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CINC Office Hours Episode 8 - Eric Robson | August 13, 2025
Office Hours airs live on the second Wednesday of each month at 11am ET.
Register to watch live and ask your questions at cinccommunity.com/registerforwebinars.
Title: Driving Agent Success with Eric Robson: Proven Strategies for Growth
đź“… Date: August 13, 2025
🏢 Presented by: CINC
Register to watch live and ask your questions at cinccommunity.com/registerforwebinars.
Title: Driving Agent Success with Eric Robson: Proven Strategies for Growth
đź“… Date: August 13, 2025
🏢 Presented by: CINC
🔍 Episode Overview
In this episode of Office Hours, CINC’s Eric Robson joins the team to share actionable strategies for helping real estate agents succeed in today’s competitive market. Eric dives into the importance of accountability, lead follow-up and leveraging technology to create scalable systems that deliver results. Whether you’re a solo agent or managing a team, this conversation is packed with insights you can implement immediately.
đź’ˇ Key Topics Covered
- How accountability drives agent performance and conversion
- Building a consistent follow-up system that works
- Leveraging CINC’s CRM tools for maximum efficiency
- Common pitfalls agents face—and how to avoid them
- Real-world success stories from CINC clients
đź”— Resources Mentioned
🎧 Listen & Subscribe
Creators and Guests
Host
Host
Host
James Terry
James joined CINC in 2013 to help Client Marketing with a special project. He stayed on and was soon managing the build and launch of all new accounts before being asked to lead the Paid Search team. Bringing over 15 years of experience in digital marketing, James is passionate about the high growth potential of our Real Estate clients.
What is CINC Office Hours?
CINC's live monthly open Q&A with different real estate experts. Hosted by Harry Kierbow, Dan Lott and James Terry from CINC. Join us live on the second Wednesday of each month at 11am ET. Register now and submit your questions to be answered live at cinccommunity.com/registerforwebinars.
CINC Marketing: Here we go, it's recording.
CINC Marketing: Hey, everybody!
CINC Marketing: Thank you for joining us.
CINC Marketing: My name's Harry Kerbo. I am the Senior Director of Paid Social here at Sync. We'll, hang out.
CINC Marketing: For another minute, and I'll leave you in suspense as to who these other fine gentlemen are.
CINC Marketing: While you're joining us, you know, let us know
CINC Marketing: Where you're coming from? And, you know, as always.
CINC Marketing: We've got some questions that we've received prior to this from clients that we'll be discussing, but if you have any questions at all, please, shoot them to us in the chat. And then…
CINC Marketing: Very exciting.
CINC Marketing: If you are into it, we're going to the next step of unmuting today, so we'll have a, have a conversation, if you, you know, if you have any questions that you'd like to…
CINC Marketing: Put out to the group here, online.
CINC Marketing: So… Allowing a couple more minutes here, you know, as always.
CINC Marketing: Here at Office Hours, just an open Q&A, for you guys to submit any questions that you have. We did get some questions, around support issues, so some things around setting up auto tracks, that kind of stuff.
CINC Marketing: One thing to remember is that you do have access to an account manager, as part of Sync, so…
CINC Marketing: You know, definitely make use of that. You can reach out to support at Syncpro.com, and they can help you with, you know, all your questions. Matt Purdy on the, on the Zoom, so…
CINC Marketing: Alright, cool. Well, people still coming in, but we'll go ahead and get started. So I, again, am…
CINC Marketing: Harry Kerbo, the Senior Director of Paid Social Marketing here at Sync, or Commission Sync, as you see Dan's shirt, back there.
CINC Marketing: And I am joined today, by Eric Robson. He's gonna be our guest today for Office Hours. Eric, say, say hi to the nice people.
Eric Robson: Hello, nice people. Yeah, I'm Eric Robson, I've been with Sync, … coming up on 10 years now, actually. I'm the director of…
Eric Robson: New accounts for paid search, as well as our display marketing. And, we'll be discussing
Eric Robson: some of those things today, some of the things that I do to help get new accounts started, and stuff like that. So, happy to be here.
CINC Marketing: Awesome, thank you very much. Glad you could join us. As always, joined here by my counterpart on the search side, James Terry. James, you doing alright, man? Anything on your mind?
James Terry: Heck yeah, man. A lot of… yes to both, right? So, for those that I haven't met, hello, welcome out, glad you guys could join us this morning. I am James Terry, I'm the Senior Director of Paid Search over here at Sync, and probably the person at Sync who's most grateful
James Terry: to Eric, because I used to handle all of the launches and the new accounts, and … and Eric came in and stepped up and has taken over such a huge responsibility, and taken a lot of that off my plate, so I appreciate him, and he's done an awesome job with it, so…
James Terry: Good stuff, a lot of, lot, lot going on.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, very good. Yeah, and I do want to mention, Eric, you may notice the name, from an email you probably received. Any, …
CINC Marketing: Is it Space Ghost Coast to Coast? Did you get that thing I sent ya?
Eric Robson: That's actually Harvey Birdman.
CINC Marketing: Harvey Birdman!
CINC Marketing: an attorney at law. So anyway, if anyone….
Eric Robson: niche Adult Swim references already.
CINC Marketing: If that invokes it.
CINC Marketing: imagery in anyone's mind. That's what I think anytime I send an email. Do you get that thing I sent you? But, …
CINC Marketing: The email did have a special offer for clients that want to try out our brand advertising. We'll be talking about that some today, but also look for that email if you have not seen it yet. But…
CINC Marketing: the moment you've all been waiting for, the introduction… it's like when Hulk Hogan comes out.
CINC Marketing: The introduction, topical.
Daniel Lott: that.
James Terry: We miss them.
CINC Marketing: I was always an Ultimate Warrior guy, myself, but… and then, … Mick Foley.
CINC Marketing: But anyway, the most handsome man in internets, Dan Lott.
CINC Marketing: Hey Dan, he's the VP of Client Marketing, the, … The founder.
CINC Marketing: Of all this, two-time Inman Marketing All-Star.
Daniel Lott: Two times. Two time, yes.
CINC Marketing: That… that could have been your wrestling.
CINC Marketing: Two times, two times.
CINC Marketing: Work on that.
Daniel Lott: Yeah, wow, yeah. Well, thank you. Thanks for that great, introduction. Excited to be here.
CINC Marketing: I'm like Paul Bear.
Daniel Lott: I don't know.
CINC Marketing: Anyone?
Daniel Lott: that.
James Terry: Oh, no.
CINC Marketing: Undertaker? Okay.
Daniel Lott: My, my wrestling stopped at, like, 1984. That was… that was about it. When it was Hulk Hogan with Mr. T. That was back, that's when I lost.
CINC Marketing: Oh, Mr. T. Yeah, alright.
CINC Marketing: Alright, cool. Well, so….
Daniel Lott: Video.
James Terry: Here he's working on the mustache.
CINC Marketing: Check out our… check out our side podcast on the mat, where we talk 1980s wrestlers, so…
CINC Marketing: Yeah, but Dan, I… I know!
CINC Marketing: Jimmy Hart.
CINC Marketing: I know you have a, a new guide
CINC Marketing: That just came out, that you wanted to, talk about.
Daniel Lott: That's true, Harry. Thanks for bringing that up. Actually, we created it together. It's a co-buyeline, so…
Daniel Lott: Don't, sell.
CINC Marketing: And it's….
Daniel Lott: What?
CINC Marketing: Yeah.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, I'm a servant leader, Dan.
Daniel Lott: Yeah, there you go.
CINC Marketing: Is that all you want to say? You said you wanted to say something about it, I assume there was more than.
Daniel Lott: No, that would be pretty short. No, so what it is about, and I think I mentioned this last month for the people who were here last month.
Daniel Lott: But, …
Daniel Lott: I did a couple videos about, AI overviews in Google, and Google, you know, everything we have to do is… has to do with lead generation, specifically…
Daniel Lott: I'm focused mostly on the, the Google side, the search side. And so, Google is changing what they're doing by incorporating AI. You already know this, you've seen the, the AI summaries, they're generating a lot of traffic.
Daniel Lott: to Google. Google wants to keep the traffic and put ads on there, so it's great for Google.
Daniel Lott: these AI overviews are not going away, and I think that's something that you need to know, that, like, search has changed. Like, over the last year, it has changed. And, it's not gonna change back. So…
Daniel Lott: One of the things that I think is particularly interesting is that I've been here forever. Eric's been here almost 10 years, and I think he's the youngest of the four of us.
