The Human Touch in Real Estate Marketing

Dylan Silver (01:31)
folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is a Jacksonville, Florida based expert in the lead space partnering with brokers to scale their business through humanized live chat strategies. Please welcome Nelson Bruton. Nelson, welcome to the show.

Nelson Bruton (01:46)
Hey Dylan, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dylan Silver (01:48)
It’s always ⁓ great to have people on in the Florida area. tell everybody this. I’m jealous at this point because I’ve had so many entrepreneurs in the real estate space on this show from Florida, from South Florida, from West Coast of Florida. Is there something in the water in Florida out there where all the real estate guys and gals are out there?

Nelson Bruton (02:05)
Just fun and sunshine.

Dylan Silver (02:07)
I

don’t know what it is. I’ve had people from all over the country from Wisconsin, from Idaho say I’m moving my business now to South Florida and I understand as well that there’s kind of a friendly competition as well between the areas of Florida. got the West Coast, you’ve got South and you’re in Jacksonville. What’s Jacksonville like? You’re my first guest from Jacksonville.

Nelson Bruton (02:28)
Yeah, it’s awesome, man. There’s a lot of waterways here from the intercoastal to the Atlantic Ocean. so fishing is huge here, water sports. There’s so many golf courses here too. So the stadium course with the island green, TPC sawgrass. So tons of golf, tons of water. It’s a great place to live up on the East Coast.

Dylan Silver (02:48)
Golf is a difficult

game. Golf is a difficult game. It’s one of those things. I might stick to Topgolf, but I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking folks how they got into the business that they’re involved in. How’d you get into leads and marketing, ⁓ specifically in the real estate space?

Nelson Bruton (03:04)
Alright, I’ll make a long story really, really short. Back in the day, 1995, 96, in those mid to late 90s, AOL and CompuServe and Prodigy used to mail out these CDs, these compact discs, and it was 23 hours of internet, 25 free hours of internet, 53 hours of internet, and you put the CD in your big desktop computer. We had gateways at the time. They got mailed to you in a big box with a cow print on them, and I was fascinated you could put

the CD in your computer and then you can be on chat rooms with people all over the country, all over the world and surfing the web through webcrawler and all these different beginning days.

search engines, right? And so the internet basically it fascinated me. I knew it was going to change business. I knew it was going to change the world we live in. And this is back when I was in high school, you know, 20, 30, how many years ago? A long time ago. And so I was fascinated with the internet.

And so that’s kind of what got me interested. went to school for a computer science major until I took a programming class, C++, C sharp. And I was like, nope, I’m not a programmer. So I went the business route and ended up meeting my current friend and business partner back 20 something years ago. We were building websites and then we started doing email marketing and paid search and

Google marketing, SEO and all this stuff and then we added our live chat solution. So we just built a digital marketing agency and I’ve been doing that for the past 20 years.

Dylan Silver (04:31)
I’ve noticed from all the tech that I’ve been involved in, I’m actually in software engineering school outside of ⁓ being involved in the real estate space, that real estate seems to adopt tech as much if not more than anything else. Like right now with AI and then of course the utilization of

media and then also probably early on utilization of early internet, real estate had to be at the forefront and is still at the forefront of so much of this.

And one of the things we talked about before hopping on the show here is this idea that everywhere it seems to be AI proliferation, but people still want to be able to talk to somebody. And so you have a niche tool that really gives people 24-7 access to a human,

Nelson Bruton (06:01)
Absolutely, yeah, we’re all about, we love AI. AI is awesome. There’s so many applications. We use it all the time to make our life more efficient and do things faster, better, cheaper. So many AI tools, you’re absolutely right. And you’re right. Real estate is one of those industries that typically stays on the cutting edge of technology and marketing. It’s definitely an industry that’s up with it in terms of the new trends. But what we found is that, you know,

People still like to do business with people. Nobody likes to call a phone number and get put through a phone tree.

Right? And with live chat, your AI chat bot, if you have one, it’s impersonal. And no matter how well you programmed it or coded it or what language model you’ve used, it’s still an interactive FAQ that doesn’t give people that empathy and that acknowledgement that a real human does. So that is a key differentiator for what we’ve been doing for 20 years. And the more people use those chat bots and get annoyed and frustrated with their experience, the higher the value of our solution becomes where we offer that human live chat experience.

