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WEAVING A WEB OF INFLUENCE CAN SUSTAIN AGENTS DURING TOUGH MARKETS AND BEYOND

Top-producers share tips and strategies for building their digital sphere of influence

WEAVING A WEB OF INFLUENCE CAN SUSTAIN AGENTS DURING TOUGH MARKETS AND BEYOND

Top-producers share tips and strategies for building their digital sphere of influence

In 2020, more than 55,000 people decided to embark on a new career as a real estate agent, according to the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR).

The number of real estate agents jumped again in 2021 by the largest number in NAR’s history: 100,786, reaching a grand total of 1,559,537 Realtors. And by the end of 2022, the number of active Realtor members hit an all-time high of 1,580,971.

If you were at all involved in real estate during those years, then you probably have a guess about why so many people decided that this was the best possible career move to make. The coronavirus pandemic halted real estate transactions for a very short period of time in March and April of 2020 before kicking off arguably the biggest real estate boom that has ever been recorded.

Price gains varied depending on the area, but almost every area saw significant year-over-year price growth from 2019 through 2022, well into the double digits in some geographies. And while real estate was booming, other industries were hamstrung by the shutdowns. Without a doubt, it was an enticing time to become a real estate agent and try to capture some of the commission from the red-hot sellers’ market that manifested and then continued to gain steam, year after year.

Until it stopped.

As of December 2022, we have seen some of the lowest rates of home sales since 2007 , when the housing bubble burst, similar to lows generated by the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Rapid increases in mortgage rates combined with affordability challenges have resulted in fewer homeowners choosing to sell and for those who do, there are fewer buyers resulting in longer days-on-market.

The December 2022 housing market numbers from NAR were dismal: 11 consecutive months of declining existing home sales reaching a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.02 million homes.

Despite home price growth, there has been a real decline in active buyers and sellers. And for real estate agents, this means the pie that seemed large enough to accommodate more than 150,000 new agents during the pandemic era has just gotten smaller. The last time we saw this few homes sold annually, it was 2012, and there were about 1 million Realtors — in 2023, there are about 60% more Realtors than in 2012.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

The basic job description of a real estate agent is simple: Help a buyer or a seller usher a real estate transaction across the closing table.

But that’s only possible when a real estate agent has clients to help. Finding enough buyers and sellers to keep business moving is going to be the biggest challenge for real estate agents in 2023.

This isn’t exactly new territory for most agents: The idea of “lead generation,” creating a sales funnel consistently filling with new prospects, has been around for some time. Focusing on lead generation seems like an obvious thing to do on the surface because a lead, by nature, is someone who’s ready to make a transaction. And for most people, that’s already a relatively rare scenario, made even rarer in an environment with high mortgage interest rates and home sale prices.

Finding those people, both on the buyer side and the seller side, is a big hurdle for many agents, which is why they choose to outsource their lead generation efforts. Buying ZIP Codes on real estate portal giant Zillow was one way that agents could find leads — but even as the price of homes (and agent commissions) have been increasing, so too have the ways that agents are expected to pay for lead generation.

Real estate analyst Mike DelPrete refers to this trend as “Next Gen Lead Gen”, noting that Zillow is pivoting away from a model of charging agents money to appear on home searches in specific ZIP Codes, and toward a model of charging a 35% commission fee to qualified, vetted leads that Zillow sends to participating agents. This isn’t a new business model: Realtor.com has been charging agents between 30% and 37% of their sales commission for qualified referrals since 2020.

The real estate portals and platforms that are selling leads to agents have already seen the writing on the wall. They aren’t trying to work with every licensed real estate agent. Instead, they are trying to build relationships with top producers exclusively, becoming a crucial part of their business. Taking a 33%+ haircut on agent commission isn’t necessarily as big of a blow if you’re closing lots of deals, and these companies are counting on finding the agents who can absorb that referral fee rate — on top of higher operating expenses and brokerage commission splits.

Paying referral fees to entities that find buyers and sellers for them is one way that agents can survive through 2023 and beyond. But there’s another option for the agents who’d prefer to keep more of that commission for themselves.

WHERE DO GOOD LEADS COME FROM, ANYWAY?

