Niche Marketing Strategy for Real Estate Agents - Kevin Ward

Hi there, it's Kevin Ward, the founder of yes Masters Real Estate Success Training and the author of the new number one best selling book, the Book of Yes, the Ultimate Real Estate Agent conversation guide. And today I want to talk to you about your niche or your niche, what we call niche marketing or niche marketing. I'm going to call it niche because that's where I learned it. And that's just, I like it, I like it best. So we're going to pretend like today it's niche marketing. You've heard the saying the riches are in the niches. And I guess that's why I think it's niche, not niche, because it rhymes with riches. So the riches are in the niches and they can be. However, I want to challenge that thinking just a little bit today because I heard that ever since I started real estate was if you really want to get successful in real estate, the riches are in the niches. And it can be true, but it's not necessarily true. And if you decide to focus on a niche, you can also be catching, kissing off or missing a lot of great opportunities that are out there. So whenever you're, if you're thinking about what niche should I specialize in, or I'm in a niche right now and I'm deciding do I want to stay in that niche, do I want to expand, how do I make the decision to do that? And listen, there's a lot of great niches out there in the real estate market. I mean there's the first time home buyers niche, there is probate niche, there is distressed sellers or notice of defaults or short sell niche. There's a foreclosure niche for people that want to work strictly with banks and foreclosures. There is the luxury home home market, there's the resort market, there are vacation markets, there's condo markets. I mean there's so many different niches. There's geographically you can do geographic targeting where you just pick one niche and I'm going to just work in one big subdivision or whatever. You can have your specialty, your niche can be expired listings or it can be for sale by owners. There's so many different niches that you can develop that all of them have potential. However, whenever you limit yourself to a niche, the question is, is that niche concept, is that niche approach, that niche strategy to my business, is that going to expand my ability to build to create business and revenue and profit, or is it going to limit it? And the concept behind niche marketing is that if you go deep, you can Actually build a more successful business because you have more specialty, more credibility and so forth. However, again, as I mentioned, I'm going to challenge that just a little bit. And here's the reason. Have you ever thought about where the idea, where the concept of niche marketing actually came from? Where did it originate? And here's where the idea the concept of niche marketing originated. It originated nearly 100 years ago. Back in the early 1920s, niche marketing came in as an approach for if you had a product or service, how do you get the most profitability in selling your product or service to the market? And here was the reason. Because for you to get the word out to the market about your product or your service, you had to get the word out. And in the 1920s, every single touch that you made to a prospect, every single touch, whether whether you were selling life insurance or whether you were selling, you know, pantyhose, it didn't. Or encyclopedias, it didn't matter. For you to touch people required a tangible cost, either in dollars or in man hours for you to hours, whatever. But in other words, it was either money or time. It was a fixed resource for me to market out to the world. So if it was direct mail or newspaper or whatever it was, there was actually a tangible cost associated with every connection, every person that I touched with my marketing message to get the message out. And so companies knew that for us to get the most return on our investment, if we'll focus on a niche, that we can more effectively hit them with the messaging of our product or service over and over and over again. And we establish credibility, we establish the value, we establish goodwill from our customer base and so forth. And the niche actually made sense both from a strategic approach of getting more customers, but also of getting more profitability. Because just to do a shotgun blast of a shotgun blast of wide base marketing got very low return, very slow return, and it was very expensive. So if you go niche, go deeper, build more relationships with people, you're going to get a better result. However, have you noticed that a few things have changed in our world since the 1920s? Whereas used to, for us, for you to be able to get the word out to people, to you, to market to people, you had to literally, it was either a tangible cost, money or time. It was a resource that you had to do that. However, because of technology, a lot of things have changed. So I think about my business, for example, as a real estate trainer and a Coach, is that 20, 30 years ago, the way that real estate coaches and trainers built their Company was they had to get on the phone and they had to call people. They had to call brokers, call offices, call real estate agents, and then they would literally go and they would travel all over this place to individual real estate offices and companies and they would speak and they would speak and then they would get on the phone and they would call and they would call and they would have to do that over and over and over again nonstop. And they would spend weeks and weeks and months every year traveling and speaking all over the place. Well, technology has completely changed and I was able to build my coaching and training company literally without having to go anywhere, without having