Krisztina Bell:
I’m Krisztina Bell here in Atlanta, coming from you live at my office space here at No Vacancy Home Staging. We are homes staging specialists, dealing with vacant homes, staging lots of them. And of course the market is still hot, but low in inventory. But I have a fabulous, good friend of mine to introduce, Luke. I love his, you guys make note, Stay Paid Podcast. You got to put that on your like podcast list if you listen to, but in the car, wherever you’re going, it’s a great marketing podcast. They have little 15 minute segments. They also have an hour segment, but they interview some really top notch people on all different topics. So you don’t even have to be a real estate agent. You can be just in the real estate industry or other industries because everything’s valuable. And I got, look, I got my notepad and my pen, I got notes.
Krisztina Bell:
And so today’s topic I came up with because I listened to one of their podcasts and I really, really liked the topic of relationship marketing, because I think now we’re taking it to another level since COVID. We’ve all not seen each other for a while, but now we’re all kind of hanging out. We talk a little bit more on the phone and it’s not so much about just kind of getting that quick sale anymore, it’s making more connections I think with your clients and getting more than just that one sale from them. Like, I want them on speed dial. Call me. We came out with an app, we have a home staging app, which is so cool.
Luke Acree:
That’s awesome.
Krisztina Bell:
Yeah. So, and without further ado, Luke Acree is the CEO of ReminderMedia. And they are a huge marketing firm. They have great products. I love their magazines, Good to Be Home Magazine. They have American Lifestyle Magazine and they have a health magazine. And so I think they also have social media type programs. And I just really think that their products cater to what we need in today’s market. And definitely he is a marketing evangelist. This is just one of many, many webinars, speeches and whatever. And he interviews so many really cool people. So I just have really enjoyed meeting with you and having you do these webinars. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, Luke Acree, please, whatever else you want to add to that intro. Sorry [inaudible 00:02:40] the bio.
Luke Acree:
Thank you. Krisztina, you are a rockstar. I always appreciate the opportunity to share. So I’m going to share my screen. We’re going to talk about relationship marketing, and it really is… What’s the point of relationship marketing? You want to focus on relationship marketing so you can take your database so you can turn them into raving fans. That really is the point. It’s like, you want to create such a great piece of marketing or such a great campaign of marketing that your clients, they end up loving you and they end up referring you, they end up staying with you and doing repeat business with you and the big pain point right now, especially if you’re in the real estate industry, which I’m assuming most of you are, chat in if you’re in a different industry. So I can make sure I give examples to other industries that you might be in.
Luke Acree:
I’ve had the privilege over the last decade to work with 140 different industries. So a hundred thousand small business owners, 140 different industries. So if you’re in a different industry than real estate, chat that in, I would love to know what that is. But I know the big pain point for real estate right now is inventory. You have all these buyers, all these people that want to get into a home, but there’s just no homes on the market. That is what I’m hearing across the nation. I will tell you, there is no better time to capitalize on your relationship marketing that hopefully you’ve been doing in business than now. You should be calling your whole database and really educating them on what is happening right now in the market. Interest rates are still historically type lows.
Luke Acree:
You are having low, low inventory that is driving prices through the roof, so people’s homes are worth more the worth record prices. And they’re probably sitting on record equity. So there’s a ton of people in your database that are probably uneducated. They’re not thinking about what’s happening in the market, 24/7. And you can literally call them up and give them a free CMA. And that is such an incredible way to generate inventory. I’ve taken this to the extreme that I’m literally telling my clients, “If you have a farm area,” so a random maybe location that you’ve chosen, that you want to be the dominant agent in where you don’t live even, you should even be calling all those homeowners. My brother did this literally two weeks ago, he called his farm. He generated three listings for himself, literally just giving that value prop. That look, interest rates are still at historic lows, inventory is at a historic low, prices are at historic highs, equity in your home is at a historic high.
Luke Acree:
I would love to give you a free CMA to see if you’d be interested in listing your home. Because I have tons of buyers on the sideline wanting to purchased homes. And he generated three listings literally doing that. I wanted to get that out at the beginning of the webinar because what we’re about to talk about and how to create raving fans and how to do relationship marketing, all of it builds up to going, you want to build such a solid relationship and such a solid brand with your database that when times like this arise, you shouldn’t have any fear right now reaching out to every single person in your database. And you shouldn’t feel bad right now going, “Wow, I really haven’t talked to them. I really haven’t touched base with them.” If you haven’t, that means you don’t have a great relationship marketing system or drip campaign set up for your database. And that’s what you need to start working on.
Luke Acree:
So what is a raving fan? That’s where I want to start, right? So you’re going to do this relationship marketing to create a raving fan. So Ken Blanchard, he really coined the term and he wrote a book. And raving fans, he did this to describe a customer who’s so overwhelmed and floored with their experience that they’ve received that they literally cannot stop telling everybody about it. Now, here’s the thing I want to point out with raving fans. You can have raving fans in a good way, but you can also have raving fans in a negative way. So if you think of like restaurants, right? And Yelp and stuff, who are the people that tend to write reviews? People who write reviews, they also tend to be raving people that are raving in a bad way about you, right? So you need to make sure that you understand raving fans can go both ways.
Luke Acree:
What creates a raving fan? That’s the logical question. How do I actually create raving fans? I believe you create raving fans by doing the unexpected. And this is my challenge to you today as a business owner is to look at your sales process, to look at your client experience and go, “Are you doing the unexpected?” So if you go to a restaurant and the food’s not very good, the service is not very good, the patron got an unexpected experience, which caused them to go write a bad review. It caused them to rave badly. But if you go to a restaurant and they do the unexpected, it caused you to rave well. I mean, you think… You’re in Atlanta, Georgia, right? Krisztina? So when I think Atlanta, I think Chick-fil-A right? I don’t know why. I guess their headquarters are Atlanta, Georgia, but that’s what I think about.