According to the most recent National Association of REALTORS Real Estate in a Digital Age report from September 2021, the top three technology tools that real estate agents use to find high-quality leads are:

  • Social media (used by 53% of agents)
  • Customer relationship management applications (used by 31% of agents)
  • Multiple listing service sites (used by 28% of agents)

“Listing aggregator sites” like the ones discussed above rank fourth on the list of the best lead-generation tools (used by 21% of agents, tied with email marketing tools). While many agents do use these listing aggregator sites, the agents in this survey noted that other methods of connecting directly with buyers and sellers are more effective for them.

What does this tell us? First, that the lines between “lead generation” and “business marketing” have become blurred. And that many agents are finding their next buyer and seller clients by creating and developing a presence in their market instead of buying a lead from a third party.

Before the internet arrived on the scene and online lead generation emerged, real estate agents relied on what they called a sphere of influence, a self-generated bubble of “people who know who I am and what I do” that was driven by marketing. Many agents still focus on their “sphere”, but instead of being determined and delineated through “in real life” activities like door-belling, pop-bys, sponsoring events and purchasing ads on billboards and shopping carts, the new digital sphere of influence is about becoming a pervasive real estate-driven presence online, where there are no boundaries.

What does this tell us? First, that the lines between “lead generation” and “business marketing” have become blurred.

Unfortunately, for many agents, “marketing” has become more about how to drive more numbers (or leads) into this always-expanding funnel than it is about shaping your present and future as the go-to resource for real estate questions and information.

Far too many agents are simply trying to fill their funnels as full as possible in the hope that some of those consumers will trickle down into deals. Those agents will have little choice but to pay whatever referral fees or other lead-gen costs are being charged to them in the future — indefinitely. For a business that attracts people who crave independence, this hardly seems like a way to control your own destiny.

But some agents are thinking about their audience in terms of the demographic or geographic area where they want to specialize, because they know that those people are more than just leads. Those agents are the real estate influencers of the future, and they won’t need to pay commission fees to third parties because they are already directly communicating with their future clients.

THE SECRET SAUCE OF INFLUENCE

To be clear, cultivating a digital sphere of influence isn’t a lead generation activity; it’s a broader strategic marketing discipline. The agents who follow this path find that when they are able to establish themselves as real estate experts within their digital sphere of influence, they don’t have to chase after leads or buy them from third parties — leads come to the agent when the time is right and say “I know who you are, I trust your knowledge, and I want to work with you.”

Agents who are cultivating a high-quality digital sphere of influence are doing so by behaving, in some ways, a lot like the most effective social media influencers out there. Effective influencers provide substance in a fun or interesting form. They are, so to speak, often imitated but never duplicated. They are true originals, and there’s a reason why they’ve reached this level of influence in their fields.

The most effective influencers don’t buy followers. Instead, they create quality content, and they post and engage with their followers on a regular basis. They are experts in their field; they know a great deal about the topics for which they choose to create videos and blog posts to help explain to their audiences. And they enjoy educating people and are clearly having fun talking about their area of expertise.

These influencers know their market, inside and out. They know a lot about real estate, and they show what they know on social media and on their websites. Being an expert and sharing your knowledge with the world is one of the keys to being a true influencer.

Influencers also get their followers to like them, sharing personal tidbits about their lives, though usually not too personal.

Not only do they know their topic of interest backward and forward, inside and out, but they’re also fun and interesting people who are willing to be a bit vulnerable here and there. Sharing even just small things about yourself, such as your favorite food or the movies you enjoy watching during the holiday season, can help people feel connected to you, like they are getting to know you…as though they are building a relationship with you.

For influencers who have managed to nail the know and like part, trust follows more or less naturally. When you’ve proven that you know what you’re talking about and that you’re an expert in your field, and when you’ve positioned yourself as an approachable and interesting person who knows these things, then people who “see” you online are going to develop a level of trust for the information you provide and the opinions that you share.

It’s not a mystery that today consumers are going to look online before they hire an agent; most recent NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers says that 47% of buyers start their real estate journey by looking at homes online, and 96% of buyers use online tools in the search process. Many of them are savvy enough to discover an agent’s digital footprint, including social media and business profiles, the substance of which can make or break the hiring decision.