CINC Marketing: It's the baby, yeah.
Daniel Lott: So, we've been there forever, and, ….
CINC Marketing: Just a baby.
Daniel Lott: So….
CINC Marketing: Had to get that out.
Daniel Lott: our clients always would say, like, oh, I want to get organic traffic, and they would bring up blogs, and we would say, like, sure, go ahead and, …
Daniel Lott: make a blog. That's great. That's fine. There's no harm to it. But it's not going to accomplish anything. Like, literally, it would not accomplish anything, because they don't get ranked.
Daniel Lott: So… or it… your ability to get ranked is really hard, with blogs. Very, very hard. And you don't want to write it, either. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work for very little rewards. One of the things we found with our…
Daniel Lott: Doing these videos, and doing all, like, the webinars, and doing our white papers, and just doing social media focused on videos, is that…
Daniel Lott: You can show up in the organic search rankings if you do videos and you do a… develop a comprehensive social media strategy. You will show up.
Daniel Lott: And it's not as much work as writing blogs, and you… you have to stick with it. There's a lot of, …
Daniel Lott: you know, you have to develop a strategy to it, and so…
Daniel Lott: the white, the white paper I wrote with Harry, just talks about some of the things from a real estate's perspective, is, like.
Daniel Lott: we always talk about hyperlocal micro-targeting, and you can do that on your own as a real estate agent. You can…
Daniel Lott: put together videos and social media posts talking about specific areas, which Google will then perceive you as an expert in that particular area, and…
Daniel Lott: that area… Right. …would… Right.
Daniel Lott: would be like a… like a neighborhood, something like that. So… …
Daniel Lott: So, anyway, so that's… that's what… that's what the guide is about. It's like how to do videos and social media to get you noticed by Google.
Daniel Lott: and have you rank in the AI summaries. One of the interesting things about AI summaries, also, is that people perceive them as being the truth, not… it doesn't necessarily… it isn't necessarily the truth, and you'll see on, …
Daniel Lott: If you ever look at one of those AI summaries in the bottom left-hand corner, it says, some of the stuff in here might be wrong. So it's like, great. It's like, here, they present this as being the truth, and it's like, yeah…
Daniel Lott: It's the truth, except for it might not be the truth. But, either way, it's fine, it's making us money, so we're gonna keep on throwing it out there. So…
Daniel Lott: You might as well be the person that they throw it to, mention you, like, if it's… if it's a… if somebody has a question about a, like, a neighborhood, like a… like a real estate question, they might say, like, oh, the…
Daniel Lott: Some of the realtors, or, like, the question is, what are some of the realtors serving this neighborhood?
Daniel Lott: you could get mentioned, which would be, like, a huge, positive impact for you, so…
Daniel Lott: Anyway, that's what the white paper's about. I'm gonna actually… Talk about.
CINC Marketing: I think a key….
Daniel Lott: I'm going to try to put a link to that.
CINC Marketing: I've already… I put it in there.
James Terry: Got it.
CINC Marketing: Oh, there it is!
CINC Marketing: I'm your hostess with the mostess, Dan.
Daniel Lott: Yeah, so if you're interested in it.
Daniel Lott: go for it. It'll be some work, not as much work as writing a whole bunch of blogs, but… and you can have fun with it, so we… like, we like doing our videos, so….
CINC Marketing: I think part of it….
Daniel Lott: Yay.
CINC Marketing: Another part of it is, the importance of, you know, the captioning that you… or the descriptions on the videos, the headlines on the videos, depending on the network, the hashtags that you use.
CINC Marketing: …
CINC Marketing: you know, I think, recently, or I know, you know, Instagram just made a big, update about
CINC Marketing: how their posts, their public posts are more searchable and findable, by search engine bots, and so those results, you know, potentially, social media has always had an impact on SEO, but with that kind of…
CINC Marketing: you know, mentioning, you could potentially rank for reels that you're doing, and so I think…
CINC Marketing: you know, Dan, what you're saying makes sense, because…
CINC Marketing: If every… if everyone's doing a video about, here's the U.S, housing market trends… Oh, I sent it to… I need to send it to everyone. Thank you, Brooke.
CINC Marketing: I'll resend that link. If everyone's doing videos about U.S. housing market trends as a whole, there's a lot of noise there. You know, the example that you use in the videos that you do, Dan, and in the guide, I think, is North Springs, which is an area here.
CINC Marketing: If you're competing
CINC Marketing: to come up when somebody looks for North Springs, or have that on your AI summary, there's less people looking for that.
CINC Marketing: But you have a better chance of coming up because there's less people trying to rank for that, too.
CINC Marketing: So the guide… thank you, Eric.
James Terry: Go.
CINC Marketing: The guide is definitely, … worth a read, you know? My mom thought it was great, Dan.
Daniel Lott: Oh, she did!
Daniel Lott: Oh, good.
CINC Marketing: No, I didn't… she didn't read it. I'm just kidding.
Daniel Lott: Maybe, maybe next time. Maybe next.
CINC Marketing: Maybe next time, yeah.
CINC Marketing: That's what I want.
James Terry: I love those AI summaries, because like Dan said, like, we all see it, and it's… it's…
James Terry: the masses, the public, like, perceives it as the absolute truth, even though it says in the bottom, like, hey, this might not be accurate. And so basically, as a society, we've just decided to crowdsource what is the truth, right? Like, hey, people…
James Terry: here's what the internet is saying, but we get to dictate what the internet, you know, what's out there, what we put out there, and what we want to be perceived as. At least right now, while that content is fairly
James Terry: relatively limited. So it's definitely the time to jump on that and try and get that information out there, if it's something that you want, you know, in the future, moving forward.
CINC Marketing: Well, and then posting regularly is an important part of it, because that encourages the bots… The bots! …to crawl your, …
CINC Marketing: Sorry, I just slipped into Quinn. I've really got movies on my head. I've got a As Good As It Gets quote, too, when I talk about…
CINC Marketing: Let's go get another sweaty wad of money. Alright, now I'm done.
CINC Marketing: But anyway, you know, posting regularly is what encourages the bots to regularly crawl your profiles, and that's what lets them see, that information. And then, comments on the posts are very important because, and not just commenting from one side, but you commenting back.
CINC Marketing: Because the networks, you know, Meta, LinkedIn, that kind of stuff, sees that as meaningful engagement, which they want to keep people on their networks, they want people commenting on posts and finding things relevant. And if you look at the analytics in the back end, even
CINC Marketing: Even posts that… don't get all favorable responses. If you're making thoughtful comments back.
CINC Marketing: … that gets an engagement boost, and Meta interprets that as…
CINC Marketing: You know, meaningful engagement, people finding value in the post, and they're more likely to refer it, so…
CINC Marketing: We did get a question from Brooke.
CINC Marketing: Brooke asked, how can we post video on our Sync website?
CINC Marketing: So there are options, I know, for custom landing pages.
CINC Marketing: To post it, there's also, I believe, some…
CINC Marketing: site templates that accommodate a video on the homepage. But then, you know, you also want to think about things like load time, you know, load time… a slow load time, for instance, can…
CINC Marketing: penalize your site, both in terms of the search engines and just in human behavior, you know, of people, loading it. So, I think that's always a concern. You know, the sync sites are built specifically to generate traffic.
CINC Marketing: into leads. So, you know, I think that's a conversation worth having with your account manager, if you're interested. What we're specifically referring to is posting videos on…
CINC Marketing: Social media. So, now feels like a good time. If you haven't followed us yet, go ahead, smash that subscribe button.
CINC Marketing: The best way to support the work we do is by you liking this video.
CINC Marketing: Those all work sometimes, but it's at Syncro.
Daniel Lott: that? Where do you find those.
CINC Marketing: At Sync Pro, at Sync Pro, yeah, it's at Sync Pro.
Daniel Lott: Yeah?
CINC Marketing: Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook.
CINC Marketing: Youtube, TikTok, even Threads, Dan. Even Threads.
Daniel Lott: Wow.
CINC Marketing: So, anywhere you want your sink, you can get it.
CINC Marketing: But posting there regularly, and when I say regularly, I'm thinking, you know.
CINC Marketing: 3 to 5, 4 to 7 times a week. You know, making sure you get at least 4 posts out there, I think, can really help the algorithms to know to go look for.
