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Beatty: [00:00:04] Well, hello everyone. This is Beatty Carmichael with get sellers calling. You and I have with us a good friend of mine and the co-host of this particular episode, and that’s Stuart Sutton out of Texas. So hello, Stuart, and thanks for joining us. Back on.

Stuart: [00:00:44] Good afternoon. I’ll try to talk fast so you don’t have to listen to my Texas drawl. How’s that?

Beatty: [00:00:48] Well, if you did that, if you really want to do that, that’s okay with me. That reminds me when I was growing up. So I’m here in the South. For those who don’t know. Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and my dear grandmother who is no longer alive these days. When I was young, she hated the Southern drawl and I’m sure she would hate the Texas drawl even more. And she would always tell me, Keep your back straight, your chin in and enunciate correctly.

Stuart: [00:01:21] So good advice.

Beatty: [00:01:23] Yeah. Um, so I wanted to for those who are just joining in on our podcast, you’ve maybe not heard the Marketing Mastermind podcast series. Stuart and I are both experts in our fields. I’ve been in direct response marketing and driving consumers to respond for over 30 years, 25 of them professionally in terms of service to others, and many years prior to that, just from my own businesses. And then Stuart is a kind of a mediocre producer, I would say maybe over in Texas. So, Stuart, what type of, uh, what type of production do you do over there? I forgot.

Stuart: [00:02:03] Well, on a basis of comparison, sometimes it feels mediocre, but I, uh, I have a part time assistant, and I personally handle clients in about the 22 million range. I do have a team, but it’s just as far as my production with my marketing that we’re going to be talking about. It’s just me and a part time assistant in about 30, 35 hours a week.

Beatty: [00:02:28] And and you work mostly weekends on that, right? When all the people can go to the houses and watch them and see them.

Stuart: [00:02:34] You’re good at setting me up. Yeah. One of my one of my claims to fame is one of the things I really press with my agents. And anybody that will listen is you don’t have to work weekends, you don’t have to work evenings, you don’t have to work long hours. You don’t have to be the stressed out, chaotic, frenetic agent to earn all the money you want to make. You earn what you deserve. If you understand the process and understand what people want and need from you.

Beatty: [00:03:01] You know, that’s so cool. And that’s kind of where I wanted to. What we’re going to talk about today is one aspect of marketing, But the thing that impressed me with Stuart and the thing that impressed Stuart with me is both of us, both of us recognize the marketing expertise in the other. But the thing that caught me is this was years, years back. Stuart’s actually in that group of the first five. I’m going to say he was my first client as we moved exclusively into real estate. And after getting to know Stuart and after selling to a lot of other top producing agents and some that were mediocre, lower level producing, the average agent we talked to was probably 20, 20, 20 to 25 transactions a year and working 60 to 70 hours a week. And then Stuart. Stuart, do you remember how many transactions you were doing back then?

Stuart: [00:03:59] Yeah, you are. Ask you just a little bit, but we’re going to get it right on the first time this time. And that is 111.

Beatty: [00:04:07] 111 transactions a year on how many hours a week at that time?

Stuart: [00:04:13] Around 35. But that was just me, not my team. That was just me and a part time assistant.

Beatty: [00:04:19] And that’s what blew me away. And then you told me that he said, Beatty, I don’t work weekends and I almost never work evenings. And I thought, How do you sell real estate without evenings, without weekends, do 111 transactions a year on 35 hours a week when the typical agent is struggling to do 20 or 25 transactions a year and they run out of time. And the key is what we’re going to talk about on this call today. And that is all about marketing. So I encourage you, if you’re listening to this and you want to grow your business, then you can grow it with marketing and you don’t have to go out and pay someone else to do it if you just want to learn it. So with that, we were talking before we started this call about a couple of things. We’re talking about what we call the marketing equation, and I thought that’d be a good place to start on this. And and I want to tee up one thing and then bounce it over to you for a moment. Stuart.

Beatty: [00:05:19] So one of the big things you have in marketing is you have a thing called a headline, and a headline is the very first words that your marketing piece has, okay? And it’s designed to grab someone’s attention. It’s the same thing, actually. If you’re calling up someone and trying to make a sales pitch on the phone to set an appointment, or if you’re talking to someone and they say, what do you do? And you know, they’re thinking about selling a home, it’s always the first words coming out that is designed to grab someone’s attention because if you can grab their attention up front, then they’ll listen to you a little bit longer and so with that, Stuart, in our last take, by the way, this is our like take number three because we didn’t like the intros on the first one, just to be quite honest. All right. But this will be a pure take all the way through now. But Stuart, let me turn over to you to kind of get us kicked off on that whole idea of the attention grabber.

