Deveria’s latest mailing is from the Real Estate Times Series (shown above). To learn more, Click Here.
Congratulations, Deveria Hampton, on winning this week’s contest!
Deveria had the following words to say about her success sending marketing out from ProspectsPLUS!,
“ProspectsPLUS! has been a game-changer for my real estate business. The postcard campaigns allow me to send information to my farming area on a monthly basis and that has increased my sphere of influence greatly! I always recommend them to new agents when they ask about my marketing strategy.”
-Deveria Hampton
Deveria, thank you for your review. We truly appreciate you and your support!
Don’t Forget to Enter For Your Chance to Win a $75 ProspectsPLUS! Gift Card! (see how below)*
HOW TO ENTER: Just leave feedback regarding how using marketing from ProspectsPLUS! has impacted your business, and you’re automatically entered into our next contest.
*If you’ve already entered our drawing in the past and haven’t won, you don’t need to enter again. Your entry remains valid, and you still have a chance to win.
Don’t forget to watch for next Friday’s email announcing the weekly winner!
PLUS: When you have time…below are some marketing tools to help support your success.
1. Put Your Real Estate Business a Step Above with Your Own Branded Magazine
Homes & Life Magazine is a customizable magazine with rich, full-color content and a sharp, professional aesthetic. It includes compelling, direct response-driven articles written by real estate industry experts and engaging lifestyle content. Send out Homes & Life Magazine in Just Minutes – No Minimums Required. Or we’ll ship it to you. Homes & Life Magazine is the ultimate “Coffee Table Lingerer”! …and it costs less than sending a greeting card! – Click Here
2.The Free 6-Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan
The Real Estate Marketing Planner is a powerful 6-Month Guide that strategically defines what marketing to do and when. Four key market segments include niche Markets, geographic farming, sphere of influence, and past clients. – Click Here
3. The Free Interactive 6-Month Real Estate Business Review
The Free Interactive 6-Month Real Estate Business Review allows you to enter your business goals for the remainder of the year and get a breakdown of how many prospects, listings, closing, and so on are needed to reach your goals. – Click Here
4. The 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
The end of the year is creeping up on us and with it comes the inevitable look-back on your real estate business. How’d you do?
If you didn’t get the results you were aiming for, your year-end business planning may require an overhaul of your real estate marketing plan.
It takes money
It may sound like a “well, duh” statement, but a marketing plan requires a marketing budget. Study your current year’s revenue numbers and commit to spending at least that on next year’s marketing.
A couple of years ago, Attom Data Solutions published the results of a survey of real estate agents, brokers, owners, and marketers to determine where they are “spending their largest portion of marketing dollars” and which method brings the best results.
Thirty-five percent of agents spent the most on social media while 20 percent spent the most on buying leads.
Regardless of how you spent your marketing dollars this year, the most important aspect of planning is that look back to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Naturally, you’ll want to reconsider underperforming real estate marketing methods and amp up anything that worked.
Chop your efforts into segments, such as:
Lead generation
Client retention
Building your SOI
Then, decide how much you’ll allocate for each in the budget. Naturally, you’ll want to spend the most on which effort brings you the best results. For some agents, client retention dollars result in the best ROI, while others may choose to go bigger on real estate lead gen.
Even if it’s just 2 percent of revenue, you’ll have enough money to engage and retain current clients “with simple tools and strategies,” according to Chris Beecher, president of thewholebraingroup.com.
Next, determine the strategies you’ll employ, such as social media, paid advertising, blogging, email, and direct mail marketing, and allocate an amount of the budget to each.
The Looking For Listings Series is shown above. To learn more, click Here.
How will you broadcast your marketing message?
How you will market in the coming year depends a great deal on your budget but also on those segments we mentioned earlier. Lead generation is costlier than client retention, so you may want to take a look at some of the less-expensive methods if you choose to focus on the former.
These might include beefing up your social media presence (by blogging more and posting to your preferred social media platforms), knocking on doors, etc.
