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Amy McCoy is someone people gravitate toward. She exudes confidence and style. Her pixie cut purple hair is tastefully sculpted on top of her head. And when she talks real estate, you know her game is strong.
This Atlanta-based broker-owner of My Hometown Realty Group spoke about her business triumphs as an audience member at the RISMedia Power Brokers panel during the REALTORS® Legislative Meetings & Trade Expo. The audience-panel discussion prompted McCoy to grab the microphone and explain how last year she took her monthly marketing budget from about $5,000 to $700, which helped her double her sales volume year-over-year in 2016. At this point, she has already matched her 2016 numbers and is on track to double her volume again in 2017.
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| Atlanta broker-owner Amy McCoy's branding sends a powerful message. |
“I used to pay for the billboards and online leads,” she says. But when McCoy took a step back and looked at her ROI, she says she realized she wasn’t making enough money to justify the costs. So, last year she retooled and started focusing on doing things she loves: community outreach and involvement. As a former state prison correctional officer, crime prevention is important to her, and, quite simply, she loves her community. McCoy actively participates in crime prevention efforts in her market. She also uses social media extensively to build her brand, and to talk neighborhood issues. She reminds people to vote, posts photos from the West Georgia Board of REALTORS® meetings, explains FHA loan issues, and shares open houses and new listings.
McCoy's approach just happens to align with the recommendations of Power Broker panelist Verl Workman, founder and CEO of Workman Success Systems with regard to social media: posting about family 25 percent of the time, real estate 25 percent of the time, fun and recreation another quarter of the time, and sharing your hopes and dreams 25 percent of the time. Usually, it’s the posts unrelated to real estate that help grow your connections with your potential clients, he says. And if it’s video, even better.
Workman is a huge proponent of video marketing tools like BombBomb to send introductions and announcement. He likes the platform’s backend analytics and video templates, which make it easy to use, he says. Workman is also a fan of SoTellUs, an app for collecting video testimonials from your happy clients. He mentioned an agent he works with who uses ACE Content to generate original articles for his website, which he then turns around and uses as fodder and discussion points in his videos. “The goal is getting belly-to-belly with clients, and automation doesn’t create connections,” Workman says. “You need authenticity in communication.”
Panelist Burke Smith, broker and chief development and learning officer at Realty ONE Group, says sellers would rather list with an agent who’s using video. However, simply creating videos and throwing them online isn’t enough to get traffic, he says. It’s imperative to set up a branded YouTube channel, as well as title and tag videos so they match what your audience is searching for. Smith created a video for people relocating to Phoenix two year ago and it’s the top search result for those terms on YouTube, which he attributes to good tagging with keywords.
“The videos that get the most views are tagged and described with what your clients want,” Smith says. Ask yourself why someone would comment on and share your video, he says, and consider if it’s truly valuable to the viewer.
McCoy, similarly, is as intentional as she is natural with her videos. She films everything from changing out a light fixture to dancing at a local flea market, in addition to on-camera home tours. “People will accept you more for who you are when you’re just being who you are,” she says.
And sure enough, participants more than accepted McCoy–she drew a small crowd of fellow attendees looking to connect with her after the session.