Luke Acree:
Think about Chick-fil-A, that business. And they make more money six days a week than their competitors make seven days a week. Why? Why is it that Chick-fil-A is a fast food restaurant, but people don’t give the same impression of Chick-fil-A that they do to McDonald’s? Or they do to a Burger King? And if you really look at it and you study the client experience of Chick-fil-A or you look at the marketing of Chick-fil-A, one of the main things that they tried to strive to do and still do is to try to do the unexpected. In fact, the founder of Chick-fil-A talked about his experience, I believe going to a Ritz-Carlton. And that experience of going to a Ritz-Carlton and wanting to bring that type of experience to fast food. Have you ever noticed that when you sit down in a Chick-fil-A, they actually come and check on you a lot of times, halfway through your eating?
Luke Acree:
Have you ever noticed they actually bring you the trays of food to your table after you’ve sat down? Stuff that you would see in maybe like a steakhouse. Have you ever noticed how they do the actual lines, the drive through lines? Right? They have people out there with little iPads to get you through faster, all these things you don’t realize. But what it does is because it’s unexpected, because you’re literally going to Chick-fil-A to get fast food that you believe is good, that’s the expected and you want it fast. But because they overdeliver, it’s cleanlier. They have staff that is always smiling and happy. They even say, “My pleasure” and not just, “Your welcome,” they’re doing these little things that are unexpected, that cause you to literally have such a good experience that you end up raving about them, or you become loyal to them.
Luke Acree:
I’m reminded of another example that I learned from the podcast. So I interviewed a guy named Jay Bear. This was an incredible interview. You could go find him on Stay Paid Podcast. And he talked about a doctor that he worked with. And this doctor, I believe it was a podiatrist, but they were crushing it. Like, they were getting so many clients, so many referrals and their patients stayed with them. And this type of doctor, there’s so many of them. Like, you literally don’t have to drive very far to find a podiatrist in your area. But people were literally driving 45 minutes, an hour, they were driving past other podiatrists to get to this doctor.
Luke Acree:
And when he looked at the business model, he goes, “Okay, what does this doctor and this podiatrist do to create raving fans out of their patients, to track clients?” And it was one simple thing. The doctor was calling every patient that was about to go into some type of surgery or they were having some type of procedure done on them, calling them before the actual procedure, before the actual appointment. And I want you to think about that for a second, because if you’ve ever had a procedure, I’ve had my ACL repaired twice. And the doctor always calls you after the procedure to check on you, always calls you after to talk about the medicine or your pain, but they never call you before. They’re never calling you to talk to you.
Luke Acree:
And what the podiatrist doctor told Jay Bear is he told him that he realized that a lot of his patients just had a lot of fear and unknown when they were first coming to be clients and patients of his. And he found that if he called before, it just made the experience so much better. And then Jay Bear went and interviewed the patients and they said the exact same thing. “Oh, the reason why I come to this doctor is he just reaches out to me. He knows me.” It was the unexpected, something very simple. I give that example because you don’t have to do something crazy to create raving fans. It can be something really simple. Think of you as a real estate agent when you’re showing homes. So an example I would give, if you showing homes, right? And maybe you’re showing homes to a family that has a daughter, when you first get to know that family, maybe you realize that their daughter is really into dance and ballet.
Luke Acree:
And so when you go show them a home, you also tell them, “Hey, look, this is the home. Here’s everything about the home,” blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you also go, “Oh, and I know, Susie, she’s into ballet. And I looked it up. There’s a dance studio about five miles from here that actually offers dance classes for children in Susie’s age group.” It’s just a little unexpected thing that they weren’t expecting that creates an experience that’s better. Maybe it’s something where you’re showing people a home and then there’s HOA fees in that area. And you show them, “Hey, look, here’s the home. Here’s the HOA fees, and I’ve pulled for you other homes and HOA fees that are comparable in this market so you can make sure you understand are these HOA fees reasonable? What can you expect with HOA fees?”
Luke Acree:
And you’ve gone above and beyond to share with them little things that make the experience just a little better. We interviewed one, he’s called the Disney Guy. So he was one of the guys that opened up the Disney hotels. And he did this for most of his career, right? And he’s written this book called The Disney Way. And the whole concept of the book is, imagine if Disney ran your business, what would your business be like if Disney ran your business? And what he talked about with Disney is they were masters at trying to do the little things that people didn’t expect that caused clients to have such an experience that they wanted to rave about it. A simple example that he gave me is he said they had every worker in the park, no matter what their job title was, you could be the CEO all the way down to just the person that stands at the gate. Every single person in their job description, they were responsible for picking up trash. Every single person in part of their job description, they were responsible for picking up trash.
Luke Acree:
If you’ve ever gone to Disney, one of the number one things people rave about is how cleanly their parks are. How their parks are so clean, and it’s because literally I believe they have 26,000 or so employees at that location, every single one of them, their job is to pick up trash. That’s a simple thing that changes the whole client experience. Another example he gave that really, really blew me away was they literally have people in the park, and one of their main jobs is when they see little kids dressed up as princes or princesses or superheroes, to go up to the little kids and be amazed and want to get the kid’s autograph, or get a picture with the kid, because acting like this is a real princess that they’re meeting or a real superhero that they’re meeting.
Luke Acree:
And that makes the kid feel like an amazing experience. They feel like a real superhero or a real princess, and it makes the family feel great. And it makes a magical experience for that family in Disney that makes them want to come back or share about that experience. Those are just a few things that you can do. I have a coffee cup here on the screen because it can be as simple as this. There was an airline company, somebody was running late for their plane, made it to their plane, but tweeted the airline company and said, “Man, I was running late for my plane, really would love a Starbucks coffee, but didn’t have time to stop.” Well, the marketing team at the airline company saw that tweet, they reached out to that location, to that airport, to their employees there, had one of their employees go to the Starbucks in the airport, buy the person the coffee they wanted, run it to the gate, and brought that person the coffee on that plane.