Daniel Lott: Well, that's a little daunting.
CINC Marketing: For new content.
Daniel Lott: Like, what you're saying, like, for a single person to post 7 times with…
Daniel Lott: Like, a video. That's kind of rough.
Daniel Lott: Got a rough hair.
CINC Marketing: I mean… What's the name?
Daniel Lott: Where you get.
CINC Marketing: Well, you're not gonna post one.
Daniel Lott: They're getting video.
CINC Marketing: you're not gonna get… you're not gonna post one organic video, but I think as you start creating content, you'll get better and better at it. You know, I think…
CINC Marketing: … you could easily go… I mean, you mentioned this in the videos, you could go into one neighborhood.
CINC Marketing: That you want to talk about, or look up a few records and come out with
CINC Marketing: 6, 7, 8 videos, you know, and that could be your whole months of content, so maybe it's…
CINC Marketing: You know, maybe it's taking a little bit of time, you know, not a full day, not a half day, I don't think.
CINC Marketing: to film different things. And you can also, you know, you can capitalize on trends. I mean, a lot of people are posting trending stuff to their personal TikTok already. There are things that make sense from a business perspective.
CINC Marketing: But you want to mix in… That helpful content, and then…
CINC Marketing: going back to your specific AI reference, the AI overview, you know, if you want to rank for North Springs…
CINC Marketing: when you do a video, talk about North Springs. When you have a, when you do a title for the video on LinkedIn or YouTube, include North Springs, you know, in the caption or the description, include North Springs, because that's the kind of stuff that, …
CINC Marketing: That the search engines are looking at, and that makes it more likely for you
CINC Marketing: to be included in the AI, and to be found. …
CINC Marketing: If somebody searches for that neighborhood, so….
James Terry: Yeah, those platforms really like consistency, and so it's a lot like going to the gym, right? If you go to the gym once a month, if you post once a month, you're not gonna get spectacular results from going to the gym one time a month. But if you start going twice a week.
James Terry: You might start looking a little better, feeling a little better, self-image goes up, and you start realizing.
James Terry: it's worth committing to 3 or 4 times, and ramping up to that a little bit. So, posting probably a couple times a week, start getting a little bit of results, and you can decide, do I want to continue to build on that? Is it worth…
James Terry: committing a little bit higher level, that kind of thing. But definitely, like, posting 3 times a year is not going to get you very far. I mean, I think we all know that, right?
CINC Marketing: Yeah, unless you're Taylor Swift, she's about to go on the Kelsey's podcast.
CINC Marketing: Early access. Dan, I know you're excited.
James Terry: an argument that Taylor Swift….
Daniel Lott: Man, I actually saw that. So, yeah, that's big news, big news.
Daniel Lott: But yes, and then, so the example that we used with, like, how Harry says, like, oh, use the word North Springs all the time, it's like.
Daniel Lott: the phrase, hyperlocal microtting, I just made it up a couple years ago, and so… but if you… if you do a search, like, oh, like, about Sync, you can see, like, in some of the descriptions, it's like, oh, Sync is an expert in hyperlocal micro-targeting. It's like, oh!
Daniel Lott: there you go. That's how it works. And so, if you do lots of videos saying that you're an expert on a certain neighborhood.
Daniel Lott: Google will… will take notice. So, it's… it's not rocket science, but you gotta do it over and over and over again, repetition. So, similar to how we're repeating the same concept over and over again right here. So…
Daniel Lott: I was thinking maybe we could move on, because we have Eric.
Daniel Lott: It's not often you can get an Eric Robinson.
CINC Marketing: I have weight.
Daniel Lott: webinar, so….
CINC Marketing: I have one more… I have one more question, but the answer will be… Amanda asked about, coding HTML into an email template.
CINC Marketing: That would be something I would definitely work with your account manager on. You know, we could help you with questions around ad spend, but in terms of formatting an email into the CRM, definitely take up, take that up with the
CINC Marketing: support team.
CINC Marketing: Or Matt Purdy, if you're out there.
CINC Marketing: Party?
CINC Marketing: You may be able to, to help with that, so…
CINC Marketing: Alright, that's it. Now you can go, Dan. Thank you.
Daniel Lott: Alright, I was segmenting into Eric. One of the unsung people at Sync, in the Sync marketing department, is Eric Robson, because it is, … the launching of the campaigns is the, I think.
Daniel Lott: Arguably, the most… the key part, because, like, if you do it wrong at the beginning, …
Daniel Lott: Like, if you picked out bad areas…
Daniel Lott: you cannot mess it up forever. So, …
Daniel Lott: there's so much pressure on Eric doing what he does. But, you know, he doesn't say… but anyway, actually, it is a really hard job, and, you know, dealing with volume and doing it, like.
Daniel Lott: Like, the time constraints, like, he'll be, …
Daniel Lott: like, told to, like, launch something in, like, an hour or something like that. So, Eric, could you just talk a little about…
Daniel Lott: kind of like the area suggestion, because that's, I guess, just in general, you know, people throw out, like, 20 different… a list of 20 different areas, or geos, or schools, or whatever it is, and how do you determine
Daniel Lott: …
Daniel Lott: you know, which ones you choose, and, how do you do it, and why do you do it? What are your, what are your thoughts on that topic?
Eric Robson: Sure, yeah, so, we definitely have some best practices when it comes to, how you want to set up your lead generation campaign. We have been, kind of coaching up the implementation managers during, kind of, the onboarding process for everybody to kind of make sure that we're,
Eric Robson: meeting expectations, and we're trying to attract leads from areas that each of you actually want to work. It doesn't do you any good if you're getting leads that are two and a half hours away. So what I specifically look for is… implementation will kind of take the broad strokes, they generally…
Eric Robson: want to see a… every market's a little different, right? So, what suits people on average may not work in some specific scenarios, but generally, we try to ask for maybe 10 to 15
Eric Robson: markets, it's, usually a best practice to have some variety in a new campaign, but we're all about trying to find that, that kind of happy medium of, like.
Eric Robson: having those hyper-local targets, like Dan's talking about, is really great when you can attract those kinds of leads. The search volume is kind of…
Eric Robson: The dynamic where we kind of have to balance, like, decent search volume versus, like, Great lead quality.
Eric Robson: So, you know, say somebody's working in, like, Houston.
Eric Robson: well, we can create ad groups for, like, Houston homes for sale, but generally speaking, that lead is going to be very high in the funnel, very early in their home buying process. They don't, you know, maybe they're relocating, or maybe they're moving across the state or something. So there's tons of search volume there.
Eric Robson: And that's not to say a search for, like, homes for sale in Houston won't generate a good lead, it's just some… some less serious buyers will also come in just through the nature of search. So typically, what I'm looking for is a good balance of, like.
Eric Robson: Getting search volume from areas that have a decent volume of listings on average, …
Eric Robson: we have seen a proportional relationship between the number of listings and overall conversion rate for each of those areas. So the more variety there is, our kind of line of thinking is, people have more choice, so they're more likely to stick around and engage with the site to narrow down what they're looking for.
Eric Robson: If we're directing people to a landing page for, like, a really specific neighborhood, or, like, a street name or something, and there's, like, 3 listings on it, it's…
Eric Robson: really unlikely to get leads out of that specific a market. It's not that it will never happen, but you can't really pin your entire campaign's performance on really specific areas like that.
Eric Robson: So my job is to kind of, amongst other things, tease out, like, which of the areas that are on that initial list are going to be viable. Again, implementation does a good job of kind of, like, giving the broad strokes of our best practices, so that when they get to me,
Eric Robson: You know, it can be straightforward, but sometimes, you know, it does merit a follow-up conversation for myself, or occasionally a regional rep might reach out, you know, if we have
Eric Robson: a lot of really specific areas, and nothing really broader, because our… my sort of line of thinking is, you don't want to be, you know, kind of sitting on your hands as you paid for this platform, waiting for that one perfect lead, and just ignoring all the other stuff. … it's…
Eric Robson: you know, part and parcel to this kind of search is there is more work in kind of, like, looking through the leads that we're generating, finding the good stuff, nurturing them into sales, …
Eric Robson: it's not going to be 100% home runs all the time, but I want to try to make sure that we're striking that balance between leads that know an area well enough to search for neighborhoods, subdivisions, school districts, whatever it is, and getting enough volume so that you're not, like.