Stuart: [00:06:22] Okey doke. The and I’m actually going to give you some examples. Okay. So the attention grabber doesn’t matter where it’s a Facebook ad or a Google ad or a postcard or a mailing or a phone call. Now I prefer marketing straight because what we want is clients to contact us. If we’re spending all of our time chasing clients, we’re going to be working weekends and evenings. So if clients are calling us because they need what we want, that usually comes from the marketing that we do. So I’m going to give you an example of a headline and tell me what you think this headline is doing. The headline for a piece I just sent out was When you sold your One Acre Plus Home in 1993, it was okay to use outdated psychology for pricing, but it’s not okay in 2023, and here’s why.

Beatty: [00:07:15] That creates some curiosity.

Stuart: [00:07:17] It creates curiosity. It if somebody truly is thinking and sometimes even if they’re not thinking about selling, what I want to do is put a thought into their mind that, wait a minute. The way everyone else does, it may not be the way it ought to be done. And I’m going to give you sort of a sister headline to that. And that is and I’ve sent out this piece as well, and it says. You should almost never cross your home where your real estate agent recommends. Here’s why. Now, don’t want nobody to get offended on this call. There’s nothing derogatory in the information provided, but that headline is something that’s really important in reaching the people that I want to contact me because what I’m trying to do is position myself as an expert and have them respond to me as a perceived expert. And when I take something big like the price of their home and say, hey, don’t listen to the industry that you’re going to have to listen to, you should listen to me instead is really kind of what that says. Does that make sense?

Beatty: [00:08:32] It does. And one of the most important things about a headline is just that whole thing that I just mentioned. It creates curiosity. And this is probably the most important thing with your first your the first words that you use with marketing is you need to grab enough attention that they want to go further. And that headline for me, Stewart says, Why should I not price it at the price my agent tells me. Right. Because now you’ve caught my interest. And the other thing that’s this is interesting we’re talking about in marketing, there’s a thing called a reticular activator. And the best way to do to describe a reticular activator is, let’s say you’re you have no interest right now in buying a new car, but then something happens with your car. It starts to break down and you say it’s time to get a new one. And so you look for a car that maybe no one else has. You don’t want to have a same car like like everyone else. So you find this really cool car in a cool color, totally unique, and then you buy the car. And then after that, do you know what happens as you’re driving around town?

Stuart: [00:09:41] Stewart Every other car just like yours, you notice it. That’s right.

Beatty: [00:09:45] You start noticing it everywhere and you realize that yours wasn’t all that unique. That’s your reticular activator. Once your mind is focused on something, then it starts to see it everywhere. But if you’re not focused on it, you don’t see it at all. And when someone’s thinking about selling, the reticular activator says, Keep your mind open and your eyes open for anything tied to selling and how to get the most money when I sell. And so that’s what happens with your headline. It creates curiosity. But my reticular activator says, Hey, take notice. This is going to be something important. Let’s read that postcard.

Stuart: [00:10:22] And that really kind of leads me, I’m going to throw this back at you. You shared something with me that basically identified what Sellers truly want to know more than anything else and why headlines should grab that attention. So do you remember the comparison that you shared with me?

Beatty: [00:10:41] Yeah. So give our viewers or listeners, depending on how you’re getting this podcast, a little background. So I’m a marketer and marketing is all based on doing marketing, testing, tracking and measuring. And if you can’t test and track and measure, it’s not marketing. So one of the first things we did this was ten years ago, Stuart, we did a series of 21 split marketing tests. We did a lot more testing, but split marketing specifically 21 times on about 2 million postcards when it was all said and done. And one of the things that we were looking for in this series of tests was what is what we call in marketing, What is the offer? And the offer is that thing that makes someone want to respond. Okay. Because if you’re going to do anything in marketing and you want to get your prospect to respond, you have to know what they’re most interested in. So we mailed a number of different times, but we had one offer that outperformed the control group by eight times. And looking back, I go, Well, duh, that makes sense. But looking forward, most people don’t understand it. And that simple offer was how to get the most money when selling my home. And so for those of you listening, if you want to do marketing, whether, as Stuart said, whether it’s a Facebook ad or even talking to someone on the phone or what we do postcards, then the most important thing is to help that homeowner know how to get the most money for selling their home, because that is their number one motivation. And number two is how to sell it quickest. And number three is how to sell it with the least amount of effort.

Stuart: [00:12:31] Very good. That’s you know what? And those are things we, I think, as real estate agents, we identify with. But I think those are also things we don’t necessarily purposely use in our attention grabbers. And I’ve just I’ve seen so many postcards and postcards that come through, you know, to my house. I just see all kinds of postcards and they all are fairly generic rather than and this is one of the reasons I picked up the phone and called you all those years ago is because your marketing was not generic. It followed particular rules. And one of those rules is, is, you know, the headline that we just used.

Beatty: [00:13:10] Yeah. So so this is the most important part. Remember, I was reading a book and I’ve got it on my it’s called the Adweek Copywriting, Adweek Copywriting Handbook, and it’s written by a guy. He ran several businesses. They were all his hundreds of millions of dollars a year. This is back in the 80 seconds and 90 seconds when that was actually a lot more money than today. And it’s still a lot today, but there’s a lot of money back then. And one of the things that he found is that, you know, the whole psychology of marketing is the headline. The purpose of the headline is to grab their attention and get them to read the sub headline. That’s it. If you just want to bring them in. And then the purpose of the subheadline is to engage them and create enough curiosity that they want to read the first sentence of your copy. The purpose of the first sentence. Can you guess what the purpose of the first sentence is? Stuart Would that.