Luke Acree:
Do you think they created a raving fan for life out of that person? Of course, they did. From a simple cup of coffee. Think about you when you show your clients a home. What if, before you set up the showings you say, “Hey, look, we’d love to know what’s your favorite coffee. I’m a huge fan of Starbucks. What’s your favorite coffee?” And then when you go and show them the home, you bring them their favorite coffee. It’s those little things, that it’s more about the relationship. What’s the return on investment? What’s the ROI of a cup of coffee for somebody? What was the ROI of that airline company doing that? It’s hard to measure the ROI on that, but you know, wow, that experience, that person is going to talk about, they’re going to share it with their friends and family, it’s going to go beyond, and it’s going to create a raving fan.
Luke Acree:
Why is this important to you? Here is the data from the National Association of Realtors. So this is 2020 data. 2021 just came out. And 2021 is actually 1% higher. It’s actually 68%. So it even went up. What this is showcasing here in a pie chart is all the listings that happened in 2020. And when they source back where did those clients find their agent, how did they choose their agent, 67% of all the sellers chose their agent through referral or repeat business. 67%, more than half of the pie. 33%, so this is open houses. This is Zillow. This is your website. This is maybe FSBOs and expireds calling those campaigns. All the other campaigns only made up for 33% of how a seller chose their agent. 67% chose the referral, repeat business. If you aren’t solidified in your mind right now that relationship marketing though, it’s not instant gratification is the name of the game, the data is telling you it’s the name of the game. And if you do it right, what can you expect?
Luke Acree:
Well, this is Gary Keller. So Gary Keller, if you guys don’t know, he’s the founder of Keller Williams. I’m sure most of you know. He wrote the book, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent. All right, I love this book, I’ve read it like four times, there’s so many good things out of here, but one of the things that he found in his research of researching with agents that make a million dollars a year in GCI, they found that if you nurtured your database, you kept in touch with them, you kept a relationship with them, i.e. relationship marketing, you should find about 17% of your database turns into a transaction for you a year. 17%. So if you nurture just a hundred relationships well, now he came up with the 33 touch system. There’s a lot of different opinions out there on whether it’s 33 touch or if it’s 40 touches or less. I’ll give you some thoughts on that in a second.
Luke Acree:
But he found that if you touched them and you kept a relationship with them at least 33 times a year, you should see about 17% turn into a transaction. Tom Ferry, who’s the number one coach in real estate right now. He’s been the number one for like the last four to five years. He found that it’s about 10%, in his experience, in his research, if you nurture them appropriately, about 10% should turn into a transaction for you. I want to convince you to go the extra mile with your clients and buy them a cup of coffee, give them a phone call, invest in relationship marketing. Here’s just an example for you. If you have 300 people in your database and we use the lower number, the Tom Ferry number of 10% turn into a transaction, that’s 30 sales.
Luke Acree:
If I use the average sale price in America right now, I don’t know what it is in Atlanta, Georgia, but let’s just say it’s 360,000, that’s 10.8 million in volume. 10.8 million in volume at a 3% commission is $324,000. From 300 relationships. From 300 relationships, if you actually truly nurture them and do relationship marketing on them, you should see 30 deals come from that.
Luke Acree:
Cut this in half. Let’s say this is exaggerated. Let’s say Tom Ferry is wrong. You’re still making well over $100,00 from just nurturing 300 people. If that doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know what will get you excited. Here’s why people don’t do it though. Why they don’t do it is because a relationship takes time. It’s like, if you’re going to marry somebody, you don’t just marry them on the first date, as we all know, unless you’re in Vegas, and maybe you’re not just marrying them on the first date. You got to go on multiple dates. You got to get to know them. You got to buy them flowers. You got to do the things to build the relationship that ultimately end up in the result that you want.
Luke Acree:
So, how do you do this? How do you do this in your marketing? And I’ve shared this before, Krisztina, with you and your crew here, but I want to go over it again because it is truly the framework, it blows my mind how well this framework works if you apply it in your business. My brother, he’s a real estate agent. He’s with Keller Williams in Virginia. He did 320 transactions last year, 320 transactions. He’s already still doing the transaction a day so far in 2022, right? He applies this framework in everything he does. I have so many agents that are doing this and having a ton of success.
Luke Acree:
The framework that I call, it’s the FIT framework. And I give this picture because a picture’s worth a thousand words. And I always tell agents when I go into their business and I consult with them, this is what their business looks like. They have their bucket, which is the business, the water’s the client. And they start these lead generation campaigns, cold calling, seminars, postcard, social media, websites, all great stuff. I have presentations. I could talk to you. I could coach you on different things to do what I’ve seen, what works and what doesn’t work in these areas, but the big mistake everybody makes this is where they stop. They start these marketing campaigns and they’re on this hamster wheel trying to fill up their bucket, trying to fill up, and they don’t concentrate on relationship marketing.
Luke Acree:
And so what happens is slowly over time, you lose the relationships you have. So they don’t refer you. They don’t do repeat business with you. You know the stats probably as well as I do, literally NAR did a study and it literally said 90 plus percent of people will use their agent again, only 26% did. Only 26% did. The water, the clients are leaking out of the bucket because you’re not plugging the holes. You’re not building the relationships with them. How do you plug these holes? It’s the FIT framework. So if your marketing’s out of shape, you got to get it in shape. So FIT stands for frequency, impact and trust. And I’m going to walk through each of them and give you tactical things to do to implement relationship marketing on your business, on your bucket right now. So frequency, most of you understand frequency about the amount of touchpoints you should do. So this is probably one of the most important things is how often should you be in front of people?
