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Rebecca Tubbs: Things are changing on the daily. So you have to make sure that you are just continuing to research how these things work. And sometimes you do have to play the game and sometimes the game doesn't work, but we still have to try it. You got to try it and keep moving and see what works. But yeah, you can't stop researching. Things are just changing way too fast.
Welcome to The Justin Landis Show, your real estate podcast about having conversations, building relationships, and creating freedom.
Justin Landis: Today I have a special guest with me, Rebecca Tubbs. Thank you for being here.
Rebecca Tubbs: You know, trying to avoid this for like 10 years, trying to be behind the camera.
Justin Landis: Yeah, Rebecca, you're usually behind the camera. The reason this is such a special guest, Rebecca is the director of marketing at JLG. And if you have ever searched Atlanta real estate agent, you have seen that there has been a lot of marketing done over the last 10 years. So we are in for a treat as Rebecca shares what she's learned with us. Rebecca, tell everybody how we actually first got connected. It wasn't through a resume or a job board.
Rebecca Tubbs: No, no. So when Justin preaches community and relationships, that's how I connected with him. My tennis captain, big avid tennis player. I basically was just like, we need to sell our condo. We had just had twins. Really trendy loft, doesn't do well with twins.
Justin Landis: Loft and twins, tough combo.
Rebecca Tubbs: Loft and twins, not really cool. That wrought iron staircase was not about it.
Justin Landis: Man, I will never forget going to their place thinking, how are they doing this? They got to move. I think our last picture was them climbing up it.
Rebecca Tubbs: I was like, okay, we're good, we're good. So we connected with Justin, and Justin actually sold our condo. It was great, and it was a time too when people were nervous about buying condos, and the BeltLine had just gone through, that's really dating myself, but it was great. We were able to sell for more than we bought, which we were just excited about at that time because of that era. And it was perfect, and it kind of just evolved into this great relationship, obviously now that I'm working here, but then with our real estate journey it's been amazing. We're in the house we absolutely love now. Several transactions.
Justin Landis: Yeah. And so you joined JLG, and JLG's changed a lot since then. Maybe tell a little bit of that before we get into the marketing specific stuff.
Rebecca Tubbs: Yeah, so when I first joined, I kind of came on as a client concierge, making sure that all the clients were getting treated really well. I think that was the thing that really shined with JLG, is clients always come first. It was fun being a client and coming into this space and getting to do lots of cool things. And it was small, our team was very small, a little tiny spot in Grant Park. And now it's evolved into this mega team, and now Bolst. It's super exciting.
Justin Landis: All right, Rebecca, we worked together selling the condo, moving to another house. Do you remember how we started working together?
Rebecca Tubbs: Yeah, so I originally came from the sports management world. When I had twins, it was way too much going on, so I stepped back from that. And finally the kids were getting back to school and I was excited to reenter the world. And because of relationships, I just had a couple of coffees with you, and you were like, I want to try this new thing. And I was like, this sounds fun, this sounds perfect. The timing was perfect, kind of just coming back into the work world. And yeah, it all worked out.
Justin Landis: And that new thing was client concierge. We've tried a lot of new things together since then. Tell a little bit about how JLG has changed and trying new things and what it's been like since we've been together.
Rebecca Tubbs: I think that's what's really cool about our team, is that we have tried a lot of things and we figured out what works. Not all of it was amazing, we tried a lot of things, but we've really figured out, okay, what works. And these systems, I just absolutely think are why agents seek us out and want to be a part of our team.
Justin Landis: Awesome. And so you have just taken ownership of the marketing. Today we're going to talk about the three myths of real estate agent marketing, and I'm excited to see what you have here. It's a little different, I have myth number one from Rebecca Tubbs: going viral is the goal. Truth or myth?
Rebecca Tubbs: I should be trying to go viral with my social media. I want you to go viral with your social media, I will say that. But for just your everyday agent, I do not think that's a requirement. I think agents have so much around them in their ecosphere telling them they need to make content, content, content all the time, and they see what other realtors are doing and want to copy that, and I think it gets a little overwhelming. A lot of times we'll get new people on our team, or people interviewing to be on our team, and the sigh of relief people get when I say, I don't want you to be viral. I want you to obviously create content, I want you to have a presence online, that's where people are going to look you up. But I'm never going to make you sit and work two hours looking at trending songs, doing trending dances. I want you out in your community. I want you engaging with others.
Justin Landis: So what's the practical of that? I know there are people listening who also got a sigh of relief, but then they're thinking, all right, but you did say you want us to create some content. What do you want real estate agents to do from a content standpoint?
