Is Niche Marketing Right for You?

SUMMARY

You have probably heard the saying many times in real estate, “the Riches are in the Niches.”

There are countless different niche marketing strategies used by real estate agents, and almost any of them can be profitable and make you very successful. However, in this video, I challenge the longstanding belief that you have to choose a niche in order to be massively successful.

Niche marketing was a concept created in the 1920’s by companies to deal with marketing costs when every marketing impression on a customer or prospect had a tangible cost in dollars or “man-hours.”

Having a niche can be great. However it can also be very limiting. If you’re going to pick a niche, you have to consider what opportunities you are also cutting off.

Bottom line, here is my favorite niche: motivated sellers. And the opportunities are unlimited when you master inspiring them to hire you and delivering great results.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hi there. It’s Kevin Ward, the founder of YesMasters Real Estate Success Training, and the author of the new #1 bestselling book, The Book of Yes: The Ultimate Real Estate Agent Conversation Guide.

Today, I want to talk to you about your niche. what we call niche marketing or niche marketing.

You’ve heard the saying “The Riches are in the Niches.” They can be. However, I want to challenge that thinking just a little bit today, because I heard that statement ever since I started real estate…that if you really want to get successful in real estate, the riches are in the niches. It can be true. It’s not necessarily true. If you decide to focus on a niche, you can also be kissing off or missing a lot of great opportunities that are out there. If you’re thinking about “what niche should I specialize in, or I’m in a niche right now. I’m deciding do I want to stay in that niche, do I want to expand? How do I make the decision to do that?” Listen, there’s a lot of great niches out there in real estate market.

There’s the first-time home-buyers niche. There is probate niche. There is distressed sellers, or notice of default or short-sale niche. There’s a foreclosure niche for people that want to work strictly with banks and foreclosures. There is the luxury home market. There is the resort market. There are vacation markets. There’s condo markets. There’s so many different niches. There’s geographically. You can do geographic targeting where you just pick your niche. “I’m going to just work in one big subdivision” or whatever. You can have your specialty. Your niche can be expired listings, or it can be for sale by owners. There’s so many different niches that you can develop that all of them have potential. However, whenever you limit yourself to a niche, the question is “Is that niche concept, is that niche approach or niche strategy to my business, going to expand my ability to create business and revenue, and profit, or is it going to limit it?”

The concept behind niche marketing is that if you go deep, you can actually build a more successful business because you have more specialty, more credibility, and so forth. However, again, as I mentioned, I’m going to challenge that just a little bit. Here’s the reason.

Have you ever thought about where the idea, where the concept of niche marketing actually came from? When did it originate? Here’s where the idea, the concept of niche marketing originated. It originated nearly 100 years ago back in the early 1920’s. Niche marketing came in as an approach for if you had product or service, how do you get the most profitability in selling your product or service to the market? Here was the reason, because for you to get the word out to the market about your product, or your service, you had to get the word out.

In the 1920’s, every single touch that you made to a prospect, every single touch, whether you were selling life insurance, or whether you were selling pantyhose, or encyclopedias, it didn’t matter. For you to touch people required a tangible cost, either in dollars, or in man hours, or woman hours, whatever. It was either money or time. It was a fixed resources for me to market out to the world. It was direct mail, or newspaper, or whatever it was, there was actually a tangible cost associated with every connection, every person that I touched with my marketing message to get the message out.

Companies knew that for us to get the most return on our investment, it will focus on a niche that we can more effectively hit them with the messaging of our product or service over and over and over again. We establish credibility. We establish the value. We establish good will from our customer base, and so forth. The niche actually made sense both from a strategic approach of getting more customers, but also of getting more profitability. Because, just to do a shotgun blast of wide base marketing, that very low return, that very slow return, and it was very expensive. If you go niche, go deeper, build more relationships with people, you’re going to get a better result.

However, have you noticed that a few things have changed in our world since the 1920’s? Whereas, used to, for you to be able to get the word out to people, for you to market to people, you had to literally, it was either a tangible cost, money or time. It was a resource that you had to do. However, because of technology, a lot of things have changed. I think about my business, for example as a real estate trainer and a coach, is that 20, 30 years ago, the way that real estate coaches and trainers built their company was they had to get on the phone and they had to call people. They had to call brokers, call offices, call real estate agents. They would literally go. They would travel all over this place to individual real estate offices and companies. They would speak. They would speak. They would get on the phone and they would call and they would call. They would have to do that over and over and over again, nonstop. They would spend weeks and weeks and months every year traveling and speaking all over the place.