Luke Acree:
What frequency of touchpoint do you need with somebody to make sure you have a solid relationship with them? If you are getting a new client, so let’s say I generate a lead on Facebook, Krisztina, you come in, you’re a lead on Facebook to me and I’m generating this new lead. How much do I need to be in touch with Krisztina to build a solid brand, a solid relationship? A good rule of thumb here is at least seven touch points. Over the course of seven weeks, I’d run an eight by eight campaign all the time for my agents, where it’s one touchpoint a week for eight straight weeks. The reason why is when you look at this rule in marketing, they find that if you can get in front of somebody seven times in a short period of time, you’re more memorable. They actually remember something about you and they start to get to know you.
Luke Acree:
So a perfect example would be me here on this webinar with all of you. I don’t know if any of you have heard about me before or not. It might be the first time you’re seeing my face. First time you’re hearing from me. For you to even remember me, you need to see me multiple times over the next couple weeks, maybe through emails that I send to you, maybe we jump on a phone call together, all of that’s going to solidify who Luke Acree is, who ReminderMedia, my company is in your mind. That doesn’t mean you’re ultimately going to use me. I still got to keep in touch after that seven weeks, right? But to really, with the new client, to solidify that relationship, think the rule of seven. That’s a rule in marketing, got to touch this person seven times over the course of seven weeks, we run an eight by eight campaign in our experience.
Luke Acree:
After you move them from a new client, I’ve solidified my brand to this is a core client in my database, how often should I in front of them? What we have found that has generated the most success is 26 touch points. The easiest way to think about it is every two weeks you need to somehow be in front of that relationship. At least once a quarter, that touchpoint should be a physical interaction. So that might be a cup of coffee with Krisztina, that might be for time efficiencies. If I have a 300 people in my database, a phone call. Once a quarter, getting on the phone with the people in your database and having a conversation with them. We find that 26 times has generated results for us of our actually turning into leads. Frank Isoldi is a client of ours. He does 60 million a year. He’s in New Jersey. He hits his core people 26 times.
Luke Acree:
Jordan Mott, he’s farming a neighborhood. He did 120 million, I believe last year in sales. It’s unbelievable. He’s out in Silicon Valley, so the prices are a little higher, but still unbelievable agent. He’s hitting his people every three weeks. Minimum that you should hit your database is once a month. Minimum touchpoint to your database, once a month. I found that once a month was not enough with all the noise going on, with all the other people that are trying to get their attention. I found that 26 times was really something that we found we got results from. So that gives you a tactical, “Hey, go look at your database. Are you getting in touch with them 26 times? What should these touch points look like?” That’s really where the I comes in, in impact.
Luke Acree:
So I want to talk about that is if you’re taking notes, underline I. Because you can be frequent, but if it’s not valuable, if it doesn’t create impact, it’s going to give you the wrong impression or make your client think about you the wrong way. The example I tend to give is a lot of us like to put our logos and stuff on things, like pens, right? Or t-shirts, right? So if I sent Krisztina this pen, or Amy, I see you’re on the webinar, if I send you this pen 26 times a year, it’s frequent. You’re going to know who Luke Acree is. You’re going to start associating me as the pen guy, right? So that brand association’s going to start happening, but not only that, you’re not going to see me in the most powerful light, because it’s not impactful. You don’t need any more pens. It doesn’t change your life. It’s not… Yes, it’s unexpected that you’re getting 26 pens from me, but it’s not unexpected in a good way. It’s unexpected in a bad way.
Luke Acree:
So you got to think, how do I create impact with people? Why is impact so important and how do you do it? Well, there’s two ways I think you can create impact in your marketing. One is through quality. The second is through personalization. So I want to talk about personalization first. There was a study done at a university and what they were trying to figure out is what causes teachers, like your teacher from high school, what causes a student to remember their teacher and see their teacher as valuable. I could ask all of you like, who’s the teacher that made the most impact on your life and why? And that was the question that this study went and asked a bunch of people, “Hey, who is the teacher that made the most impact on your life and why?”
Luke Acree:
And here’s what’s so crazy about the data that came back. The data that came back was not data that said, “Well, I love Krisztina, my teacher in high school, because they had this PhD and they taught this course.” Or, “I love Krisztina because they were an excellent lecturer. Like, their presentations were phenomenal.” That was not the overwhelming amount of data that came back. The overwhelming amount of data that came back of what made a teacher memorable and caused the most impact on that student’s life was that teacher got to know that student personally. That teacher got to know what that student’s dreams were and got invested in that student’s career or their trajectory, you might say, and that’s what made that teacher memorable. It’s obvious when you say it out loud, you’re like, “Yeah, of course. That’s what makes a teacher stand out in my mind is they actually invested in me.”
Luke Acree:
So think about your clients. What’s going to make you impactful to that database of 300 that you have as an example that I just gave you? Do you know them personally? And how do you get to know them personally at scale? The tactic that I give here, that’s a great exercise to go through is the FORD methodology, the FORD methodology stands for, the F stands for family, the O stands for occupation, the R stands for recreation, and the D stands for dreams. So look at your database and ask yourself, if I’m a friend of Krisztina and she’s in my database, do I know about her family? Do I know about her occupation? Do I know about what she’s into, her hobbies? Do I know about her dreams? So if Luke Acree’s in your database, what you’re going to find out is Luke Acree’s married to his wife, Megan. They had first little girl, Evelyn. She just had her first birthday.
