Physical marketing like postcards, magazines, flyers, and print media has taken a backseat over the last numerous years to digital marketing. Every business wants to crush social media Crush Video Crush email as they should. This is in no way me saying those channels aren't worth pursuing. however, not at the expense of dismissing what's worked historically.

A lot of folks say hey, postcards are old school I say that's wrong It all boils down to who are you talking to, how are you talking to them and What needle are you trying to move Because physical marketing may be the very ticket your brand needs to scale and grow and create consideration within your local community so that more buyers and more sellers think of you when the time comes to buy, sell, invest, or refer. So today's conversation is a highly critical conversation that could be a Make It or Break It defining moment in terms of the brand you're building with the marketing that powers that brand As to what channels are you going to leverage now in 2023 and In into your business plan in 2024. So welcome to this weekend marketing. My name is Jason Pantana I'm your host and this is going to be a super fun conversation as I'm going to be joined with an expert in the world of physical marketing talking about magazines, postcards, headlines, what works, What doesn't work, How do you track, how do you measure what are the Kpis that are going to Showcase whether or not what you're doing is working.

So if you're looking to level up your brand and I hope you are because right now there's a line of demarcation that separates the rich and the rest in the marketplace. and we know the agents and the teams that are winning and crushing at the highest level. They have strong. Brands They're integrated into their communities and folks are coming to them because they're absolutely top of mind and they're on that consideration set and physical Marketing may be the piece that's been missing in the puzzle of building your brand.

So I'm so stoked for this conversation and I'm joined by an expert in the field. Mr Luke AE Who is the President of Reminder Media? Luke Thank you so much for being on the show today! How are you man, Dude? I'm amazing man. and after that intro man I am fired up. That is incredible.

I I Do a podcast myself and I'm sitting here in awe like man. That was an incredible intro. So well done Well, thank you thank you! Uh, the fact is, I'm a fan of your work and so intro you and intro. The topic was highly easy.

So for folks who aren't watching, let's do a quick little fly over. Tell them who you are and what your focus of expertise is in the Realms of Real Estate marketing. Sure so appreciate the opportunity to be here and talk to everybody. So Luke Acram The President of Reminder Media Reminder Media.

For those who don't know, we're a marketing company and really our specialty has been in relationship marketing referral-based marketing for been around for about 18 years. Um, work majority with real estate agents so we'll work with about 70,000 real estate agents and our specialty from a product standpoint has been customizable magazines. So maybe people have heard of American Lifestyle magazine that was our Flagship product we launched with. We now have multiple, but we ventured into postcards.

um, years ago and so we really have, um, ventured into this print space and in a big way. And that's really where I've spent the majority of my time. Um, and that's really. You know what we do every single day for agents I Love that.

And you know a lot of folks are like wow. 70,000 folks doing that's incredible. Especially when everybody thought everybody who does direct mail went out of business. So what have folks who have been not paying attention to postcards and magazines and physical mail? what have they been missing out on? Yeah, I mean I Ultimately believe in omnipresent marketing, right? So that's my fancy way of saying like I Think you should be everywhere I Think you should be on social I Think you should be in email I Think you should be in the mailbox I Actually think the mailbox is being ignored right now and there's an opportunity I Think the stats show it if you look up the stats I Think the average person is getting two pieces of direct mail a day versus the person getting a 100 plus emails a day.

So there's a lot of noise right on the digital space and because marketers, when we see something that works, we all run there and it creates a bunch of noise and it's harder to cut through. The reason why I think Print is really successful right now is because Print can still capitalize on some something really key for especially real estate agents. Referrals are the number one source that you should be driving in your business is my belief, and Print marketing allows you to connect more emotionally with your database than digital marketing does and it was interesting. The US Postal Service uh did a a research study with Temple University and they were trying to understand the difference between digital marketing and print marketing.

and one of the biggest things they found is that print marketing has a better ad recall than digital marketing and it makes sense if you think about it because you're seeing ads all the time, the amount of emails you get so you're more likely to be able to recall the print piece in your mailbox. But what I thought was more interesting about the study was that people had a deeper emotional response when they did this uh, study and they literally tracked not only where people's eyes went, they actually put sensors on people. They actually were tracking how they actually responded. And they found that people responded it even more emotionally or got more emotionally tied to the print advertisement than the digital advertisement.

