Finding The Hungry Crowd To Get A Cut Above The Competition

Let's go to our first caller.

Alison, how are you?

I'm good, thanks. How are you?

I'm amazing, thank you. So you're calling in because you need marriage advice?

Well, marriage advice I guess everyone always needs, but more specifically, advice for my business.

Okay, tell me what's going on.

Well, I am a Realtor in the Chicago market, and I'm about three years into my business, and I'm trying to find that right mix where.

And I'm struggling with the notion of am I still doing some print direct mail marketing? Should I be focusing more of my efforts on the social side of advertising? What kind of advice can you give me on that?

Okay, so I need to know a little bit more because usually marketing is more about having something that converts and then putting it in different places. But if you don't have a message that converts, it doesn't matter if you put it on digital or traditional. So tell me what your ads say and what separates you from the other realtors out there, if that makes sense.

Sure.

Why?

And I guess that's part of, maybe part of the struggle too, is just being able to differentiate myself to kind of get my name out there in front of all the other realtors that I'm competing with in terms of getting the listings and grabbing the attention of those buyers. And I guess even if we break it down a little bit more, more specifically, if I'm advertising a property, I'm wondering if I should still be just putting that out there on something like Facebook and promoting it with the boosted post, or should I still be sending direct mail pieces? I'm wondering where.

You know, where buyers are still looking for homes these days.

Okay, so give me an idea of the type of houses you're selling or that you most mostly sell.

Probably in the 350 to $500,000 price point. You know, traditional homes, we find a lot here in the Chicago area.

You know, most. Most of what I'm selling are remodeled homes. They're well done. It's nothing like a tear down. It's nothing that someone has to put a lot of money into. It's just, you know, trying to find the right buyer who needs to get into that neighborhood or in that price point, needs a little bit more space or is downsizing.

Okay. And what are like if we take like the last three houses that you sold and we kind of profile the seller and the buyer. Right. So because we have people on both ends of it that you want. Am I correct? Assuming that.

Sure.

What. What commonalities do they have in that range. Like where.

What kind of jobs do they have? So tell me what they did for a living.

Well, the. The last one that I closed, it was an older couple who was looking to downsize and move out of state. Those were my clients, the sellers. And then the people who bought it were, you know, a younger family that needed four square footage from the home that they were currently living in, so.

Exactly. A trade. One's getting smaller and one's getting bigger.

Exactly, exactly. And I mean, certainly within the state of Illinois, we're finding more and more people who are 50 plus who are looking to not only downsize but also leave the state. So I am getting more and more seller clients with that, with that in mind.

And I guess the buyers, I mean, my buyers are kind of all over the place. I've got some buyers who are upsizing out of a condo, looking to start a family. I've got some buyers with kids that just need a little bit more space. So they like the same neighborhood, but just want a bigger house.

Some sellers that are just same thing. They've outgrown the house. They want to stay in the area, and they're selling and moving because they need more space.

And the person that is upsizing, that wants more space or better neighborhood, what kind of are their fears in buying a bigger house? Like, what is going on with them emotionally.

When they're going through that process?

That's a good question.

I mean, I guess everyone's fears could be a little bit different. I. I can't say that I can communicate for any of my clients that I'm working with now. Any fears that we've talked about in terms of upsizing.

I don't know.

I would encourage you to pay attention to that a little bit because, for example, like, your marketing would really cut through if you knew that the fears of the buyers were credit. Right. Or if the fears were what the payment would be or that they wouldn't be able to sell the house they're in and get, you know, the new house or whatever it is, there's a way for us to put that into the marketing, knowing that those are the fears and then that's what we're going to market. But I think if you. If you're a realtor and you're just marketing to market and you don't have a niche or you don't have something that's really playing to their fears and their emotions, you're. You're mostly probably wasting your money. And so what I would like to find for you is I'd like to find a niche and something that separates you from everybody else. And so I would kind of go back and I would. I would talk to the, you know, the last three or four that you've sold and ask them, hey, going through the process before you reached out to me or before, you know, I found you, before you decided to buy the house, what were you thinking? And kind of understand that, because I think that there's something in there about payments, there's something in there about credit closing fast, those sort of things that would separate. If you. If we could really play into those emotions, it would separate you from everybody else. Does any of that give you any ideas?