Luke Acree:
What do you know now you can do? Well, now you know, guess what? You could give a text message. “Hey, Megan and Luke, was thinking about you today. I know Evie just had her first birthday. Hope you guys enjoyed. I know the first one’s a memorable one.” All of a sudden it’s impactful you remembered them, right? You knew something that was going on in your life. Heck, you could take it to the next level, send Megan and I a gift for little Evelyn. All of a sudden it’s our real estate agent sending us a little gift. Unbelievable. Think about your CRM. This is what a CRM is for. You want to manage your contact and you want to try to get as much detail as you can on these people. So you know how to… When you make your quarterly call and you’re thinking to yourself, okay, Luke, you’re telling me I need to reach out four times a year. What am I going to say? What am I going to do?
Luke Acree:
You want to find out these four pillars. And you can talk about these things because now you can call Luke and Megan up and go, “Hey, Luke and Megan, haven’t talked to you in a while. Just want to check in, see how life’s going. How’s little Evie doing?” And of course, you’re looking at your CRM right there, and you have the notes on me, but it makes it more impactful. As you find out these four pillars on Megan and I and the people on your database, you now know how to market to them. We offer social media here at our company. We have a library of content that we give to our clients. And the main thing I teach our clients to do is what I call the five for five.
Luke Acree:
Here’s 2,500 plus articles. Every different topic you can think of, take five minutes each day, pick five people in your database, go to their Facebook wall, or when you post this piece of content, tag them in the actual post. So if you know Luke and Megan, they have their little daughter, Evelyn, but also part of their family is Bills and Nora, our two Labradors, you can literally go to our library of content, search dogs, find an article on dogs, post it on my Facebook. “Well, hey, Luke was thinking about you today. Hope Bills and Nora are doing well. Thought you might like this article on dogs.” And that is so powerful. Why? Because now your top of mind to me. I’m thinking about you. I remember you now. Write this stat down if you want to make sure you understand the power of why you need to be remembered. 82% of sellers only interview one agent.
Luke Acree:
That’s the latest stats from NAR. That’s the 2021 stats. 82% of sellers only interview one agent. That means you must be first. When people think real estate, and I’m going to sell my home, if you’re not the first person in the door, if you’re not the first person they think of, you’re going to miss out on that business. So doing a simple five for five, where you take five people, you post something to their wall, you DM them, you text message them today, over the course of 30 days, over the whole month, you’ve hit your whole database with a personal message that gets them to think of you. And what’s so great about this too, is you also get a hack on the algorithms of Instagram and Facebook. The more you engage with your database on Instagram or Facebook, the more they see your content.
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Luke Acree:
So if you’ve ever wondered, man, how do I get my content to show in front of my sphere? Go and engage with them. Trust me, like, when you friend somebody for the first time, you start seeing their content. Why? Because Instagram or Facebook wants to see, hey, you just friended this person, are you going to engage with what they’re posting? If you don’t engage, you’re going to no longer see that stuff in your feed. If you engage with it, you’re going to start seeing more of their stuff in the feed. So if you can get all of the people in your database to engage with you, then they’re going to see more and more of your content. And guess what? When you put your listings out or you put your educational pieces on real estate, they’re going to see that too. And that’s going to build your brand and credibility from the business side as well.
Luke Acree:
A really good tactic that you can use on social media is start a Facebook group for your core relationships. So we interviewed a guy, Will Penney. He sells about 200 plus homes a year in Ohio. Awesome guy. He is a fanatic about Facebook groups now, because he kept posting on his Facebook business page and realized he gets no engagement, right? Because Facebook kind of limits your post when you post as a business. So what he did is he started a Facebook group. He invited all of his friends, all of his core people to this Facebook group, he gets insane engagement. And all he does is he does fun stuff, he says, in the group. A lot of times he’ll post stuff like, what’s your dream vacation, the islands or the mountains? And you would be so surprised, people in his sphere are just commenting, “Oh, I love the islands” or, “I love the mountains. This is where I go.” And he learns about his sphere. He stays in front of them. It’s just one touch point that he can give.
Luke Acree:
All right. So that’s personalization. The more personalized you can make your message to your clients, the better your messages are going to be. How do you do that at scale? It can be simple. You can set things where you’re touching people 26 times a year, but maybe one of your touch points is their birthday. Maybe one of your touch points should be a phone call once a quarter. You get into your CRM, you’re capturing the four pillars. Most of the people, when you start, you will know none of the four pillars, the FORD method on them. Your goal is to know that stuff. So what’s the phone call about? Is to try to learn more about your clients. That’s relationship marketing, right? Takes a long time to do, but the effects of it in the long term ROI is substantial.
Luke Acree:
All right. The last in this FIT framework is trust. Before we get to trust, I want to touch on quality for impact. So you’re marketing, you want to make it personalized, but you also want to make sure you’re delivering quality. Quality can be done two ways. One, can be done from the actual quality of what you’re sending them. So one of the reasons why our magazine that I’m holding up here works so well is because when people perceive it, when they receive it in the mail, how they perceive it is as a gift, they don’t perceive it as just a mailer or just a flyer. They don’t just toss it. They perceive it, because there’s some quality to it. But the quality doesn’t just have to be the physical product, though that’s important. The quality can also be the quality of the content that you’re putting out.
Luke Acree:
And one of the things that makes content quality is when you’re giving away free, valuable information that usually people have to pay for, right? So you have all these questions that are asked to you all the time in real estate that you know you’re the expert in. You’ve spent years knowing the market. Give that away for free, you’ll be so surprised how people just start receiving your content, appreciating your content because you’re giving them away all of your trade secrets in a way, but it’s free, valuable content that they look up to and they respect. The other way you can do quality content is making sure it’s authentic.