Dylan Silver (06:58)
I want to get a little bit granular and maybe give away some of the gold but not all of the gold and talk about how brokers or real estate agents can utilize a website and how this might be advantageous to them versus just having an MLS listing, which of course does a lot for them, right? Puts it everywhere. But how can they utilize a website to draw traffic to themselves or maybe generate leads? How does this benefit them?

Nelson Bruton (07:14)
yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so mean people get so let’s start from the top. If you’re a broker and you have a website because you have to write because you have to put your listings on there right and have links to the MLS and all that good stuff. So your next task is once you build the website, you got to get people there. You’re spending.

Thousands and thousands of dollars probably on Google ads and social ads and content and all these different things to drive people to your website And there’s gonna be people that are self-serve. They’re gonna peruse. They’re gonna look around until they’re ready to take action When that person is ready to take action, they’re gonna do one of two things They’re gonna fill out your form on your website for somebody calling back. They’re gonna call your phone number or They’re gonna have a chat. Those are the three

preferences of communication that people have once you get them to your website. So if you’re not offering all three, easy to find phone number, easy to fill out contact form and live chat, then you’re missing out on those conversions. The whole goal of people at your website, you want them to convert into people that go through your sales process, turn into listings or buyers.

Dylan Silver (08:22)
Now, one of the things that’s interesting about real estate versus other ⁓ industries, right, is it’s such a long sales cycle, years, right? And you might be reaching somebody when they’re thinking about buying a home and specifically first time buyers, there’s so much that goes into it, right? And so how does that process, and maybe this may be a little bit long-winded, but how does that process work as far as staying in touch with folks? Are you involved in that side of it at all as maybe as a consultative as far as

Nelson Bruton (08:29)
I

Dylan Silver (08:48)
Hey, this is the initial point of contact and maybe they’re warming up or hotter now because they’ve been making more contact and so on and so forth.

Nelson Bruton (08:54)
Short answer, we used to be, we know what to do, but we don’t really pitch that as a solution that we offer anymore. That’s kind of a whole other, we engage, we have a conversation, we send the transcript over. It’s up to our customer to do their qualification and follow up process on their own or using some other tools.

Dylan Silver (09:11)
Now,

now because you are a niche down and specific working with brokers, real estate agents, right? So the folks that you have who are chatting, the live humans, right? These are people that are having kind of similar conversations routinely. And so they’re really subject matter experts to a high degree in what they’re talking about versus being kind of spread thin meat, which may be other people who have a similar platform might be doing, cause they might be talking about different verticals, different avatars. Everyone who’s chatting is

chatting about real estate all day.

Nelson Bruton (10:15)
Yes, and for us, we have call centers offshore across the globe because we’re 24-7. And any chat team that we assign to a customer is going to go through a rigorous script training process. So they work off a script playbook.

and they study the website for our client and they’re dedicated to our client. So the script gets better and better and better as we get feedback from our customers, as we send the chat transcripts through, but also kind of a nuance to this particular point of conversation. The role of the chat team is not to get into…

a deep level sales process or a highly technical conversation about all the intricacies of what the visitor needs. Chat is not the place for that. A Zoom meeting or an in-person meeting or showing is where you want to have your experts, our customers have the experts already to have those deep level conversations and normal sales process. So our job, our role,

as the chat team with our chat agents is to work off a script playbook and be very, top level. Find out who the visitor is, where they are, what time frame they’re looking, you know, are they buying or selling, you know, top level qualification questions. That’s all. Get their contact details and then say, all right, great. Thanks for that information. One of our team members is going to get back to you as soon as possible. So we don’t have to be subject matter experts on our chat team. We just have to be client matter experts. What is important for the client?

What do we need to capture during that conversation? Top level and then send it over to our client. Does that make sense?

Dylan Silver (11:40)
It does. I want to pivot a bit here and ask you about gaining exposure to a website in general. And to me as an outsider looking in, it seems like one of the ways, maybe the thing that everyone thinks about is getting higher in Google search and paying for that and so on and so forth. Is that the number one way? there other ways too that are involved with that? Do you also work with folks on that?

Nelson Bruton (12:01)
We used to, we don’t anymore. Getting number one on Google absolutely is a very important piece of getting people to your website. Boy, has that changed over the years. So we do still have some legacy customers we do this for. know, pay per click, you Google ads, that’s become more expensive, but more important because it takes up more of the real estate on the home, the first page, the results page of Google. And then of course you have the AI results that are showing up now.

So the organic listings for search engine optimization, those are minimized, those are harder to earn. Google ads are getting more expensive.