Rebecca Tubbs: Yeah, so in practice, obviously people are going to know you, they're going to look you up online. You need to have some sort of, I am in real estate, I am good at my job, I am telling a story about my clients, I'm telling a story about these listings that we have. That needs to happen, you can't neglect that. What I don't want people to do is spend hours editing a reel or a TikTok off of a trending song that's only going to get ten likes, because you spent all that time when there are other ways you could be putting back. My biggest prescription to the agents on our team is spend that time you would be editing that video pouring back into other people's feeds. I think that's the biggest thing people are neglecting.
Justin Landis: Pour back into other people's feeds. Because that creates relationships.
Rebecca Tubbs: Creates relationships. So think about it. When you're on Instagram scrolling, you'll see one friend's post, and then the next is an ad, the next is sponsored content, the next is something you may like. You've lost all your friends in your feed. So how do you get them back? You go and engage with your friends again. You go leave comments for them, you go into their stories, you like their stories, you create the conversations again, show back up in their algorithm. That time spent is going to go way further than a trending TikTok.
Justin Landis: All right, I love that. Myth number two: you have to be an influencer to be successful.
Rebecca Tubbs: Yeah, we get agents in all the time who are like, I love this person on social media, I think they're doing all the things. My favorite thing to do when agents come on our team and show me these people who are in front of Range Rovers and doing all the things, is I have them, we look them up. Let's see what kind of business they've done recently. And I can tell you right now, our most successful people on our team aren't aggressively being on social media like that. They are out in their communities, they are reversing the script. And you'll find that the people doing all these things aren't really doing much as far as business goes. So it's like, what do you want to be? Do you want to be a realtor, or do you want to be a social media content creator?
Justin Landis: All right, so we've talked about, we don't have to go viral, we don't have to get a hundred thousand impressions on every single post. And now we're talking about being an influencer. When I think influencer, they're always online, living their life online. Do agents, even if they're not trying to go viral, if they're trying to do it relationally with their own database, do they need to be online all the time in order to do that, do you think?
Rebecca Tubbs: No, I don't want them to be. I don't want them to spend that much time there, because I think our reality is we've got to get back out into the community, we've got to put the phone down. You have a lot of AI content all day long, people are just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and you see a lot of fatigue nowadays especially. So let's take advantage of this current wave of fatigue with social media. Let's get back into the coffee shop, let's get back to hanging out with our friends, joining a sports league.
Justin Landis: I think one of the things you've really helped the agents at JLG do is take some of the marketing pressure off their plate. They want to put out good content, good marketing, and they need to, but they don't want to have to spend all day like an influencer doing it. Maybe give a little plug, even if it's not JLG, but just for working with a team or working with somebody that can help you do it. How do you feel like that's played out?
Rebecca Tubbs: I think that is a problem agents have, is they don't really know what to post. What I love about Bolst, and then at JLG we kind of do it for you, but Bolst has this huge library of content that you can use, great advice on types of posts you can do. I think that's a huge value asset, you can grab this stuff. But sometimes agents get to the point where they're like, here's the content, but how am I going to do it, how am I going to get it out? So a lot of times on our team we will personalize everything for you, we'll get it to you, we'll help you get it out. That's a really big value. When I first joined the team, a lot of the content we did and do create right now is because our agents didn't want to post anything at all. They were like, this is not for me. So if that's your situation, we're going to help you out, we're going to do these kinds of things for you.
Justin Landis: Yeah, I love that. I think that's made a big difference for the agents. I do see a generational change, we were talking about this recently. We've had a lot more agents come in the last year or two who are used to putting out content, and so we're trying to help them optimize so they're not spending too much time on it, it's the content that matters, we can help them do things. But it's funny to think about in the past, we were like, hey, please just let us do it, you've got to get something out there, so that has definitely changed. I've loved how you've adapted with that. All right, number three, and man, I can't wait to get into this one. Here's myth number three from Rebecca: social media content matters more than reviews.
Rebecca Tubbs: Yeah, when it comes to searching, this is going to be the nerd marketer side of me, I only do the agent marketing but I do JLG marketing as well, and a lot of my background comes from SEO and search and now AI search. So we really have to optimize what we're doing. Social media content is great, it's a little harder as far as the searchable route goes. When it comes to reviews and things like that, that's something we took on I want to say about six, seven years ago, we said this is going to be a project for us and we took it on. We probably started with about 50 Google reviews, and we've just been able to explode. It was because we created a process, we created a system around it, and also our agents were scared to ask for reviews, so we do that for them, again it's a service JLG provides, and now they just come in naturally. The reason they're so good is that we're imploring our clients to not only give us a five-star review, we're imploring them to share a story with us. And so we have people writing novels for us, and that's free, that's searchable, that's when people go to Google or ChatGPT they're finding us immediately because of the sheer volume.