And why I Point that out is because I Think in referral-based marketing, it's what it's about getting people to know, like can trust you. It's about building an emotional connection with your audience. So they see you as a person. They see you as that person they trust.

and I think you're missing out on an opportunity to do that if you don't have a piece of print Marketing in your drip program. So there's so much I Want to unpack there? Uh first. I'm curious what the kinesthetic involvement was was the touch? Because you think about emails, you think about social and videos and again, you all watch the show. If you do watch this show, you know this is predominantly what I talk about on this show.

However, the touch has to be a factor too in terms of helping to send those signals of an emotional response to marketing and the other piece. I Think about and this is a psychology principle I Get into pretty often when it comes to fundamental beliefs about marketing you see I believe like you. this is a referral-based business. predominantly I'm all for Legion but we know that roughly 6 to 70% of all deals buyers and sellers in the US are going to be the result of a referral or repeat business.

So that relationship marketing is absolutely critical for any agent looking to build and scale and maintain their level of business on an ongoing basis. It has to be the relationship. But this psychology principle that I think about a lot is called the Frequency illusion. You made the comment about being Omni Channel being everywhere so to speak and Tom Ferry says all the time you're that agent I see you everywhere And that's the magic phrase in terms of knowing that you're on people's radar you're getting their attention.

And what the Frequency Illusion tells us in a marketing context is that when a customer or a prospective customer is exposed to the messages and marketing of a brand or a business across multiple different mediums, it has a higher recall to your point. It has a higher remembrance to your point because it says it creates the illusion that they're seeing and hearing from you more frequently than you really are because they got the email they saw you on Facebook and they got the in the mailbox, the actual postcard for instance and it's like oh, there they are again. So I think we're very aligned. I I mean my first question I was going to ask you is what are your core principles about real estate marketing I think we sort of unpacked it, but is there anything else you'd add to that? Well, you know it's interesting.

I I Went through a process about a year ago where I was trying to break down because we've been at this for so long and I was trying to understand. What is it about marketing campaigns that really are successful and work? What do they have fundament that the ones that have failed and trust me? I've done a lot of fail campaigns myself that have failed. why didn't they work? And it was interesting and looking at all these different marketing campaigns that we've done over the years, right And what I found was there's three core things that you need in your marketing and I boiled it because I'm a marketer I Can't help myself I Put it in an acronym called Fit and Fit stands for frequency, impact, and trust and just quickly on that. It's most people don't understand when it comes to marketing.

you're probably spending too much time trying to design the perfect piece. I've been there, done that, and you don't realize that it's actually probably more important that you have frequency than the perfect piece because frequency is what creates familiarity and you'll never get to trust. Everybody knows Zig Ziggler No, like in trust, you'll never get to trust. Without familiarity, You can't create familiarity without frequency.

A perfect example of this is me on this podcast. If this is the first time you're ever hearing of reminder Media or Luke Acree, then your your trust in me is probably naturally low. Not because I've done something wrong I just haven't been frequent enough, right? if you start listening to my stuff. If you start seeing me more often like you're saying and these different mediums, your familiarity will rise and your trust will naturally rise from that frequency.

And this is one thing that I always ask people is how frequent should you be? That's the million-dollar question, right? If frequency is a core fundamental, how frequent should you be in your mailers, in your email, your drip and I always tell them this. and if you're taking notes right now, if you're in the car, don't take notes I don't want you to wreck. but if you're taking notes right now I would tell you write this down. The magic number that we've seen over 18 years of doing.

this is more M O R E meaning I was hom school. So maybe I'm confusing numbers with words, but it is more than you're doing today. So if you're doing 12 touch points a year for your database, you should be doing 13. If you're doing 100, you should be doing 101.

I have a client Brian Harris he's top 1% in the financial advising World he's in Annapolis Maryland He does over 200 touch points to his database a year. over 200. Now most people when they hear that number, they go Man, that seems like Overkill But the reality is is Brian Harris is capitalizing on what you talk about. which is he's not just doing 200 pieces of direct mail, 200 emails, 200.