Eric Robson: going a week without a lead showing up. …
Eric Robson: But yeah, that's… that's kind of how we get things started.
Daniel Lott: Well, one of the things that we have at Sync is that when Eric goes about creating the account,
Daniel Lott: And this happened years ago, but it wasn't always this way, but we have this cool, ad group creation tool, is what it is. And, so when Eric creates it, he'll plug in the different areas, and then press a button, and magically, it'll show how many, homes are on the landing page of the
Daniel Lott: Of that ad. And why that's important, as Eric mentioned it, is the number of homes on the landing page has a very, very, very direct relationship with the conversion rate.
Daniel Lott: Conversion rate being the, kind of the chance that the person who clicks on the ad is gonna become a lead.
Daniel Lott: And why that's important is the conversion rate is one of the two factors in, what… how many leads you get. So, if the conversion rate is low, you're gonna get very few leads. And, we've… over… over time, like, we have a lot…
Daniel Lott: one of the great things about Sync is that we have access to a whole bunch of data, and so we've downloaded, like, all the landing pages that we figure out, like, how many homes are on each landing page, and then we do all this research to see
Daniel Lott: what is the direct… what is the correlation between the number of houses on the landing page and the conversion rate? And it is… it is a stark, very close relationship. Like, if it's less than 10, your conversion rate's gonna be much, much, much, much lower.
Daniel Lott: And that's just the way it is. And, I think part of it has to do with the fact that we have 12 homes on our first landing page, so…
Daniel Lott: On our, on our homepage, or on the PDQ page is what we call it. …
Daniel Lott: So that, you can see, like, oh, I wanna get a, I wanna get by a house in this little, neighborhood. Okay, I've seen them all. I'm not interested, I'm gonna move. I'm, I'm leaving. So, that's pretty much it. So, Eric has to decide…
Daniel Lott: like, okay, this person really likes this neighborhood, but they're not gonna get any leads from it. So there's kind of that delicate…
Daniel Lott: balance. So, if you just pick
Daniel Lott: You're not gonna get any leagues, or very few leaks.
CINC Marketing: Well, and I think that's… when we tell a client, you know, no, we're not gonna do this ad group, or this target, it's not because we don't like you, or anything like that, it's because it's not gonna be a good use of your money, because maybe there are too few listings, or anything like that.
CINC Marketing: I know for a long time, where Bieber lived, we were hesitant to include… and the Kardashians, I think it was Calabasas?
James Terry: Masses.
CINC Marketing: We were hesitant to include that in campaigns, because so much traffic was people just seeing where Justin Bieber lived.
James Terry: The cost Great.
CINC Marketing: Most of it was me, James. Most of it was me.
Eric Robson: Quality's not there for searches like that.
CINC Marketing: Yeah.
James Terry: involved.
CINC Marketing: If you, if you, watched the last Office Hours with Alvaro, one of the things he talked about was the difference in cost per sale, and that's what…
CINC Marketing: That's what the balance that Eric's talking about is all about. The example that Alvaro uses is a Zillow example of…
CINC Marketing: 42% of a $12,000 commission is $5,000, somewhere in those… those lines. You have a $5,000 cost per sale.
CINC Marketing: just from that amount, you know, before you start paying your agents, with Sync.
CINC Marketing: Our whole goal is that that cost per sale is much, much, much lower than that, even though the leads may take a little bit more time to nurture, but once that pipeline is mature.
CINC Marketing: you have an asset, you know, you have your database that's converting leads and something that, you know, can be passed on, versus just buying from a vendor, I think, which is a very different…
CINC Marketing: Very different thing, so…
CINC Marketing: Sorry, Dan, did I cut in? Did you have more for Eric, or should I get to some questions that we had?
Daniel Lott: … let's see, what else was I gonna ask? The, … what about, like, how would you target a neighborhood if it doesn't really exist, or if it's just kind of like a made-up concept? How do you go about doing that kind of stuff? How do you do… what are some of the cool stuff that… that Sync has that allows you to do…
Daniel Lott: This stuff, when this is one of the things that other search engines can't do, particularly.
CINC Marketing: Maybe Buckhead? Maybe Buckhead in Atlanta is an interesting example.
CINC Marketing: Buckhead the Neighborhood vs. Buckhead the city?
Eric Robson: Yeah, that one comes up a lot, with, people in the Atlanta Metro that we have that want to target that area. It's, you know, for those of you not in the notes.
Eric Robson: where everybody in the Atlanta area wants to sell condos and homes and stuff, because it's one of the priciest places to live around here. …
Eric Robson: But there's also a actual city called Buckhead, Georgia, that's, like… people.
Eric Robson: And it's maybe two and a half hours southeast of here. So that's one of those long lists of really, like.
Eric Robson: like, anecdotal little things that I have to know when I'm launching stuff. Again, talking about the neighborhoods in Los Angeles that really don't convert into meaningful leads and stuff, knowing how to target, the right areas. And, you know, I…
Eric Robson: I'll admit, I can't know everything about every single market all the time. Sometimes we do have to have a little follow-up dialogue to make sure that we're… we're getting the right area, but to Dan's point, yeah, so…
Eric Robson: One of the things that makes… Sync unique is, …
Eric Robson: you know, other lead generation services might be entirely dependent on the MLS mapping that the IDX feed gives them, and that's the only way that they can filter things.
Eric Robson: We have a lot of different methodologies that we can use to target specific areas, so that's one of the things I look at in the launch process. Dan's talking about listing counts show up for the different areas. If I feel like something seems really low, but it's on somebody's
Eric Robson: you know, requested areas, and for the most part, everybody kind of knows where they can sell homes effectively, and where they've had business before, so it may merit some further investigation to make sure that, like, okay, if I'm relying on, like, a subdivision field and an IDX and nothing's showing up, it could be that
Eric Robson: Well, maybe most listing agents aren't identifying that area with subdivision. Maybe they're using the school district, or maybe there's some other field, like a main area or something. All the MLSs are kind of different with how they handle the information.
Eric Robson: But another way that I can kind of…
Eric Robson: do a bit of a sanity check is running just broad keyword searches through the MLS for wherever that neighborhood name shows up. You know, that might give me a better idea of…
Eric Robson: where this area is, but again, maybe it doesn't capture everything. Maybe there's 7 listings out of 50 that are in an area that only have that neighborhood listed in the description for those 7, and we're missing the others.
Eric Robson: So what we can do in that case, this also gets kind of more nitty-gritty, but we also have, …
Eric Robson: a way to actually, like, do a polygon map of a certain area. Like, certain neighborhoods and areas within, like, Los Angeles, one I was working on just last week, was like that, where…
Eric Robson: some of the listings might say something like Studio City, California. Well, Studio City isn't, like, necessarily the catch-all way that all those listings are mapped in Los Angeles. Some people have them in the description, some people have them in the subdivision. But one thing that we do have the ability to do in those cases is we can actually just…
Eric Robson: Draw a map around where the physical boundaries of the neighborhood are to make sure that we're…
Eric Robson: targeting the right listings in the right area. And, you know, similarly, we may have to use that kind of methodology for…
Eric Robson: neighborhoods that have really commonly used names, like, you know, Riverside, or Oak Ridge, or something like that, where in a specific
Eric Robson: you know, larger metropolitan area, there may be multiple neighborhoods that use that kind of naming convention. And it may be that, like, you're operating in one particular part of this market, and
Eric Robson: you know…
Eric Robson: that's just kind of part of the… your local knowledge. You only know of the one Riverside, you're not thinking about the others.
Eric Robson: So that's… that's one of those things where I have to kind of, like, get dialed in and figure out, alright, which of these areas are they talking about? And I can do…
Eric Robson: other kind of filtering, like, oh, it's in these two zip codes with this keyword, that gives us the neighborhood that they're after. So, that is kind of a more in-depth approach that we sometimes have to use in the launch process if…
Eric Robson: We have specific neighborhoods that aren't clearly defined in the feed, but we want to make sure that we're…
Eric Robson: You know, when we're driving traffic to the page based on the areas that you're targeting and the searches that we're trying to go after, we're showing them the most relevant results.
Daniel Lott: Well, you've just flown.
CINC Marketing: hearing….
Daniel Lott: James said… James couldn't take it anymore. He was like, this is too amazing. So….
CINC Marketing: Wait, wait….
Daniel Lott: Interesting! Yes, I hear it.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, I just think here… oh, wow, and now.