They use this evidence to investigate the agents they might want to hire. And they do this largely before the agent has any idea who they are, or that they’re thinking about buying or selling a house soon. The background research happens before the agent knows they are being investigated; they often never have the chance to talk to the researcher at all before a decision is made.

Digital sphere builders, influencers, and local experts who really know their stuff are inherently more “discoverable,” which helps keep them at the top of the social media food chain. They are building relationships and paving roads for smoother, easier future transactions with the clients who are actively following them, and the clients who lurk for months and years before deciding to transact. And the best part is that this future business comes without monetary strings attached from a third-party lead provider. It is the true power of word-of-mouth marketing, done in the digital realm.

Here are stories from four agents from various parts of the country who have done this in their region. Each has their own unique strategy and way of doing things. But they all have one thing in common: They invest heavily in building their digital sphere of influence because it’s the best thing they can do for their business.

And the best part is that this future business comes without monetary strings attached from a third-party lead provider. It is the true power of word-of-mouth marketing, done in the digital realm.

DON’T JUST BE A FACE, BE A PERSON

– Stacie Staub

When broker-owner Stacie Staub, who operates West + Main (headquartered in Denver), first got her real estate license, it was in 2006, and she did it because she was working for a tech company that built software for real estate agents.

“They wanted a Realtor on staff,” she remembers. “Then I just fell in love with residential sales, and it worked really well with my family.”

Then the market downturn of 2008 happened, and Staub realized she was going to have to change the way she operated. “I learned to work in a very stressful environment, with short sales and foreclosures, and obviously people who were underwater on their loans,” she notes. “I’ve been able to experience a lot of different markets, and what I know to be true is that you can become the neighborhood expert.”

Today, Staub focuses exclusively on brokerage operations, referring any sales leads out to her agents. West + Main has a robust social media presence in every market where it’s active. Now that the real estate market is starting to shift back to a more balanced environment, Staub says that she’s excited to see what her agents can (and will) do with their sphere-crafting skills.

“Agents have an opportunity now to build a personality and presence in their farm areas that they haven’t had time to do because they’ve been chasing business and writing offers as fast as they could,” she explains. “Now I’m talking to my agents a lot about ‘buckets of business’ and where they should be focusing as an agent who wants to make real estate a lifelong career.”

This means building a reputation as an agent who knows the market and the neighborhood, is friendly and dependable, and can be trusted with big life decisions. The agents at West + Main who do this most effectively are typically power-users on social media, posting regularly across several accounts and engaging with their followers.

She acknowledges that building a lifelong business as a real estate agent can be a challenge especially when inventory is low. “That’s the social media piece,” she explains. “I always say that people should see you in their inbox and their mailbox, plus NextDoor and Facebook Groups where people are talking about your neighborhood.”

“Agents have an opportunity now to build a personality and presence in their farm areas that they haven’t had time to do because they’ve been chasing business and writing offers as fast as they could,” she explains.

Those are the places where agents can share your exclusive hyperlocal expertise with prospective clients, such as the vet clinic where they’ve been taking pets for years, favorite coffee shops or remote-work hotspots, and more.

“Having that hyperlocal expertise is more important for agents than ever,” she explains, even as it’s become increasingly difficult for agents to focus on a specific neighborhood or development.

West + Main as a brokerage is active on social media; if you have an Instagram account in any of the cities where they operate, then you might have seen their listings. And the agents who work there tend to focus heavily on Instagram, too: “A lot of our agents are getting the majority of their business from Instagram,” Staub says.

On Instagram, what seems to resonate the most with real estate audiences are original posts from accounts that seem genuine and approachable. At West + Main, agents can use posts provided to them by the brokerage, or they can curate their own content.

“We do put out, almost daily, new collateral for them to post on Instagram — a market stat, a holiday post, or different categories of posts that we create for them,” Staub says. This helps fill the endless need for content for some agents, although the agents who use the West + Main resources are “encouraged to write the caption and post in their own voice and make it theirs,” she explains.

