A Real Estate “Niched Funnel Framework”

What’s A Real Estate Niche Funnel Framework?

Okay. Hey, Ryan here with Wake Up Real Estate. Welcome to this quick video about our niche funnel framework. And what this is, it’s a step-by-step framework for growing your real estate business by focusing your marketing efforts around one specific niche customer or property type.

And I guarantee you, if you follow this video and you kind of add a lot of the commo components in this framework around one niche system, you’re really going to like the results here. Now, some caveats before we get started, and in no particular order, we’re just going to run through some of the things that you want to be aware of here. So first off, 90% or more of your competitors are generalists.

Which means they don’t really have a specific niche. They work, they generally serve buyers or sellers in an area. And if you ask them, he say, yeah, I work in x, y, Z area and I work with buyers and I work with sellers.

Now, there’s a lot of opportunity in this because you have the ability to say something more specific like I serve first time investors in Pinellas County, Florida. That’s what I specialize in looking for opportunities in Pinellas County, Florida. It’s kind of my thing. And when you do that, you immediately stand out from the crowd.

Having A Real Estate Niche Helps You Stand Out From The Crowd

There’s thousands of people in your market, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands, who are licensed to have the same real estate salesperson license you do. And nicheing down immediately gives you the opportunity to differentiate just because you niche down. This is another big objection we get. Just because you niche down doesn’t mean you’re excluding other business. People will say, well, if I only work new construction or if I only work downsizers or if I only work with investors, I’m excluding, I’m not. I still want to be able to do other stuff.

And the reality is, yeah, you can take any other business you want and in fact, nicheing down will actually generate a lot of other business that isn’t related to your niche. But what happens is you, when you get this focus around a specific idea, it makes you more efficient with your marketing. You end up generating more of everything, not just your niche.

And along those lines, a lot of people listing agents in particular say, well, I don’t really want buyers. A lot of these niches naturally lend themselves to generating people on the buy side. And what you need to know is that buyer focused niches actually generate a lot of listing leads because half the people who opt in just it’s just math, half the people in your market are either renting and the other half probably own a house. The numbers might be a little different where you are, but half the people opting in for whatever it is you’re offering on the niche level already own a house.

And if you serve them on the niche idea that you’re putting out into the marketplace, they’re naturally going to look to you to be that professional who lists their homes. So you’re not going to not get listings just because you do one of these niches that might seem buyer focused.

Having A Real Estate Niche Helps You Work Less & Make More

And the last point here is that you’ll probably, over the years, it might only take a few months. You’ll probably find you end up working less and making more money because by specializing, you just get more efficient. If you only work with, you specialize in new construction in your area, and at any given time there’s only five to 10 major projects going on.

All you need to do is be really good about knowing those projects and reporting them to the marketplace. And if you just do that consistently, you don’t need to worry about much else. Your marketing engine will run and you will be the kind of owner of that corner of the market, so to speak, and you’ll do just as many transactions with les’s work. And this’ll all make a lot more sense once it happens to you. Definitely the reason we do this is because we want to work less and make more money.

The Components Of A Real Estate Niche Funnel Framework

All right, now let’s get into the nitty gritty here. We’ll get that stuff out of the way. I’m going to talk about the different components in the funnel framework. I promise you that everything I’m about to go through is gold if you’re able to execute all this.

Let’s just jump on in and talk about the main four components of a niche funnel framework.

Traffic Sources That Feed Your Niche

The first one is traffic sources. And what you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to start with one main source of traffic that’s people coming into your fold from an online site or offline, and you’re going to start with one, master it, and then you’re going to lay in layer in extra just kind of a, so we still really like Facebook lead formats.

Josh and I have been messing with those since about 2011 when they came out and they still work like crazy. So you’re going to hear us talk about those a lot, but there are lots of other sources which we’ll talk about more later in this video.

Lead Magnets

The next component is going to be your lead magnets and offers. These are the things related to your niche that you’re dangling out there to get people to trade you contact info for. So lists of properties, webinars, videos, PDFs, even direct consults, things like that. You’re going to have as part of your niche funnel framework as people come in and they trade you contact info for your lead magnets.

Automated Follow Ups

You’re going to have automated follow ups and those fall under these categories. Short term conversations, starting drip campaigns, property alerts, longer term drip campaigns, retargeting, you can have your ISAs, your assistants, mortgage partners kind of behind the scenes following up in an automated way for you.

And if you have a mobile app, that can also function as some automated follow up there.