Yeah. No. And it makes sense that, you know, like you said, you want to call out to something specific, call it to someone's fear and a way that I can provide a solution to that in order to kind of grab their attention and start the conversation. Because if I'm just throwing the same information out there that others are, then it just kind of gets lost in the weeds, regardless of through direct mail or whether it's online.

Yeah. The biggest mistake is to think that print or social media and online marketing are different from each other. And really what it is is finding what message resonates and converts and finding a hungry crowd for that message. So I think we talked about this on the Business Outlaws podcast and maybe heard it, but I'll tell the story again is there's a great copywriter that in one of his books, he. He says that if there's four people in a room and we're all opening hamburger restaurants or hamburger stands, and he says, I will give everybody an advantage. What advantage do you want? And so, you know, most of the people going down the line would say, I want to have the best meat. And somebody else will say, I want to have the best location. And somebody else will say, I want to have the best buns and my gr. Grandma's secret special sauce. And, you know, everybody focuses on the commodity and the hamburger. And he says, okay, well, I will outsell and beat you all, because all I want is a hungry crowd. And that's really what we want our marketing to do, is we want our marketing to serve the hungry crowd. And so if you see that most people are downsizing and upsizing, you know that that's a hungry crowd. And now how do we figure out what their emotions are, their fears, their ambitions, and. And then how do we serve that up to the hungry crowd to get them to come into our hamburger? Stand. It's really pretty simple at the end of the day if you figure that out and then you will actually find that print and online when you're serving it directly to a hungry crowd, you will get better results. I had the same sort of experience when I ran a BMW store where the owner of the store was handling marketing and he would judge the marketing by his friends at the country club telling him that they heard his commercial. So he was running commercials on the stations that he listened to, but he was a rich white guy in Orange County, California. And BMWs, the volume is in the 3 Series, the cheaper car. And so where the 3 Series, we barely sold any 3 Series and we sold some sevens and like the higher end cars. But what I did is I moved all of my marketing to where the hungry crowd is, which was the three series. And I doubled the volume by marketing to the entry level buyer and putting all my money there. And then I got the seven series because the older clients aspire to be younger and they want to go where the younger crowd is going. And so I went where the hungry crowd and the volume was with my marketing and I increased sales automatically by, you know, figuring, figuring that out that the volume was at the three. And so I gotta think that I don't know that it's credit score that is the ambition of the family that wants to move out of a condo. But I do know that you can, if you figure out what their fears are, you can then market to customers directly that are in condos that want to upsize. And then you can make a deal with a realtor in Phoenix because most of your clients are moving to Phoenix, believe it or not. You probably know that, right? Some are, yeah, I know I had a house in Bolingbrook, Illinois for a while and everybody was moving to Phoenix or they were in Phoenix during the winter because the winters are unbearable. So you know, you could do some sort of marketing thing where you're co marketing with somebody in Phoenix where it's like, hey, move to Phoenix and get, you know, your closing costs taken care of or I don't know, relocation or a $2,000 moving credit to an older couple that wants to downsize. And now you're feeding something to a hungry crowd that's going to actually get them to take action. And so, you know, niching into that, you could be playing both sides of that. Well, you got to figure out what the fears are of the family that wants to upsize and then figure out what is the couple that wants to get out of Cold Chicago and downsize. Is it a $2,500 moving credit that you split with a realtor in Phoenix?

That. Does that. Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. And so refocus my efforts.

Yeah, it's really. The wrong question is where should I market? The right question is, how do I figure out where the hungry crowd is?

And.

And then serve up what they. What they're the most hungry for? And then all your marketing online and print will work. So I would love if you would. If you would go interview and then call me back and kind of let me know what you find, and I can help you narrow it down a.

Little bit, but, yeah, that'd be great.

And ask them their fears, like, what were you thinking, really? And when you're doing it, think of yourself as an FBI interrogator. They're going to give you the right answer probably the third time you ask the same question. So don't be afraid to kind of prod the same question over and over again to really find out what. What their fears were, because they won't. They're gonna. The first answer will be the one they think you want to hear, and then you'll really get into their subconscious and what they were thinking. But that's where the magic is for your marketing.

Okay, perfect. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much.

Thanks. Alison, call me back. I'd love to hear what you find out.

All right.