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Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Lisa Gray

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Lisa is an accomplished marketer with years of expertise in direct response marketing, digital marketing, data analytics and business development working with both B2C and B2B.

Who started the thing where new agents should go after buyers? Sure, right now there are lots of buyers in the market, but it isn’t always like this.

And, there is a truism in real estate: If you list, you last.

So, let’s get you some listings before you stereotype yourself as a strictly buyers’ agent.

Do it right

While shooting a bunch of arrows into the air may result in you eventually hitting something, a planned, disciplined approach to lead generation works far better.

This means choosing which methods you will use, planning your marketing approach carefully and scheduling a time to perform the necessary follow-up.

Most important of all is that, should you seek advice from your colleagues, ignore the unsuccessful among them and definitely pay close attention to anything offered by the most successful agents.

Target neighborhoods

You’ll often hear this approach to real estate lead generation referred to as “geographic farming,” and for good reason.

To be successful requires certain farming techniques, such as choosing a fertile plot of land, planting marketing “seeds,” and having patience while these seeds germinate.

Then, you need to nurture them along.

To find that fertile plot of land, research. While there’s no consensus among the experts, many suggest that you start with an area of about 500 homes. Ultimately, it comes down to your budget – how much money you have for marketing – that will determine the size of your initial farm.

To narrow down the choice of area, agents use different techniques. Some choose an area based on its current sales activity.

“Look for movement,” suggests Martin Bouma with The Bouma Group in Ann Arbor, MI in an interview with Gary Keller.

Others choose by home price point. For instance, if you know how much you want to make in gross commission income, it’s easier to hit your target if you’re consistently listing homes in a particular price range.

Bouma suggests that you research each area of interest to determine how many commission dollars were earned last year (by all agents) and then determine if any particular agent dominated in listings. If the dollars are high and competition is low, go for it.

Ok, so you’ve chosen your ideal geographic farm – now what?

It’s time to start communicating with these people. Again, how you’ll do this depends on how much money you have to spend on marketing.

If you aren’t crunched for money, consider using “things that people will hang on to,” Bouma suggests. He mails 4-page market reports in a color-magazine-like format.

Successful lead-generating marketing ideas include postcards, flyers and door hangers with the following information:

  • Introduce yourself as the area expert
  • Announce just listed or sold homes in the farm area
  • Advertise an open house that you’ll be holding (hopefully, someone in your office has a listing in the area and they’ll allow you to hold it open)
  • The advantages of buying over renting (for the tenants in the area)
  • An invitation to contact you to learn what’s happening with home values in the area (ideal for absentee owners)
  • Offer a CMA

How often?

“If I was brand-new I think I’d do it every month,” suggests Bouma.

More important than how often, however, is that you reach out consistently. Gary Keller calls consistency “the magic pill” and Bouma agrees: “I just keep reaching out in a bunch of ways, consistently.”

 “The medium is the message”

In the 1960s, Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan studied the media as a way of understanding society. He coined the phrase “the medium is the message” to describe how the medium is as, if not more important than the message, because of its enormous influence on how the message is perceived.

What medium (or mediums) will you choose for your message?

While digital messaging can be inexpensive, it’s also hit and miss in its effectiveness. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. Consistent blogging and social media use coupled with direct mail, however, is the bullseye you should aim for.

Postcards, capture the recipient’s attention instantly making them less likely to be thrown away than something sent in an envelope.

If you’re a door-knocker, consider printing up your message on door hangers. You can blanket an entire neighborhood (up to 400 homes) for less than $200.

“Having the right attitude is probably more important than any other factor,” when trying to become a top listing agent, according to Phoenix mega-agent Russell Shaw.

“A complete willingness to do whatever is necessary and to have the viewpoint that you are going to persist until you have arrived.”

Get started now, send out at least 100 Free Home Market Analysis postcards from the Free Offer Series to an area where you want more listings.

Need help targeting the perfect niche of buyers or sellers? Use our mailing list tool to create the ideal list (it’s easy) or call our support team for assistance at 866.405.3638!

PLUS: When you have time…here are 4 free ways we can help you STILL CRUSH IT in 2018!

