How to Use the Art of the Offer to Find Real Estate Clients Without Coming Across as Pushy or Desperate

Real estate agents are very familiar with making offers on behalf of clients, since they’re often writing them for buyers. But very few agents are great about making offers in their marketing, in order to gain clients.

Many agents take a fairly passive approach to marketing. It often amounts to more of a branding effort, than an attempt to get someone to take action. For instance, there’s the classic “Contact me if you or anyone you know is thinking about buying or selling.” But that’s not an “offer” or very effective call-to-action; it’s a request. It relies on someone seeing that message often enough, and close enough to the time they do take action for it to really do an agent much good… if it even compels the person to contact them.

Not to psycho-analyze agents with a broad stroke, but many likely take this approach because they’re afraid to come across as pushy or desperate for business by being more direct. Or perhaps they’re just being polite in a way. It’s ironic because agents are often portrayed as being pushy and selling themselves, yet the vast majority are the opposite and stray away from even the slightest amount of directly asking for business.

Fortunately, using compelling offers in your marketing is an easy way to get people who are thinking about buying or selling in the near future to contact you, without you coming across as pushy or desperate.

Let’s Define “Offer”…

An “offer” can mean a lot of different things in marketing, but the type we’ll focus on here is offering people something for free that they’ll find useful or valuable enough to gladly give you their contact info.

Years ago, the go-to “offers” agents had at their disposal were to offer things like:

• “Interested in knowing how much your home is worth? Contact me for a FREE market analysis!”
• “Thinking about buying a home? Let me know the area and price range you’re interested in, and I’ll send you hot new listings as soon as they hit the market!”

Those seem so quaint and outdated now, considering anyone with a phone or computer can get all of that information easily and for free right on the internet, without your help. Granted, there’s still ways to massage those offers into something valuable, by positioning your valuation as more accurate, or suggesting you could send them listings they may be overlooking or missing somehow. But people just aren’t as hungry for those kinds of offers, since they have enough access to that information on their own.

You need to be offering them some next-level, insider information that’ll help make their purchase or sale go more smoothly, and help them get the best results possible.

How-to Guides Are the New Go-to Offer

Just because people have the basic information people want at their fingertips, that doesn’t mean they have everything they need to make the best decisions and go about buying or selling a house, given their particular situation.

For example, they may be able to find out how much their home is (allegedly) worth online, but do they know how to accomplish getting every penny of that amount? Or, even though they can see all of the houses available to buy online, that doesn’t mean they know the things they need to do to put themselves in position to buy it at the best price possible.

Heck, they probably don’t even realize how much more information they could use! But you do…

You have knowledge and insights that the average homeowner or buyer could benefit from. Of course they’ll get the benefit of your experience when (and if!) they end up working with you, but there’s often a gap in time between when they begin thinking about selling or buying a house and when they actually reach out to an agent, and they’re trying to figure out a whole bunch of things they’re not sure about during that time. Which makes having an array of how-to guides to offer people the perfect thing you can offer them for free to get them to give you their contact info, and start building a relationship with them before they start talking to other agents, and until they’re ready to buy or sell. (Plus, they’re a great way to establish credibility and authority with prospects as well!)

16 Ideas for Different Types of Guides You Can Offer

There are so many types of guides you can offer people interested in buying or selling a house. The more you have to offer, the more prospects you can appeal to.

But if you have to choose two to start with, you can’t go wrong with these:

• A home seller’s guide
• A home buyer’s guide

Those two alone are perfect all-around guides to start with since you can offer them to anyone buying or selling a house.

But when you’re using offers in marketing, the more specific you are to addressing the concerns and needs of the prospect, the more likely they are to take you up on the offer. Here are 14 more ideas to get your wheels turning:

• How to prepare your house for sale
• Things to consider if you’re thinking about downsizing
• A buyer’s guide specifically geared toward first-time buyers
• Tips on how to sell a house for sale by owner
• A guide for people who are thinking about buying a FSBO
• One that helps renters figure out if owning makes more sense than renting
• Insider tips for anyone who wants to buy new construction
• Things sellers need to know when they’re offered a corporate relocation package
• Things buyers should know when they’re offered a relo package
• Advice on what to do if your house didn’t sell and their listing “expired”
• How to handle selling the real estate of a loved one who passed away
• Dealing with having to sell a house when getting divorced
• A guide on becoming a real estate investor
• What to do if you’re facing foreclosure

See how that would be even more appealing to someone seeing your offer? They still are all essentially buyer and seller guides, but they truly speak to the needs and concerns of a specific type of buyer or seller.

It probably sounds daunting to write, edit, and format that many guides, but once they’re created they’ll work for you day in and day out for years to come, so they’re definitely worth the effort. Just pick one or two to start with that would appeal to an ideal prospect you’d like to work with in your market, or you think would appeal to the most potential clients. As you have time, create more you can offer.

7 ways to Offer Them the Offer

The guides are what you have to offer, but you still need to make people aware of the offer, and build in something they need to do for you in order to get their hands on it! They won’t do you any good if people don’t know about them, or don’t have to give you at least their contact information in order to get it.

There are endless ways to offer people your guides, but the key is to make sure you’re offering them to people on a daily basis! So let’s get you started with a week’s worth of ideas to make people aware of your guides:

• Post about them on social media: Make an announcement whenever you have a new one available, and occasionally remind people about a guide you have available.
• Run ads on social media: Posting on your profile is great for reaching people you’re connected to, but running ads will allow you to target and reach people beyond your sphere.
• Write blog posts or articles: Use a specific topic within one of your guides to write an article or blog post you can post on your website, and add an offer for a free downloadable guide throughout the blog post.
• Print out copies to put out at open houses: Have a sample that people can flip through, and offer a copy they can take home in exchange for their contact info.
• Send an email to your sphere-of-influence and past clients: Look through your database and choose specific people you think may benefit from a guide you have to offer.
• Respond to people in local online forums: When you see someone posting on a local forum asking for recommendations for a real estate agent, or the scoop on houses for sale, rather than just being yet another agent who comments that they’d be glad to help them with their real estate needs, offer them a link to download a free copy of one of your how-to guides.
• Send out a postcard: Got a neighborhood you’re farming? Send them a postcard with an offer to download a seller’s guide. Is there an apartment building filled with renters in your area? Mail them an offer to download a buyer’s guide.

Remember, much of your competition probably isn’t even out there making an offer, let alone making several offers on a regular basis. By constantly having as many guides on offer out in the world as possible, in as many different ways as possible, you’re increasing the odds that you’ll know about prospects before many other agents even know someone in the area is thinking about buying or selling, giving you time to develop relationships with them until they’re ready to buy or sell.

Here’s an Offer for You to Take Advantage Of…

If you want to fast-forward to the fun part, check out our Inner Circle membership and get your hands on all 20 of our “Branded Booklet” how-to guides! With just a few clicks of your mouse you can make every single one of them look like you authored them within minutes.

Each one of them has a landing page you can use to offer them to people, and a series of follow-up emails you can use to nurture the relationship with them after they receive it.

You’ll also be able to turn on a “lead gen” button that offers up one of the booklets when you share one of the over 1,500 articles we have for you to share.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! You’ll be able to brand even more types of content than the booklets for less than you spend on a daily cup of coffee per month!

Whether you take us up on our offer to make making offers easier on yourself, or you decide to go the DIY route and write your own guides and lead gen content, good luck and make making offers something you do on a daily basis!