Almost every business guru on the planet has said that “Sometimes you gotta zig when people expect you to zag,”. It is an undefeatable principle that is based on the law of diminishing returns and the disruption cycle and it pretty much proves that if you aren’t innovating, you’re dying at an accelerating pace.
The way we relate to our customers in the 21st century so far has been largely dominated by digital, but if those qualified leads aren’t falling out of the digital sky and into your sales ledger, then it might be time to start zigging.
HARD WORK
When you offer a service, it is getting harder to let people know that you can help them.
Ad spend is getting higher and it is fragmented across different social channels.
There is a limit on how many Google ads are displayed per location.
The Facebook feed is crowded.
The amount of content being produced right now is enormous.
Retargeting a service business, like real estate, is less effective than it is for product companies.
Remarketing, while more relevant than a cold email, is competing for voice in email inboxes that are bursting at the seams with volume and content from other would-be sellers.
CPL and CPC is getting higher as more and more people participate in marketing in the digital space.
Digital channels aren’t going anywhere, but we will all need to think about doing them differently.
DIMINISHING RETURNS
The law of diminishing returns is an economic theory that states that once you hit a certain limit, the more you invest in an area means you will get less out of it in proportion to the investment. The classic example is where more workers are added to an assembly line in a factory.
There comes a point where adding more workers creates its own issues – such as them getting in each other’s way or requiring a manager to organise the work – and so the overall output grows but at an ever-decreasing rate. The result or return per person is actually less than you were achieving when just one person was doing that work.
It is an important phenomenon as modern marketers observe that an explosion of digital channels and a competitive investment is yielding less than it did in the early days of digital marketing or for those who got there first.
THE DISRUPTION CYCLE
That ‘D’ word usually draws an eye-roll or two, but if we are so aware of disruption – then why does it keep happening?
Applying the law of diminishing returns to innovation, the disruption cycle shows us that by the time the innovation trickles down and becomes commonplace, it no longer represents a competitive advantage and the need to re-innovate results in yet another disruptive leap.
The renowned commentator, ex-Uber growth leader and venture capitalist Andre Chen describes the phenomenon in digital marketing as ‘the law of shitty click-throughs’.
TIME TO REIMAGINE
The price for being ahead of the pack is that you need to constantly reimagine how you are going to zig while everyone else is zagging – and then being among the first to start zigging.
If digital is diminishing because it has become basic, we must reimagine how to do it differently. When any human activity becomes mundane, it is a clear sign that it can be automated.
Automation buys you time to innovate and reimagine your real estate service in a way that will be different – and better – from your competitors.
WHERE TO ZIG NOW
There is no getting around the fact that your customers need to hear from you regularly in order for you to stay in the top of mind battle arena, where everyone else is playing. While you are there though, smart tooling like artificial intelligence and data science can help you to use the information you have about your customers to stand out with personalisation of this content.
Automatic, and hyper-personalised communication allows you to communicate with your customers, in bulk, but in a way that feels personal to them.
It isn’t a complete zig – but it is a start. Automate the communication to the bulk of your customer base and buy yourself time to nurture the ones that really matter.
Where you will really make some serious zig marks is when you leverage the robot labour to focus on your most important customers – pick up the phone!
But how do you know who your most important customers are – when your focus could be on thousands of contacts in your CRM each day.
There’s Ai for that. RiTA delivers agents an optimised list of the most important contacts to connect with each and every day and she even finds something for you to talk to them about, so you’ll never be lost for words.
PROVE ME WRONG
And while that final sentence represents a traditional ‘call-to-action’ to generate what Andrew Chen calls the ‘shitty click throughs’, it is a symptom of an open mind to be proven wrong, so I dare you – enquire about RiTA now and we’ll set up a demo to show you how you can be among the early adopters of Ai, automation and data science for better results and a better service experience in real estate.
