“Crickets,” an agent said to me. “I sent a postcard, and I’m hearing nothing but crickets. No calls, no response.”
A good ad should get a response right away. If you’re not getting a response, it’s probably because you’re running an image ad. You’re following the same practices you’ve always followed, and you’re doing it pretty much the same way everybody else does. You’re running the cookie cutter “head and house” ad — a photo of your listing plus your headshot — in hopes of getting more listings. Instead, it’s getting you . . . well . . . crickets.
Try a direct response ad instead. Direct response advertising focuses on the customer, their problems and aspirations. It’s education-based marketing that helps sellers with their problems. Direct response promotes an offer that calls on consumers to act promptly, such as to request additional information.
We’ve created a direct response seller campaign for our agents, as an alternative to image advertising. In architecting this campaign and its marketing funnel, we:
- diagnose 4 common advertising mistakes
- provide 4 fixes for those mistakes
- show campaign architecture for a direct response advertising campaign to sellers
- share early results from the campaign
Are You Making These 4 Common Mistakes on Your Ads?
Image ads typically make at least one of these mistakes:
| Advertising Mistake | Direct Response Fix |
| Mistake #1: Your advertising is about you. Your advertising is about you, your company, your image, your bio, your tagline, your sold listings, your logo, your dog. Image advertising is very ego-based because it’s about getting your name out there. Here’s the problem: people don’t give a hoot about you. They’re interested in themselves and solving their problems. When your advertising is about you, people tune out. |
Fix #1: Make it about them. Stop using advertising that’s about you, and start using advertising and marketing that’s about THEM.Enter the conversation that’s already going on in your prospect’s mind. Get their attention by showing them how to do something that’s already on their mind. Focus your ad on sellers’ biggest problem. There’s any number of ways to do that, with offering people consumer awareness guides or offering free reports or free recorded messages that all have a compelling title that really articulates what they really want, in a way they’re compelled to call and get that information. |
| Mistake #2: Not making ANY offer. Your ad doesn’t make any offer. What’s in it for the seller? Offers are the bait that attracts clients. If there’s no offer, there’s no compelling reason to respond. |
Fix #2: Make a compelling offer. Make sure your every communication actually asks somebody to do something. The function of an offer is to move your prospect to take the desired action – to overcome inertia, to move the prospect along the buying cycle, to imitate the persuasive of face-to-face sales. Every direct response communication must include an offer and the accompanying call to action that clearly tells them what to do and makes it easy to respond. |
| Mistake #3: “Call me” Your main call-to-action is call me – “call me to learn what your home is worth” “call me for a report on home prices in your neighborhood”. You sell a service that costs over $10,000 and has an 18 month sales cycle (the average length of time someone starts thinking about selling their house, until they actually sell). The likelihood that any one individual will call you based on that main call-to-action is incredibly low. Nobody is going to call you off that ad, and you know it. |
Fix #3: Offer a non-threatening way to respond. If there isn’t a real hope in hell that they’ll do your big call-to-action, give them something else to do. Give them something of perceived value. If you offer a free report, provide a non-threatening way to get the information you offer. Three times more prospects will respond if they don’t have to speak with a salesperson to get the information they’re after. Send them to a website or a recorded message. Those response mechanisms are far safer than “Call me.” People don’t have to talk to anyone right now if they don’t want to . . . but they can still reach out and get the info — and it gets them on the road to meeting with you one-on-one. |
| Mistake #4: Not tracking or monitoring results of your ads Some of your advertising dollars are working for you right now, and some of them aren’t. P.T. Barnum once famously said, “I know HALF the money I spend on advertising isn’t working . . . I just don’t know WHICH half!” If you know where you get the best return, it makes your decisions easy. |
Fix #3: Track and monitor every ad. You should make it your business to know exactly how each campaign is working. Track every ad in every media. If you’re running ads in different real estate publications, add a response mechanism and track, so you know which ads worked best. Your intention is to weed out the losers and nurture the winners. |
This an image ad in Sonoma Magazine makes three of the above mistakes: it’s about the realtor (and the lifestyle), it makes no offer, and asks people to call her. What’s in it for the reader . . . anything? What would compel the reader to call this agent?
Why It Would Have Paid You to Advertise This Way A Few Months Ago
We used these fixes to create a direct response seller campaign, and early results are promising. One of our agents ran a direct response ad in a local real estate magazine that got him a $4M listing.
The ad highlighted the hassle of cleaning out stuff, doing upgrades, living in a work zone, then presented results from a family who handed off the job to him. Last, it offered a free report on the success story and our system for handling everything. One prospect downloaded the report. The agent followed up the next day with a short email: “Were you able to download the report? Do you have any questions? ” The prospect wrote a lengthy reply, and asked to meet with our agent. After meeting with our agent, the seller decided to put her $4M house on the market in a few months. Our agent got a listing that was 100% attributable to that ad.
This ad had a lot of copy, and just one small image, in keeping with the old mantra, “The more you tell, the more you sell.” People who are really interested and are your best prospects will take time to read a longer advertising piece. When you get someone captive and reading your piece and you’re one-on-one, you have a chance to tell your story and connect with the prospect. That’s why direct marketers have found that when they increase copy length, they increase response.
The No-Hassle Campaign: A Campaign That Gets Listings
Let’s unpack the architecture of this campaign. It provides a year’s worth of advertising material (postcards, full page ads, sales letters, follow up material), so that our agents can advertise regularly — and get a better response.
Sellers’ Biggest Problem: Overwhelmed at the thought of…
We began by doing some mental heavy lifting to identify sellers’ biggest problem. Their biggest problem is not getting the most for their house. In our market, sellers know their homes will sell fast — and for a lot of money. That’s their baseline expectation. They’ve heard the stories. They’ve seen the ads: “Sold in six days!” They’ve seen the signs: “Sold with multiple offers.
Instead, their biggest problem is feeling overwhelmed about the process. “How do I DO this?” is a question every seller asks us. Maybe they’ve got three kids and no idea how to move out and prep the house. Maybe they’ve got big jobs and no time. Maybe they’ve got 40 years of accumulated stuff. Maybe they don’t know how they’ll pay for improvements.
The Offer: The No-Hassle Report
We offer a free report to help people overcome this overwhelmed feeling. It’s called the “No Hassle, Stress-Free Guide to Selling Your Home.” It is a Q&A style white paper that answers their most frequently asked questions. Its purpose is to reassure them that we handle all the details.
Campaign Architecture
Here’s how our marketing funnel works: the postcard or ad instructs the reader to visit a landing page to download our “No Hassle” report in exchange for their email address. A landing page gives prospects a non-threatening way to get the information they’re after – and gives them instant access to the No-Hassle report. You can get more leads from postcards and ads by sending interested prospects to a landing page, where they can download the No-Hassle report, instead of asking them to call you, the salesperson. When a prospect opts in for the report, the report PDF is instantly, automatically emailed to them. Their email address is captured, and the agent emails a simple follow up. “Were you able to download the report? Do you have any questions?”
Ad Creative
The ad creative has a light, playful touch. A series of illustrations depict a middle aged couple doing their favorite things — dinner in SF, hiking in Tahoe, vacationing in Paris, cycling, playing golf — all while their agent toils away, and their home sells for the highest price the neighborhood has ever seen. The message is simple: we handle everything, while you enjoy life.
Tracking Results
Our ads offer two response mechanisms beyond the usual “call me” that allows agents to know which ad works in any media that they use. For instance, we can track people on their landing page – how many visited, how many downloaded the report – with analytics from our LeadPages software.