Stuart: [00:14:13] Be to get them to the second sentence?

Beatty: [00:14:15] Yeah, to get them to read the second sentence. And the purpose of the second sentence is to get them to read the third sentence. And I’m not going to keep going this way, but I want to make a point. Once they read about the third or fourth sentence, the vast majority of people would read the entire ad. As long as you didn’t board them. And so it’s it’s the approach is you put enough time and effort into what does that headline say? That that’s actually the most important part of your marketing. In fact, I’d like to tell a story. Do you remember back in the 1980s, Stuart, when interest rates were going through the roof?

Stuart: [00:14:54] Yes, I do.

Beatty: [00:14:55] And in fact, one day, about the time you got started.

Stuart: [00:14:59] Or just the time I got started and we really love today’s interest rates comparatively.

Beatty: [00:15:04] Yes. Everyone’s complaining about interest. They’re too high. Yeah. Just try 13 and 17% mortgage rates, right? Yep. So. But back during that time, gold was going through the roof in in the pricing. And there’s a type of company called Numismatic Company. They sell gold coins, gold and silver coins. So there was a company based in Washington that was marketing and the Wall Street Journal and New York Times and other places selling gold coins. And the headline was two thirds bank financing on gold and silver coins. Okay. In other words, they had a relationship with a financial institution that would actually loan money for people to invest in gold and silver coins because the prices kept going up and they made enough money to do a great job. But then a marketer got involved and he started testing about 5 or 6 different headlines. And the one the headline that outperformed everything else, get this to it, it produced for the same dollar spend in marketing. It produced 20 times the number of sales. The basic premise of the ad was the same, but the headline was different. And this is what I want to encourage everyone about.

Beatty: [00:16:21] The headline is the most important part and what this guy did. His name is Jay Abraham. For some who understand who that guy is, is he articulated the value clearly, say two thirds bank financing on gold and silver doesn’t mean a whole lot to most people. So he reworded it. He made it a longer headline, but the longer headline was to clearly articulate the key message to grab people’s attention. And his headline that produced 20 times more sales said, If gold is selling for $300 an ounce, give us just $100 an ounce. We’ll buy you all the gold you want. Wow. Yeah, it’s the same message, but now it’s articulated in a way that you go, Wow, and now you want to read that ad you do. And all it is, is that that headline is what grabs the people with that reticular activator and it stops them in their tracks. We call it an interrupter. At times. It stops them in their tracks and they say, Oh, let me read. Right. You got my attention now. And then you bring them on down the cycle.

Stuart: [00:17:35] Exactly. That is great. What a great example too. I do actually remember that. Maybe I remember it from the last time you told me, but probably so. But that is a great example because just the way that headline read really was the difference in I mean, 20 times is that’s that’s pretty amazing.

Beatty: [00:17:53] Yeah. One of the tests that we did so part of our 21 split marketing test since we’re on the topic of headlines is we tested a short headline versus a longer headline. Okay. Now we had a really good short headline that already was I mean, it hits all the key buttons. If you’re thinking about selling your home, read this immediately. Dot, dot, dot. Very good. Right? So you got the reticular activator thinking about selling your home. Create a sense of urgency and curiosity. Read this immediately. And and so we were testing against that headline but which is a strong headline to test against its most most agent headlines. If I were to pull out my postcards that I keep every postcard that agents send me and most of it is just garbage, right? I mean, it’s it’s the same old, same old. So we tested a long headline versus that short headline and the long headline that produced it was only an incremental increase. I think it was it was our lowest producing increase over the control group of any of our tests. And it was only about a 25 or 30% increase, which in marketing that means if you got ten sales, you would have gotten 13 sales, right? So so that’s still significant.

Beatty: [00:19:12] But the the headline was it went from are you you know, if you’re thinking about selling your home, read this immediately to if you’re thinking about selling your home, I can get it sold for the top price immediately because the special buyers I work with. Read more. To learn. Read to learn more or something like that. So it was a longer headline by a factor of probably 2 or 2 and a half times, but it increased results because it was more descriptive like the headline that that headline that you read the first or the second one. It was a long headline, relatively speaking, but it was more descriptive and because it was more descriptive and at a moment’s notice, that person gets to get a picture of what’s the value and why should I continue reading? If you want more listings, we guarantee them an agent dominator. Whether you’re marketing to a geographic farm, past clients and sphere of influence, a niche market, or even commercial property owners, our fully customized postcards produce up to ten times more results than standard real estate postcards, and we guarantee your listings or your money back. So visit us at Agent dominator.com to learn more. And now back to the podcast.