Manual Follow Ups

And then you’re going to have manual follow ups as the fourth component, and that is where we highly recommend at least once a week you send something cool and unique that you create out to people that isn’t automated so that you can engage in an even better way. And then the final thing with manual thought is that you are going to start to generate inbound inquiries on almost daily basis. People are going to be reaching out and responding to the things you’re doing and you’re going to want to serve those really quickly and fastly. So those are the four components and I’m now going to drill down and run through them all here. This is going to take a little while, so hang with me. If you need to watch this a few times or watch it in fast motion, you can keep doing so, but we really want to drill in here in this video and give you the whole kind of open the whole kimono or whatever they call it and give you the whole picture of what’s going to happen.
So traffic sources, and I have this a little out of order, I have traffic sources continued. Let’s get rid of this continued right here. I’m just going to keep going. So our traffic sources in order that we like to do them. First off, we have Facebook lead forms. And the thing they know about Facebook lead forms is that they are typically low intent and low cost per lead, meaning somebody’s being interrupted on Facebook, they don’t have a lot of intent when they see your ad, but at the same time, it doesn’t cost a lot to generate accurate contact info including a cell number with Facebook lead form. So that’s always, we always like to go there with these niches at least to get started, at least to test stuff and then move on into these other sources. Next we have Google and Bing paper Click.
They pretty much run similarly, this is these search engines, right? Somebody goes to Google, they go to Bing, they type something in, and these leads, because somebody’s explicitly typing something in, they do tend to be higher intent. The person opting in might be closer to actually making a decision than the person on Facebook, but at the same time, they tend to be a little more expensive. And with Google and Bing and Paper, click, Google, Bing and paper click ads, the contact generally submits the info on their own and sometimes they can lot. It’s not always accurate. You don’t always get a real phone number, for example. Next, we have direct mail. We are huge fans of direct mail around here. I am personally a co-founder of something called Thanks that IO you might already know, which is a direct mail traffic source. We do a lot of stuff in real estate, but direct mail.
The idea here is that you’re going to put something physical in your prospect’s hands. It can be very targeted. The responses to direct mail are very, very high intent. People need to take some steps to move offline to online. And once they do that, they are basically saying, yes, I’m interested in your offer for sure, because they’re a little more energy involved than just clicking something online. And the downside of direct mail is that, yeah, it can be a little slow. It could take you a week or so to get something out to somebody and it can feel expensive in the short term, but over the long term it definitely almost always ROIs gives you a return on investment better than anything else you can do if you do it right, basically direct mail has this sort of curve where when you first send a campaign, it’ll feel like nothing’s happening.
But then as your creatives kind of sit in somebody’s house and they sit, they get Ed to the fridge or they sit in a drawer, they’re found later and later and you find the ROI kind of slope up on every campaign you do. It’s kind of a weird thing. But over time, direct mail works really well. Other traffic sources, we have organic slash seo. Now, a lot of people will come and say, Hey, I want to SEO my website. I want to add a lot of content, or what tricks can I do? So I show up in the search engine engine and the reality is Zillow and realtor.com, the big boys have won this game for the most part. And I’m al I’m pretty comfortable saying your website almost cannot, for the most part rank for almost anything other than really