1. Become a Listing Legend Free eBook.

Ready to take a vertical leap in your real estate career? If you’re looking for inspiration…and the tools and methods to dominate a market and go to the top in real estate…you’ll find them in this free book. – Click Here 

2. The Free 2019 Real Estate Business Plan.

Treat your business like a business it is vital to long-term success in this industry. Some agents may put together elaborate business plans, yet there’s something powerful about keeping it simple. Check out our one page Online Real Estate Business Plan  – Click Here

3. The 12 Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan.

The Real Estate Marketing Planner is a powerful 12-Month-Guide that strategically defines what marketing to do when. Four key market segments are included, Niche Marketing, Listing Inventory, Geographic Farming, and Sphere of Influence – Click Here

4. The Free Online ROI Calculator. 

Consistency and automation are the keys to success. Discover how effective direct mail marketing can dramatically increase your bottom line. Enter your statistics in our Free online ROI Calculator and click the ‘CALCULATE MY ROI’ button to see your results instantly! – Click Here

Also…check out these cool tools 

 Three Click Postcards – Just snap a home photo & create a postcard all from your mobile phone

MLSmailings.com – Automated Just Listed, Just Sold Postcards

Market Dominator System – Become a neighborhood brand

Want to Refer a friend or colleague? Refer them, Here. THEY get a Free $25 Gift Card and YOU become their hero. BTW, you also get a $25 Gift Card too (now that’s what I’m talking about)!

Congratulations to our $250 Gift Card Winner of our October Strategy Challenge!
Carmen Wieck!

Here’s what Carmen shared as her October Challenge Marketing Strategy!

“To establish myself as a local real estate expert, every month I have a short video about one of the local businesses, sometimes, even with giveaways that encourage engagement”.

“This month the video prepared will be about a well-established local restaurant that was destroyed in a fire 9 months ago and just re-opened this week“.

What a clever and informative way to embrace your target community! Well done Carmen!

To give you a little more insight into Carmen’s other marketing habits we’ve shared a few marketing pieces she’s sent out from ProspectsPLUS! including the Market Dominator, the Free Report, “5 Reasons Why Your House May Not Sell” and the Free Report, “6 Dangers of Overpricing your home”.

For more information on our NEW November Strategy Challenge, Go Now!

Need help targeting the perfect niche of buyers or sellers? Use our mailing list tool to create the ideal list (it’s easy) or call our support team for assistance at 866.405.3638!

PLUS: When you have time…here are 3 free ways we can help you STILL CRUSH IT in 2018!

1. Become a Listing Legend Free ebook.

Ready to take a vertical leap in your real estate career? If you’re looking for inspiration…and the tools and methods to dominate a market and go to the top in real estate…you’ll find them in this free book. – Click Here 

2. The 12 Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan.

The Real Estate Marketing Planner is a powerful 12-Month-Guide that strategically defines what marketing to do when. Four key market segments are included, Niche Marketing, Listing Inventory, Geographic Farming, and Sphere of Influence – Click Here

2. The Free Online ROI Calculator. 

Consistency and automation are the keys to success. Discover how effective direct mail marketing can dramatically increase your bottom line. Enter your statistics in our Free online ROI Calculator and click the ‘CALCULATE MY ROI’ button to see your results instantly! – Click Here

Also…check out these cool tools 

 Three Click Postcards – Just snap a home photo & create a postcard all from your mobile phone

MLSmailings.com – Automated Just Listed, Just Sold Postcards

Market Dominator System – Become a neighborhood brand

Want to Refer a friend or colleague? Refer them, Here. THEY get a Free $25 Gift Card and YOU become their hero. BTW, you also get a $25 Gift Card too (now that’s what I’m talking about)!

At the risk of sounding cliched, content is even more of a king now than when Sumner Redstone coined the “Content is King” mantra.

Gone are those days when a 100-word post, unartfully packed with keywords and links, ranks anywhere near Google’s first-page search results.

It’s not merely content that is king, it’s quality content. Writing for the reader and not the search engine, with relevant, valuable and shareable content is today’s challenge.

If you struggle with content creation, read on.

Determine a content strategy

Your content strategy is best determined by first figuring out your goal in writing it. Sure, we all hope to generate leads with content, but go deeper than that. Are you looking to close more deals, build a referral base or maybe set yourself apart as a niche expert?

Once you’ve nailed your ultimate goal, you’ll need to figure out your target audience or audiences. Creating personas helps you narrow down your audience and helps you provide more relevant and, thus, valuable content.

Need help? Hubspot.com has available, Make My Persona, as a fun tool to help you build your target audience’s persona.

All of your content must be appropriate and of value to this audience. Kelton Ried at Coppyblogger.com calls this an “audience-first mentality.” He goes on to suggest that “Without a deeper understanding of the needs, hopes, desires, and dreams of your audience, you’re doomed to turn them away.”