Stuart: [00:20:33] Exactly. Yeah. And it’s I’ll tell you what, I’m going to go from that one because you said the headlines designed to get them to the next to the sub headline. Okay. So when you sold your one acre plus home in 1993, pricing it using outdated psychology was okay, but not in 2023. And here’s why. So the next line says, If a real estate agent suggests you price using psychology, you should see a big red flag. And I’ve got a graphic of a red flag because fewer home buyers will actually see your home online if you price that way. So let’s kind of talk about what we’re doing there. What? Yeah, go from headline to sub headline.

Beatty: [00:21:16] So let me let me back up before we go there if I can. Um, because one of the challenges that we have in working with real estate agents and showing them what we do and then buying into it is they go, Well, that’s too much. No one’s going to read that. Or they’re going to say, Well, that doesn’t hold my attention because what’s happening is they’re looking at it from their perspective as a real estate agent, right? Not the homeowner’s perspective who has no clue of this stuff and they’re the ones that were marketing to. Okay. So just to give an idea. Um, so you’re, you’re sending this out to mostly your one acre plus niche, is that it?

Stuart: [00:21:55] That particular one, Yes. Okay.

Beatty: [00:21:57] So let’s talk first about one acre plus. What type of volume do you do and how many hours a week do you work on getting that volume?

Stuart: [00:22:07] Well, it’s obviously incorporated into my into my regular week. But that particular part of my business is I spend probably a quarter of my time on to a third and it represents about. Over half to two thirds of my volume.

Beatty: [00:22:27] Okay. So putting some numbers to this, because this is what you shared with me last time, about 8 to 10 hours a week. And it produces about $15 million a year in volume. Right. Okay. So I want to just kind of first set the baseline. If you don’t like the headline, doesn’t matter. Would you like 8 to 10 hours a week of effort to produce $15 million a year in volume? Because that’s what these headlines are doing. That’s what this whole process. So with that said, now let’s go back and talk about talk about the card just so people don’t so we don’t lose people saying, well, I wouldn’t read. I wouldn’t respond to that. Right. Right.

Stuart: [00:23:03] Okay. And I understand exactly what you’re saying is absolutely true. As a real estate agent, I had to navigate over that hump of this is too much. I actually have my agents, Beatty, who will take my example of a marketing piece, and they will cut it down and cut it down and cut it down until they’re comfortable that it is just short and sweet enough and then it becomes nearly totally ineffectual. I’ll go back to a little bit of history. Okay. If you’ve heard of a car company, let me ask you something. There’s a car company that’s number 12 ranked number 12 out of all the car companies in the world. Do you think they run around going, we’re number 12, We’re number 12?

Speaker3: [00:23:47] No, not at all.

Stuart: [00:23:47] There’s nothing really to brag about there. Right. But so let’s take them and put them into a category. Luxury car sales. They’re number one. So. Mercedes Benz most successful sales letter in the history of their company was 28 pages long. Wow. The reason? It was 28 pages long. You have already described because it was pertinent, relevant, compelling. The headline took the reader to the subheadline, which took them to the first sentence in paragraph, which kept going. So they truly mean it was. It was historical. 28 pages long to a sales letter sent out to prospective Mercedes Benz buyers. My pre list package is 30. In 39 pages long. Okay. Okay. And you know what? Real estate agents constantly tell me. Nobody’s going to read all this. Nobody’s going to read all that. You know what sellers tell me every time I go on a listing appointment? Nearly. I read every word. Thank you.

Beatty: [00:25:00] Yeah, You know, that’s interesting.

Stuart: [00:25:02] No one’s giving them that kind of information.

Beatty: [00:25:04] Yeah, that’s. That’s the thing that. So for those who don’t know, we do a postcard marketing service. If you’re on my podcast, you know that we do it right on postcards. And when we are, it’s interesting. And I wish I could pull this up for our listeners, but I won’t. I won’t because most of them are audio, so they won’t see it. But we show them pictures of two postcards, right? One is the standard real estate postcard has got a gorgeous photo, a short message at the top, you know, sold for $6,000 over asking price. And then it had the real estate agent’s information. And then the next postcard has lots and lots of text on it and just a little tiny photo of the home that was sold. And so we always ask the agent, you know, out of these two postcards, which do you like the most? Every single agent loves the beautiful photo with little bit of text. And then I share our study that what homeowners want the most is how to make the most money and the message the. And so I show them both cards again and say, put on your homeowner’s hat and the card with a beautiful photo or the card with all the text and all the text is educating that homeowner on how to get the most money for their home.

Beatty: [00:26:20] Now, say, as a homeowner thinking about selling, which car do you like the most? They always pick the long copy. But here’s the point I wanted to share with that, too. Not only, you know, a lot of agents say, well, I don’t think anyone will read it, but our experiences, not only do they read it, they read all all of it, but then they hold on to it and they actually accumulate all these postcards. So when our agents go on a listing appointment, oftentimes they’ll have the homeowner pull out all the postcards, said, Look, I’ve kept all your postcards. Why? Because they were just like your pre listing packet. They had all of the information that they were looking for. And how do you sell a home and get the most money? And when they held on to it, they’re keeping that agent’s branding in front of the whole time.