Long tail terms don’t get a lot of traffic. And the best way for you to get SEO is actually to create blog posts and YouTube videos and other social content that over time will get you to rank national naturally. You actually have a better chance of ranking a YouTube video, for example, around a specific title or and keywords. Then you do a blog post on your own site. So I’m asking you, I guess to forget about organic and seo, but just know that in the process of creating cool stuff, which is one of the ingredients in our follow up, you’re going to naturally start to rank for things and get traffic. So this source is best handled by creating. You’re saying cool stuff, rank weekly content. Next, we have ads on other networks. So we have YouTube, paper, click TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, anything else out there.
These are the things that you’re going to want to go to after you’ve gotten Facebook and Google and maybe even Bing running. That’s generally what we say. Now you might say, Hey, wait, I’m having great success right now with TikTok. I know how to use their ad platform and I’m just going to stick with that and for sure do not mess with that. If you have a good source going, just stick with that. And I’m not saying not to do that, but if you don’t have any established traffic sources right now, we are just recommending Facebook, Google as starting points and then you’re going to layer in these others right here. And then we just want to mention here, once you’re niche funnel framework and you’re working and it’s really hard and it’s generating basically revenue and ROI for you, you can start to think about other offline sources like billboards park benches, bobblehead dolls that you sit at, bars and pizza shops, TV ads, radio, Spotify, all that other stuff probably comes later once you’re more established and it’s kind of the next level, Hey, put the pedals to the metal and really accelerate things.
And these other sources, these exotic maybe offline sources, they’re probably best tested after you have everything we’ve mentioned above really running smoothly for you. So that’s the traffic sources section of the four main components. Now next what we have are lead magnets and offers, and you kind of almost end up creating these flipped a lot of times you need to create or think about what your lead magnet is before you start driving traffic. So I might be doing this a little out of order, but it doesn’t really matter. You kind of do these things together. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to run your Facebook ad or your Google paper click ad, and you’re going to run it at something interesting enough that somebody will trade you contact info for it. So you’re going to need things compelling enough for somebody to trade you their name, email, phone, so on.
So what are these things? You’re going to have niched property lists. This is kind of our go-to the easiest low-hanging fruit and still works almost every time. Kind of never ceases to do. Amaze me while all your competitors are saying, Hey, come search for properties on my website. All you need to do is say, Hey, click here for a full complete list of all fixer uppers in St. Petersburg, Florida, and it works like a charm. So you can do fixers, foreclosures, condos, and a specific price range you can do, here’s a list of on the beach under 250 K. Really niche it down. You can do homes in a specific school district properties with three plus acres or whatever a lot of acreage is. It doesn’t need to be three in your market. Waterfront homes, new construction properties with views, land for sale. There’s so many different options here.
Basically anything you could search for using your IDX website or in your M MLS can become a niche property list offer that you give away. So niche property list is going to be our go-to next. After that, depending on what your niche is, you might decide that you’re going to do free reports, videos or webinars. This is basically unique content that you create. And just real quick examples of what these might be would be things like, Hey, here’s seven repairs you can do that’ll make your home sell more. I’m kind of paraphrasing these here in the bullet points. Five, creative financing ideas for self-employed entrepreneurs. How to buy your first fixer upper and finance the cost of repairs. That would be a video about F HHA 2 0 3 K, which incidentally you can use financing side offers for your niche. This one is a very, very proven and good one that I’ve used a lot over the years.
Just do a quick video about F hha 2 0 3 K and you’ll attract a lot of home buyers and sellers in your area. And I’ve gotten a number of listings over the years just from that offer directly as counterintuitive that as that may sound. Another example, three little known first time home buyer programs for Tampa, Florida, first time home buyers. That’s first time home buyer niche. Seven tips for downsizing into a smaller home with as little stress as possible. So these are all kind of direct response if you’re familiar with that term. Direct response, Dan Kennedy style headlines, they’re kind of easy to come up with. You’re going to see that numbers usually come into play. You can do like a list of things, a list of ideas around a specific thing is a pretty good formula, and you can create this content in the form of a PDF report, a document, a video, or even do a full-blown webinars.
And I’ll tell you, this is probably a lot more work. I mean, it is a lot more work than just offering in this prop focused list, but this section right here will actually generate you a lot higher quality lead because what’s going to happen is as a person consumes the content that you’ve created, they’re going to start to trust you a little more. Whereas these lists, there’s not a lot of you involved there, right? It’s just a list on a website. While these have a lot more going on here in terms of introducing you to the recipient. So next, after we have our lead magnets all configured and people are opting in, you’re driving some traffic from your Facebook ad, they’re opting in for your property list, you’re going to set a number of automated things in place in order to start to incubate and generate conversations that lead to closings.
So we have automated follow ups, which would include things like short-term conversation, starting drip campaigns. So what this is is you might send an email and a text right away that sends the thing they asked for, right? So here’s your list of fixer uppers in St. Pete, Florida, and you might end that with a accompany that with a PS in your email or a text that says something like, Hey, just curious. Do you already live in the area or are you moving here from somewhere else? Or are you an investor or are you looking for a home to live in? Right? Just curious, do you need financing or are you buying cash? There’s all kinds of either ORs that we can get into to start the conversation there. Basically you want to send something that with an expectation of response to that. The cold lead coming in off of the traffic source then starts to engage with you and talk to you.
Another form of automated follow-up is property alerts. This is something we all probably have access to. If you have an IDX website or even through your mls, you’re going to send updated alerts related to what they opted in for. So if it’s property list they opted in for very simple, just send the same list at least once a week, maybe every day if they opted in for a free report related to fixer uppers of some sort, fixed or upper financing, start sending properties that are fixed or upper. So property alerts can be configured automatically in systems like KV core or you can just manually input people into your mls. Next, we have long term, longer term drip campaigns. This is typically where a lot of agents really waste a lot of time and they get bogged down. They’re like, I want to create a two year drip campaign for first time buyers.
Well, you can do that and sure it will help. Everything helps, but it’s not super necessary. If you’re doing the property alerts and you’re doing some conversation starting in the begin beginning, and if you are doing the manual, something cool once a week follow up that we recommend at least once a week sending something unique that functions as a better drip campaign than anything else. You don’t need to actually spend years building out a drip campaign. It’s unbelievable the amount of time I see people spend on it. They even pay other people to build these campaigns. Whereas if you just think of something cool once a week related to your initially you could share with people, it basically does the same exact thing for you. And then the next kind of category of automated follow-up will be retargeting. This is a little more advanced, but you can set up ads on the ad networks that follow people around on Facebook, Google, all the other TikTok, reminding them they are interested.
So this might be a video from you that shows up on Facebook after they often saying, Hey, thanks for grabbing my starter homes list. Here’s how to contact me, stuff like that. And you can also use direct mail things like thanks that IO you can will allow you to automatically trigger postcards out to people who visit specific web web pages, pages on your website. So there’s our automated follow section. Some other automated follow-ups might also include using an assistant or an ISSA or even your mortgage partners through our co-marketing program. For example, our team of mortgage loan officers will actually work your leads from the financing side of things, right? So you can use your in-house assistant to call or text leads manually. You can pay third party ISA services or again, you can work with a mortgage partner and say, Hey, would you follow up on my leads as they come in from the financing side to help engage them a little more? It just gives you another layer of people working your leads and a lot of times it can be done for free if you’re using your mortgage team. Next, if you happen to have a mobile