Let's say client events, right? Because that'd be impossible. He's doing 200 touch points spread across all those six different frequencies that you can do to be able to really get him in front of people. And the result of that has been for him. Hey, he's always in front of people, never overbearing and so I always tell people look.

The fundamentals to marketing is you got to be frequent and I would tell you a good Benchmark is at least 26 touch points. So when we're designing touch Point campaigns for people, we try to get them to at least 26 hitting their list. Um and build. From there, they have to have impact And we could talk about impact for a long time because I Think that's really where the the Home Run is and then you've got to have trust and Trust to me is built by your accolades, by your experience, by your testimonial.

There's a lot of things you can do on print marketing to Showcase trust to your target audience to get you elevated there. so if you are fit in your marketing you're not out of shape, you'll be getting a good conversion. You'll be getting a good return on investment. I Love that.

It almost seems like trust is the it equals trust and I think your comments before about familiarity. Certainly, that's a factor because when something's new and unknown, it's untested. But when something's been there for a while and they get accustomed to seeing it again and again and again, there's a level of it's It's we. We talk about this in other videos we call the mere Exposure effect, which is another principle of psychology that impacts marketing Where what's really happening is the customer who's becoming familiar with your brand is mistaking familiarity for trust and it looks like trust.

in this seamless process of they've been there, they're Road tested I can trust in them because time has elapsed where I have a level of comfort. No doubt, you recognize the importance of having a strong brand online offline all the above, but the challenge is digital marketing. Online marketing can be quite challenging and there's a real learning curve to it. So if you're looking to dial in your social media strategy, your Google business profile strategy, your video strategy, your email marketing strategy, make sure to click the link in the description to learn more about marketing.

Pro A series of online courses led by me. they're yours to be watched as many times as you want, with step-by-step screen sharing demonstrations to take you from Rookie to Rockstar. With your email marketing, your social media and video marketing, your local SEO and reviews through your Google business profile, click the link in thep description for all the details I I Really like the fit analogy, let's do take a moment and talk about the impact piece. What does that I Look like From an Impact standpoint, Yeah, so most people make this mistake.

they get into business and they go okay. I need to go tell the world that I'm in business. So what do you do? You start marketing to your list purely with things about your business and everything becomes promotional. Everything becomes transactional.

And most people, when they do their postcards or they do their print advertising, it's all transactional and promotional. The problem with that is you need some of that, but put yourself in the consumer's shoes. You've bought a piece of furniture before you've bought maybe a car before. When your furniture store send you the emails or send you the postcards, your car dealership sends you the postcards.

what do you do with those? And if you're like me, you glance at them. if the promo doesn't hit you at the exact right time, where you're in the buying mode for whatever on that postcard you toss it. And what people miss when it comes to impact is impact is driven through personalization. That's the real key, right? Facebook and Google I've really figured this out.

It's why they make billions right. They they track everything you do, They build an ad profile based upon you and they sell that to advertisers, different companies. and they serve up ads based upon your likes and interest based upon things that you have clicked on or looked at which is personal to you. You can do this even in print marketing.

You can do this by understanding who your target audience is and how do you make your marketing more. uh, personal. So I tell people this: When it comes to content, think about the three: Ease of Content Education, Entertainment endearment. Most of the time real estate agents spend all their time in education and the problem with that is I Don't think about Real Estate 247 I Think about it once or when I need to actually buy our sale which happens what every 7 11 years.

So you've got to show up for people in the 99% of their life and connect with them there if you want to capitalize in the 1% when they actually need your service. so most people stay in the education which might be a just listed just sold, might be a market report. good stuff to send, but you've also got to tap into the entertainment so why not personalize and go like? One of the things we do is here are the local events that are happening in your area, right? So that's personalized to that Target area. If you're going to do education, do education more personalized.