A planner will help keep you on track
A planner is a must if you hope to keep your marketing efforts on track all year. We offer a Free 6-Month Real Estate Marketing Plannerto help with this task (a new 2024 Planner will be available soon, so watch for the announcement in our weekly emails).
Although it’s important to create a coming-year marketing plan for your real estate business, don’t become a slave to it. If something doesn’t appear to be working, replace it with something else.
The key to success in real estate lead generation and client retention is consistency. Having a plan will ensure this.
PLUS: When you have time…below are some marketing tools to help support your success.
1. Put Your Real Estate Business a Step Above with Your Own Branded Magazine
Homes & Life Magazine is a customizable magazine with rich, full-color content and a sharp, professional aesthetic. It includes compelling, direct, response-driven articles written by real estate industry experts and engaging lifestyle content. Send out Homes & Life Magazine in Just Minutes – No Minimums Required. Or we’ll ship it to you. Homes & Life Magazine is the ultimate “Coffee Table Lingerer”! …and it costs less than sending a greeting card! – Click Here
2.The Free 6-Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan
The Real Estate Marketing Planner is a powerful 6-Month Guide that strategically defines what marketing to do and when. Four key market segments include niche Markets, geographic farming, sphere of influence, and past clients. – Click Here
3. The Free Interactive 6-Month Real Estate Business Review
The Free Interactive 6-Month Real Estate Business Review allows you to enter your business goals for the remainder of the year and get a breakdown of how many prospects, listings, closings, and so on are needed to reach your goals. – Click Here
4. The 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
Yes, there’s still time! Here are six ways to help you stir up more activity in your market before the year-end.
1. Stick to the plan (or create one if you haven’t yet)
A marketing plan does much more than let you know how much money you’ll spend for the remainder of the year promoting your services. Chief among the additional benefits is that it helps you fill your days with prolific and directed activity.
That forward-thinking stuff you need to create a plan forces you to carefully consider each option, both in terms of its financial impact and effectiveness.
“Big ideas fail without a plan, and your marketing plan is the one thing that will still drive innovation and help you meet sales targets,” according to Mark Ellis, a business writer at Business2Community.com.
If increasing listing activity is your goal, hammer out a marketing plan for the next two months and stick to it.
And, if you already have a marketing plan in place, review your plan for its effectiveness over the last year and make changes where needed.
Whether you door-knock, cold-call, chase after expireds and FSBOsor use another method of prospecting, ensure that it gets done by making it a part of your daily or weekly schedule.
Prioritize the task as well. It’s easy to keep putting it off when there are more interesting tasks to pursue, but it’s not wise. The more leads you steer toward that real estate sales funnel, the more prospects you can convert into new listings.
People who sell customer relationship management software are fond of claiming that a CRM is the “lifeblood” of the real estate agent’s business.
Guess what? They’re right. Building and nurturing relationships is the key to increased commission checks, and to do it right, you need a way to keep track of leads, prospects, clients (both current and past), and just about everyone else you know.
While there are probably a million and one ways to set up a CRM, find a way that makes adding information and finding what you need easy. A way that works for you. Then ensure that you keep it safe, and back it up.
HOT TIP: We offer a free CRM, the Contact Manager,on ProspectsPLUS.com. With the Contact Manager, you can tag entire mailing lists or just one contact within a list, building one highly targeted list for your marketing materials.
In addition, you own your list, so you can export and download your CRM list anytime if you decide to move it. Check it out HERE.
Now schedule time on a daily/weekly basis to reach out to the contacts in this database and nurture these relationships.
One easy way is anSOI scheduled Campaign. It takes only minutes to set up and can run for up to two years automatically without you touching it. Other benefits in addition to making your life a lot easier? You don’t pay until each mailing goes out, and you can cancel, pause, or change the campaign at any time up to the night before mailing. Oh, and it keeps you in front of your market stirring up listings indefinitely.
