Is Your Real Estate Business a Media Company?

You’ve likely heard of the Michelin Guide and their star ratings of the world’s most lauded restaurants and hotels. These are the kinds of establishments that people plan special trips around, booking months – years – in advance.

Would it surprise you to find out that the “Michelin” behind this exclusive list is the same as the tire company?

So, how — or maybe the question is why — did a tire company become the world’s leading authority on restaurant and hotel quality?

The Michelin Guide origin story

The Michelin tire company was founded by the Michelin brothers in the late 1800s. At the time, very few people owned an automobile, so the demand for tires was limited.

Their business need compelled them to create valuable media that people would use, and thus bring a boost to their business.

Over the years, the Michelin Guide evolved into what we know now as a star-rated list of the ultimate hospitality experiences. The book certainly still gets people out to travel and that funny little character made of tires still appears on every cover.

Give your audience what they want

The point of most traditional product and services companies is to develop an engaged and loyal audience in order to drive business to their brand.

As a real estate agent, you are your own business and need to build an engaged audience to drive your business. According to the Zillow Group Consumer Housing Report 2017, 79 percent of buyers select their agent because of their local market knowledge.

A steady stream of new content is a great way to reach and engage an audience. But creating content won’t be right for every real estate agent. You need to take an approach that is authentic to who you are and gives your audience something they find valuable.

How to do it

No matter whether you’re embarking on an effort to create some sort of media specifically, or have some other creative marketing approach in mind, the following guidelines will help you to successfully reach your audience.

1. Have a targeted group of people in mind. Focus first on who it is you are trying to reach. A specific niche is best. Understand this group’s needs and address them with your marketing efforts.
2. Have a plan that provides value. You can’t be successful if you don’t have a documented strategy that you and your team knows and delivers against consistently. Make sure your strategy is centered around what’s valuable for your audience (i.e., not just for your business). At FresYes, one Saturday morning the newsletter didn’t go out; their community reached out asking about it. Would your audience miss what you have to say if you stopped?
3. Build your audience. You’re already building an audience and hopefully managing them through the Premier Agent App or another CRM. You collect emails and other contact information at your open houses and through your website. Always gather new contacts and add them to the list of recipients for your marketing.
4. Get your message out. Once you have your plan in place, you need to get it out there. You have multiple channels at your disposal: email, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), your website, direct mail, etc. Despite the proliferation of social media and other channels, email is still the most reliable approach to reaching your audience. At the end of the day, this is a channel you control. Facebook could make one platform change and completely dismantle your ability to reach your audience. Regardless of whether you use just a couple channels or go all in on every possible channel, it’s important to be sure that each channel has a strategy that rolls up to your larger plan (number 2 above).

Rather than doing a quick marketing hack here and there to drum up business, consider a longer play that really digs into what your audience wants.

Focus on developing a concerted strategic effort to fundamentally change the way you engage your database of contacts and deliver value on your their terms — not yours.

If you’re a nerd about this kind of stuff, like me, this 45-minute documentary about the practice of content marketing is helpful to further wrap your mind around this topic.

Over to you! What are your thoughts? What are you currently doing to service the audience in your database? What ideas do you have?