So one of the postcards that my brother I do for him and his team is they take the recent sales that happened actually in that area and they put it on the postcard and then put that person's address on the postcard and basically go, hey, here's the homes that have sold: Do you want to know what your home at 545 Store Road is worth? And because it's actually personalized right to that target audience? they pay more attention. Which ultimately, if people pay attention, you have a chance to get them on your call to action. Um, there was this really interesting, uh, survey done on Impact when it came to remembering teachers I Don't know if you ever heard this before or not, but it's like what makes you think about your like when you think about your high school teacher that was your favorite or your professor in college. why did you choose them as your favorite High School Professor and what was interesting about this data is not what came back, it's what didn't come back.

Nobody said man I love Jason my professor or my high school teacher because he was an amazing lecturer or I love Jason because man, he just had a PhD next to his name. his his credentials were off the hook. Everybody said man I love Jason my high school teacher because he took a personal interest in my life and cared about where I was going I share that with people because if you want people to remember you, if you want people to know like and trust you, you got to take a personal interest in your in their life. You need to send entertaining content You won't get an immediate Roi of someone raising their hand to do a listing, but what you'll get is somebody who feels like you actually care and you're giving them an item of value that they'll tune into and then the last one.

Endearment Man, this is an incredible campaign that all agents should do I Don't know when the podcast comes out but I encourage people to do it around November because Thanksgiving and stuff most people they do education, they even Venture into entertainment. Very few do endearment and endearment to me is how do you connect yourself to the community to give back. And so my brother. What we do is we do a postcard campaign to his 4,000 person farm and it's raising awareness.

It's doing a food drive for the local food bank in his area and what's really cool about this is here's the key to Print marketing: I Think you got to take it from passive to proactive. So he sends out this uh, endearment campaign where it's like hey, I'm raising awareness for the Agape House here I want to collect your canned goods? He sends it to his whole Farm It has his branding but now he has a reason to go knock on the doors. He has a reason to take his passive mailer that goes in the mail as a billboard to go proactive and he goes knocks on those homeowners doors and goes hey, don't know if you saw my uh mailer come in I'm raising awareness for the Agape House I'd Love to connect any caned food that you want to give to them and he gets to meet the homeowner and you were talking about psychology. There's this principle in Psychology called the halo effect and it basically means that when you do something good people take that Association that they see you doing and they put it on everything else you do.

So what I love about it is like if you do this now you shouldn't give to charity just because of the halo effect. but if you in marketing is powerful that if you give and do something endearing to your community you can immediately get the halo effect where people associate that with your brand in real estate and here I mean what I've learned over my journey is that people want to do business with businesses of purpose not businesses of profit right? They want you to make a profit but they want you to do business because they they believe you have a purpose because you actually care and so when I think about like your mailing campaign I challenge people man, educate, but you want to entertain to connect personally and then you want to endear to elevate that trust that hey I'm here because I have a a purpose I'm not just trying to make a profit off of you Yeah I think what's interesting I Was having this conversation during some coaching sessions recently talking about your content on social media and you made the comments earlier on about hey, if it's just a static advertisement, pick Me 5555555 call me to sell your house. If it's just the same ad over and over and over again, it's going to get monotonous. That's going to get annoying, That's going to create ad fatigue over time.

You have to treat your postcards and your physical marketing like your content. If you made a video every day on social media and all you did is say pick Me please to sell your house and then it was the same video Tomorrow you're basically watching Bill Murray and Groundhog's Day at that point in time because it's not helping meet the person where they are and so from a Content marketing standpoint, the principle is hey, it's not about what you want people to know, it's about what they need to know, what do they care about and then being able to supply that And I think a lot of people look at postcards and they look at magazines and they think advertisement I can put the same offer over and over and over again and they don't treat it the way you're recommending it be treated. which is this is another extension of your content and your content is underlying fuel to create consideration. It's about being relational and not transactional and I think a lot of Agents treat it like It's transactions.

I was going to say I would add to your um because I want people to make sure when they do their mailers like you should have consistency of brand but not necessarily consistency of message from the call to action standpoint. The content standpoint because what I have found with mailer specifically is no matter what in marketing, it's a short attention span right? It doesn't matter what marketing you do, you're trying to capture your attention So like you should have your photo. I'm a firm believer front and center. We've done a lot of research for our magazine.