Well, technology has completely changed. I was able to build my coaching and training company literally without having to go anywhere, without having to literally leave my home office, because I could get on a video. I could shoot a training video that gave great value, great training content, post it on Youtube for free. I could get exposure all over the globe, literally. It didn’t cost me anything. All of the sudden, my niche became real estate agents. I still talk to people, I’ll meet people. “What do you do?” “I teach real estate agents how to make more money and make a life.” That what I tell them. They’re, “Oh. Where do you work out of? Where are you out of? I tell them “I live here and so forth, but I train real estate agents all over North America, and all over, literally, around the world, because our training is all online. It’s virtual. I can do conference calls, I could do webcasts, I could do video training, and I could do it anywhere in the world.” Why? Because technology has changed. I don’t have to focus on just one area of training real estate agents where I can go to the real estate offices, or anything like that. The limitations have just been completely removed.

Well, the same is true for real estate is your ability to reach out and touch more people because technology has removed a lot of the barriers that we had before. Another thing that happened back years ago was that real estate agents were known worked on very small local markets. Literally, they would be a neighborhood or a small suburb, that would be their market. Why? Because you needed to know the market. There just wasn’t a lot of data out there if you didn’t actually know the market.

Now, because of technology, because we have an MLS that actually you can go online and you can look any house up that is either active on the market, has sold in any time over the last sometimes 5 to 10 years is on the MLS, with pictures, with full descriptions, with hyperlinks to the tax record. You could literally pull up online the complete tax record. If I want to see a house that … If I want to go on a listing appointment in a neighborhood, in a market I’ve never been in, 20 minutes away, or 20 miles away, that’s going to be a 30-minute drive, I can literally get on the MLS, pull up all the homes that have sold in that area for years. I can look at the pictures. I can look at the streets. I can get on Google Maps.

With the satellite view, I can look and I can get a bird’s eye view of it. I can literally get on the street. Because of Google Maps, I can literally get a street view in front of the house. I can look all around at the neighbor’s houses. I can look across the street. Granted the picture might be a year or 2 old, but I can still get a feel for an area that you could not do anything like that, even 10 years ago, much less 20, 30, 40 years ago. The world has completely changed our ability. Now, real estate, really, has become more regional, because I can know what’s going on. I can know the statistics. I can study market areas. There’s so much more information so readily available that was not available before. Your ability to expand your market base is greater than it’s ever been before.

Now, bring all that back to the idea of marketing to a niche, or a niche. That is, when I look at, “Okay, do I want to specialize in just the luxury market, or do I want to specialize in just the resort market, or do I want to specialize in just this neighborhood?” Look, there’s nothing wrong with targeting specific places where I want to build business, where I want to get more business, and targeting and say, “I built my business with for sale by owners and expireds because I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t have any money.” When I started real estate, I had no money. To be able to do traditional marketing, I just had to go out and talk to people. I found out real quick that for sale by owners and expireds were the people that wanted to sell right now. I go talk to them and learn what to say and how to say it, I could get them to hire me very, very quickly and got business very, very quickly because of that.

In a sense, that could have been called my niche. However, I never limited myself and said, “Well, I’m not going to work with a referral because I specialize in for sale by owners and expireds.” Here’s the deal, when you limit yourself with a niche, think about what opportunities am I losing, or am I missing out on? Is it necessary to mark that distinction? Is it necessary to do that?

I’m just going to give you now my bottom line suggestion. This is what I tell my coaching members, and what I’m going to tell you today. That is, if you’re going to specialize in a niche, the best niche to focus on in real estate is motivated sellers in your market, in any price range, in any situation, it doesn’t matter. When you’ve got a motivated seller. You know how to list a home, and how to get a home sold for top dollar, and you know how to get that result, there is no better market to work in than motivated sellers. I don’t care if they’re in a bread and butter type home, in a $200,000 or if they’re in an ultra-luxury home, it doesn’t matter. The process is very, very similar. Are there some things that are different? Of course. You can learn to master all of them. You’re going to spend less time chasing long term business and more time getting business when your focus is learning how to get motivated sellers. It opens up massive control to your business, massive opportunity, and profitability when you do it right.

That’s my thinking on niche marketing. I’d like to know what you think about it. If you have any comments or questions, please post them on here. If you liked the video, give it a thumbs up. I look forward to talking to you again real soon.