What are the top 5 things to do after the sale?

1) 7-day and 30-day follow-ups.

Call your clients to see how they are enjoying their new home and ask if they need anything. You don’t want a nagging problem preventing your clients from referring future business to you.

2) Make a list of special dates.

Make sure every past client is on your personal holiday card list. Consider mailing birthday cards or closing day anniversary cards. Record the move-in date, mortgage renewal date and any birthdays that you feel comfortable requesting.  Stay in touch with clients on a regular basis by phone, email or on special occasions.

3) Welcome them to their new home

On moving day think of taking a lunch and refreshments.  After they have moved in drop by with a gift showing your appreciation for their business. It can range from a plant, to a bottle of wine or anything else that you feel is commensurate with your appreciation for their business. Think outside of the box; hire a company to power wash their patios, hire a lawn cutting company to cut their lawn. The more thought you put into it the longer lasting the impression.

4) Be their go-to real estate resource

Make sure they know they can rely on you for anything real estate.  From market conditions to tradespeople and everything in between. Encourage them to have their friends and neighbours call you too.

5) Host a client appreciation event

It does not have to be a fancy sit-down dinner. You could organize a family picnic and sports day, rent a theatre, invite them on a harbour cruise, an evening snowshoe or a wine tasting at a local restaurant. The important thing is to invest the time to show your appreciation and have clients meet your other clients. This group is your number one source of referrals so treat them accordingly.

Google reports that “consumer expectations are higher than ever before—and that means everyone is upping their game. The future of marketing is all about delivering relevant, useful, and assistive experiences. The playbook, however, is still being written.”

The ways people get assistance will evolve

Mobile has conditioned consumers to turn to their devices in I-want-to-know, I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, and I-want-to-buy micro-moments. Now the ways people get assistance will evolve too, from typing on devices to speaking to them. For example, in the Google app, 20% of searches are now by voice.¹ And that’s just a preview of what’s to come.

Consumers want a frictionless mobile experience

“Getting the mobile fundamentals right is critical. To stay ahead of consumer needs, it’s important to lay the groundwork with mobile now. Marketers need to think about optimizing their brand’s entire mobile footprint to ensure success in the future. And speed is key here. No matter how great your mobile site looks, if it loads slowly, users will abandon it. For every second delay on mobile page load conversions can fall by up to 20%.”

People are blending their offline and online worlds

“The customer journey is far from linear today. Still, a holistic view of customers is now possible. Innovative measurement tools will help marketers understand the full customer journey across channels, devices, and media types—bridging the digital and physical worlds.”

Expectations for advertising are rising

“Today, consumers believe they should receive marketing messages that are tailored to their unique needs. So, once you have a comprehensive view of your customers, the next step is to reach them at the right moment with the right message. And reaching your audience just got much, much easier.”

I recommend you read the whole article by clicking here.

1 Source: Google Data, Google App, Android, U.S., May 2016.

As Spring is a time for new growth we thought it would be a good time to reprint this and offer you access to the E-Book in pdf form below.

Habit 1: Start tomorrow today

At the end of each day review your phone calls, emails and personal contacts and make a list of tomorrow’s marketing activities.

Habit 2: Return your phone calls and emails immediately

Your phone is like an ATM. It is what makes you money. When buyers and sellers are looking for a Real Estate Agent, your response time is a benchmark for how the rest of the relationship is going to progress. The faster you can respond, the less chance a prospect will contact a competitor.

Habit 3: Check your social account engagement

Social media can be distracting, so get it out of the way early in the day or late in the evening. Review your accounts and determine if there is any action you need to take.

Habit 4: Plan social posts for the day

Tweeting and posting can consume more time than is necessary if you are reacting throughout the day. In the morning, when you are sharing content on social media or if you read something in the newspaper or online, schedule posts or tweets for different times of the day so it looks like you are active all the time.

Habit 5: Check your website stats

Are you using Google Analytics on your website? If not then you should set up Google Analytics and log in each day to see how your website is doing. You can see visits to listings, the number of visitors and how long they stayed on your website. You can even see if visitors are reading your blog posts.

Habit 6: Write and upload a blog post

According to some studies, blogging gets 67 per cent more leads on a company website than a site without a blog. That is a good enough incentive to make blogging one of your habits.

Habit 7: Never be “too busy” for marketing activities

As a company specializing in Real Estate Agent marketing, we work with dozens of Real Estate Agents developing marketing plans and strategies from note cards, to letter writing and newsletters to blogging – and the number one reason we hear why they cannot execute their marketing is they are “too busy.”

