For many real estate consumers, buying or selling a home feels like a blur—something that happens all at once. In 2015, the majority of sellers nationwide had their homes on the market for 4 weeks or fewer. Buyers, meanwhile, spent a median of 10 weeks searching for a home, with folks over 49 searching for less than two months.
Anybody can put your house on the MLS, and take some cool photos…[We] go after that market that doesn’t know they want to buy yet, and doesn’t know they want to buy in your neighborhood.
— MELANIE PICHE
Nevertheless, these numbers don’t tell the full story. Every great real estate agent knows that a sale is the culmination of a long journey that begins with a client’s first exposure to your brand, whether it’s via a yard sign, an online ad, or a blog post.
The challenge, of course, is understanding how to guide prospects along the path from that initial encounter to a sale or purchase—a process that can last months, even years. So, what’s the secret? For Melanie Piche of the BREL Team at Sage Real Estate, it’s content, and lots of it.
When she started in real estate, Melanie wasn’t interested in walking the traditional agent’s path. “We got into the business about eight years ago and had no interest in cold calling or door knocking or any of that,” Melanie told us.
Instead, she decided that the best way to establish her business was by building an “online machine” with blog and social media posts that inspired confidence and attracted the right leads. Today, Melanie runs one of the top real estate teams in Toronto.
Understanding your target audience is the key to attracting a buyer. But Melanie thinks about that audience differently from many agents. “Anybody can put your house on the MLS, and take some cool photos, and write some cool copy,” Melanie says. “[We] go after that market that doesn’t know they want to buy yet, and doesn’t know they want to buy in your neighborhood.”
While her approach takes patience, Melanie has seen amazing results. “We’ve had people come to us two, three years after being on [our] weekly hot list, and they’re like, ‘Okay, I’m ready to buy. I’ve read your list every single week for the last two years, and I wouldn’t even think of buying with anybody else.’”
In this interview, Melanie explains how effective content nurtures prospects in the long term, and how retargeting ads on social media can help you sell to consumers who don’t even know they’re looking to buy.
– Matt & Seth
