Every Monday, we have a team meeting with Stoli Network. All the agents across the nation hop on a one hour. Today was one and a half.
Training session where essentially I go over some topic that has something to do with scaling a business, marketing a business, content creation, ads, leverage, hiring, process, operations, all that great stuff.
Today was about advertising. Specifically, it was going to be around Instagram and how a whole bunch of gurus out there are teaching a tactic that is kind of going viral in the real estate space right now, but not netting any real estate deals.
And so my challenge to the team was, hey, you guys should totally do this stuff. We've been talking about it for a while.
However, you need to understand that if you're addicted to likes and shares and comments and all that stuff, which is great, not saying that you shouldn't be addicted to that. You've got to be really careful because at the end of the day, our job as real estate agents is not to get likes and follows.
Our job as real estate agents is to have conversations so we can meet with more people that want to sell and purchase real estate. And if you're doing things that even if it goes viral and gets you tens of thousands of views, which is great, but if it doesn't get your business, it's all a waste of time.
And here's what I've seen happen way too many times before. It gets very addicting. And then all of a sudden you're creating content for the likes and the shares, not for the So my suggestion to you, number one, if you're going to follow Instagram trends, which I clients.
am recommending you do, make sure you stay in line with real estate content. And to illustrate this point home, to make it super clear, you're never going to see
Porsche or Lamborghini or Ferrari or BMW or Mercedes ever post on Instagram their five favorite In-N-Out burger stops or the best taco shops in Germany or Italy or wherever.
It is all Ferrari, all Porsche, all Mercedes, right? When you're on their socials, they want you to know that we are the brand of choice. And we talk about this over and over and over again.
It is no different for us. When we're on socials, if you're always creating content around the best restaurants in town, it will get shares, it will get likes, all of that will work, right?
And I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, but if that's the only thing that you're doing to have the expectation that along the way, somebody is going to make the connection that you are a real estate agent, just because you put in the description is a failed marketing
And I can tell you it's a failed marketing strategy because I can give you 75 examples strategy. of people who are doing really well, but not converting deals. So my suggestion to you is if you're going to do this Instagram marketing, the green screen marketing, all that fun stuff, it works.
I will tell you 100% works. Do yourself a favor and only talk about real estate stuff. Nothing more, nothing less. You can have a viral piece of content in Columbus or Houston or Charlotte or San Diego or Portland or Seattle or any of those markets that get 70,000 views and 200 shares and 600 comments, which is great.
But you can have a video that gets 2000 views, a handful of comments and four or five shares that could be worth a hundred fold what the other post is based on the content that's in that, right?
That's our job. The second part of the team meeting today and where this kind of led into was advertising. And we started off something to the effect of, I cannot believe how many real estate agents run Facebook and meta ads or Instagram ads.
And it's to a fresh, cold audience who have no idea who they are. They run it for a couple of days. They spend $30 a day. It doesn't convert at the level they want to.
And then they blame Facebook. Running cold traffic to an ad is the same as running down the street at full speed and screaming at somebody as you're running by saying, grab coffee.
That's it. And then going to coffee and then wondering why they're not there. Yes, they heard you say grab coffee, but it happens so quick. They didn't know what time, where, what date, any of that stuff.
They did hear the coffee part, but there wasn't enough substance or context to the conversation. So of course they didn't show up to coffee. That's how you guys are running ads right now.
We have the strategy that we went over today. And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, this is only for the So I'm not going to go deep into the strategy today, but understanding how to go out there team.
and get data, meaning the people that live in your market, how to advertise against that data and do a whole bunch of different ad campaigns and direct mail and targeting.
And then knowing who's taking action on what ad dynamically. And I have news for you. This is much cheaper than you think it is. But it is a totally different strategy than just running an ad to San Diego plus 15 miles and then getting mad when it doesn't convert.
That is cold traffic. 0.6% of them, by the way, have never seen your ad before, but the ad was good enough for them to give you their contact info, but they're ghosting you because they don't understand why they should contact you, right?
This takes a while. You know, you guys know the marketing. I think that somebody needs to consume. There's something like 17 different touches before they feel safe and working with somebody. And most of you guys are running ad expecting that the ad can show to one person to get one lead, to get one appointment, to get one deal.
It doesn't work that way. We have to build that audience straight. There are tons of strategies out there, whether you're using HubSpot or Salesforce or any of the enterprise-level CRMs.
You can't do this on Lofty. You can't do it on Top Producer. You know, I couldn't do it on FollowUp Boss or any of this stuff. And you could probably hack it together with Zapier and all these simple tools.
But at the end of the day, using enterprise-level software will make it so much easier for you to build your own custom audience, continue to market to that audience, and then the marketing changes the more engaged they get with you.
And what you'll find is marketing is the number one thing that you could be doing for your business. Third thing before I set you free, I had a call with somebody that was considering joining Reel, and she had a pretty decent-sized ad budget.
I won't give you the exact number, but we'll just say a thousand bucks. And she knew she wanted to spend more. She's in a market that does, you know, has really, really good turnover. And I said, look, the budget's not the issue.
It's the type of ads you're running. If you're only running homes-for-sale ads, you're not doing anything to position yourself any different than any other agent out there. If I can just...
If the only thing that you did by coming to Reel or joining the team was shift your marketing strategy to content-based marketing, not homes-based marketing, a thousand-dollar ad budget, you know, or $30 a day will be profitable.
And, you know, as you guys have heard me say before, the discipline is we take 18% of all those closings, we put it in a different account, and that becomes the marketing budget. That becomes the oxygen chamber that we draw from every day to make sure that business is coming in over and over and over and over again.
And you may be thinking, oh my gosh, Steve, 18% is a ton of money. Well, it's not if you're not productive. It's the best money you ever could spend, right?
The more you spend, the easier it is to do business. Meaning if you spend a thousand, it's probably profitable. Spend $2,000 a month, you'll see results relatively right away.
$3,000, you'll probably have results within 30 to 40 days. But at the $4,000, $5,000, $6,000 a month ad spend, you can cherry pick the deals you work with because the ads are getting shown enough times every single day to where people are seeing it and they're starting to have recall over who you are.
Again, a $200, a $300, a $400, a $500 budget on Facebook in 2025, it is not enough. You will not get where you need to go.
All right? So that's today. Listen, cold audience traffic works, but you got to spend a lot of money. But there has to be a strategy to take somebody from cold to engaged to customer. And there are very specific strategies with layering on data to make that happen.
So if you want to know what that is, reach out to me. I can totally walk you through it. If you're interested in joining the team, go to StoleNetwork.com. We walk you through all of the stuff.
I am fully financially vested in growing your business because partnering with you, that's the only way that we get paid. It's a 10% commission split.
So if you don't sell any more real estate, we don't make any more money. So I'm 100% invested in getting you to sell more real estate because it's just a more efficient business model.
We make more money. Go to StoleNetwork, S-T-O-L-E-N-E-T-W-O-R-K.com. You want to learn about that? You can learn about it then. Schedule a call with me and see if it's fit.
All right? That's it for today. Ads work. Ads are your oxygen. They're your lifeblood. The distance between or the gap between where you are now and where you want to be is your tolerance for learning the ad game.
It will change your life. All right? Hope you crushed the weekend. Hope you're good. See you on the next one.