Welcome New Client Gary Kent

John: How did you hear about us? 

Kevin: Gary heard about it maybe from one of the NAR conference recordings. Gary's a real marketing and real estate geek, and actually buys those recordings from NAR and/or listens to other recordings from other top producing agents. He must have heard one or more people say, "Hey, what about that Vyal?"

John: Summarize where you're at with your business right now. What are your goals going forward? 

Kevin: Well, we're a pretty efficient team. Gary is the rainmaker on the team, he's our lead listing agent and our leader. So his job is to go out and get listings and to point us in the right direction. He does a ton of the marketing also. He writes that weekly e-newsletter. We have a team of seven buyers agents, and myself, along with five support staff. We've been experiencing great success but we know the market's always changing, so we're looking at ways that we can spruce up our web presence and perhaps find some ways to wow our clients with something that the other guy might not have.

John: Do you know how many people are currently in your database? 

Kevin: At last count, the e-newsletter was around 20,000. I'm not sure how great the deliverabilty is of those 20,000, but I'd say we probably get an open rate of 1200 or so a week.

John: That's great. So of those people, how many of them would really be the sphere of influence? 

Kevin: That's a tough one to call, because we've added these people over the years. One thing we found is that it does work in this stealth mode. People just start looking at it when it's important to see the information All of a sudden, people we didn't even know were in there--they visit our website, they signed up, maybe we tried to make contact with them--and a couple years later they say, "Hey, I'm ready to list my condo."

John: So the e-newsletter's working pretty well for you. Are you doing anything else to market to the database? 

Kevin: We've just switched over to BoomTown, so a lot of those same people in the database are getting a drip email campaign that way. Of course, the agents have their relationships with their clients that would also be in that database. A lot of people in our database are also part of a mail campaign, like past clients and referral sources. Gary does a bi-monthly handwritten newsletter that goes out to them.

John: It seems like you guys have a well-oiled machine going. Why hire us? Why not try to do this yourselves?  

Kevin: We actually had some pretty good success with video this summer. My niece was out here, and she's a journalism student. She did an internship for us this summer, and made some really nice video for us. Really pleased with how that came out. She did some community videos for us, and she did a series interviewing Gary. He wants to make sure those go out right. He doesn't want to slow down from doing something successful to doing something else, but I think he's had enough success now with video that he's decided to move this along.

John: What kind of results are you expecting? What does success working with us look like to you? 

Kevin: Well, I see it a couple different ways. One would be, depending on how we utilize the video on the website, to increase our SEO. When we talked about the blog earlier, we talked about maintaining our blog on our site because we have a blog with about 600 entries. I'd want it to be there to ramp up what we've already got. Ultimately, selling more real estate, that's where the rubber hits the road. We don't want to be the most popular broke Realtor in town.