Daniel Lott: Yeah, Taylor.
CINC Marketing: I'm gone. I'm gone entirely. Jeez. Alright.
Daniel Lott: Alright, James.
Daniel Lott: So I'm gonna say is….
CINC Marketing: No, I was saying, a recent launch, just hearing all of that makes me think of…
CINC Marketing: a recent unnamed competitor launching a totally AI-automated suite for advertising. You know, like, that kind of expertise is the stuff
CINC Marketing: That can't exist.
CINC Marketing: With that type of system, and your lead gen is something…
CINC Marketing: you know, people aren't buying houses in 2 weeks. People are buying houses in months. So by the time you realize that
CINC Marketing: the AI doesn't know what it's doing, you know, you're 6 months in the hole. So I think it's…
CINC Marketing: That's a really cool example to me of the difference that you get from a company like Sync, who has
CINC Marketing: Who actually invests in the people who are running the campaign.
CINC Marketing: In a manner more so than streamlining their jobs away with AI.
Daniel Lott: Whoa. Harry, hot take!
CINC Marketing: Hot 10!
Daniel Lott: Throwing it out there.
CINC Marketing: There we go.
Daniel Lott: I was just gonna say that, like I said, we have built all these tools, and it makes things go…
Daniel Lott: Much, much, much, much, much faster to do these. But…
Daniel Lott: Like, the kind of, like, the grunt work, like…
Daniel Lott: before, you would have to manually, like, oh, how many houses are for sale in this neighborhood? Okay, then you go, and it would take, like, it could literally take hours. So the tools has shortened it.
Daniel Lott: But, it only goes to a certain… a certain level, in which case, like, what Eric's talking about, this is a real… this is a lot of work. Like, what he's doing, it's like… and it's so easy to just say.
Daniel Lott: that's good enough. It's good enough. It's fine. It's fine. I, you know, I know there's around 60 homes for sale in such and such a neighborhood, or…
Daniel Lott: Plan community, plan communities can be, tricky, in the, like, the Southwest. So…
Daniel Lott: Like, I know there's, like, 60 houses, there's 20 here, that's… that's fine. It's fine. It's… otherwise, I'm gonna have to go and figure out what the zip codes are, and, like, doing the little thing, like, what he's saying, it's complex, it takes lots and lots of time.
Daniel Lott: But…
Daniel Lott: what we just said before about the conversion rates, well, you're gonna get twice as many leads in the area which is your favorite area, so…
Daniel Lott: you know, it's worth the extra step, and… but…
Daniel Lott: It's… because the other stuff has been automated, you're able to, like, the things that you can…
Daniel Lott: It is impossible to automate, we're able to dedicate the time to do that.
CINC Marketing: I have two things. The first one is, if James comes back, everyone be quiet, like we've been waiting for him this whole time.
CINC Marketing: Good, you're back.
CINC Marketing: He sent a message, he said something happened to his computer.
CINC Marketing: James got a new computer, and I got a new computer. Mine's working great, James is doing things, and that's got Dan on the fence about whether or not he should get it.
Daniel Lott: I'm not getting a new computer. I like my old computer. It works, it works great.
CINC Marketing: Okay, masochist. It's missing, so….
Daniel Lott: 5-year-old computer, it's great.
CINC Marketing: Yeah. Okay, well, I do… we did get some good questions from signups. Should we go into them? A couple of them are around… were around launching accounts, targeting, that kind of stuff.
Daniel Lott: short.
CINC Marketing: Alright, this was one I thought was interesting. This is, a client that's…
CINC Marketing: launching… at the time, they were launching soon. They had questions about market saturation. So they were launching in the Dallas area.
CINC Marketing: And they listed a bunch of different smaller neighborhoods. I can get the list if needed, but I think just in general, listed a bunch of different smaller neighborhoods within Dallas, and also Dallas as a target area.
CINC Marketing: And, …
CINC Marketing: So I thought there were two interesting parts of that question. The first is market saturation in general, and then the client-specific question was, would Dallas be the most saturated? So, you know, when you talk about saturation, is it…
CINC Marketing: You've got a lot of different neighborhoods running within Dallas.
CINC Marketing: and then Dallas itself, is that… like, I guess just talk about that, and how you guys…
CINC Marketing: determine that, because I think, you know, market saturation is…
CINC Marketing: It's real, but in online advertising, it's more… become more of a myth as…
CINC Marketing: Meta's bought threads, and Google has updated their search engine results pages to be able to place more ads, so….
Daniel Lott: Do you want to comment, Eric?
Eric Robson: I can't.
CINC Marketing: Anyone?
Eric Robson: Like me to.
CINC Marketing: Just throwing it out there, guys.
Daniel Lott: Oh.
Eric Robson: Okay, so specifically with, like, market saturation, I mean…
Eric Robson: it's not something you really have direct control over, right? Like, you can't determine how many of your competitors are gonna operate in a given space, and if Dallas is the market that you work in, and you want online leads, it's…
Eric Robson: Is it gonna be through us? Is it gonna be through a competitor? Is your competition going to be using online lead generation as well? If it's all coming from Google Ads, it doesn't particularly…
Eric Robson: matter which platform it's with, because the search volume in each of those markets is going to be the same. And so…
Eric Robson: whether they're… they're on, you know, Team Green, or Team Yellow, or Team Blue, whatever it is, like, you're still… that money is still entering the marketplace. Those ads are still showing up regardless of where they're coming from. And if you're a realtor that needs leads in Dallas, like.
Eric Robson: it's… the… sitting on the bench is not the strategy, right? So…
Eric Robson: It's not something where we can have active control over, like.
Eric Robson: what… what cost per lead are we gonna expect out of this area? If we're launching people here, are we gonna discourage people to just not enter the space at some point? Well, no. That's where all these other micro-targeting strategies come into place. And that's part of the conversation that we have to have with each
Eric Robson: client, because, as I said, when you're targeting a broad geo, like Dallas, there will be some good leads, there will be some not-as-good leads.
Eric Robson: But we can't rely exclusively on really small neighborhoods, because you don't want to be missing out on the good leads you could be getting if you're going after a larger
Eric Robson: higher in the funnel area. We want to try to drive that consistency, build that market relevance, drive your CPL down over the weeks and months over time.
Eric Robson: You don't accomplish that by only going after small areas and just…
Eric Robson: Hoping that your campaign gets relevant in 6 to 12 months versus what you could achieve in 6 weeks.
Eric Robson: So, you know, I don't really know that, like.
Eric Robson: bowing out and saying that the landscape is too competitive is really the strategy. It's, you know, you've got to get in the mix, we've got to talk about what your priorities are, you know, if we have, like, broader scope things, and we have that conversation one, two, three months down the line, and you're like, look.
Eric Robson: the Dallas leads are really not doing it for me, like, the quality's not there. We have other strategies, in addition to…
Eric Robson: Other more specific neighborhoods and subdivisions and stuff, we can go after, niche property terms.
Eric Robson: … within a larger geo, which also help demonstrate more of that intent over time. If somebody's looking for, you know, a gated home in Dallas, or a home with a pool, or, like, a luxury condo or something, like, that's…
Eric Robson: somebody who's more in touch with what they want. Again, the search volume is not going to be nearly as high as a broad search, like homes for sale in Dallas.
Eric Robson: But the lead quality is gonna help make up for that, and so that blended approach is going to kind of help you establish a healthier campaign that's gonna help you avoid just exclusively competing on the most expensive keywords and placement times and things that
Eric Robson: that higher level of saturation starts getting us to worry about in terms of campaign performance. That kind of balanced approach is what keeps…
Eric Robson: you competitive when you're getting lead generation through Sync.
Daniel Lott: And we don't usually… we used to kind of say, like, oh, we're not accepting any more people in, like, a handful of cities, and that was just because of…
Daniel Lott: the way Google used to display their advertising, especially on desktop devices, you could tell….
CINC Marketing: Well, tell them what… tell him what the cutoff was, because I think that that is interesting. What would make you close the market?
Daniel Lott: Oh, God.
CINC Marketing: Do you remember? I remember.
Daniel Lott: It was the… I spent a lot of time doing… it was the aggregate search impression share of all the specific
Daniel Lott: …
Daniel Lott: sites in a, sub-market. So, it would be like, oh, yeah, well, we have… like, if there's too many… if there's too many sync sites, you would see, like, oh, they're all sync sites here. But the… so they're like, that looks pretty.
