Today, Kathy from our genius Customer Success Team schooled me on some Redman Tech fundamentals. She talked about what new and established customers can do to set themselves apart right from the start. Our Basic and Pro Packages come loaded with stock content for you to take advantage of, but does that content give you the chance to reveal anything about you?
The truth is, stock content is a really good thing. There is nothing worse than paying for a website solution and having it sit idle awaiting your web writing equivalent to Margaret Laurence’s stroke of genius. Your site might be sitting idle for a while under that kind of pressure…
Stock content gives you the chance to go from zero to generating leads, and that’s great. But since Real Estate is people oriented, would you expect to see huge results from a website that lacks content specifically about you?
We know that the places visitors look to find out about REALTORS® are the Home Page, the About Page, and the Testimonials Page. Your Home Page is your introduction to your prospects. How absurd would it be if you were to walk around all day introducing yourself to prospects using generic, empty words that say nothing about you? Well, by using the stock content on the homepage, you essentially are.
Write down this question:
What type of Real Estate client do you work with?
Give yourself 15 minutes at a quiet time to write down the answer. Be sure to keep it really short.
Your About Page is the one place that you get to share your story. It’s sometimes where website visitors will spend the most time (next to your listings pages, of course), so it would make sense to have something there that speaks to your prospects directly. According to many marketers, your About Page is where your credibility is considered, and people are familiar enough with the digital experience to know that is where I need to go when it’s time to decide if you’re whom they will want to buy or sell a house with.
Write down this question:
Who Am I? (What is my story?)
Again, give yourself 15 minutes to answer that, but keep it short and sweet.
One of the most important aspects of business is your Unique Selling Proposition. This is the one thing that differentiates you from your competitors. All of the great business mavens have well defined ways of separating themselves from all others in the market. Yeah, we can talk about Apple and Harley Davidson, but we can also talk about that vegan resto cafe, Fresh, in downtown Toronto, Elbow Room in Vancouver, or Ming in Calgary. These eateries stand out in their huge markets—in menu, style, service and experience.
Think about these qualities because these are what will help you to define your business. It could be the Real Estate market you serve, it could be your style or your customer relationships. It could even be your warmth or fire—or your incredibly mumbly voice. The things that make you stand out are uniquely yours, so it’s important that you embrace them and use them to further yourself in your marketplace.
Write down this question:
Why am I awesome?
Give yourself 15 minutes to answer that, but keep it really short.
Now that you’ve got three groupings of messages, it’s time to edit them and look at how you can get them on your site. Take the last 15-or-so minutes to clean up your Home and About Page content. It gets a lot easier once you have something on paper!
For your testimonials page, take that last question and hand it over to some of your customers. Any recent, successful real estate transactions will fill your bucket up nicely, so be sure to get variety: New clients, repeat customers, clients referred to you from friends, REALTOR® testimonials of agents you know in other cities who have referred you to their clients. There is nothing more that any person would like to do more than preach about how awesome their real estate experience turned out to be. It’s an important part of buying and selling, and it helps to deepen relationships with the customers who go public about you.
One Last Thing…
Seeing as when you were writing that content and it took about an hour to do, why not repeat taking an hour to work on your site regularly? The best marketers out there still schedule time to work ON their business (marketing, etc.), even if it’s only an hour a week. I believe it was Jim Rohn who said that success comes not in landing great feats, but sticking to the small steps that get you there—or maybe it was his protege Darren Hardy. Either way, the success of your Real Estate Website can be made or lost in an hour a week. Stick to it, and success can be yours.
Kathy is already proud of you. But get in touch with us should you need anything.