Seth Price, the VP, Head of Product, at Placester, one of the leading real estate website developers, shares his Top 5 best practices for Realtors to use to engage their audience.
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Welcome to Top 5. My name is Chance Brown. I'm your host for today. Top 5 is a show that was designed to be a place where experts on certain topics can come and share their best practices with the hope that you can take them and easily implement them in a way that impacts you and impacts your real estate business in a positive way. My guest for today is Seth Price. He is the head of product and vice president at Playster and author of one of my favorite easy-to-apply books that's really, really actionable, which is The Road to Recognition. How are you doing, Seth? Great to have you. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Awesome. So, our topic today is the Top 5 ways that you can be found online as a real estate agent. And so, I know there's so much pressure with all the different tools and things online to be found and to be everything to everybody. Just in general, before we kind of jump into the five tips, what are your thoughts on picking and choosing your battles, I guess, is the right way to put it? Yeah. I mean, I'd say the biggest thing is this is not the time to turtle. And what I mean by turtle, this is not the time to be quiet and not communicate with your customers. You know, once you take care of your family, which is that's first and foremost health and safety, it's really about showing empathy to your community and your audience base and being available. And if you take that mindset, which is, hey, people are trapped in their homes or trapped in ways where they can't normally communicate or socialize, they need the connectors. They need you to help them, one, just have someone to talk to, two, have a perspective on the world, and three, just have some thread in their community that is not, that's sort of broken right now. Yeah. I know one of the things that we've noticed as we've just, you know, been making those phone calls and reaching out to people is that as opposed to quote unquote normal now, during this time of COVID, our engagement levels are huge. I think people are just kind of craving that human interaction. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So when I think about the five things, I think the overarching sort of theme of it is don't be secretive. I mean, this is not new, but don't hide. So the first place that I would start is you need a home base or a hub. Every business creates a hub. If you think of, you know, CB Realtors, you guys have spent a lot of time creating content and creating a website that once you reach out, there's a destination for someone to see, have social proof, all of those pieces. So you need a hub. You need some place that you control. Secondly, you need to communicate via email. Email still works. And in fact, it works better than ever. It's low cost. You don't have to spend anything to do it. You can be very personal with it. Thirdly, pick up the phone.
Can we go back to a second before we get to third? Yeah. So when you're talking email, let's talk about what are some of the things that we're doing on email? Because, you know, there's the, I'm going to send you this newsletter, or I'm going to, you know, kind of take more of the Dan Stewart and happy grasshopper route and kind of do this off topic, but still designed to create engagement. You know, what are the things that you see that work best when it comes to, I'm going to try engage somebody in a conversation via email. So I think there are two lenses that you want to think about. One is, does someone need your service? And so if they need your service, they don't need the sort of story of your life, what you're going through. They need action oriented emails. So that's one group of customers, folks that are actively either looking to buy or looking to sell browsing on your site for properties. They're in market. The rest are nurturing an audience. And so if you separate those two things, the ones that are looking for action, you need to respond to them with information that helps them along their journey. So whether that's curated listings, listings that you've found, whether it's info about the market, info from the governor about what's available to do for open houses, those types of things, right? If it, the nurturing is different, and you can add your special special spin to that. It could be just a, and I've seen this done very successfully where people are, I don't want to call it a town hall, but they're sharing their thoughts in the world, what their life is like day to day. I mean, that's really interesting in your community. What it's like, are the farmer's markets open when you go there? Are you experiencing fear? Is it easy? If you went out to dinner, like what was that like in this new world? I think being real and being honest about your experiences, tap something in your, in your audience that they can then relate to. So two different audiences, those that need help with a service and those that you're nurturing. And I would treat them differently. So question on when we're sending stuff out. Yeah. There seems to be an argument somewhat on content really matters or just the fact that you're doing something really matters. What's your take on how much do you have to put in? Because like, I'm a huge, I want really great content. I want it to be of value. Like to give an example, I know when we're little, the first thing we're taught when we go out into public settings is we don't talk about politics. We don't talk about religion. Personally, I think Realtors miss the boat when they don't talk politics with their clients because nobody does more for private property owners than the Realtors to protect them politically. You don't have to get, I do or don't like this politician, but we do a lot. And I think that from a content standpoint, that's engaging no matter what side of the aisle you fall on.
And it's something we ought to be talking about. So how much do you value content versus value activity? So I would, again, put it in two buckets. Quality is generally always going to outperform a lesser quality post. But the caveat there is if the person who's doing quality does not put out their content very often, then the person who's doing lesser quality but is consistent is going to win. And so it's a balance. Like if the thing I would start with is you have to do something, you have to communicate. And what you'll find as you start communicating consistently is you have a desire to make your content better. And your customers will tell you either by opting out of your list or by reading your content that you're onto something. And so you have to use that gauge to be the reason why you improve your content. Because improving it just to make it more beautiful and have more words, like that doesn't mean anything if it doesn't move your audience. And so it's a tricky thing. There's no black or white answer to it. But I would say try and do the best content that you can. Try and be as real as you can. And then also try and be as consistent as you can.
Right. Everything works and nothing doesn't. That's right. That's right. It's a funny paradigm where you wonder why someone who is maybe not as good as you does better than you. And generally, it has to do with their work ethic more than anything else. It's not that. I mean, there are lots of really smart people that aren't successful. And there are lots of people that you go, how did that person become so successful? I don't even know how they put pants on in the morning. Exactly. But every day they put pants on, they go to work and they do the work that's necessary to get it done. So that's it. Yeah. Cool. All right. Moving on from email. What's your next one? Phone is still really powerful. I mean, we know that from cold calling. I mean, cold calling works. It's like if you're going to pick up the phone, you're in a community. It's like you can start with, hey, I live in the neighborhood. I'm just checking in on all of the people that are in my neighborhood to make sure everybody's okay. Like that's a simple intro. You could go through your entire phone list and call people and go, hey, I haven't spoken to you for a while.