Like should you have your photo on the front cover? Should you not? It's like an 84% lift in brand recognition for clients. If they have it on the front cover, you need to have your photo like Stephen when he does this a nonprofit type postcard right? he still want wants his face front and center because it it it gets that Split Second of brand recall and they associate it with him. He still wants his colors to be the same, He still wants to be seen. Oh yeah it's Stephen but they he doesn't want the messaging always just to be.

Want to know what your home's worth? Want to know what your home's worth? Want to know what your home's worth because people tune it out and so I just wanted to make that delineation of you want your brand to be there but the messaging to change content wise. Same is true in your video strategy. I Used the example before like hey, if you watch a TV show like the TV show Friends Every episode's different, but we all know it's friends. It's the same set.

Yeah, it's the same characters. There's a level of repetition because repetition creates memory or remembrance and so you. It's like you said, you want that brand Association and you're getting fleeting attention I Would also add since we're geeking out on uh, some of the underlying science and uh, psychology behind marketing I Believe showing the face is Paramount uh if you look at Neuroscience there's two different parts of your brain that discern objects versus faces. if I see like this little remote for my light right here.

it's a different part of my brain that says oh, it's a remote for my light right there than when I look at your face when I look at your face, it's a higher functioning part of my brain and so when you put your face in your marketing, you are invoking a higher brain power of computing who you are and creating a tighter Association for your brand. So I agree. Uh, couple of things as we run a little low on time and I want to make sure we we hit some rap fire stuff here. You talked about the importance of personalization.

You talked about the importance of a varied message yet consistent branding elements. What are like, let's go rapid fire. What are some other best practices or core um, core approaches that are effective right now when it comes to the tactics of physical marketing like postcards and letters and flyers and magazines. What else? Um, you know the the principle of Kiss Keep it simple.

Stupid. Um is is so critical and so you want to keep it very, very simple when it comes to your text on your direct mail. Um, and you want to make it so people don't have to think when they're reading what you're asking them right? So a lot of times I see mailers that have just too much on them and you can have more when it's just a Content based card. Maybe you're doing the entertaining thing, but when it comes to when you're trying to get a response like a CMA or something like that, you want one big headline and and the rest to be super.

Just the called. Basically super simple. Uh. another thing I would point out is that you know I mentioned omnipresent marketing.

You want to tie direct mail to online, so it's the tech is there today to do it. So with your direct mail, you can put QR codes on your direct mail. 36% of Um phones right now are scanning a QR code at least once a week, right? So it's a common practice in today's world. So have QR codes you could do that.

You could have a unique phone number. You can get a Google phone number and put it on on your actual Direct Mail because a lot of people struggle with tracking right and I know we talked about that a little bit. Um, before we got on, you can get a specific number just for those campaigns. If you're really like, um, proactive, get a unique URL for each postcard Which basically when they go to see what their home's worth, they don't even have to fill out the form cuz you know that URL was hit, you can track your analytics and go this.

URL was hit. So I know I sent this URL to 1100 1 Avenue So chances are J is the one who hit it. I'm going to pick up the phone and I'm going to call Jason and follow through on that lead. So let's get into some tactics there for a second because we've talked about this in Prior episodes.

Uh, earlier in the year, Tom was sharing a principle of Home valuation offers through postcards and using uh, a unique postcard printer for every respective address so that if they scan the QR code or in your case, if they click the unique link, we know who did it. Even if they don't fill out the form attached, we know they're the only ones. that house is the only one with that specific QR code or or that address is the only one that got that specific website. And you also talked about your brother who's using he's personalizing with the actual address.

Talk to us about how that's approached through the lens of working with printers because that would mean getting literally every postcard printed differently. So what does this audience need to understand about that? Yeah, so um, you can find print companies that will basically create the unique uh, pearls for you, these personalized URLs for you so you don't have to worry about actually setting up a 100 different landing pages or something like that. that. The print companies will do that for you.

