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This is the first of our industry highlights on the best way to use radio advertising to create and generate business for your industry.
PLEASE NOTE: This series of posts will be longer than usual and will include one or two actual examples or case studies and will come around once per month.
Today we look at the Real Estate service industry…
Have you ever wondered the best way to generate leads for your real estate business?
While newspaper is fine, signage (either electronic or billboard) is great, and web advertising captures part of the market, but did you know that a very effective radio advertising campaign will get you responses that you never thought you would. If it is done right!
'Right' meaning that you need the right strategy that helps to generate real estate seller leads and buyers, so, this may well be worth the time to read, even if you are not in real estate.
As you may know, from personal experience, creating ‘buyer’ leads can be seen as being easy.
There’s always people looking to get into real estate, either as an investor, or as an owner occupier.
However, generating ‘seller’ leads can be difficult.
Some real estate agencies continually prospect for leads, with people doing direct mail drops, door knocking, or through referrals.
I am informed by reliable industry insiders that referrals are usually the number one way of creating new sellers.
Did you know that in radio, you could create a referral that will reach not one or two people, but hundreds, if not thousands of prospective ‘sellers’ and ‘buyers’ at once. All for a fraction of the cost of time and money that you would expect.
But, the trick is to use radio strategically, rather than running ads at all hours of the day or night, you need to target the specific people who would be interested in buying or selling.
One way of strategically planning is: the average listener usually works out their finances and/or budget for the coming week on a Wednesday on-wards (this is after the hectic previous weekend, and usually when their pay and bills start to roll in), they will also talk at the same time about big life decisions (such as buying a house/selling their house) so from Wednesday on-wards they plan, then on Saturday and Sunday, they look, or set their plans in motion.
So a campaign on radio listing either the home opens for the weekend, or recent listings, running from Wednesday afternoon on-wards would work and generate leads for you and your company.
Another example of a strategic plan is by finding out when the largest audience is listening to their radio. This is usually during the breakfast show (on Coast FM, it’s with the Coast Crew), our listening audience see the hosts as ‘friends’, they wake-up to them, have breakfast with them, and drive to work with them. Every week day, Monday to Friday.
Then, by strategically planning what exact time period you think within that show will reach those people who may be interested in ‘buying’ or ‘selling’ – book that time to advertise to them.
It may be when parents are dropping kids off at school (8am), or just after, or at 7am when most people are waking up. Find your target time and stick with it.
Here’s an example from another radio station that I worked at:
A local agent in that town ran his ad only once a day, Monday to Friday at exactly (or as close as possible to) 7:40 am – because that’s the time he knew most of his prospective buyers/sellers would be listening, and heading off to dropping the kids off to school. He used ‘Live Reads’, not recorded commercials, and the reads were read out by the 2 hosts of the breakfast show.
He would use 4 bullet points, which were worded to be as close to call to action as possible, to make people interested.
The first bullet point was worded along the lines of “your home is guaranteed to sell”, “hassle free listing”, and “if you are unhappy with his service, you can ‘Fire Him’ at any time”, then he would have an example of a recent listing or sale, or some sales statistics to back up the offer.
At that time, he was selling houses within 24 hours of listing, with the full asking price (this was back a few years now).
For example the hosts would say… “Let’s talk about XYZ Real Estate, where your home is guaranteed to sell! That’s right HOST’s NAME, and if you are unhappy with their service, you can ‘fire’ them at any time. They’ve got hassle free listings and remember how yesterday we talked about the home that they just listed in SUBURB NAME, well, it’s already sold, in less than 24 hours. Wow! And for the asking price too. If you want your house sold, call XYZ Real Estate on PHONE NUMBER”
Every morning, people heard the personalities of the show, talking sincerely, and bantering back and forth, as if having a conversation, about the business in question – listeners then connect the dots, and they saw this as a referral from a friend!
Sometimes, depending on time available, and if the hosts have a lot to talk about, it can could go longer, or shorter, but the fact that it is the same time, and along the same, or similar lines, it really worked for him!
And as a little aside to this – the agent sold the breakfast hosts house at one time for them, within 28 hours of listing it – they got the most enthusiastic referral ‘live read’ spots for the rest of the year from him.
So in closing, in this example the ads ran 5 times a week, once a day. And the ads had similar bullet points, either highlighted a new listing, or a recent sale, and always finished with contact details. Listeners saw these ads as instant referrals from a trusted friend, and more importantly, they worked!
Radio can work for real estate, and work well.
It’s just a matter of finding the type of strategy that will work for you, and then work that strategy not only on radio, but across all media that you use.
Until next time... Keep On Selling!
This post was written by Earl.P. for the B4C.
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