You have your goal in mind and you know who to target, so let’s get started creating a content strategy action plan.

Creating content to help you meet your goal

If you’ve taken our advice and you are clear on your target audience’s persona, you’ll find that writing becomes a whole lot easier.

If you specialize in a niche, writing content is even easier. An agent who specializes in military relocation, for instance, has an endless number of topics to write about. The same holds true for condo, ranch, waterfront, and luxury real estate specialists.

Generalists, on the other hand, just need to keep the focus on what type of information is valuable to their target audience. Buyers naturally want to know about mortgage rate changes, how to get a mortgage, the mortgage process broken down into layperson’s terms, information on the area’s neighborhoods and, of course, they want to see listings.

TIP: Ask the pros in other industries to write guest posts. This might include your home inspector, favorite title company representative, and lender. Hang on to these for those days when you’re too busy or too writer-blocked to come up with a post.

Make your content work hard

Content should act as a magnet to draw people to your website and it can’t do that if you don’t promote it. The best place to do that is on social media.

Remember, posting a piece of content to your website isn’t the end of that piece. Push it out on social media.

Since most social media platforms are visually oriented, repurpose your content into quick, easy to read infographics. The most commonly shared post on Facebook, by the way, is an image.

Whatever you post, ensure that it grabs the eye – use Canva.com or a graphics program to create compelling photos.

Create a content schedule

 Ask any SEO specialist how often to post content and you’ll get a ton of different responses.

We think it’s important to come up with a posting schedule that meshes with your business schedule. Sure, you can promise yourself that you’ll write and post content three times a week, but if you don’t have an assistant or you get busy, the posts won’t get written, posted or promoted.

The best time of day to post and promote your content is another hotly contested issue. Many of the big SEO pros we follow to claim that mid-day or lunchtime is ideal.

The name of the game when considering a content schedule is to bite off just enough that you can chew and stick to it. Consistently.

Start by writing some content centered around the Free Report, “How to CHOP $24,000 & 4 Years OFF Your Mortgage”. Order 100 of this Free Report today to have on hand for requests.  

Need help targeting the perfect niche of buyers or sellers? Use our mailing list tool to create the ideal list (it’s easy) or call our support team for assistance at 866.405.3638!

PLUS: When you have time…here are 3 free ways we can help you STILL CRUSH IT in 2018!

1. Become a Listing Legend Free eBook.

Ready to take a vertical leap in your real estate career? If you’re looking for inspiration…and the tools and methods to dominate a market and go to the top in real estate…you’ll find them in this free book. – Click Here 

2. The 12 Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan.

The Real Estate Marketing Planner is a powerful 12-Month-Guide that strategically defines what marketing to do when. Four key market segments are included, Niche Marketing, Listing Inventory, Geographic Farming, and Sphere of Influence – Click Here

2. The Free Online ROI Calculator. 

Consistency and automation are the keys to success. Discover how effective direct mail marketing can dramatically increase your bottom line. Enter your statistics in our Free online ROI Calculator and click the ‘CALCULATE MY ROI’ button to see your results instantly! – Click Here

Also…check out these cool tools 

 Three Click Postcards – Just snap a home photo & create a postcard all from your mobile phone

MLSmailings.com – Automated Just Listed, Just Sold Postcards

Market Dominator System – Become a neighborhood brand

Want to Refer a friend or colleague? Refer them, Here. THEY get a Free $25 Gift Card and YOU become their hero. BTW, you also get a $25 Gift Card too (now that’s what I’m talking about)!

Keeping past customers coming back should be easy…

After all, you don’t need to “sell” them on your service and phone calls to them are warm and friendly. In addition, if you did your job right, they know, like and trust you.

So, why do so many agents fail miserably at retaining past customers? And how are you going to ensure, as you head into the new year, that you keep your past clients present?

Beyond this being a smart question, it is also an important financial decision.

The following are some statistics that explain why you should strive to remain top-of-mind with former customers and some tips to help you do so.

The puzzling facts

Nearly 90 percent of real estate consumers surveyed by NAR say that they would use their agent again and that they would recommend their agent to others.

Yet the same statistics show that, sadly, only 12 percent of consumers actually used an agent that they had worked with in the past. Dive deep into these numbers and you can easily see that real estate consumers want to use the agent they’ve worked with in the past,

Yet curiously, few do.