Stuart: [00:27:10] Exactly. That that makes so much sense. And it’s so true because when again, I’m just going to go back to relevant and compelling. So if someone truly is thinking about it, then those are compelling pieces of information that make them want to read it. They want to learn. They want to understand. Um, I’m going to move to a different purpose for the headline and that is to target. So we want to grab their attention, but whose attention do you want to grab? That’s very important as well. You’ve got to target who you want in that headline. So the very best headline I could I could have would be, Hey, Beatty, if you’re thinking about selling your home, this is something you have to know. I mean, that’d be the best, right? Right. But can we really mail, merge and do all that and put every single and make it look, you really can’t, but you can come pretty close to that. So if you’re marketing to a farm area or a particular type of property, you need to target within that postcard and you can’t really target too many times. Well, yeah, you probably could, but it would be really hard to. So I’m going to give you another headline real quick. This headline says, in this area that I send it to is Woodland Park. Okay. Kind of a typical sounding subdivision name, but it’s a subdivision within my niche. So it says the headline says, Our Woodland Park Homeowners, The Smartest Homeowners in Georgetown. I get that and other riveting answers. So what I’m doing is basically grabbing their attention, but I’m grabbing particular people’s attention. In other words, I’m not going to if I’m a Woodland Park homeowner and I see those big, bold letters, Woodland Park homeowners, you know, smartest, et cetera, that’s going to grab me. And it’s targeting me saying, hey, you’re the one I’m talking to. Does that make sense?

Beatty: [00:29:15] That makes a lot of sense. And when you’re spending money with so in all marketing, you have what’s called wastage. Okay? For example, if you’re going to mail to a farm of 300 homes and you’re going to do postcard mailings, if there’s a 5% turnover, that means in a year, 15 homes will sell. That means every quarter only about four people are actually four homes are thinking about selling. So every time. 300 postcards. You have 296 wasted postcards for the most part. Right. Because you’re only looking for those four that are selling or those 15 that might end up selling all year. And you’ve got to target your marketing so you grab their attention. And if you miss their attention, then you miss your target. So it makes a lot of sense.

Stuart: [00:30:08] Well, you know, studies from the I’ll just call it the old days back when there really wasn’t much online. The things the sellers want a home owners wanted the most was to see what homes were selling for in their neighborhood. Right. So agents sent out the price lists, right? Yeah. You can’t do that anymore. You know, privacy laws now restrict that. So are there loopholes around it? Sure. But, I mean, I don’t see any reason to fight. Fight when there’s plenty of other things to do. So what can you substitute for? Hey, what if things sold for you can substitute with, hey, go online and get this information rather than sending them a list, you can now send them online to get the information they want, but that makes the headline ever more important because used to you’d have it right on that sheet that you mailed to them. Now you’ve got to get them to take action and go online.

Beatty: [00:31:01] Very interesting. So let me clarification. So the the market. Market analysis market snapshot type postcard that showed addresses and homes and what they sold for. That’s is that what you’re saying is not allowed anymore?

Stuart: [00:31:17] Well yeah. Privacy laws prohibit me telling what somebody home sold for. Okay. So I can say hey price range the range from here to here. And and these are the homes that sold. But privacy laws do well in my state anyway, I thought it was federal, but I can’t send out and say 2 to 3. Woodland Park sold for 899,000. I can’t send out a list like that anymore.

Beatty: [00:31:41] Gotcha. Very interesting. Yeah. So that brings me to another thing then. This is, this is one of those things that when you have one door shut, you have a great big opportunity door that opens up. That is if you can get people to the website and you can do a short video to explain what’s going on. Now they get a chance to meet you. So this is what we talked about on times past. So just for those who don’t know, Stuart has his niche of one acre plus. He’s actually has rolled it out. If you have interest in growing a niche, he’ll hold your hands and guide you through it. It’s a it’s super powerful. We’ve taken the same approach that he does, except we do it just with any address that any list that you want. But the whole focus is you use the postcard to grab the attention and then you get them to scan a code or go to a web website URL and get the information that that postcard talks about. Because when you do that, now, they get to see you in person, and once they see you in person, they start to buy into you and they start to trust you. And you were sharing, Stuart, that from the marketing that you do to your one acre plus niche, a percent of sales that you get that are referred by people you’ve never met. Do you remember that stat?