The agents at West + Main who are using Instagram most effectively are also posting at least once a day in their own feeds. One of Staub’s agents is so good at Instagram hashtag strategy that Staub says she got about half of her business from Instagram last year, and she’s on track to close 70 deals this year. “She’s very findable on Instagram, and you can’t help but love her because she is who she is.”

Staub also suggests that her agents have a Facebook presence, even if they aren’t using it heavily for work. “It’s mostly for when people are doing research on you; otherwise it’s like you don’t exist, and then people don’t trust you.”

Every real estate agent at West + Main gets a bio page on the main website, and then Staub will also provide a personal website for each agent that’s hosted on the same platform. This helps provide agents who don’t have time to create their own web presence with a jumping-off point or “home base” for listings, email newsletter signup options, and more.

“The listings all have a history, almost a portfolio,” on the West + Main site, Staub says, and she notes that it’s a priority to try to get those listings ranked for the home address above the Zillow and Realtor.com search engine results.

To fill the website with new, interesting content, “Our creative team blogs constantly,” Staub says. “We have a blog for each market as well as a national blog, and that turns into a weekly e-newsletter for our agents to distribute to their clients.” Agents at West + Main can customize blog posts and share them, and Staub says this system works well for the brand while it helps to generate a real presence for West + Main across Google and all the social media platforms.

The brokerage social media accounts include stories about clients, local businesses, brokerage events, and — of course — listings.

“We’ve always had a philosophy around our listings that every listing gets a full marketing push — no matter how fast it’s going to sell, and no matter the price point,” Staub explains. “So all our listings have gotten a push on social media, including social graphics and fliers.”

Staub also suggests that her agents have a Facebook presence, even if they aren’t using it heavily for work. “It’s mostly for when people are doing research on you; otherwise it’s like you don’t exist, and then people don’t trust you.”

For Staub, part of being a top real estate agent is honing the ability to generate new sales and referrals out of your existing active clients.

“If you’re doing it right, you should get two more listings out of every listing,” she says. “But you don’t do it by putting a sign in the yard. Talking about your listing and promoting it is where you get that business.”

For her agents, that means focusing on their marketing strategy instead of buying leads, and it also means they pay more attention to engagement than to the number of total followers they might (or might not) have on social media.

“If they’re putting stuff out and then they’re not seeing real comments, and they’re not getting the opportunity to comment back, then they’re probably not doing it right,” she explains. “Also, when people are engaging with you, and they’re a stranger, are you taking that next step and gathering their information and turning them into an e-newsletter subscriber, or getting them to your website to register them for an IDX search?”

Staub still believes in the lead-generation funnel; she simply fills the West + Main funnel through methods that don’t involve buying leads, and that do involve crafting a reputation of local expertise and trustworthiness, a great deal of which is done online. ”That’s where the magic really happens,” she notes, “as you’re asking engaging questions as part of your strategy, then going and following them back — and not just being a face, but being a person.”

CULTIVATING TWO OR THREE (OR MORE) DEGREES OF SEPARATION

– Nikki Beauchamp

Nikki Beauchamp is an Engel & Völkers broker who’s also one of the bestknown real estate experts in one of the toughest markets in the country: New York City. Almost all of her business is referral-based either through previous clients or word-of-mouth, she explains, and her clients are “sometimes a very eclectic mix — they can be everything from a first-time buyer to someone who’s buying their fourth or fifth property, whether here or somewhere else.”

She remembers jumping on the digital marketing train about 15 years ago. “It was right after Lehman crashed,” she said. “Most of my core people were not transacting because most of them had lost their jobs — they were all finance people.” She signed up for Twitter and eventually got roped into Facebook, where she (virtually) ran into several old classmates from elementary school, middle school, and high school.

“They were all like, ‘Where have you been?’ And I laughed — I’ve been in exactly the same place and I have the same landline number.” Because she grew up in New York and had a deep (but untapped) network of friends and acquaintances to draw from, she found that this foray into social media generated “a whole new avenue to my business that I didn’t have before.”

Her specialty — in theory anyway — is Manhattan condos and co-ops and often works with buyers in new developments. But she adds that her clients reach out to her for advice about all kinds of real estate opportunities. “Even if it seems like it’s something that’s not my niche, they know I will give them advice irrespective of the price point,” she explains.

