Delivering a Simple but Compelling Message that Will Boost Your Lead Engagement

This post comes to us from Delta Media Group:

The KCM Blog drew a significant amount of attention this week with the most simplistic of messages.

It used the chart below to demonstrate how much extra money it might cost a consumer who decides to buy a house today as opposed to one year ago.

Difference in house payment in 2012 vs. 2013 based on typical price
and interest rate increases. Source: KCM Blog.

The concepts illustrated here are based on a bit of assumption and a bit of fact.

The assumption being the same house would still be on the market, and would have increased in price by 10 percent (house prices have increased by double digits in markets across the nation, so a 10 percent price increase in a comparable house is not a stretch).

The fact being that interest rates have increased by a full percent over the past year, which they have. That increase alone means a higher monthly cost to home purchasers, and a much higher total price at the end of a 30-year mortgage, if paid out over all 360 months.

The KCM Blog post is also popular for what it did not say—that if the cost of buying has already increased this significantly over the past year, imagine how much more it could cost to buy a house in another year or two.

That might be an important message for you to leverage. While a consumer can't go back a year and buy that house they might have considered while rates still hovered around 3.5 percent, they can decide if now is a better time to buy than the future, when we might see even higher interest rates and prices in the market.

Do your customers understand the specifics of the market in order to make an educated real estate decision with financial implications? And do you have the capabilities of communicating such a message to your clients? How would you go about communicating it?

This message is simplistic, yet important for those working with potential buyers and sellers. It demonstrates the importance of acting now, without directly applying pressure for them to do so. And it absolutely needs communicated, which means you absolutely need a way to deliver it.

Such a message works perfectly with "pull" marketing approaches, like social media. It can also be pushed out in an email blast, perhaps with a report attached demonstrating the numbers, or a link to where the message lives in more depth.

This message might make for a good blog entry. Of course, you didn't create the original blog post, but you can repurpose the ideas and even images by citing your source and linking to the original post, as we did above. You can also add your commentary to the post, and analyze how it might fit with real estate price increases in your direct market.

Doing so would boost the local keywords in your blog post, which would then better its chances of ranking in search engines under related keywords, which would increase the likelihood that someone looking for that information might find and work with you.

Your social updates can point back to the blog post, and new studies continue to show the impact social has on search engine ranking factors.

The call to action would be a way to contact you directly and immediately to discuss the real estate market. On a mobile device, it would allow consumers to submit a lead, call, or text you directly. It could also be a link to your property search, where consumers can immediately look for listings in their area to see the current market prices, and imagine where they could increase to in another year or more.

Altogether, it might sound like a few steps. But each step is related to the next, and connected through links. Each step makes it more likely that a consumer will take the next step with you, with the ultimate step being their call or text, or lead submission on your real estate website.

Of course, it helps when these steps are already connected through a central real estate marketing system that allows you to tie your website to your blog and social media presence, provides a path for each, and allows you to engage them all through integrated email marketing abilities.

A simple, but compelling message.

To view the original article, visit the Delta Media Group blog.