CINC Marketing: So it was… but I think it was the likelihood of two sync ads showing up in a market. And, I mean, you talk about the data that Sync has, I…
CINC Marketing: Do you think other companies were doing that at the time? I can't imagine.
Daniel Lott: Well, they didn't care. So, but now they have… well, Google, I think, is out of their fourth, their…
Daniel Lott: At some point, Google's just gonna be ads. They're gonna be like, …
Daniel Lott: It's gonna be… well, it's gonna be all ads and AI. So we… I think we all know that. Like, okay. So, but, so, at some point, it might be just, oh, Sync ads, because you can kind of tell some of our…
Daniel Lott: keyword things. But, but yeah, exactly. So, yeah, what Eric's saying is, like, if they don't go with us, they're gonna go with someone else, which is gonna make it more crowded. There's no sort of, like, first mover advantage, like, oh, wow, there's already a whole bunch of people in this market.
Daniel Lott: My time has passed, shoot, I wish I would have done it 4 years ago… 4 or 4 years ago, whatever. As they say with planting a tree, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. The second best time is today. So, ….
CINC Marketing: Great delivery!
Daniel Lott: Yeah, hell, yeah, it's….
CINC Marketing: Good work.
Daniel Lott: I'm very passionate about trees.
Daniel Lott: So, you know.
Daniel Lott: So, anyways….
CINC Marketing: Yeah, I… Yeah, so that's all I have to say. I love getting asked to…
CINC Marketing: I love getting asked the question about saturation, because I think it really does play into the hyper-local. I mean, if…
CINC Marketing: If your market is saturated, don't you want Sync running your ads?
CINC Marketing: You know, like, if your market is saturated, don't you want those hyper-local ads in your campaign, and…
CINC Marketing: That's what's gonna separate you.
CINC Marketing: You know, is those longer-tail searches that other… other agents in the area don't have, because, you know….
Daniel Lott: They don't even hyper-local, bro.
Daniel Lott: In Dallas, there's probably around 500.
CINC Marketing: Better shirt.
Daniel Lott: sub-markets that we, micro-target within that sub-market to, that we advertise.
Daniel Lott: there's some really exciting videos where I count down the, the ones that generate the most leads, and it's like, in a lot of the cities, it's not actually the city itself. It's like a lake, or it's a bucket, is a, as Eric mentioned, is a huge…
Daniel Lott: it's… that might be number one? I'm not sure what the number one in the Atlanta area is. It might…
Daniel Lott: It might be, like, Lanier, but it might be Bughead. They're probably one and two, so… Which are not a lamb.
CINC Marketing: nation.
Daniel Lott: Atlanta doesn't generate that many leads. Right. So… It's crazy.
CINC Marketing: Yeah.
CINC Marketing: Okay, got a new… a new fun question.
CINC Marketing: … I'm just… I'm trying to…
CINC Marketing: So… yeah, okay, so we did get a few questions again around wanting to target really specific areas with a launch. I think we've talked about that a lot. You know, the whole idea there is just a good balance of lead flow.
CINC Marketing: So we want to get as many of those hyperlocal leads as we can, but that's a supplement
CINC Marketing: You know, not the, …
CINC Marketing: What? That's the pickle, not the ham sandwich. You know what I mean?
Daniel Lott: Fair.
CINC Marketing: Anyone know what I mean? Okay. I mean… I'm not gonna move on.
Eric Robson: that analogy before, but….
CINC Marketing: I just made it up.
Eric Robson: bandit. That's….
CINC Marketing: go viral.
Eric Robson: Right.
CINC Marketing: …
CINC Marketing: Okay, so one of the things that I, that we talk about a lot, at least internally, and we got some questions around it, is this, this idea of a ramp-up period, when a new campaign starts. So, you know, my understanding is that
CINC Marketing: Generally, a campaign's gonna do better in month 2 than in month one.
CINC Marketing: You know, and that's specifically on search. We actually see a lot of times the opposite on social, and, you know, one of the strategies for bringing social cost per lead down is what we call refreshing an ad set, or basically duplicating it.
CINC Marketing: And restarting it, which resets all the audience feedback and that kind of stuff.
CINC Marketing: …
CINC Marketing: And that's another reason that diversifying funds… diversifying ad spend makes sense, to keep good lead flow. But, you know, what is the, … what is that ramp-up period? You know, how…
CINC Marketing: how… is there an average length of time? And… and why is it… why is it happening? And what should someone that just launches maybe expect?
Eric Robson: Yeah, so… some… another thing that kind of makes lead generation, I wouldn't say completely unique to us, other advertisers do this as well, but for…
Eric Robson: you know.
CINC Marketing: Probably not as good, though, right?
Eric Robson: Of course not.
CINC Marketing: Yeah.
Eric Robson: Now, clients coming from, bigger shops where there's kind of this almost expectation, where there's, like, a…
Eric Robson: a buy-in, and instead of, like, bidding through the actual ad network, you're bidding with the service that you're subscribed to, to get leads. There's this kind of notion of there's a big pool of leads, and they're sort of divvied out depending on what you're bidding. …
Eric Robson: With… what we do is…
Eric Robson: We're creating a new account and campaign, ad groups and ads, keyword lists, everything, based off of our best practices, but they're all unique to each client. So every…
Eric Robson: every campaign is basically starting fresh on Google. You are a new entity to them, and so everybody kind of starts at this baseline level of, like, basic
Eric Robson: relevance, and that's kind of the period when your costs are going to be the highest for advertising, because…
Eric Robson: Google's…
Eric Robson: Entire search model is based on promoting the content that's most relevant for the searches that are happening on their search engine.
Eric Robson: And so to promote that, to maintain that integrity, to keep them as, like, the premier search engine used on the market, they have to make sure that they're driving the most relevant content. And so when you're starting a new ad campaign.
Eric Robson: That relevance hasn't been established.
Eric Robson: So, Google is having to take a chance on your content to figure out, okay, is this relevant to the search terms that are being used? And they determine that through several different ways. The algorithms have changed over the years, but the three basic guiding principles are
Eric Robson: how relevant is the ad text that you're using to the search terms that are being targeted? …
Eric Robson: how much time are people spending on the site when they get there, and how often are the ads actually getting clicked on versus when they're not? So…
Eric Robson: Google looks at all that, and that… that does kind of play into what we were talking about before with, like.
Eric Robson: people being able to comparison shop when they get on your site, and so more listings tends to generate higher conversion rates. So, if someone lands on a page and there's 300 plus listings available, Google is monitoring how much time you're spending on the site, interacting, clicking on properties, things like that. That helps kind of promote that relevance
Eric Robson: score. Back in the day, it used to kind of be called Quality Score. That's…
Eric Robson: kind of a dubious metric now, they've kind of moved away from that. The point is, what they're looking at is the same kind of criteria to determine that relevance. And so, over time.
Eric Robson: Google aggregates the relevance based on each of those sessions that people are engaging with the content that you've directed them to with your ads, and if they're determining, like, oh, hey, this content is relevant for the search, homes for sale in Dallas.
Eric Robson: then your ads are gonna show up more often, because Google wants to promote that content that they feel is being more relevant to their user base.
Eric Robson: So as that time progresses, the amount of money we have to spend from your marketing budget on each click on those ads goes down, because they want to incentivize that higher quality content. If, you know.
Eric Robson: I'm running a real estate page, and I'm bidding for terms like, hammers for sale, well, you're gonna get absolutely crushed by, like, Lowe's and Home Depot, because that actually matters. Like, they don't want to have random stuff showing up for searches that are unrelated. …
Eric Robson: And in a similar vein, we try to improve lead quality by using really comprehensive negative keyword lists to filter out things that are less relevant to clients like you all.
Eric Robson: To make sure that we're avoiding, kind of, those lower quality searches, or things that are adjacent to real estate, but don't really matter for buying and selling a home, that kind of stuff.
Eric Robson: … But all of that gets pulled together.
Eric Robson: to determine, like, how to best improve your relevance over time. And so, in that first month.
Eric Robson: you know, you may look at a marketing report and your CPL is super high, and you're like, oh my god, what have I done? Like, this is… this is way higher than I expected, and it's… that's very normal, because as I said, all of these accounts are brand new to Google, and so they're kind of having to…
Eric Robson: you know, they're financially incentivized to give you that opportunity to show up, but they want to make sure that they're… they're making their money in the process. So…
Eric Robson: Generally speaking, with average budgets in a typical market, you know, that ramp-up period can take
Eric Robson: Four to six weeks, sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter. There's no real hard and fast number that applies to everybody. It's really a function of search volume and how much budget we're moving through in a month.