Like other agents who have established themselves as local real estate experts in their digital spheres of influence, Beauchamp says the biggest advantage of this marketing tactic is that it helps smooth the way for her relationships with buyers and sellers, who feel like they know her before they speak with her for the first time.

“They get a sense for who you are as a person, who you are as an agent, what your marketing approach is, what your company’s marketing approach is,” she says.

“I looked you up; I followed your Facebook page, and I followed your company Facebook page.” He’d been following her for nine months before deciding to call her and ask her for help selling his co-op.

She remembers several years ago getting introduced to a seller with a co-op in Manhattan, and when she spoke with the seller, he told her, “I looked you up; I followed your Facebook page, and I followed your company Facebook page.” He’d been following her for nine months before deciding to call her and ask her for help selling his co-op.

“I was one of three or four agents he spoke to, but by the time we met, he felt he knew what I was about, what my approach would be,” she remembers. “He was at a bigger advantage than I was because I had no idea what kind of property it was until four days before the listing appointment.” (She ended up landing the client and selling the co-op.)

Beauchamp has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and she’s exploring TikTok. Right now, she’s a fan of LinkedIn over Facebook and some of the other options: “It’s a natural area where I can talk about business without doing the roundabout story of talking about business.”

Beachamp does sometimes pay to promote her content on social media, especially if it’s related to one of her media appearances or quotes. “When I get quoted in outlets, that stuff actually does better in my posts — even though I’m saying exactly the same thing, it seems much more interesting because I said that thing on television, or it was in The New York Times or something.”

“Sometimes what I’m finding has been greater for me is that second-and-thirddegree referral of the new people who I’m engaging with,” she adds.

She spends about $3,000 to $3,500 each month to help sustain her digital sphere of influence, and the lion’s share of that expense is for public relations assistance, which helps get her quoted on television or in The New York Times in the first place.

She tries to post information that’s highly specific to her market and area “at least once a week,” and she also uses Instagram Stories more than posting in her feed; if she finds that her audience is reacting to a story, she might consider adding it to her feed.

Historically, she hasn’t been big on video, but “I recognize that it’s definitely more relatable,” so she’s been exploring beyond sending a one-on-one introductory video to referral clients, for example.

She used to post regularly on her blog and maintain it with thrice-weekly updates, but now it’s slipped onto a “perpetual list of things to do.”

But she’s still creating content, just distributing it in a different way. “I’ve kept up with the weekly market recap,” she explains, “but instead of it being on a blog, it’s in my email newsletter, which goes out to people who actually want to hear about what’s going on on a weekly basis — because not everybody does.”

Although it might feel repetitive to her, especially when there are other real estate agents in her network creating the same type of content, Beauchamp notes that her digital sphere of influence appreciates the regular outreach.

“It doesn’t feel repetitive to them,” she says. “My core people are really only paying attention to what I’m doing; they’re not paying attention to 300 other Realtors.”

Those other agents in her network also create a source of referrals for her, and she says that sometimes the best leads come from the most unexpected places. She recalls a recent example: “I took a referral once — this is not an agent I know, but she knows someone who knows me, and she needed a Manhattan broker for a buyer who wanted to move here in the next 24 months. So because I continue to post about what I’m doing and promote the various aspects of both life in New York and real estate and everything else, I’m top-of-mind for this agent who’s in her referral network.

“Sometimes what I’m finding has been greater for me is that second-and-third-degree referral of the new people who I’m engaging with,” she adds.

Her steady referral partners don’t need to see her on social media to keep sending her their leads, but by marketing herself as an expert on New York real estate, Beauchamp is landing referral leads, and she’s getting them from agents at competing brokerages that provide referral programs.

“It doesn’t feel repetitive to them,” she says. “My core people are really only paying attention to what I’m doing; they’re not paying attention to 300 other Realtors.

“It’s fascinating to me that agents are still leaning into who they know, and how they know people, before going through their internal networks,” she says. “For me, that’s how I build out a whole new lane of my business.”