Luke Acree:
When I go to an Instagram page of a real estate agent and it’s all just solds, it’s all listings on there, I’m out. We interviewed a top agent and you guys should follow her on Instagram. She masters this idea of authentic content. Her name’s Shannon Gillette. So look her up on Instagram. She’s out in Arizona. We interviewed her on the podcast. She said she did 90 million in sales last year volume. And most of it came from Instagram. And her number one tip was people treat Instagram like a commercial when it really should be treated as a reality TV show. So one of the ways you can do quality content to build relationships with your sphere is be authentic, post about yourself, what you’re into, right? So, look at the FORD methodology for yourself, your family. Are you sharing that stuff? The post that get the most engagement on my Instagram are when I post about little Evie and Megan, not when I’m posting these business tips, even though I hope they get engagement, it’s when I’m posting about Megan, Evie and I doing something, right?
Luke Acree:
Or, I’m the son of a pastor, I’m super involved in my church, my local church. That’s passionate to me. That’s authentic to me. And so as I post about that type of stuff that I’m into, my tribe gets attracted to me, and the people that are in my database, they know the true Luke. And then when they meet me in person, I’m no different in person and it solidifies the trust. And what’s the number one thing people are looking for in their real estate agent? Is trust. They want that trusted advisor and this plays into it. So quality is not just about the physical product. It’s also about the content you’re delivering.
Luke Acree:
So you got to be frequent, got to create impact, and ultimately it has to lead to trust. What I always tell people is, look, you can be frequent with impact, but you’re going to end up with a bunch of best friends if you don’t add this last category of trust on, because people will see you all the time, they’ll love the stuff you’re sending them, they’ll feel like they know you personally, but you need them to also see you as the agent of trust. You need to them to see you, I always call it the SME, the subject matter expert. So when they wake up today and they decide, you know what? I need to list my home. You need them to be thinking of your name. That there’s no one that knows more about the real estate market of where I live than this person. The way you do that with your database is you frequently are in front of them with impactful information, but also brand yourself as the expert.
Luke Acree:
There’s three ways I think you can easily do this, that I have on the slides on the screen. You can showcase to your database your accolades. So accolades can be simple stuff. How long you’ve been in the business, how many clients you helped, how many clients you helped in a month, how many clients you helped in a given year. It can be super simple. It can be awards that you’ve won. That’s going to raise the trust in the mind of your sphere.
Luke Acree:
So for me, it’s things like, I’ve worked with a hundred thousand clients. It’s things that I’ve worked in 140 different industries. I’ve been in business for 18 years. I’ve been on the Inc. 5000 list, which is the fastest 5,000 growing companies in the nation. I’ve been on it four years in a row. So those things are my accolades that when I share them with my database, not all the time, not back to back, back to back, but in between the other stuff that I’m doing, it raises the trust in the minds of the people that I market to that, “Oh, Luke really is passionate about marketing. He knows what he’s doing.” Which makes you go, “Man, if I need help with marketing, I’m going to go to this guy.”
Luke Acree:
The second way you can build trust is by what your clients say about you, your testimonials, your reviews. These are so important, especially in the digital world, you need Facebook reviews, you need Google Business reviews. An easy way to get them is do an event for your database. If you’re looking for what should my 26 touch points be? Make one of them an event. My brother, he did a pie event, where he partnered with a local bakery. What he did is he partnered with a local bakery, got pies, invited his whole database to come out and get a free pie. This was right before Thanksgiving. Had a huge turnout. One of the things he asked people to do when they came and they got their pie, he’s talking to them, he’s networking with them, catching up. He asked them if they would write a Google review for him. He collected over 60 reviews that day for his Google Business page.
Luke Acree:
So if you look up Acree Brothers Realty on Google, you’re going to see that their Google Business profile, he collected the majority of those reviews in one day from his sphere and took advantage of having events, another touchpoint, got information from them, so he could keep in touch and build relationships. So your reviews, people care what your clients have to say about you. So it’s like, you guys care what I say about ReminderMedia, but Krisztina’s an actual client of mine. I bet you anything, you’re going to respect her opinion more as an actual user of the product, because I’m the creator of the product and trying to get people to use it, but she’s a user of it. So her opinion is just elevated.
Luke Acree:
So I can build trust by also, in my 26 touchpoint, putting some testimonials out there. Here’s how I’ve helped someone like Krisztina. Here’s how I’ve helped someone like my brother, Steven. Here’s how I’ve helped these clients. Then you can also build trust through educational content. So I’ll use an example that’s not the real estate industry. Think about roofers. So if you’re a roofer right now, you want to make sure people know that if they have any questions, if they need anything, repairs, new roofs, you want them to come to you. So one of the things you could do is put out there educational content about roofs. How do you take care of your roof? How should you properly clean your gutters? What is a good timeframe to realize you need a new roof? What can a roof do if you replace it for the value of your home?
Luke Acree:
You could put out all these frequently asked questions that you have about roofing, you could write emails on a blog post, you can put them up a social media post, you can do all this stuff from a marketing standpoint. Again, it’s not everything is educational content about roofing. You mix in your authentic content. You mix in some personal content like birthday cards or phone calls, but you also put that educational content on roofing. And what happens over time is if you do it long enough, people subconsciously start thinking, Luke is the expert on roofing. If something ever comes up with my roof and I need help, I’m going to Luke, because I’ve just seen him post about it all the time. This guy knows what he’s doing. The same would apply to any industry that you put in there. If you give your valuable information, your educational content away for free, it elevates you in the minds of the people receiving it.
Luke Acree:
The easiest way to do this tactically is every single one of you on this webinar, write down your FAQs, write down your frequently asked questions. That’s your content. That’s your educational content right there. What are the questions you’re getting all the time? And it changes, I’m sure, year to year with the market questions and stuff like that. You should film videos on that. You should write blogs on that, if you have time. You should send out an email to your database on that. You should call people and make sure they’re educated on that stuff. That’s your content that you can give out. When you do these three things, this is when this trifecta comes together to where people know you, like you and trust you.