Stuart: [00:33:08] You know what? I just make sure I unmute. I don’t remember the exact stat and I apologize, but it’s extraordinary the number of people who call me and say, would you come visit with us? And that’s what my business has been based on for the last 27 years. Clients calling me, Would you come talk to us so I don’t have to chase leads? I’m basically responding to someone who says we need you. So the number of people who call me and say, Would you come talk to us? And of course, one of the questions we have that we’re going to ask every time is, do you mind me asking how you heard about me? Well, the Joneses referred well, gosh, I don’t think I know the Joneses. Well, No, you don’t. But they knew that you specialized in one acre plus and told us we ought to call you. So those kind of calls are very common. And that only happens when you are perceived as an expert when you’ve basically gained that position. I think we talked about that in the last call in the mind of the consumer as being the expert in that type of property. There’s people calling me referred by people who’ve never used my service, but they perceived me to be the expert.

Beatty: [00:34:23] Yeah. And the and back to is the headline that drives him there without the headline. You can’t get it. Let’s talk about the next stage So we have this attention grabbing headline. So there’s a marketing formula that is if you really kind of break it down, this is the process prospects go through. You first have an attention grabber. I’ll call it the interrupt because it interrupts them out of their their mind is not engaged. And now they see your marketing piece, whatever it is, and now they get engaged with you, right? Then you have the engagement. So you you interrupt, you engage, you educate, you offer. And the engagement usually is like a a sub headline. It’s the next words off of the after after the headline that will grab them to take them the next step. And, sir, what do you, uh, because I know your post cards are set up a little bit different than the way we do ours at times. But if you were to talk about engagement and then I know how you get into education, but how do you start to engage them between the headline and the next step on educating?

Stuart: [00:35:38] Well, that would be really just kind of a follow up on the headline. So most of my headlines are based on proven formulas from people like Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, things like that. So there are a series of headlines and a lot of those. Really kind of lead into the next line. For example, you heard the one where I said you should never price where your real estate agent recommends, and here’s why. So the next sentence better start to address the here’s why because the headline sent them right to that next sentence in one of those formulas is new information. People respond to new information, a much higher rate than they do what’s considered old hat. Okay. And one of the things that and you had mentioned this earlier or alluded to it, that I get so many postcards from real estate agents saying, hey, I sold this house. Do you want to know what it’s worth? Well, I don’t need you to tell me what it’s worth. I can go to the Zillow, I can look at my appraisal. I mean, my tax assessment. I can go on any one of 4 million websites.

Stuart: [00:36:46] So you’ve got to give them something that they just don’t think is everyday information. So here’s another one I send out. This is statistically oriented and these are a minority of my postcards, but this will give you an example. Here are answers that one acre plus homeowners want to know. But the truth is you can’t get them anywhere else. Here’s why. So what I’m doing is saying, hey, there’s you want to know these answers? This is it. And then the next line says, you know, I hear so many stories. Does anyone really know what happened? And when the market changed and started shifting in 22, well, here. And then it leads them into some of the questions that I get asked. So the questions that I’m answering for them are what they have been asking me, not what I think they want to hear, what they have been asking me. And as a marketer, Beatty, you know, the number one absolute rule is give them what they want to know, not what I think they want to know.

Beatty: [00:37:45] Yeah. So let’s all so let me now interpret this a little bit further. For those who are listening. If you don’t really understand marketing, maybe this is kind of grabbing your interest. What do you do with this? The key is new information. This is what you know when you have when you’re out there on listing appointments, you’re talking to sellers and they’re asking you these questions. Those questions become the food that you then turn into a marketing piece, right? When you start to see the same question over and over again, then even if it’s just 1 or 2 times that you hear it, you can say, well, this is a this is a really good question, and I bet others have the same type of question. So now you can market it as, hey, here’s some new information. In fact, I’ll have to tell you a funny story, Stuart. Here in my family, we would make, you know, my wife and I, we would make a decision and then she would come back and it’s like, let’s think through this decision again and go, No, we’ve already we’ve already thought it through. Let’s don’t do anything more. But she found that if she said, Hey, I’ve got some new information for you, okay, Now with new information, I’m going to actually listen because new information means we might need to change our decision. Does that make sense? So so with that, you know, if you’re thinking about selling your home, here’s some new information you need to be aware about, aware of with selling your home in 2023.

Stuart: [00:39:15] Okay. Makes complete.

Speaker3: [00:39:16] Sense.

Beatty: [00:39:16] And that new information now is a curiosity grabber. So it makes them want to engage. And now you start to educate on whatever that.

Speaker3: [00:39:25] I don’t know why.

Stuart: [00:39:26] But I think my wife is a natural marketer just like yours.

Speaker3: [00:39:28] Yeah. Yeah.

Beatty: [00:39:30] What happened? You know, sometimes you become a great marketer after you beat your head up to, you know, beat against the wall too many times. And she finally figured out Beatty’s hard headed. Once he makes a decision, you can’t get him off of it unless there’s new information. So she says, Hey, I got some new information for you.

Stuart: [00:39:48] New information? Yeah. And that’s that’s actually something that goes way, way back. Studies have been done on that since the early 1900s. As far as marketing is concerned, new information really pulls people in at a much higher rate.