THE DISNEY WORLD APPROACH

– Sue ‘Pinky’ Benson

Sue Benson, also known as “Pinky” Benson, has created the “Pinky Knows Naples” brand in Naples, Florida, where she heads a team and uses both first names interchangeably. “It all comes down to name recognition,” she maintains. “It’s always been the same; it’s just the platforms have changed.”

When she thinks about her social media strategy, she pays more attention to the long game of explaining who she is and what she does instead of trying to sell her services. “Everyone wants to copy the post you put up and get all the business from, and it doesn’t work that way,” she notes. “We’re not in the makeup industry, where you post about your new line of makeup and everybody buys it — that’s not how we work.”

Instead, Benson says, real estate agents should aspire to be “more like the theme song that gets stuck in your head. Your audience has to consistently see you over and over again, then they start to know, like, and trust you.” She remembers differentiating herself with a color more than a decade ago, when she was working in an office — and when clients still called the office to get in touch with their agents instead of trying a cell phone number. “When the phone would ring, there were multiple Sues in the office,” she remembers, and of course, no one calling could remember their agent’s last name.

That was when Pinky was born. “I worked at Disney World when I was in my twenties,” she says, “and Disney World really hammers home to their cast members that this is an experience all the way around. One guest comes up, and if they have a negative experience with one cast member, that destroys Disney as a whole for that person.”

After watching Legally Blonde and seeing how the character of Elle Woods was largely geared around a signature color, “it just kind of evolved from there,” Benson recalls. “I have a pink car, I sometimes have pink hair — it really is going all in, all the way around, whether it’s pink hair or consistently using pink text when you do an Instagram Story.”

This is, of course, very deliberate on Benson’s part. “It’s kind of that Disney World effect of, how many Mickey Mouses are there? There’s only one. You have to conceptualize it so that this goes all the way around. It is a dedication that many people don’t have. But as you go into the digital sphere, you have to have that consistency.”

Apart from being an expert on her town — the “Pinky Knows Naples” branding, like everything else she does, is quite deliberate — Benson says that her “avatar” attracts a certain type of client. “On average, I relate to women in their mid-thirties to their mid-sixties,” she explains. “They tend to be strong women who are independent. They may be running their own business or something to that effect. They tend to be artistic. And a good portion of them are pet owners.”

Instead, Benson says, real estate agents should aspire to be “more like the theme song that gets stuck in your head. Your audience has to consistently see you over and over again, then they start to know, like, and trust you.”

“You have to know who’s in your audience and reciprocate with them, go in and engage and communicate and talk and share, and that’s how you build your digital sphere.”

Creating a memorable and relatable persona is just one piece of the puzzle, of course — an important one, but not as important as becoming the local expert in truth and action. “You need to be consistently sharing items of interest,” Benson explains. “For me, I love to tell the history of my town and do little reels about Naples fun facts: How did this street get its name, and where did it come from?”

She also notes the importance of “working the room,” so to speak, or engaging with the people who have decided to follow you and comment on your social media pages. “You have to know who’s in your audience and reciprocate with them, go in and engage and communicate and talk and share, and that’s how you build your digital sphere.” One of her tactics on Facebook is to use a photo instead of a video and share a link only in the comments, but she says that she’s had to be careful even with the text that she’s adding to the photo. “Even certain words, when you use ‘sold’ or ‘money,’ they know those are promotional terms,” she explains. Posting her videos as a reel on Facebook instead of a video post on her page is another tactic that sometimes works.

Creating content regularly for Instagram, Facebook and YouTube give Benson the ability to discuss more timely topics when it makes sense. A hurricane hitting Naples in 2022 was big news in the area, and Benson says that the weather event caused her to change up her YouTube strategy to accommodate what people wanted to know about Naples.

“I had been doing a series on the best beaches in Naples and how much it costs to live there,” she said. After the hurricane, she pivoted to different video topics: “Are you thinking about selling your house after the hurricane because you have storm damage?”

“There’s a longform video on YouTube,” Benson says, “and a short version on Instagram reels with a link to my YouTube. “This is all really in-depth strategy,” she adds, “and a lot of agents are like, ‘I couldn’t possibly do that!’ Well, find what you can do, and do that.