Luke Acree:
So if you look at your relationship marketing system, you should ask yourself, “Am I hitting people at least 26 times a year? Is my stuff personalized? At least some of the touch points,” not all of them. It’s not realistic to have every single touchpoint totally personalized, but, “Do I have personalization within my touch points? Do I know about my clients from the FORD method to make it as impactful as possible?” You should be asking yourself these things, and then, “Am I showcasing my client testimonials? Am I showcasing my accolades? Am I showcasing educational content? And am I doing that over the course of a year, 26 times?” And if you are, Gary Keller says 17% of your database should turn into a transaction. Tom Ferry says 10% of your database should turn into a transaction. If you do this for just a hundred people, that’s 10 sales. What’s 10 sales worth for you in 2022? Right? So that’s the way you got to think about it. I know this and I can speak on this with such conviction is that we’ve been doing this for so many…
Luke Acree:
I’ve sent over a hundred million pieces of direct mail, 500 million marketing emails, millions spent on Facebook advertising and social media. One of our products is our print magazine. And what I tried to do is boil down, okay, what have we learned from our experiences of what causes a campaign to work, what causes people to become raving fans? And we found that, man, if you can be frequent with impactful information, but also brand you as the business of trust, that’s really where the magic happens. So our magazine, the reason why it’s lasted so long is because it’s frequent, it’s a subscription, goes out to your database constantly, it’s impactful because it’s not just about real estate. It’s actually content-filled with people that they can enjoy. It’s also unexpected, because everybody expects to get a marketing piece from you like a postcard or a flyer or an email, but they don’t expect to get a high quality magazine from you filled with content that’s more just about their enjoyment than yours.
Luke Acree:
But at the same time, you can customize the back covers, the covers, the tarot cards with client testimonials, with market updates, with, maybe reviews, maybe things like your accolades to brand you as the business of trust. And you do that consistently enough, you’re going to see a referral rate come from your database that you’re marketing to. We do this on the digital side. So we have emails. So not only your digital magazine, we have emails like local content, where you can send the local events that are happening in your community to your database, brand it to you. You can do social media where you schedule out all your social media with content that your clients would like. We’ve been doing this stuff. And the reason why it’s been working as I went back and said, “How do I boil down all this knowledge that we have into something that’s bite size, that people can remember?”
Luke Acree:
And that’s where we spent the time to develop the FIT framework, which is frequency impact and trust. My encouragement to you is, whether you use us or don’t use us, you need to make sure that you have the frequency, the impact and the trust happening with your marketing, because that’s what’s going to sustain you, that’s what’s going to build a brand. If you’re interested in our stuff, the magazine, I always tell people it’s less than a hallmark card. It’s $4.19, and that in includes the shipping and handling. So that includes it. So it’s $4.19. Minimum is not a thousand magazines. Minimum is literally only 50. So, you can hit your 50 top relationships for $209.50. Goes out six times a year. So that’s six touch points for you to help you out with your 26 that you’re trying to build. We do normally have a $300 setup fee.
Luke Acree:
With Krisztina, and what we’re doing, we’re reducing that down to 99.99. And we’re also going to give 15 free magazines to anybody who wants to try it. So if you are interested in this and go, “Hey, I would love to find out. Hey, how do I build out these 26 touch points?” We can build out to 64 touchpoints for you with our print magazine and our digital components. So we can sit down with you and walk you through all that stuff, but if you’re interested to learn more about what we’re doing to help you with the FIT framework, would love for you to take advantage of that. You can go to remindermedia.com/bell, that’s Krisztina’s landing page that we’ve put together, but real really appreciate all of you guys joining, listening to this. I’d love to take questions, if you have any questions or if I can help you anymore. Really appreciate the opportunity as always, Krisztina, and hope you guys got a lot out of it.
Krisztina Bell:
Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I made some notes actually for me. I like the 82% of sellers only interview one agent though. That’s interesting.
Luke Acree:
Yeah, that was brand new. That came out… So NOR puts out a buyer profile report every year. I don’t know if you guys look at it or get it, but I read all that stuff and that came straight out of that.
Krisztina Bell:
Yeah. I tell agents in my home stage agency class to go there because there is some really good statistics on the buyer and seller side. And they also have Home Staging statistics on there too. I like the pie thing. I remember you talking about your brother with the pie day thing, because you know that my dad is in the healthcare industry. So we’re coming up with a memory care. We’re opening up memory care in our senior living community. And I’m like-
Luke Acree:
Oh, I love that.
Krisztina Bell:
…for Ideas. And so we’ve done a pie thing where people can drive in and pick up a pie, kind of thing.
Luke Acree:
It’s amazing how much people love their pies. And I would encourage you if you don’t have a lot of money, which I totally understand. A lot of us don’t, right? Is you can partner with other businesses. They want to get their brand out to your database just as much as you want to. So your title company, your mortgage company can help chip in. You can go to the pie, the bakery company, and they could probably give you discounts. Like, there’s a bunch of stuff you can do to help business owners support each other.
Krisztina Bell:
We brought out, actually believe it or not, I know I’m talking about the healthcare thing again, but we managed some other assisted living facilities and believe it or not, we did the first… We’re probably the first ever senior living community to have like four food trucks come and park themselves right out front in part of that community, which was really cool. So we’re trying to do something like that again. Don’t see any questions unless you guys want to put a question or so in the chat box, this is my latest Good to Be Home Magazine, which I love. But also you can put a letter inside too, which I love. And then the tarot cards, the recipes and whatnot. And then you go kind of mail it for everybody too, which I love. Because you can just give them the mailing and you don’t have to do anything. They mail it all out for you, which I love as well, but-
Luke Acree:
And then the key is the calls. I would tell you guys is the key is… One of the things we will do for you is we’ll analyze your database and try to predict who’s most likely to list in the next six to 12 months, that’s free included in with the magazine. So we run it through an algorithm that it’s looking at public record, data points, thousands of them and trying to make what is called correlations that, hey, when this happens and this happens, we find that when these data points exist, the chances of someone listing their home in the next six to 12 months is very high. So we will score your whole database and then point out to you who’s most likely to move. So what we encourage clients to do is that’s who you should call this time, right?