Justin Landis: Speaking of the volume, how many five-star reviews has JLG gotten since you've started?
Rebecca Tubbs: I mean, we lump them together, obviously, so our major sources are Google, Yelp, and Zillow, and we're at over 4,500 five-star reviews.
Justin Landis: 4,500 unique five-star reviews, that is powerful. And there are stories. I'll never forget when you told me the first time, because I was amazed we were getting these, like, how are people writing such long reviews about this? And you were like, we're not asking them to leave us a review, we're asking them to tell their story. And I was like, oh, that little scripting right there is gold, absolute gold. So everybody, you can take that: when you ask your clients to review you, say, tell your story, as opposed to, give me a five-star review, because people, when they have a great experience, they'll tell the story.
Rebecca Tubbs: Yeah, and the consumer wants to see themselves in these reviews. So when the client is actually sharing a really personal story about either being a first time home buyer or someone who's downsizing, they want to see themselves in these reviews. I feel like that goes so much further, and I think it's more powerful for the other consumer because it's a third party saying it versus on social media, if I'm talking into the camera, I can say anything I want. Who knows? So to get a third party verified review, I feel like that's a lot more powerful than content that I could put out myself.
Justin Landis: Absolutely. Cool. Another thing about the reviews is with the change in search, so many people now using ChatGPT and Claude, Meta just does not have an API that's open that allows them to search there. So the content you're putting on Facebook and Instagram, the AI models are going to like Reddit and Google and LinkedIn and the things that are open to get it, which I think, even though maybe Google searching is going to come down and we have a lot of Google reviews, it might actually be more powerful in the world of AI.
Rebecca Tubbs: Yeah, and what's been really cool too is that we have been able to, through some technology of our own, have every single review that we have on our website. So even though we're across multiple platforms, we've got everything there, so everything is searchable, which is really good. It kind of takes out that layer of when these big tech companies don't want to talk to each other, and we own those reviews, so we're not at risk of them being taken down or anything happening to them.
Justin Landis: Yeah, I do recommend having some sort of software in the back end so you don't lose these, because you never know where these tech companies are going to go.
Rebecca Tubbs: Yeah, and I think that's another thing from a marketing of real estate agent standpoint. We have obviously been on other platforms, we're on Zillow, we're on Yelp, we're on Google, but you've worked really hard to control what we can control and have people in the Justin Landis Group ecosystem. I think there's something agents could learn from that, it is risky to be dependent upon a third party who changes their algorithm, who changes how their pay structure works. So the more that your database and the people you're marketing to can come to you, the more stable it is.
Justin Landis: Yeah, that is kind of where our marketing department started, right? Zillow changed how they were going to hand out leads, and we never wanted to be dependent on that anymore. So what we did is really focus on all these different systems, and now the lead flow that comes to JLG is also a big breath of fresh air for our agents. They don't have to depend on being viral and doing so many things out there, because our team lead flow is so strong, there's some stability in them.
Rebecca Tubbs: Yeah.
Justin Landis: I mean, to give Rebecca big kudos for this, she kind of mentioned it, JLG used to do a lot of Zillow leads back a while back. I think our peak maybe closed like 125 transactions in one year. That's obviously a lot. And then Zillow changed how their lead flow worked, and we could see this was coming. Luckily we saw it a year, year and a half in advance, and we were like, oh no, we do not want to be dependent upon this, we need to generate our own business. And you started to work to do that through, that's when we did the reviews and Google and all sorts of other things. And now JLG doesn't do Zillow. 550 transactions last year, not doing Zillow. You're generating roughly 45% of the business through team leads. So that's hundreds and hundreds of sales that transitioned out by being intentional about the marketing, getting those reviews, doing things that are optimal. What would you say has been your biggest learning over these last six or seven years as we've worked to be in more control of what we're doing?
Rebecca Tubbs: I mean, things are changing on the daily.
Justin Landis: They are, on the daily.
Rebecca Tubbs: So you have to make sure that you are just continuing to research how these things work. And sometimes you do have to play the game, and sometimes the game doesn't work, but we still have to try it. You've got to try it and keep moving and see what works. But you can't stop researching, things are just changing way too fast.
Justin Landis: Or be on a team where Rebecca is doing it for you. That too. Awesome. All right, I'll actually end it on that, and maybe we'll just call it with a call to action plug here. Hey, if you want help with your marketing, you want to work with somebody like Rebecca, who's generating business for the team, who's helping agents build their own social media and their own marketing plan, we would love to have a conversation with you. Click on the link below and we'll connect with you. For everybody else, thanks for listening, make sure you like or subscribe, and we will see you again next week.
Rebecca Tubbs: Thank you.