“This is all really in-depth strategy,” she adds, “and a lot of agents are like, ‘I couldn’t possibly do that!’ Well, find what you can do, and do that.”

A WINDOW INTO LOCAL LIFESTYLE

– Brad Allen

At the beginning of Brad Allen’s real estate career in 2006, he teamed up with two fellow agents in Columbia, South Carolina, who had grown up and gotten married in the area. Given that strong connection to the region, “we never had to worry about lead generation,” he says; eventually, the three agents created a team, hired new agents, and were doing pretty well for themselves.

Allen realized something. “Our mission and vision has always been to be a community resource and community advocates,” he explains. “And I was spending $150,000 a year on Zillow, and it dawned on me that I wasn’t in control of those leads. And I thought, ‘What if I take that money and invest it in videographers and social media people?’”

For Allen and his colleagues, this strategy made a lot of sense. “With Zillow at the time, for every ten leads we got, four were ready to transact, and the other four were longterm, and the last two were just garbage,” he explains. “We were closing around 8% of those leads, and we realized that the other 92% didn’t know who we were.”

Allen had a vision to change that. Now the current broker-in-charge at The ART of Real Estate, with eight locations across South Carolina and Tennessee, he began laying the groundwork for what would become an entire brokerage’s marketing strategy. “We started doing content — vlog (video blog) stuff for our agents; not really house walkthroughs or anything, but area tours, restaurant spotlights, top fives, and these other things.”

This way of operating helps keep the brokerage top-ofmind even when prospective clients aren’t seeking an agent, and Allen says that it gets them just as many leads and closings, if not more.

“People don’t want to hear about how to buy a house when they have no desire to buy a house,” he notes. “But if we’re talking about the local area, then we’re staying top-of-mind for when those people are ready to come back around.”

Practically speaking, this means that Allen and the ART agents mix a little bit of business with a lot of education “We might post a listing first,” he explains, “and then five dog parks near this listing, and then ‘here’s how to buy a house.’”

Every quarter, Allen says, the team sits down to assess the current market and consider what might happen in the next quarter of the year. “We couple the content to that,” he says, “whether that’s interest rates up or down, getting people to buy or sell.”

To fill the sales funnel, he focuses on education and entertainment to fill the top, uses automation to fill in some of the blanks, and then reuses content when clients have specific questions. The local information and tours are used to supplement or generate listings for the brokerage.

“And I was spending $150,000 a year on Zillow, and it dawned on me that I wasn’t in control of those leads. And I thought, ‘What if I take that money and invest it in videographers and social media people?’”

“We know if we’re going to do an area tour for Lake Murray, then we’re going to do three different things: an area video, a post of the top five places to check out, and then what we call a local business profile,” he explains. “That way we build out some content for that location. And then as we get listings, we use that content for the funnel, and when our ISAs get leads, they can send them over some of those videos, and it really makes the client latch onto us as their source of information.”

Once a month, the brokerage sets up a vlog room with videographers; agents can book time and use it to talk about whatever they like (and get some great video of their thoughts). “We have a whole video guide,” Allen says, “with fifty different topics to record. So we give them that guide — but if they want to do a client testimonial, we’ll have them come in, shoot it, edit it, and give it back to them.” Ideally, ART agents will post a new video at least once a week.

“People don’t want to hear about how to buy a house when they have no desire to buy a house,” he notes. “But if we’re talking about the local area, then we’re staying top-of-mind for when those people are ready to come back around.”

Those videos get posted on Facebook and Instagram (where they will likely be turned into Reels), posted on YouTube, and embedded on the website. The ART agents only list homes on certain days, and automation creates the social media posts via photos and videos that are curated from the listing raw footage. They also create a Matterport tour for every home.

All of these efforts have helped Allen and his brokerage to get their brand out there to that 92% of previous leads who didn’t know who they were. “When agents leave here, their clients call us back,” he reveals. “And we’re very nice and are like, ‘So-and-so doesn’t work here anymore, they’ve moved on.’ But they say they don’t want the agent’s new contact information: They called us for a reason.”