Eric Robson: There's no, like, specific ratio that's like, oh, if you're spending this, and you're getting this number of clicks per month, this is how long your ramp-up period will be. That's… that's really not how it works. At the end of the day, these are human beings conducting these searches. Every day, the volume's gonna be different, every searcher is gonna be different, their intent is gonna be different.
Eric Robson: So, we just kind of give people these basic guidelines. That said, if your CPL is really high in the first month, and in the second month, it's just as high.
Eric Robson: that's probably indicative of a problem. Our team tries to look at stuff like that, stay ahead of it. We have lots of robust reporting that lets us know when things are not where they should be, and that's… but that's… that's a process that every new client, every new campaign, every new platform has to go through.
Eric Robson: Typically.
Daniel Lott: Well, I was gonna say that I think it's around a 90-day ramp-up is, like, when are the, …
Daniel Lott: the sales… the sales folks, give, lead estimates for… for new clients. They'll… I think it's, like, a 90-day ramp-up. Like, they try to…
Daniel Lott: give us a buffer. But it's 90 days, and we…
Daniel Lott: It's, twice as high. So, for the first 90 days, it's twice as high as what the mature
Daniel Lott: … cost per lead is for, for a, for a market. So, … It's usually…
Daniel Lott: a lot less than 90 days, and as Eric said, you know, if it's not going down, …
Daniel Lott: like, we have to, like, kind of take proactive measures, and I have a whole bunch of accounts that I'm looking at right now, which, launched a month and a half ago with
Daniel Lott: frustratingly high cost per lead, so I'm…
Daniel Lott: Adding a whole bunch of ad groups and niches and stuff like that, and those are the kind of things.
CINC Marketing: Piper, Google.
James Terry: It's….
Daniel Lott: lower it.
James Terry: Yeah, it's not uncommon to see an account, and Eric, correct me if I'm wrong, like, in month one… from month one to month 2, the cost per lead come down.
James Terry: 30%, mostly because that cost per click is coming down so drastically, but also because we're doing those optimizations, like Dan was just saying, adding in new areas, those niches, you know, things that improve the conversion rate, so it drives down that cost, and then from month 2 to month 3, for it to drop another 20% to 30%. And that's why Dan's saying, like, it can be twice as expensive in month one
James Terry: than what we would see in month 3 or 4. Obviously, at some point, it's gonna balance out, and we're gonna get…
James Terry: where we're going, right? It's not just gonna keep dropping 30% indefinitely. Man, I wish, yeah.
CINC Marketing: Sounds pretty good.
James Terry: He will let.
Daniel Lott: Yes.
James Terry: Hold another one you about it, right?
James Terry: What that means.
CINC Marketing: But, you know, close the doors, go sell houses.
James Terry: Right? We won. We beat Google. But, …
James Terry: But that relevance and that maturity of the campaign is why we'll see that.
Eric Robson: Yeah, and.
CINC Marketing: So… Go ahead.
Eric Robson: Well, just… just to kind of sum up, I mean, that's…
Eric Robson: That's why we use that balanced approach, right? Like, I've talked about this before, like, if we're trying to establish that relevance on terms that don't have a lot of search volume, that ramp-up period is longer, because ultimately, it's a numbers game. It's how many times your ad's getting clicked on, how many opportunities are you giving Google to establish how relevant you are.
Eric Robson: for those search terms. So, having… having that balanced approach really helps shorten that, and having…
Eric Robson: You know, increased budget to be able to put in to create more opportunities for those ads to show up are the more direct ways of shortening that ramp-up period.
James Terry: And one more thing on… I promise I'll kick it back to you, but…
James Terry: a lot of the people who are listening might not be brand new clients to sync. They might be out of that ramp-up period by now, but one thing to know about that is if you say, let's add this new market, let's get into this new area, if you want to create new keyword groups in new areas, and we're expanding.
James Terry: you were using Dallas as an example, and it's like, hey, let's create a Fort Worth
James Terry: campaign, or let's create ad groups in Fort Worth. Those new areas now have a ramp-up period as well. So don't think you can just, like, add a new major market
James Terry: And it's gonna do as well as the areas that have been in the campaign for 3 years, building that, that history, that relevance.
Eric Robson: Or if you've, like, got a platform and you've shifted from one market to the other, like your office has moved, or you have another primary that's taking over, or something like that. Yeah, it's handled on the ad group level.
CINC Marketing: Is there… so Meta has a concept of the learning phase, which is a certain number of leads, you know, optimizes the campaign once it exits the learning phase, and essentially.
CINC Marketing: I do believe that it exists, but the number of leads is…
CINC Marketing: I believe it's 50 in a certain period of time, so it seems like a way to drive more spend.
CINC Marketing: for Meta, is it possible to exit…
CINC Marketing: The ramp-up period earlier by spending more on search, as it is on… In theory on Meta?
Daniel Lott: Well, theoretically. Theoretically, yes, but…
Daniel Lott: And there is such a thing as, like, the learning period. Whenever we make Big adjustments to spend, or…
Daniel Lott: We're constantly making big adjustments to accounts, kind of behind the scenes, like the budgets and stuff, but that will throw you back into a learning phase, and ….
CINC Marketing: Yeah, any major.
Daniel Lott: I think it's just who… you know, I know this is not.
CINC Marketing: Hoopla? Were you about to say hoopla?
Daniel Lott: Hooey. I was gonna say hooey.
James Terry: I was here in Law as well.
CINC Marketing: So….
Daniel Lott: I'm not really sure, because it's like, well…
Daniel Lott: we did this yesterday, and we're doing it tomorrow, I think they'll be able to… I think the learning's already been done.
Daniel Lott: And that….
CINC Marketing: I haven't heard the word.
Daniel Lott: Eric, Eric, like, what Eric described is, I think, what… like, that they know that we're…
Daniel Lott: They know we're good people, it's a good site, they know… they have the metrics on the click-through rate and stuff like that, and the time on the site, and they know what we are, so….
CINC Marketing: I haven't heard Hooey since my last trip to the Haberdasher.
Daniel Lott: Oh, how about that?
CINC Marketing: Alright, it's, we're… oh, Dan?
Daniel Lott: What are you gonna say? I was gonna segue to Eric, what Eric's other… primary.
CINC Marketing: I'm about… I'm about to do that right now.
Daniel Lott: Okay.
CINC Marketing: Don't tread on me, Dan.
CINC Marketing: As the settlers said.
Daniel Lott: Okay.
CINC Marketing: Treading on me is hooey.
CINC Marketing: So, we are at the end… we are at the end of our time together. It's been, magical, as always, but Eric, I know Dan.
CINC Marketing: Eric has a, a special offer.
CINC Marketing: From the bottom of his heart that he wants to talk about. It's in that email. Remember Harvey Birdman? Get that thing I sent you.
CINC Marketing: To come full circle. But Eric, why don't you tell, us, or Dan, or whoever, tell us what's going on with brand advertising.
Eric Robson: Yeah, so I just dropped a little bit of information in the chat for anybody who's interested. As we mentioned at the beginning, I also manage to display marketing initiatives here.
Eric Robson: on the client marketing side, so what that entails is we have a brand advertising service. So, unlike search, we're actually trying to drive,
Eric Robson: Improved market relevance to the people that have visited your site.
Eric Robson: Through display ads. These display ads are served on the Google Display Network.
Eric Robson: … I don't know if they've crossed 3 million just yet, but it's on over 2 million websites that are connected through the Google Display Network. So… lots of different sites, like.
Eric Robson: you know, news sites, recipe blogs, sports pages, all manner of content out there on the internet. I'm sure you've seen display ads out there, you know, if you engage with, like, an e-commerce site, you know, looking at a…
Eric Robson: pair of shoes on Zappos, or, you know, some new tool you need to work on a project around the house, and you start seeing the product showing up in different places on different websites, as well as Facebook and Instagram. That's basically, you've been…
Eric Robson: Targeted by a remarketing pixel, and you're being served those, through the display networks on each of those
Eric Robson: ad providers, so we…
Eric Robson: Offer that ability for people to kind of improve their brand awareness, send clients to
Eric Robson: People who have visited your site, whether or not they've registered as leads, and we can also, if you opt in.