Um, especially if you go to a marketing company. uh, there's a lot of them out there that will do that for you in terms of like, uh, tactic wise that I would also encourage you to do. if you find that someone actually you know clicks on. that is the key is you have to do the Outreach and I think that's where people fail and they don't know how to make that call or they don't know how to reach out and I always tell people.

one being direct is the best approach you know. So basically sharing with people hey, I sent you some information you know? I Think you might have U been able to check it out. Just want to follow up and see if you able to check it out or you can use Leverage of the area of going. Hey I'm getting so many requests right now from this area of figuring out hey what their home is worth and you can use a leverage piece of information that this listing sold down the road or whatever it is there.

But I Just see the reason why I wanted to get that in there is because I see so many clients. They have people that maybe click on their their link or they have people that you know have responded but they haven't gone all the way and they're too nervous to do the Outreach because they feel like they can only Outreach if the form is fully filled out and I wouldn't have a business today. um for my own business of growing reminder media if I did not reach out to people who have filled out forms and turn them into clients I Love the one twist like hey, I'm reaching out because you haven't filled it out and so many others in the interest are taking up on the offer and I wanted to make sure you didn't miss the opportunity as a reason for reaching out. And another principle that seems to be just you know a thread running through this continuously is you can't rely on just the postcard.

The postcard job is designed to spark a dialogue, spark a conversation. It can't just be one form of marketing, It can't be one thing. It has to be all things leading to conversations. I Wonder if you can elaborate on what are some of the mistakes you see most regularly when it comes to physical marketing for agents businesses.

Because let's face it, it's cost prohibitive. Sending postcards is a lot more expensive than boosting a post on Facebook I'd Love for you to talk to about. Okay, reframe that perspective for our viewer and then also talk about mistakes that you seeing that make it so cost prohibitive. Um so I Think the biggest mistake is that, um, the quality of your marketing will be always determined by the quality of your list, the quality of your target audience, and and most people don't spend enough time thinking about who they're marketing to before they? Market Um so in choosing your list, So if you choose a geographic form, did you even look at the turnover rate? uh, of that area before you farm to it, right? If houses aren't moving in that area, you know that that's a huge red flag.

so that's one piece. But I would really encourage just to maybe hone in on your database for a second is going. Man, look at your database from a marketing perspective. And the biggest thing that I would encourage people to do when it comes to making your direct mail effective is you've got to utilize and set up your direct mail to allow you to have a conversation.

And the only way you can do that is to personalize your direct mail to where it gives you a reason to call. And so the reason why our magazine people always ask how does a customizable magazine work in today's day and age and how have you been doing it for so long? It's because when I talk to people about it I say hey, you're doing a nice quality piece of mail to this person that's perceived as a gift. But the real thing it gives you is it gives you the opportunity to have a conversation. And we know real estate's a contact sport.

So if I send Jason my customized magazine I'm picking up the phone and going hey Jason was thinking about you today brother I Just got my latest issue of Good To Be Home. It reminded me I'm sending it to you as a gift. want to make sure you got it? My wife Megan and I man we made the blueberry pancake recipe last week and it was phenomenal. You should make it I Get to now, use the magazine as a nons salesy reason to call and if I'm sending it to my database right? from a marketing standpoint, you got to think: okay, how do I take the conversation and turn it into a funnel to where I can potentially get a referral or potentially get a lead and I teach people all the time that hey, when you call People based upon your mailer that you've done, you always want to First Hey, catch up.

Hey here's the reason I sent it to you, the magazine and then you go hey man, you know how's your work been going for you, how's how's life at XYZ Because hopefully you're documenting that in your CRM. When you ask somebody how their jobs going, how their work's going, their natural response is to answer and then ask you well, how's your job going and that gives you a perfect transition line to go. Oh man, the Market's super interesting right now, but I I have a lofty goal for my business this year: I Want to help 25 five families find their home and when I think about the people I love to work with Not to be funny Jason Man if I could work with 25 years, it'd be amazing. Do you know anybody that may? Maybe I could reach out to Maybe they're not looking right today to buy or sell but my business I Love I build it off of relationships would love to send them my magazine and that's the magic.