App, we always forget about this one. Definitely consider making sure people know that you have the app, and that’s something that’s really sticky. Somebody might use it every day. You don’t even know they’re using it, right? But they’re searching and seeing your logo in your name in the app every day. Next, if you have a home valuation tool and you happen to have the address for somebody, they’re a homeowner, make sure you put them in that tool. Home bot’s a really good one with our co-marketing partners. We use something called Home iq, which sends a really cool report once a month about the person’s home. Definitely try to get as many people on those as possible. And I’m forgetting my favorite one here. I’m going to edit Bridge pages is another automated follow up. This is kind of a thank you video. Thank you video before you send the lead magnet.
Oh boy, just realized I even forgot that it’s very important. Basically what you’re going to want to do is have some kind of sandwich page or the meat of a sandwich, we call ’em bridge pages where somebody opts in for your list of foreclosures. You then have a video introducing yourself saying, Hey, the list of foreclosures is down below, or I’m sending it by email. Something like that just to introduce yourself as sort of an automated step between them getting the thing that they’re going to get. So this is another component that you might add to your system. So hang in here with me guys. We’re about 20 minutes in. I don’t like making videos this long, but this is very important. I’m kind of giving you the whole thing right here. And yes, don’t get overwhelmed. It will take a little while to build this all out, but it’s worth doing.
I promise all of this, as you can tell, everything up till now can actually run very set it, forget it in an automated fashion once you have it going, once you pick your traffic source, once you have one lead magnet and once you have these automated things in place, it’s not like you need to be working a ton every day. It’s going to automatically generate conversations that lead the closings for you. So don’t get overwhelmed, there is a payoff here, but stick with me now. We’re going to continue on and finish up this video with a few more slides and we’re going to talk about manual follow-ups right now. So if you only did all the stuff I’ve mentioned alreadyi, and you only allow the automated system to work, you would probably actually still do pretty well. You would get a handful of people every week depending on how much of a budget you’re spending to get people through the front end, through your traffic source of the funnel.
But say you’re generating one to three leads a day automatically and all this automatic engine is running, you can probably count on getting a small handful of people just kind of emailing you and responding back to properties that they’re getting automated or to your drip campaigns and saying, Hey, I want more info about that. Right? And for whatever number that is, say it’s two people a week, do that. If you do these manual follow ups, you’re going to three extra response or better, I promise. And the biggest thing you can do is send something cool weekly or even daily if you can, which might sound like a lot of work, but I promise everything you do in this section will just pour fuel on the fire of your niche funnel framework. So what do we mean by sending something cool weekly?