1. Abbreviating words that don’t need to be abbreviated

How many emails do you get that end with “Thx”?

Really? You just didn’t have the time to type out “Thanks”? It’s not that I don’t understand what is being communicated. I get it. But it’s almost like saying, “I’m too busy and important to have the kind of time required in a day to type out the word ‘Thanks’.”

2. Responding to an email that has three questions and only answering one

This is another email behavior that slows up the communication process and slows down everyone’s workflow.

3. Forwarding an email ‘as is’ to someone else

Have you ever sent an email to a colleague that was intended for only that colleague? Yes, of course! Every day!

Ever have that colleague forward it completely as is to someone else that you hadn’t intended to read it?

4. A ton of images in your e-signature

It’s one thing to have an organization logo in your email signature. I get that.

But some people insist on including logos of their organization, images of an upcoming trade show they are attending, promotional images of their top-selling items, etc.

Read the entire article by clicking here.

LinkedIn

“LinkedIn traffic peaks in the middle of the working week (Tuesday through Thursday). Optimal times for posting are focused around the morning and evening commutes of 7:30am-9am and 5pm-6:30pm. There’s also a slight peak at lunchtime between 12-1pm. Morning commute hours are heavily dominated by mobile usage.”

Facebook

“Facebook usage peaks in the afternoon between the hours of 1pm-4pm as users log in to help get them through the remaining few hours of the working day. Productivity and distractions are both more prominent offline in the mornings so there is typically less engagement with posts and fewer end-to-end user journeys completed.

When looking at the week as a whole, Wednesday (hump day) is a peak period for post engagement. A second peak comes on Friday. It has been suggested that Fridays see a generally happier Facebook audience as the weekend approaches, leading to a 10% rise in all round use of the platform and a 10-18% rise in post engagement rates.”

Twitter

During the week the most active community Monday through Thursday is mid-afternoon around 1pm-3pm. The volume of users drops off considerably post 8pm, at which point remaining usage becomes highly broadcast based with Tweets reacting to televised news and entertainment.

Twitter also sees a drop off Friday from 4pm but the lowest usage day is typically Sunday.

Click here to read the entire article.

According to Laura “Some 1.2 billion people worldwide access the Internet from a mobile device. If your business doesn’t have a mobile-friendly site, then you’re missing opportunities.

Furthermore, 55% of time spent with online retail occurred on a mobile device, according to one study. That stat and more are highlighted in an infographic by Harris Myers Business Development that explains why businesses should ensure their websites render and function well on mobile devices.

In addition to simply making your site more accessible, mobile-friendliness helps achieve higher rankings in Google search results, and it’s more economical than creating different versions of your website for various types of devices, the infographic explains.

All the benefits that a mobile-friendly sites give to your visitors naturally come together to help you achieve better conversion rates and more sales.”

Click here to view the Infographic.

49% of homeowners do not have a “go-to” real estate agent.

The survey also revealed homebuyers are using word of mouth to find an agent, with:

51% of buyers connecting with their real estate agents on a referral basis
10% of homebuyers were contacted first by an agent.
70% of homeowners said they did “very little” or “some” research before choosing an agent.

We had no idea this new feature had been added to Google search until a client called and said he had 7 phone calls in one day about cottages for sale on a specific lake. At the top of the page was a box with an excerpt from the page on his website, a photo excerpted from the page and a link to the page. Right below that is a link to the page again. Try your own search for lake vernon cottages for sale and see for yourself. See the image below.

Today I was talking to a client about their SEO and I Googled flat fee Vancouver and the search result you see above was displayed. What an incredibly effective placement on page 1.

We did a little investigation and learned what Google has to say when a user asks a question in Google Search:

“we might show a summary of the answer in a special featured snippet block at the top of the search results page. This featured snippet block includes a summary of the answer, extracted from a webpage, plus a link to the page, the page title and URL.”

“The summary is a snippet extracted programmatically from a webpage. What’s different with a featured snippet is that it is enhanced to draw user attention on the results page. When we recognize that a query asks a question, we programmatically detect pages that answer the user’s question, and display a snippet as a featured snippet in the search results.”

How can I mark my page as a featured snippet?

You can’t. Google programmatically determines that a page contains a likely answer to the user’s question, and displays the result as a featured snippet. The only way to achieve this incredible advantage is to continue to add relevant keyword content in context so your page is the authoritative result for the search terms.

One thing I find interesting is that the page that is featured in the snippet does not have a lot of content which adds to the mystery of Google. Check it out.