Like the magic is in. you do a mailer whether it's a postcard, a magazine, whatever you end up doing. but you've set up your mailer with a campaign in mind to be Pro active behind that mailer to use it as your reason to reach out. So if you tie it back to the example I gave with my brother of the Agape House right, He did a mailer for a good thing, but he tied it to a reason to have a conversation and businesses on relationships.

Relationships about getting to know people, getting to know people's about conversations. Marketing should set you up to have conversations. There's a second benefit. It's not just to have the conversation, but you also did a little.

Switcheroo because generally somebody would say I want to help 25 folks buy or sell a house this year and then who do you know who's looking to buy or sell. Instead you said I want to give them my item of value and it reminds me of something Jay Bear says to make your marketing so useful, people would pay you for it. When was the last time you could look at your marketing and say this is an item of value to be given because most people think about their marketing as advertising I Don't think about marketing like that I Think about marketing as the message that needs to be given to an audience that you're working and you're cultivating and you're trying to build relationship with. And if you have marketing like that then it's an it's a gift and it's a touch point and it's a way to spark a dialogue.

Uh I know we're going along I Want to Circle back to something you said earlier in the podcast because I think it was super critical. Uh, and it was important. The marketplace has shifted. We're seeing longer time frames.

You know during the Unicorn years as uh David Chers at KCM refers to them During the pandemic, everybody was buying and selling. I mean if you looked at the number of people who were in Market to buy or sell, the percentage was really high. You could almost go to a Walmart parking lot and hand out business cards and say are you thinking about selling your house And as luck would have had it, you would have found somebody in a Marketplace that was you know characteristic of the Unicorn years. But now we're seeing much more normal time frames.

The market is more difficult, there's fewer sales happening, and yet we still have lots of agents. And so your comment was the three. e You talked about entertainment. You talked about endearment and education.

Now pushing back a little bit. I'm a huge fan of education, so I often recommend or suggest to agents. Hey, when it when when you break down what you sell, we know this is a relationship business, not just a transaction based business. But if you reverse the question, what do you sell and you instead ask what is it people are hiring you for what's the basis for why they hired you.

They'll say stuff like well, I trusted you What's that predicated on Well, they trust you because of your expertise and experience at the end of the day. If you were going to fill in the blank, what do you sell? it's your expertise to help folks buy, sell, and make the best possible decision in your market area and your comp idence may be lifestyle. It may be the numbers game of Real Estate That's up to you and your unique DNA as a Realtor, but it's your expertise at the same time. What you say is true if your expertise is being delivered across all your mediums, not just your postcards, but also even in your videos and your emails.

If it's always informing, informing, informing from a transactional mentality, you might have to pull back a little bit because not everybody is in the market the way they once were. But you don't want to pull back to the point where you're a secret agent and I want to be careful I Want to tiptoe through how I talk about this because I in no way, shape or form. Want to encourage people to deviate away from presenting themselves as the consumate real estate professional I talk a lot about there's personal you. There's professional you.

Well, in today's day and age, there's one you. Personal and professional all the time. And so I want to just circle back and I'm trying to even formulate the question for you I want to Circle back and expand more on this idea of: how do you use your postcards? How do you use the magazines, the Flyers the videos, the emails, and all your marketing as an instrument to carry out a conversation across a longer sales cycle. Does that make sense? Where I'm coming from? Yeah, makes makes perfect sense and um kind of to step back on the Um question I Totally agree with you that nobody will work with you if they don't trust you.

People want to buy from people they look up to, not people they look at or people they look down upon someone that knows more than them. but you can never get them to pay attention to your expertise unless they first like you. Um, as a person they have like what Tony Robbins will say is commonality like is probably the wrong word. It's just when you use no like and trust but this whole Rapport building.

um is that's what really? Because when you think about like to give an example of why did you choose the doctor you chose or the dentist you chose, did you really do your research to find out that they were the very best dentist or was it convenience and that they were the most known and and and you maybe got referred to them and as a real estate agent is very similar when I think about postcard marketing specifically and like an education campaign. I Agree with you 100% Over a long period of time, you should be building some type of call it story narrative like an example would be. Maybe you want to convince people that renting is not the best way that they should own a home and so you have a 8 By8 Campaign which is one mailer a week for eight straight weeks to a multif family complex teaching them the benefits of why they shouldn't rent and why they should buy that I 1,00% We have people that do those types of campaigns all the time agree with because you're building a storyline over eight weeks and just building that pain and building that pain and building that pain and you're touching. The reason why I think a campaign like that works is because you're hitting them with something personalized.