to literally leave my home office because I could get on a video, I could shoot a training video that gave great value, great training content, post it on YouTube for free, and I could get exposure all over the globe, literally, and it didn't cost me anything. So all of a sudden, my niche bec real estate agents, I still talk to people and I'll meet people and they'll go and they'll. So what do you do? So I teach real estate agents how to make more money and have a life. And that's what I tell them. And they go, oh, where do you work out of? Or where are you out of? And I said, well, I mean, I have, you know, I tell them why I live here and so forth. But I train real estate agents all over North America and all over, literally around the world. Because our training is all online and it's virtual and I can do conference calls, I can do webcasts, I can do video training, and I can do it anywhere in the world. Why? Because technology has changed. So I don't have to focus on just one area of training real estate agents where I can go to the real estate offices or anything like that. The limitations have just been completely removed. Well, the same is true for real estate is your ability to reach out and touch more people because of technology has removed a lot of the barriers that we had before. Another thing that happened back years ago was that real estate agents were known, worked in very small local markets. Literally they would be in neighborhoods or a small suburb that would be their market. Why? Because you needed to know the market and there just wasn't a lot of data out there if you didn't actually know the market. Well, now, because of technology, because we have an MLS that actually you can go online and you can look any house up that is either active on the market has sold in any time over the last five, sometimes five to 10 years. Is on the MLS with pictures, with full descriptions, with hyperlinks to the tax record. You can literally pull up online the incomplete tax record. If I want to see a house that I've in a, if I want to go on a listing appointment in a neighborhood, in a market I've never been in, 20 minutes away or 20 miles away, it's going to be a 30 minute drive. I can literally get on the MLS, pull up all the homes that have sold in that area for years. I can look at the pictures, I can look at the streets, I can get on Google maps and with the satellite view I can look and I can get a bird's eye view of it. I can literally get on the street because of Google Maps. I can literally get and get a street view in front of the house. I can look all around at the neighbors houses, I can look across the street. Now granted, the picture may be a year or two old, but I can still get a feel for an area that you could not do anything like that even 10 years ago, much less 20, 30, 40 years ago. The world has completely changed in our ability. So now real estate really has become more regional because I can know what's going on, I can know the statistics, I can study market areas. There's so much more information so readily available that was not available before. So your ability to expand your market base is greater than it's ever been before. Now bring all that back to the idea of marketing to a niche or a niche. And that is when I look at, okay, do I want to specialize in just the luxury market or do I want to specialize in just the resort market or do I want to specialize in just this neighborhood? Look, there's nothing wrong with targeting specific places where I want to build business, where I want to get more business and targeting and say I built my business with for sale by owners and expireds because I didn't know anybody and I didn't have any money when I started real estate, I had no money and to be able to do traditional marketing. So I just had to go out and talk to people. And I found out real quick that for sale by owners and expireds were the people that wanted to sell right now. And I would talk to them and learn what to say and how to say it. I could get them to hire me very, very quickly and got business very, very quickly because of that. So in a sense that would be my, could have been called my niche. However, I never limited myself and said, well, I'm not going to work with a referral because I specialize in for sale by owners and expires. So here's the deal. When you limit yourself in a niche, think about what opportunities am I losing or am I missing out on and is it necessary to make that distinction? Is it necessary to do that? Here's my I'm just going to give you now my bottom line suggestion. This is what I tell my coaching members and what I'm going to tell you today. And that is if you're going to specialize in a niche, the best niche to focus on in real estate is motivated sellers in your market, in any price range, in any situation, it doesn't matter. When you've got a motivated seller and you know how to list a home and how to get a home sold for top dollar and you know how to get that result, there is no better market to work in than motivated sellers. And I don't care if they're in a bread and butter type home in the $200,000 or if they're an ultra luxury home, it doesn't matter. The process is very, very similar. Are there some things that are different? Of course, but you can learn to master all of them and you're going to spend less time chasing long term business and more time getting business when your focus is learning how to get motivated sellers and it opens up massive control to your business, massive opportunity and profitability when you do it right. So that's my thinking on niche marketing. I'd like to know what you think about it. If you have any comments, questions, please put them on here. If you like the video, give it a thumbs up and I look forward to talking to you again real soon.