Eric Robson: You can target a sphere of influence, so we can take, like, a… basically an export of the leads in your sync database, trim it down to the essential information that each of those ad networks needs.
Eric Robson: They encrypt it, upload it, give us a display audience to serve to, and then we have, integrations that update that if you have
Eric Robson: you know, organic sources, or third-party lead gen sources, people that are visiting your site that aren't coming through one of our ad networks. You'll be able to stay kind of top of mind with display ads.
Eric Robson: Through those channels as well. Right now, the offer that we're… we've emailed everybody out is, you get your first 2 free months, 2 months for free, and additionally, we design,
Eric Robson: ads for you in-house. You know, my team kind of works on, providing a lot of different design services.
Eric Robson: we can follow basic templates and get assets from you, headshots, logos, things like that, and build a suite of ads so that you're eligible to show up on the greatest number of placements that are possible on Google, Facebook, and Instagram. But if you register before the end of the month at that link and use the code ONBRAND, you'll be eligible to get
Eric Robson: your first two months of that service for free. Once we get your information, and we build your ad set, we'll provide you with a link to preview them, you can let us know if we need to make any changes or updates, or anything like that, and … once we get the go-ahead from you, you'll start your…
Eric Robson: Start your display campaign and start staying in front of your leads.
Daniel Lott: Well, alright. Two free months, Eric!
CINC Marketing: Evans to Betsy!
Daniel Lott: Two free months!
CINC Marketing: ….
Daniel Lott: And this is really good, I don't know, I'm a big fan of the, the, the brand advertising. And especially if you have…
Daniel Lott: Like, if you're already spending, like, $5,000 on advertising, this product is… it's pretty cheap, it's like $200 a month, so the bang for the buck is a lot better… bigger if you have a very high ad…
Daniel Lott: ad spend, because, like, all those leads, you've just generated, you know, 800 leads this month. These 800 people are gonna see your face all over the internet. And so it's like, oh, who's this… who's this weirdo calling me up? Oh, it's this guy that I'm seeing all over the internet. He must be…
Daniel Lott: he must be a pretty great guy. So, I'm gonna pick up the phone. So, there's just the economies of scale, like, if you, …
Daniel Lott: If you have a lot of leads, if you have a lot of leads, if you have a lot… and this sphere of influence thing that Eric, is talking about, it's really cool. So if you… if you're moving to a new…
Daniel Lott: a new brokerage, you can upload the, the sphere and tell people, like, hey, I, or not tell them, but they'll, they'll see your new, your new place in the, in the ads.
Daniel Lott: Because the sphere of influence.
Eric Robson: Just gonna show a quick demo. This is an ad set that we, worked on just a short while ago. …
Eric Robson: They do have little, little animations in them to help them stand out on the page, … And….
Daniel Lott: make it smaller.
Eric Robson: Well, I can show you all of them, if you'd like.
CINC Marketing: Whoa!
Eric Robson: So yeah, as I said, they come in a lot of different placement sizes, that's kind of something that's configured by the people that, distribute this content based on what kind of fits how they're displaying their content on their pages. …
Eric Robson: But, yeah, we have, … in addition to a lot of these other sizes, we have several sizes that work on Facebook. These also get populated over to Instagram, when we set up those campaigns, as long as you have a page that we can advertise on your behalf.
Eric Robson: And this is just one example, I didn't wanna… I don't wanna bore you guys with every single little… little one that we have, but….
Daniel Lott: No, I think….
Eric Robson: A little taste of what they like.
Daniel Lott: I'm always really impressed when I see the house.
Eric Robson: Link's in the chat, syncremarketing.com forward slash register, use the code ONBRAND.
CINC Marketing: How many impressions is that? Did you mention that?
Eric Robson: I didn't.
CINC Marketing: Terr.
Eric Robson: Great question, Harry. So, minimum guaranteed for…
Eric Robson: for the campaign is, 10,000 impressions. That's just kind of a baseline to give us kind of a way to make sure that we're
Eric Robson: … providing value from sending these ads out there. On average, I would say our clients get between…
Eric Robson: 16 to maybe, like, 24,000. It's all kind of dependent on the size of the audiences we're serving, right? And so, those audiences get built through…
Eric Robson: the, …
Eric Robson: lead generation that you're engaged in, so people that have higher budgets tend to have larger audiences, and they tend to get more impressions per month. It's a flat fee, $200 a month. Like I said, with the code, you get those first two months for free. Decide if you like it and want to keep going. Just reach out to us if you don't.
Eric Robson: You won't hurt my feelings, but we just want to put that out there. But yeah, so that's… that's across both the Google Display Network, and as I said, if you have a page on Facebook that we can connect to, we'll have you show up there as well.
James Terry: And that impression count is, … is an impressive number, and like you said, dependent upon how big is the reach, how many… the sphere of influence, or the number of leads, but I know you also do a lot of research into
James Terry: avoiding, like, ad fatigue. Like, when you say 24,000, it's not because you showed 10 people the ad 5,000 times, right? I know you put a cap on, or whatever, we can put a cap, to make sure that people aren't seeing the ad 100 times a day, because it can have a very adverse effect, right?
Eric Robson: … Yeah, so that's…
Eric Robson: So there is… that's kind of more handled automatically by the display networks right now. There is, like, a setting where if we feel like, you know, it's… it's very rare, but we have gotten feedback from maybe a handful of clients over the number of years that I've gotten this, where they're like, this person feels like they're seeing the ad too much.
Eric Robson: If you get feedback like that, we do have levers to pull to kind of dial that down. But yeah, it…
Eric Robson: the campaigns do the best that they can to make sure that you're not, oversaturating somebody and creating, like, a frustration factor. There's definitely a…
Eric Robson: A sweet spot of…
Eric Robson: Showing up enough that they remember who you are, but not so much that you're, you know, getting…
Eric Robson: Negative feedback.
CINC Marketing: They hate who you with their brand. Well, I mean, like, so….
Eric Robson: Well, so, I don't know if there's any keen-eyed people in the audience, but, like, I have my little Washington Capitals cup here, and…
Eric Robson: notoriously, I have noticed, like, during the NHL playoffs, that the same advertisers seem to show up in a rotation all throughout the playoffs. And eventually, you do get kind of tired of seeing the same 8 ads over and over again. …
Eric Robson: Google and Facebook are wise to that, so they want to make sure that advertisers like us continue to engage with services without frustrating people, so they try to strike that balance for us. But yes, if you do get any kind of feedback like that, there are ways for us to tone that down if we need to.
James Terry: Correct.
James Terry: As I live and breathe.
CINC Marketing: Good one.
CINC Marketing: That's no Hooey right there. So, man, well, I know what we're gonna do next Office Hours. Next Office Hours, all Dan Lott Vernacular Edition.
Daniel Lott: So get excited.
James Terry: Heavy sigh.
CINC Marketing: Get off my lawn.
CINC Marketing: But yeah, no, so we went over like we always do. That's… we're not good at much, but online advertising and, going over on webinars. But we are very good at those two things.
CINC Marketing: So, thanks everyone who's been on here today. As always, had a good amount of people that stayed the whole time, which is always great. We appreciate your time and know that it's valuable.
CINC Marketing: Thank you, Eric. A lot of really good, information.
CINC Marketing: And, you know, whether you know it or not, Eric has probably worked on your campaign at some point.
CINC Marketing: So, ….
Daniel Lott: That is true, that is very true.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, yeah, so it's… I think it's cool to get his perspective. I appreciate you coming on and answering questions.
CINC Marketing: We'll be putting this out. The number one asked question on every webinar.
CINC Marketing: This is being recorded, and we will add it, to our YouTube channel, so again, please smash that subscribe button for us if you have not done so already, so you can be notified when this comes back out, and we will see you, next month, unless Dan and James have anything….
Daniel Lott: Nope, I think you covered it.
James Terry: Yes, sir.
CINC Marketing: Yeah.
James Terry: Down.
CINC Marketing: Yeah, thanks very much, this is always my favorite webinar, always the most fun. So, we will see you guys next month. It is the second Wednesday every month at 11am. If you loved us, be sure to tell your friends, and if you didn't, just keep it to yourself.
CINC Marketing: But otherwise, we hope to see you next month. Thanks very much!
CINC Marketing: Have a great day.
Eric Robson: Hi, everyone.