to show you just how important it is that everything you put online – including your realtor bio – be written with internet-search in mind.
Click to Open Full Size
In 2013, half of all home buyers said their home buying journey started online, up from 18% in 2004. That means that all other sources combined – real estate agents, personal referrals, personal connection with sellers and new home builder site and listing agents – are now being out-gunned by the internet; and this trend has not yet peaked.
In terms of your real estate professional bio, about us pages, social media profiles and status updates, text included in MLS, Zillow or other directory listings, text that you include on specific web site pages or put at the end of a blog article, etc., all of this digital real estate can be used to attract members of your target markets if you do one little thing: Include a keyword or key phrase that they would be likely to type into a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Comcast, Amazon or any other search engine).
***
Knowing that most real estate buyer and seller journeys start online and that the internet now plays an integral part in the journey at some point for nearly everyone, isn’t it time that you learned more about what it takes to get found online?
Own It: 2015 Marketing Calendar for Real Estate Pros provides a day-to-day guide that can help you step up your game and carve out your own digital real estate, so that more of your ideal client types will find you, your services, your agency or the properties you have to sell. The tactics laid out in the calendar are the same ones that I’ve used to generate up to 250% increases in year over year web traffic, qualified leads that turned into buyers. For about the cost of lunch, you can have the formula, laid out on a 2015 calendar that takes the guess work out of real estate marketing!
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you have a question or just want to say hello – Elizabeth
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!