How do you beat the Realty.bots? The 3 key weapons of the Guerrilla Bloodhound: Brick and mortar, ink and paper – and flesh and blood.

I spent an hour on the phone with Brian Brady yesterday, always a tonic for my spirit. We are both of us guerrillas, both counter-marketers, always looking for ways to use the enemy’s strengths against him.

When we first met, Brian was using the internet to take business away from white shoe lenders and I was using it to scare up clients who wanted to avoid the sleaze of the supermarket-magazine-advertising Realtors.

That is to say, we were using the internet as guerrilla marketers against competitors who were not – or who were not any good at it, anyway.

How now, russet Bloodhounds?

The opposite, yes? Now our most-threatening competition is very adept at marketing by internet.

The Guerrilla Bloodhound’s response: The three ideas in the headline can be subsumed by one idea: In Real Life. And that notion is best understood in longtime BloodhoundBlog contributor Jeff Brown’s formulation: Belly-to-belly.

Be here now? You’ve got it, they don’t. Your best marketing advantage, by now, is that you are not on the internet, that you are present in real life and can address the issues paperwork exists to paper over.

Until they burn up all the excess wealth fools accord them, the Realty.bots will take as much business as they can from Driven and Cautious principals. The former value time over money, while the latter seem to think computers can’t cheat. Those folks may not be completely gone from your life, but they are all of online-shopping’s target market. Your value propositions and their values are a poor match, going forward.

The Incandescents will always be represented. If you’re good at selling luxury, historic, architectural or other jewelry-box homes, your world is secure. Bots can’t do what you do as a real estate analyst, but they can’t even touch what you do as showmanship.

And that leaves the Sociables, who are wise to wonder – continuously! – if they are being taken. They are yours and you are theirs because they do not trust a transaction this huge to what might as well be a slot machine.

Your insuperable marketing advantage, going forward, is your corporeal existence as a real and accessible human being – that you are not a bot.

Accordingly, your marketing should emphasize these ideas:

1. Realty.bots are bad, m’kay?

2. In Real Life is how you secure satisfaction safely.

3. So let’s get together right away.

Don’t sell your web site, sell yourself. YOU are the product, your clients’ champion – the difference-maker. You can deliver what Realty.bots can’t – the feeling of being represented in the transaction. Sell that.

Landing pages convert one prospect in 1,000. Coupons come in at 1 in 100. Closers convert on one out every two at-bats. How do they do it? By selling – belly-to-belly, ear-to-ear, heart-to-heart – which passive marketing can only do poorly.

Sell Sociably and you will get all the business the Realty.bots repel – and a lot more that they could have had.