Well, it’s more of the thing they opted in for. So if somebody opted in for a new construction list, you might wake up tomorrow morning and say, what can I send? That’s interesting. Okay, here’s the highest price new construction home in the area. Here’s the lowest price. Here’s the floor plan of the day. Just sticking with the new construction example, here’s a rebate that the builder at X, Y, Z development is now offering. Every day you’re going to offer something. It could just be the new construction home of the day. If you have nothing else, go grab one of the listings in your niche and do a quick screencast video about it or run out there even better. Take a tour in person and send the video out this unique content that kind of just says, Hey, this guy or this girl who’s working this niche, my new construction agent who I opt him for, they really know this market and why would I ever, ever, ever want to work with anybody else?
And when they become ready to buy, he sell in that niche, they’re going to call you. But the funny thing is, even if they don’t want a new construction home, maybe they just opt in passing and they’re just looking for a house, what you’ll get is you’ll get people who call you and say, Hey, I really love the stuff you’ve been sending me. Is there any chance anybody who could help me? I really don’t want a new construction house. I actually want to fixer upper could do you know anybody who could help me with that? You’ll get those kind of weird interactions where they assume that you don’t want to work with other stuff, but they will ask you for the help. Or they’ll just ask you general real estate questions in addition too. So that goes back to our point about you’re not excluding other things.
You’re just setting yourself as an expert in this one thing. So that leads to more, so more of the thing they opted in for. That would be highest price, new construction, open area tips for first time home buyers. You could do videos of the standard agreement of sale in your area. If you have something come up in the process of a closing or at the settlement table and you want to share a story about something happening or the possibilities are endless, you can also send things like open house invites. If you have nothing else to send somebody, maybe on a Friday you say, Hey, here, you send an email to everybody on your list. You say, here’s a list of all the open houses in the niche or even just in the area. You can do webinars from week to week. You might say, this month I’m going to do a special webinar or an in-person seminar.
We had somebody, I’m sorry if I’m getting your name, who recently in our community did an in-person seminar of sorts for self-employed business owners in their area to talk about self-employed financing options, and they did it in their office. This is a wonderful thing to invite people to in a very something cool, something very cool to do to keep engaging your audience. So send something cool once a week. It’ll differentiate you from everybody else, and it’ll pour fuel on the fire of your niche funnel framework. If you’re getting two warm, warm inquiries a week, I promise it’s going to be like six or seven. It’s going to just be, it’s going to three x at least, probably 10 x the results of the whole framework. And then finally, with all this, you’re going to be doing all this work. You’re going to be spending a little money to drive traffic through the front end of your funnel. You’re going to have done all the work to set up this automated framework. You’re going to be putting in the effort, maybe

Spending an hour or two a week sending this something cool. In total, you’re going to be putting the effort in. Don’t squander it by not serving your warm inquiries. And I’ll be the first to admit, I am the worst at this. I get so focused on the fun part, the driving of the initial lead, all the digital kind of techy, geeky stuff at the front end, and then people, it works really well and people start calling you, but you have to close it out. You have to finish the whole thing, and you have to serve those warm inquiries fast. So if somebody responds to one of your emails about a hot deal or a specific floor plan about new construction, get on it right away. It is a red alert. I need to serve this person right away. Make sure that you are as responsive as can be and that you don’t let the opportunity pass.
Because what happens when you are that way, of course you get more closings, but also you get more referrals. As everybody here knows, the more we serve, the better we do. So if you do all of the above, people will be emailing you and calling you day in and day out. Anytime this happens, please make it a priority to reply and over deliver. Okay, so now I’m stumbling over my words. Talking for 26 minutes straight is becoming a bit of a problem for me. I guess as I get older, I feel my voice getting tired. And I’ll just close by thanking you sincerely for watching this. Hopefully this made a little bit of sense to you. Just know that creating funnels in real estate, there is kind of a proven path. Everything I’ve just taken you through is kind of the direct response roadmap. If you bought an internet marketing course, it would look kind of similar people.
You’d hear people talk about lead magnets and traffic sources and conversion elements. What we’re doing here at Wake Up Real Estate, what we hope to do is kind of apply that thinking and that theory to the real estate industry with very, very, very specific examples for these very specific niches. So this video itself was designed to be an early module in the niche thinking section of the Wake Up dot real estate website. If you’re not already a member, go to wake up dot real estate, create your free account. If you are watching this in this member’s area and we’ve already created all the additional course content, you should be able to find more details and more information down below. And just know that we will constantly on the Daily Morning show be talking more about this stuff and we’ll be adding more and more specific resources related to specific niches as time goes by. Thanks again for watching here at Wake Up Real Estate. We look forward to seeing what you do with your niche in the days to come.