Luke Acree:
So you should send the magazine out. These are the people most likely to move, call up, use the magazine as your reason to call. “Hey Krisztina, I was thinking about to you. I just got my latest issue of Good to Be Home. I know I’m sending it to you as a gift. Want to check in, see how’s it going. Hey, I don’t know if you saw that article.” Use the magazine as your intro and then go, “Hey, I don’t know if you know what’s going on with the market right now.” And then slowly go into offering like a free CMA, educating them on what their home might be worth. And that’s what easily turns the combo to figure out, is this person interested looking to move? Are they not? Do they have a relative they’re looking for? Because some of the data we look at is like search data. So have they requested comparative market analysis before on these public sites, data from sites like realtor.com, Zillow, that type of idea.
Krisztina Bell:
Interesting. I did not know you that you did that. The only other place that I have seen that this person might potentially list is there’s a app that they teach a class here in Atlanta. The homesnap.com app. And on Homesnap, it’ll say most likely if there’s like a little comment there, which I thought was kind of interesting, but I didn’t know you guys did that.
Luke Acree:
Yep. That’s all three included into your subscription. It’s just trying to give you… Like, you got to be first, right? It’s all about being first. It’s like 82% of seller shoots the first one, right. So if we can just give you a little edge that, hey, Vicky Howard, she’s likely to move or Katie, you’re likely to move. Jamie, you’re likely to move, I want to reach out to you to make sure I just get my name in front of you off her value. Do whatever I can to make sure I’m solidified in your mind.
Krisztina Bell:
And people like getting mail. I still like getting mail, besides emails and things like that. And now of course, I see you mentioned too, I think one of your 15 minute segments about the text messaging, like there’s different programs you can do. And I actually made a note of that. And over Christmas, I should have used a program, but instead I was copy pasting one by one and went down my whole entire VIP list of people. And so Merry Christmas from, [inaudible 00:52:11] and I made this cute little thing, but I text messaged everybody. And then I was calling some people and they were all like, “Oh, hey, what’s going on?” But I’ve done a lot more phone calls with our clients and with mostly agents and some of them will just talk, talk, talk about whatever’s going on. It helps me to know what’s happening in the industry too. I’m like, “So what’s happening out there?” Because they’re asking me, “How busy are you?” And so it’s kind of been an interesting, more interesting conversations.
Luke Acree:
Never let a holiday go to waste, as they say. Meaning take 20 people in your database, pull out your phone. “Hey, Krisztina, thinking about you to day. Hope you have a great Presidents’ Day.” And it’s so unexpected. Like, it’s random, like Presidents’ Day. You can make it laugh, right? “Hey, I hope you have a great Presidents’ Day. I know no one’s reaching out to you on president’s day, but I wanted to make sure you knew I was thinking about you. Anyways just want to tell you I appreciate you being a client, and if you ever need anything, I’m here for you. Thank you so much.” Shoot that video to them, they’ll remember it.
Krisztina Bell:
So there’s the whole texting thing now. I’m like, “Oh Lord.”
Luke Acree:
Yeah. So don’t, what I would encourage people as we wrap up is don’t get overwhelmed, get it down to bite size things you can accomplish. So you’re not going to accomplish all of it overnight, but what’s one thing you could commit to? Can you commit to calling your database once a quarter? If you do that, that’s probably the most effective change that you will make in your business in 2022 believe it or not. Like literally cost you no money, but your time, call your database one quarter. It’s amazing how many people find gold in their database when they do that, maybe it’s, you’re going to commit to doing, “Okay, Luke, you said minimum of 12 touch points. I’m going to make sure my drip is at least 12 touch points for 2022.” And that way, when you make and have these small wins, it gives you momentum in your business and it influences your confidence. And we execute based upon our confidence and we don’t execute based upon fear.
Luke Acree:
And so if you can just break it down to something bite size, get the momentum going, accomplish that task, that will influence your confidence and then add the next thing on. And then also you have momentum going, but when you’re at a standstill, right? When’s the hardest to get momentum? It’s when it’s at standstill. That’s when it needs the most push. And so you got to just take that leap, pick something you can bite off and influence your confidence to do the next thing.
Krisztina Bell:
Yeah, definitely. No, I appreciate that so much. And I’ve been doing that very much and I did my Facebook community group too, with our clients and talking with agents that way, but this has been a really great webinar and by the way, we definitely recorded it. So if you all that joined us, want to review it again and maybe you missed a couple things or had to step out and take a phone call or whatever, because I know that happens. With real estate agents, to know what’s going on, just to email me and my information, you guys probably follow me on Instagram. You probably have my email, because otherwise you wouldn’t have heard about this webinar. So I do appreciate you guys joining us. Thank you, Amy, Andrea, Jamie, Katie hopped on and Kristen. Actually, Katie hopped on later. Vicky, all you guys are hopping on and off. So thanks so much for joining us. Luke, we definitely, I think should do this one again, because some people might have missed out. Maybe we’ll pick another day. Maybe not a Wednesday, maybe a Monday.
Luke Acree:
No problem at all. Really appreciate you and appreciate everybody joining. We’d love to connect. If you’re on social, all my social handles are right there on the screen now, but I’d love to connect. You can ask me any questions, obviously no pressure to use our product or anything. If I can help you, I would love to do that.
Krisztina Bell:
Our VIP No Vacancy clients actually are going to get access to that landing page and some other special deals. So, we’re excited about it. Thank you again, Luke.