And, it’s a safe bet that they don’t because they forgot about the agent and went with one referred by a friend, family member or colleague.

A financial reality

“Depending on which study you read, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one,” claims Amy Gallo at Harvard Business Review.

In fact, there’s a formula you can use to determine just how much chasing after new business costs you each year.

Divide your total marketing and sales costs (what you spend on gas driving buyers around, listing expenses, etc.) by the number of new customers you acquired during the year.

Scary, isn’t it? Those are some expensive customers.

Former customers, on the other hand, are gold mines. “Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%,” according to Frederick F. Reichheld and Phil Schefter of Harvard Business School.

How’s your past customer list looking? If it appears dry and parched, it’s time to try nurturing it.

Customer retention strategies

Remaining top-of-mind with former customers doesn’t have to be an expensive endeavor, although the larger and splashier the “touch,” the more memorable you’ll be.

Less expensive ways to keep in touch are the no-brainer methods that tend to fall through the cracks of the busy agent’s schedule.

  • Drip email campaigns
  • Monthly direct mail, of interest to your customers, such as newsletters and market updates
  • Birthday and anniversary postcards
  • “Or offer home maintenance reminders (e.g., changing out smoke detector batteries once a year),” suggests Melissa Dittmann Tracey at realtormag.org.

Face-to-face

Some experts recommend a quarterly face-to-face visit with former customers. Take them to coffee, happy hour or lunch. Or to get the most bang for your customer-retention buck, throw some sort of annual customer appreciation event.

It can be as lavish as the black-tie event Buyer’s Edge agent Steve Israel holds (complete with orchestra and catered food), or as simple as a casual backyard summer barbecue.

You might even consider an event that not only brings your past customers back into your sphere but benefits your favorite non-profit as well.

Kathy Broock Ballard invites customers, past and present, to “The Annual Erin Go Bra(gh) Party” on St. Patrick’s Day. She asks that they bring an item of clothing for the local women’s shelter and in return, lunch and an open bar are theirs to enjoy.

An agent in San Francisco holds a crab feed every year during Dungeness season. He holds it in partnership with a lender and title company to keep expenses to a minimum.

Don’t forget to ask

Whether it’s one-on-one or as part of an event, don’t forget to ask former customers if they know anyone who may be thinking of buying or selling real estate. Focusing your “ask” may bring better results, according to the late Jay Conrad Levinson, father of Guerilla Marketing.

Narrow “the universe of those you ask,” he suggests in the book “Guerrilla Marketing in 30 Days.” For instance, instead of asking your weekend golf partner to thumb through his mental database of everyone she knows, ask her who else she plays golf with who may be thinking of buying or selling real estate.

The smaller you make the “universe,” the more likely your customer will be able to come up with a name.

Keeping in touch with the customers you already know and who know you is one of the easier parts of your business. By not periodically reaching out to them, you’re leaving easy money on the table for your competition to grab.

Start sending out a Community Newsletter to your clients each month to remind them of who to turn to for expert guidance when needed.

Need help targeting the perfect niche of buyers or sellers? Use our mailing list tool to create the ideal list (it’s easy) or call our support team for assistance at 866.405.3638!

PLUS: When you have time…here are 3 free ways we can help you STILL CRUSH IT in 2018!

1. Become a Listing Legend Free ebook.

Ready to take a vertical leap in your real estate career? If you’re looking for inspiration…and the tools and methods to dominate a market and go to the top in real estate…you’ll find them in this free book. – Click Here 

2. The 12 Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan.

The Real Estate Marketing Planner is a powerful 12-Month-Guide that strategically defines what marketing to do when. Four key market segments are included, Niche Marketing, Listing Inventory, Geographic Farming, and Sphere of Influence – Click Here

2. The Free Online ROI Calculator. 

Consistency and automation are the keys to success. Discover how effective direct mail marketing can dramatically increase your bottom line. Enter your statistics in our Free online ROI Calculator and click the ‘CALCULATE MY ROI’ button to see your results instantly! – Click Here

Also…check out these cool tools 

 Three Click Postcards – Just snap a home photo & create a postcard all from your mobile phone

MLSmailings.com – Automated Just Listed, Just Sold Postcards

Market Dominator System – Become a neighborhood brand

Want to Refer a friend or colleague? Refer them, Here. THEY get a Free $25 Gift Card and YOU become their hero. BTW, you also get a $25 Gift Card too (now that’s what I’m talking about)!

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