So yeah, getting on the first page of Google is important. I would suggest to any brokers that are doing marketing, and they know this already, especially in the higher end, that the more quality content you produce and the more frequent content you produce, the social channels, the TikToks, the Instagrams, the Facebook, the meta stuff, meta ads, there’s a lot more complexity to getting awareness for your website nowadays than there used to be five, 10 years ago. It’s a much more arduous task and more expensive task, I would say too.

Dylan Silver (12:59)
I know that you’re not.

Nelson Bruton (13:00)
Which by

the way, Dylan, which by the way, points to the signifies the importance of if you’re going to do manage all those complexities and spend much more to get people to your site, you better convert every single person or as many people as possible into a name, number and email.

Dylan Silver (13:14)
Name number and email. I say name number need but name number email right. I want to I want to ask you about I know that you’re not involved in this day to day right now but I want to ask you about you mentioned those other channels right. And sometimes people say well the buyers are here the buyers are here. What’s your perspective on that. Maybe in your business as well when you’ve been looking for clients but also just for real estate folks in general. Is it. Hey you really got to be active on Facebook or hey if you’re professional you got to be on LinkedIn and is it.

Nelson Bruton (13:18)
Yep.

Dylan Silver (13:42)
Hey, there’s so much going on here. Maybe this is a lot of time to allocate. And I hear people saying like three posts a day. Maybe I should hire someone to do this. And at what point do I do that? What’s your perspective on?

Nelson Bruton (13:52)
Yeah, you got to be everywhere. And real estate is one of those businesses that’s both, you know, so and it depends on if you’re the broker or if you’re one of the agents, right? The agents, the broker absolutely has to focus on all the marketing channels because their job is the broker and they bring value to the agents by, hey, we’re going to supply you with some constant leads of, you know, list, you know, buyers and people who want to list. So brokers have to be more aware of the marketing side of things.

But agents and brokers alike should still be doing as much as possible in their local areas from a networking perspective, from a community give back perspective. The old adage, your net worth is based on your network. You know what I mean? So the more people who know you and the more relationships you build in your local area, regional area, you still have to do the old school stuff.

Dylan Silver (14:31)
is their network.

Nelson Bruton (15:21)
the networking groups and the networking events and the charity events, know, give back to your community. Those are going to obviously drive your awareness and business and brand, both as an agent and as a broker. But the broker, to answer your question, has to be outsourcing as much as possible, making sure they have a good agency, managing all these things. Most importantly, inspecting what they expect. Make sure if they’re doing all these things, they’re doing them with a purpose.

Make sure there’s stats and reports and hey, we need to hit this level of engagement. We need to hit this level of people commenting. We need to drive these many conversions from all these different channels. So it’s a lot of work to manage all of those different marketing channels. ⁓ And it’s a lot of work to create all the content for all of them. So there’s certainly some options for hiring VAs. We just hired a few VAs for us to do some very specific tasks to grow awareness for our business.

Dylan Silver (16:00)
insurance.

Nelson Bruton (16:11)
management and otherwise. So there’s lots of options out there. You know we always say you can’t do it all at once. You can’t start from scratch and do everything at once. So pick one or two do them with excellence but make sure you do them with a hey here’s what we’re gonna do here’s what we expect from it and then measure it.

Dylan Silver (16:26)
And

you know, on that note, the consistency is so key, right? Because I think sometimes people expect results in one month, right? But in many cases, when we’re talking about marketing, right? It’s not in real estate, right? You’d be great, it’d be great to have results in one month, but also be great to have results over a year or two years, right? And so someone might and I’ve had this happen with episodes in this show, they see an episode that we did, you know, months ago. And that’s what got them interested in hopping on the show. Or that’s

Nelson Bruton (16:36)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (16:54)
how we made a connection. so it’s kind of a slow drip, right? You’d love to see an instant ROI, but you have to have kind of a long-term consistent mentality with it. We are coming up on time here though, Nelson. Where can folks go if they’d maybe like to reach out to you or if they’d like to learn more about the business or if maybe they’re thinking about putting up a website for themselves?

Nelson Bruton (17:07)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a DME on LinkedIn, Nelson Bruton. Or you can email me directly, nelson at interchanges.com. And I’ll be happy to answer any questions and guide and help and speak from experience. I’m here to serve.

Dylan Silver (17:26)
Nelson, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Nelson Bruton (17:28)
Thanks for having me, Dylan.