Beatty: [00:40:02] So let’s kind of wrap up and summarize real quickly on this call. If you’re going to do marketing and you want to generate more listings, the most important thing you can do is this headline. It’s a it’s the attention grabber. It will determine how successful your marketing piece is because if you don’t grab their attention, nothing else that comes after the headline is going to even be seen. Whether you’re running a Facebook ad, you’re doing a postcard campaign, you’re talking to someone personally or making a phone call. It’s those very few first words out of your mouth or out of your marketing piece that’s designed to to grab them by their reticular activator and say, wake up, take notice. This is specifically for you. And once you have their attention, then now you’ve got their attention for just a little bit of time to see if them giving you their attention. Is worth their while. So that’s where your next engagement that it’s usually right after the headline if it’s a postcard. So if you think about a postcard, you got this headline and then you have the marketing copy. Usually that engagement is going to be your first 1 or 2 sentences. It kind of restates the headline. But more than anything else, is the connecting piece between the headline and the main copy. It’s it’s like, okay, now that I caught your attention, let me transition you into what I’m about to tell you and you start to grab some attention and then.

Speaker3: [00:41:29] Exactly focus on I’m going to I’m going to.

Stuart: [00:41:31] Share this headline with you because it’s it’s so pertinent. I just sent this out. I wish I could show this to you, but it it sounds like that this is scripted. But I just sent this card out and gave it to all the folks in my group at the headline says, Are you ready for this? Yep. The smartest four steps to get top dollar for your one acre plus home in 2023 and why you should start now. So what it did was the smart steps, the positive top dollars in their targets, the one acre plus homes and sends them to the next line. It’s not the perfect headline, but it just sounds very much like what you and I were talking about as we went through this.

Beatty: [00:42:17] Yeah, you know, that also brings up one other thing that we didn’t cover. We’ll talk about this more in a different session. But everything there and everything you hear me talking about is on the positive. How to the smart stuff make more money. Everything’s positive. One of the things that we did test is a negative headline, like how to keep from losing a fortune when you sell your home. No one is interested in that because it’s negative. Homeowners are always in You find business owners are motivated by the negative because their risk risk adverse, how they’re always managing risk. But home owners are consumers, and consumers are almost always focused on the opportunity the to gain more. So all your marketing needs to be on how to get more money, the smart way of selling your home, you know, all these things that are focused on uplifting and positive.

Stuart: [00:43:12] You know, it’s in. I know we’ve got a time limit, but as we’re talking about this and going through this, maybe next time we’ll we’ll kind of roll into the rest of the card. But the way mine always end is sending them to a video every single time without fail. I do not send out cards that don’t send them to a place to get the rest of the information. I don’t leave them wanting like, Well, this is ridiculous. He didn’t tell me anything. We actually give them some good information on the marketing piece, but lead them to the rest of the details. Or, like Paul Harvey says, the rest of the story. But for example, I’ll just go buy a domain for nearly every card. Not everyone, but nearly every card. For example, I sent one out about the market shifting and I sent them to one acre plus shift.com. So I’ll just go grab a domain to send them to an appropriate video. Here’s another one. One acre plus truce 2023 They don’t have to be short and sweet and clever, they just have to be pertinent and again, relevant to the information. So that’s where we send them to the video is to a URL that’s relevant to the message that we were giving them, if that makes sense.

Speaker3: [00:44:31] That makes a.

Beatty: [00:44:31] Lot of sense. One of the things that and what you’re doing is another marketing truism. You can’t give them too much information if it’s information they want to know. And so rather than just relying on the postcard and I share this because both what Stuart does with One Acre plus his niche and what we do with our video infused postcards is all focused on this concept that if you have someone thinking about selling, they will read a 49 page pre-listing packet because they want to make the right decision. They’re selling a very expensive asset and they will take time. And so the postcard then grabs their attention, starts to engage them and directs them to a website. And then on that website there’s a video where I know our typical videos are 7 to 10 minutes long. Yours are about the same. Stuart And now you can start to not only educate them, but they start to look at you as the expert. They start to trust you and I keep going back. For those people who are wondering how in the world can you work only 8 to 10 hours in your niche and do 15 million a year in volume? This is how in the world you do it. A postcard sends them to a website and then it’s you giving them more information through video. They are learning, they’re believing, they’re trusting, and now in their mind, they’ll call no one else but you. By the way, that statistic on how many of those sales from your one acre plus marketing are referred to you is 35% is what you told me. Interesting. Yeah. About one one third. Yeah, about a third.

Stuart: [00:46:14] A third of the referrals come from people I don’t know.

Beatty: [00:46:16] Yeah. And that’s. That’s just an amazing number. So. All right, let’s see, Stuart, for people who might have interest in engaging with you on one acre plus niche. So if you want to grow a niche, add another income stream. How do they reach out to you?