TOP SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS USED BY REALTORS

WEAVING YOUR REPUTATION WEB: HOW TO GET IT DONE

A digital sphere of influence is built by cultivating a digital presence that’s pervasive and personable, across multiple platforms and channels. Agents do this by creating and sustaining social media profiles, a website, business profiles such as those found on Google and a host of other channels.

As we’ve learned from the examples given by agents who are currently doing this, digital sphere building is not a onesize-fits-all approach. You have to pick a lane and learn how to drive it until it feels authentic and you’ve learned how it works for you. You have to talk about your business, about real estate, about the people and the homes.

And maybe most importantly, you have to be consistent, putting out quality content regularly that helps share who you are and why you’re the best at what you do with anyone who might be looking to buy or sell a house in your area. True digital marketing is a journey without an end that requires a commitment, and not many agents have the bandwidth or the ability to create content and manage their social media accounts to these exacting standards. But the rewards are worth it for those who can figure out a way to connect the dots.

It’s not just about one platform, either: The very best agents in the business pay attention to more than one element of their digital exposure and reach. They curate a balance of reviews and testimonials, build their social media presence across multiple platforms, populate a website, and follow an SEO (or search engine optimization) plan that keeps them easy to find and top-of-mind.

All of these components balance each other and don’t contradict one another, establishing the agent’s credentials impeccably as the go-to expert in that area or for that demographic.

This might sound easy in practice, but any agent who’s actually tried to do this knows that real estate professionals like Brad, Nikki, Stacie and Sue only make it look easy. The truth is that only a select few agents have really nailed their digital sphere-building strategy. It’s certainly possible to strike a balance like this yourself, but it’s not easy. If you already know how to do it, and you can accurately assess your own strengths and weaknesses, then compare what you’ve learned to the competition in your market and understand what is helping (or hurting) your advancement in certain rankings, then you’ve probably got what it takes to do it yourself.

For most agents, however, these sphere-building activities and strategies are either a work in progress or — worstcase scenario — they are just an idea that may never get off the ground at all.

Being busy online does not necessarily equate to being effective, and since an agent’s time is their most valuable asset, understanding what to do — and outsourcing as much of the heavy lifting as possible — is critical.

If it were easy, everyone would do it. As it stands, the options are overwhelming, and most agents don’t know where to begin — it’s important to have a digital presence everywhere, but you have to start in one place. What is that place? How do you know? And once you figure it out, what are you going to post, and how will you ensure that it reflects your brand consistently and in a reliable way?

For the majority of agents who can’t manage all of these tasks themselves, and still tend to all of the other areas in their business, there are solutions: Innovative tools like SphereIndex™ makes measuring the strength of your digital sphere of influence easier, helping you understand where you are today relative to top-producing agents in your local market and where you might need to improve.Once you understand where you are, groundbreaking applications like SphereBuilder™ make it easy to begin the journey of taking control over your digital presence.

Keeping tabs on the overall health of your digital reputation and your online trustworthiness is something that only the best agents are doing today. But as we move forward into the future of digital marketing, it will likely become the only way that new agents can grow their business and that seasoned agents can stay top-of-mind and relevant with their existing spheres. Getting ahead of the curve before the road starts to bend will help current agents ensure their longevity and new agents to find a foothold and shine in a challenging business.

If you’d like to learn more about how SphereIndex and SphereBuilder are crafting products that will help you evaluate and optimize your digital sphere of influence, get in touch! We love talking to forward-thinking agents about how we can help them find and hold an edge in an increasingly tough business.

Email us at success@spherebuilder.io

ABOUT SPHEREBUILDER AND SPHEREINDEX

SphereBuilder™ is an all-in-one platform for automated digital content creation and sharing. It blends the power of automation to instantly create powerful listing content, along with thousands of brandbuilding video and image templates, with one-click sharing to social channels and seamless paid ad placements to your favorite platform.

SphereBuilder’s set of products help real estate professionals build lifelong client relationships through smarter content, better data and actionable insights to grow their digital sphere of influence. SphereIndex™ is the industry’s first, real-time assessment of a real estate professional’s digital marketing efforts against a benchmark of top-producing agents in their local market. It provides valuable recommendations on how taking certain steps can build a digital sphere to, ultimately, generate more business.

For more information visit www.spherebuilder.io.

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