Things are really weird. I just wanted to let you know I'm available to chat. I'm open. And if you need any help, I'm here. Two, the more like, hey, I'm in your neighborhood and there's a listing I just put on the market that's right down the street. I know it's difficult to see them right now, but I just want to let you know that I'm here to give you every information that you could possibly want about it. Those are all three very valuable ways in which you can communicate to your audience. Right. So we, to kind of give you an example on something like that, we do a call nights inside the bucket, right? Yeah. And so we did one in the first quarter, did one in January when the world was still normal. Yeah. And we did one in May when the world was COVID. And, you know, obviously January, people are making plans for the year and everything. We set a lot more appointments for a lot more dollar volume and stuff like that in that month. But our dials per conversation numbers in May were much higher and the time on phone was higher. And really it was the opportunity to either connect at a deeper level or completely reconnect from people we haven't, you know, you just give the old apology script of, Hey, sorry, I haven't done a great job, but I'm reaching out to everybody in my database and just touch a base.
And it really, the after effect has been, we set more appointments two, three, four days later this time than we did in that initial conversation. And so absolutely, you know, I jokingly, when I teach and when I, when I work with our agents, I jokingly just hold up my phone and, you know, make sure they're aware that it does more than check Facebook. Yeah. The interesting thing that this, I think any crisis creates is a desire for communities to be stronger because that's all we've got, right? We don't have international, we don't have the next state over. We've got right here. We've got to make sure our people are fed and that they're safe and that they're healthy, like all of those things. And so you now have a greater license than you've ever had to call anybody in your community and offer help. We are in the service business. And so if you put on a service mindset, like there's not a human that you couldn't call and say, can I help you?
Do you have, are you getting food in your house? Like, you know, do you, is everything working for you? Like that's a welcome call. So, um, I wouldn't hold back from using the phone. It's an amazing tool. Yeah. Here in Houston, we saw that, you know, really clear post-hurricane Harvey a couple of years ago, which was, you know, we had more people lined up to volunteer than we had lined up who needed help. Um, so you see that sense of community and it's just that one of want to be part of something that belonging, um, that people crave during times like this. So yeah, definitely. Um, the, the fourth thing that I would say is what you, you asked about the content and we were talking about email. Um, as you get better and want to be more efficient, you want to start creating content that you can reuse over and over and over again. This is, this is what companies do. This is what, if you ever hear the term content marketing, it's about creating something of value in the form of a video or a written post or a podcast that can touch one to many. You do the effort to create it once, you can use it to communicate with many. And so the fourth thing to me is start to think about one piece that you can create that would be worth sharing to all of the folks that you got on the phone. If you spoke to them, or even if you didn't, you would go, Hey, I'm going to send you something that might be valuable. I don't know whether it's all the stores that are open, all the places that you can get farm, fresh food, all the places that you can get, you know, care for your car, because now that's backed up right now. I don't know if you've experienced that, but if you're trying to get your car fixed, you got to wait, like, I don't know what the value is, but you will know what the value is in your community. Creating those assets mean that every time someone asks that question, or you sense that it could be helpful, you can go, Hey, I've got something that I created.
Let me send it to you. It then becomes a gift that you are giving to the recipient. And that's what content in its best form should be. You create something that you are thinking about the recipient that they are going to get immense value from this thing. Create one, then create the next one. When you have another question that gets asked a lot, then create the next one to answer that question. And that's how I would think about the content piece. Cool. I love that. Yeah. We have a mantra inside of our brokerage. It's do for, not to. Yeah. And so as we create everything that we try to create from a marketing standpoint, from a tools and service standpoint, it's always a, is this of value to the person who's receiving it?
And that's right. Does it build value in the person sending it? That's right. That's right. Spot on. The last one is different and it's not necessarily a tactic, but this is advice that I give founders a lot. And I give other people who are either starting businesses or in businesses and running teams is that carve out time every day to take care of yourself because it's very difficult to be a leader when you are falling apart. And so the thing that it could be just five minutes, it could be locking yourself in the closet. So your kids can't find you. It could, you know, it could be just going for a walk or walking the dog or taking a bath or any of those things that give you a moment of peace. It will allow you when you come back to do the work that you need to do to be fresh. And that freshness is so important because then you can think of new ideas. You can respond to the changes in our world, which is changing, you know, it's changing every hour. You need to be your best self so you can deliver your best self. So that would be tip number five. Awesome. Yeah. You can't, you just can't underestimate that enough. I mean, it's people aren't taking care of themselves both physically and mentally. And I think that as often as real estate agents get busy and they get, you know, really down into the minutia of I've got to deliver this check or I've got to get this inspection or this thing signed or that thing. It's so easy to get caught up in that, that we don't really do a very good job of stepping away and reexamining things at a 30,000 foot level or just taking, you know, everybody wants to get into real estate because of the flexibility and everything. Yeah. Do that. Go see a movie in the middle of the afternoon by yourself if you need to just to reset, you know, get out of the house and get out of your whatever you can't do whatever you have to do. All right. So that wraps it up for today. I want to thank our guest, Seth Price, head of product at Playster for sharing his tips on how to be found online.
Great, great stuff. I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day, being committed to improving your business and coming and watching the Top 5 show. We will see you next time. Have a great one.