Stuart: [00:46:34] Well, we got I’ve got a website that we put up, especially for listeners of this podcast, and that is one acre plus niche niches in one acre plus niche.com. So when you go there, you’ll get some great information. Basically, you’ll get a lot of information that we sell, but that we’ve agreed to provide at no charge to listeners of Betty’s podcast. So go there. And when you look at the information, if you feel compelled and want to just check it out a little bit more, just sign up. No obligation, no hassle. I’ll have a consulting call with you. Explain to you what we do, how we do it. And again, it’ll do nothing but help you if if we can go any further than that and it works, that’s great. If not, that’s absolutely fine.

Beatty: [00:47:25] And also, if you want other help in other markets, in fact, if you want to see what we did on our split marketing test, this was really cool. So we did 21 split marketing tests and there were five that were our top winners. Okay. Three of those five each produced more than eight times the overall results. And so if you want to see what we actually did and to see what causes people to respond more, if you go to our website at Agent dominator.com, as soon as you hit there, there’ll be a pop up page. Right. And that pop up is, is this 21 split marketing test that we did. So just fill out that we’ll send you a link and it’s a short video.

Stuart: [00:48:04] You’ll going I’m going to follow up on that and highly encourage you guys to watch that. I’ve been a marketer for a long time and that. Was extremely interesting. I’m going to throw one more thing at you. One of the reasons that. In my niche and I encourage anybody and everybody that that uses our process to use Agent Dominators because they have the one absolute killer process that I’ve never found anywhere else. If someone, you know, the hard thing to do is get people to go to your landing page and then put in their information. Yes. They go to my landing page. They don’t have to do a thing. They can watch my video, fill out nothing, and I get the information about who they are and I can follow up. So let me go back to an old sales formula. And this kind of shortens the marketing formula, but it’s the sales formula attract, engage, follow up. So why are flier boxes that are in front of houses no longer existent? Because they would attract someone could engage because they pull out a flier. But how could the agent follow up? I quit using flower boxes in zero seven. Yeah. So with Agent Dominator cards attract, engage, follow up now in Beatty has shown me the way on this a long time ago and that is I can be a reactive agent which if you’re marketing is really good, that’s okay. But if I can be proactive, my numbers, all they do is go up because now I can reach out to somebody because I have their information and you can’t do I’m maybe, you know, maybe I just don’t know of any other way you can do that.

Beatty: [00:49:49] Yeah. Let me share because this is fun and thanks for bringing that up. So a while back, Stuart and I were talking and he’s been using videos for a number of years and he was saying on one video that, you know, he’s had 1200 people watch it or whatever the number was. And I said, Well, Stuart, you know, if you’re tracking if you if you use our service, we have what we call stealth trackers. So it’s a it’s a QR code that they scan. And as soon as they scan it, they go straight to the video. But we now know exactly who they are and they don’t have to fill out a form because it’s all through some proprietary software. We wrote and said, you know, you’re making a lot of money, you’re being reactive. You have to react when they choose to call you. But what if you knew every single one, the homeowners that went to watch your video? What do you think? What do you think would happen to yourselves if you just pick up the phone and start calling some of those people? You know, the obvious answer is you’re going to get more sales. So so that’s what he’s talking about. So let me encourage you. You’ll see it on our website at Agent dominator.com if you do have interest. It’s part of our video infused postcards. The whole idea with the video infused postcards is we grab their attention on that which is dearest to them as our seller, which is how do you get more money? We educate them.

Beatty: [00:51:10] Okay, all this is your educating them. We’re just creating it for you. And then they go to learn more. And it’s your personal video, which we actually script specifically for you. You just record it on a zoom call and then we finish everything for you. So now they’re actually watching you educate them on how to get the most money for their home, and they’re going, This guy really knows his stuff. And so now they start to trust you. And as soon as they go to that video, you now know exactly who they are. So you can actually pick up the phone and call them or go knock on the door. And now they know you. And now it’s a very warm conversation. So check us out if you have interest on that. And until next time, Stuart, thank you so much for co-hosting with us. And for those who are listening, I hope you get a lot out of this. And if you go back and listen to it again, there’s a lot of little truisms that I was thinking most people miss because they don’t really catch it. But one of the statements you make, Stuart, is there are a lot of little things that add up to something big, and there’s been a lot of little things that just been rolling off our tongues. But if you really catch it, it’ll add up to something big for you. So you all have a very blessed day.

Speaker3: [00:52:20] Good point.

Beatty: [00:52:21] And Stuart, you have a great time. Great day. And thanks again for being here.

Speaker3: [00:52:25] Thank you so much. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please do two things. Number one, please share this on social media so other.

Beatty: [00:52:36] People can enjoy.

Speaker3: [00:52:37] It.

Beatty: [00:52:37] And number two, if you haven’t already subscribed.

Speaker3: [00:52:39] To our channel, please subscribe to either our YouTube channel or our podcast audio channel that you’ll find on any audio player with your mobile phone. And then that way you won’t miss another episode. Also, if you want help generating listings, please visit our website at Agent dominator.com where we guarantee them or give your money back. Thanks again for listening to the get sellers calling you podcast and have a very blessed day.

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