They do rent so it's very personal to them right? and if youve done your and then you're you're in flicting different ways of showcasing. I would say a pain or a desire that you can fulfill to them that would would bring that to fruition. Um, when I look at your 26 touchpoint campaign that I was talking about earlier and I think about that in your journey. I Go when you do your content.

I Still believe 60% of your content is going to be educational content, but most people they're they're doing 80. 90% of their content is educational and I go well. The problem with that is that nobody is going to tune in to get to know you as the person. So a simple example would be our holiday issue of the magazine.

We encourage people to put family photos on there, not just professional headss. You can do this for postcards too. Do a family photo if you've never done this right. If you don't have kids, if you have pets, do a photo with you and your pets.

You will be blown away how you will connect to your audience more. Everybody who has a pet will instantly be connected to you more. Everybody that has kids when they see you or wow I didn't realize Jason had kids I didn't realize Jason was married. they immediately connect you more and so it's like.

that's what I'm encouraging is going. Hey, look, you got to humanize yourself in this 26 touch points because that's what ultimately is going to get people to even remember your education because they actually see you as a person. I Think there's so much truth to that. It's no like trust.

but trust has two sides. It's personal trust and professional trust. And I'm thinking about a podcast with Mark the Creative Director of Thousand Watt that we did with Tom Ferry and he talked and I it's a 90-minute podcast I Can't do it here, but it was such a powerful conversation on what is a brand and a brand. I'm trying to paraphrase it in a very succinct way.

A brand has a a belief that transcends Beyond There's a certain set of values that a brand possesses and I think if you I I think you have to also be careful that you don't assume educational content is necessarily impersonal. It doesn't have to be got to talk about personal and professional. and the way I look at it is it's both. And you can't be a secret agent, but you can't be so salesy all the time where you're just trying to get business.

It has to be that relationship based mindset. and and I love the example of the kids, the dog. Um, I think humanizing yourself certainly makes a lot of sense I think an example to drive it home for everybody because maybe we've all seen this. Have you ever come across the real estate agent's Instagram And it's always just their their recent listings and there's no engagement right? Every body and it's like there's no engagement.

but yet you scroll down their feet and you see the one personal photo they post and that has you know. 50 likes and all the others have two likes and it's like hey, you need to do that the the the listings because you'd be crazy not to. but you also got to do the more personal. It's like the same concept applies because humans are the same, the medium's different.

Then you got to use that Medium to connect on human emotion. Uh, through that process. So I I that's maybe a a parallel example for like social that maybe drives it home. We have to do part two of this.

We could go all day and we should completely geek out on some of the underpinning thinking because I do think a lot of agents are looking for a blueprint when it comes to just do this. Just do this for your videos, for your postcards, for your marketing. But until you can really consider, well, who am I marketing to what what matters to them and where are you based And let's talk about you. There's always the level of It's not just personalizing to the customer but also personalizing to who you are because it's like says your Vibe attracts your tribe and something you said that I Think we can wrap up here with is you talked about A lot of agents make the mistake of not carefully curating the list.

I' I've got an expression I've used with clients before and it's meant to be provocative. It's to work the list, not just the leads. and a lot of Agents will work their leads. but they don't work the list.

And when you look at the reality of how most deals come together in real estate, it's list-based marketing. It's referrals. It's repeat. It's being in front of people on a prolonged basis that they can come to know you and like you and trust you.

It's relationship, not transactions. Dude, this has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for being on today. And let's seriously do a part two.

And I Want to know for everybody who's watching or listening? Load up these comments with what you learned, what your questions are, what we missed, or what we should talk about on the next episode. Thank you so much for watching Everybody Until next Week! This is this week in marketing a.