4. Find a mentor or mastermind partner
“Coaching works,” according to the authors of a study, “Evaluating the effectiveness of executive coaching: Beyond ROI.”
If coaching helped former President Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and athletes like Michael Jordan, perhaps you should also consider it.
Are you a new agent? Consider latching on to a mentor. Not only is this a way to quickly learn the nuts and bolts of the business, but to begin to nurture new habits that will help you immensely in the long run.
Mentors, coaches, and even mastermind groups can propel you to the next level in productivity, thus increasing your listing activity.
You can’t turn a lead into a prospect that you’ll convert into a listing if you don’t respond to their initial contact promptly.
The short and sweet of it is that you have five minutes to respond to an incoming lead if you hope to reach the person live and get them into your sales funnel, according to InsideSales.com research.
In fact, the agent who responds within this period is nearly 25 percent more likely to snag the lead.
Wait a half-hour? You might as well forget about it and let the agent down the street who responds quicker have the lead.
6. Start farming, via direct mail, if you haven’t already
Farming is a low-cost, effective, and easy way to reach out to many people simultaneously and build relationships over time.
The fact remains that direct mail is one of the most powerful marketing methods available. Mix that with a focus on a specific farm, and you have something powerful working for you.
PLUS: When you have time…below are some marketing tools to help support your success.
1. Put Your Real Estate Business a Step Above with Your Own Branded Magazine
Homes & Life Magazine is a customizable magazine with rich, full-color content and a sharp, professional aesthetic. It includes compelling, direct, response-driven articles written by real estate industry experts and engaging lifestyle content. Send out Homes & Life Magazine in Just Minutes – No Minimums Required. Or we’ll ship it to you. Homes & Life Magazine is the ultimate “Coffee Table Lingerer”! …and it costs less than sending a greeting card! – Click Here
2.The Free 6-Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan
The Real Estate Marketing Planner is a powerful 6-Month Guide that strategically defines what marketing to do and when. Four key market segments include niche Markets, geographic farming, sphere of influence, and past clients. – Click Here
3. The Free Interactive 6-Month Real Estate Business Review
The Free Interactive 6-Month Real Estate Business Review allows you to enter your business goals for the remainder of the year and get a breakdown of how many prospects, listings, closings, and so on are needed to reach your goals. – Click Here
4. The 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
Over the past few years, direct mail real estate marketing has seen a resurgence. Experts chalk it up to the overuse of email marketing, but direct mail outperforms most digital marketing tactics, according to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
Direct mail marketing’s “response rate ranges from about five to nine times greater than that of email, paid search, or social media,” according to the pros at datatargetingsolutions.com.
Pretty impressive, right? Yet, at least in the real estate industry, it’s still not utilized like it could be.
This leaves the door open for agents seeking an additional marketing vehicle and a way to stand out.
Niche real estate postcards
A few years ago, scientists at Temple University’s Fox School of Business Center for Neural Decision-Making teamed up with the Postal Service to study the circumstances under which email or direct mail was more effective.
Postcards were more effective in five of the nine tests performed.
The most popular postcard agents are familiar with are the time-tested Just Listed and Just Sold postcards, which are still highly effective. To stand out further in this market, consider a local market update on the postcard back or a QR code leading to a valuable direct response flyer opt-in.
To think outside the postcard box, there are a multitude of real estate niches that you can drill down and focus on to stir up interest.
Some popular niches include baby boomers, high-income renters, expired, absentee owners, FSBOs, move-up markets, and investors. The more obscure niches include divorce, foreclosure, estate sale, and notice of default.
ProspectsPLUS! has postcard designsavailable in all of the niches listed above, already done for you with the perfect message for the niche market.
Education Direct Response Reports
Direct response reports are a great educational tool, filled with valuable information homeowners appreciate.
You can share them on social media as a “free offer”, include them in your email newsletter as a free offer, add them to your website as an opt-in in exchange for an email address, or add them to your listing presentation folder and pre-listing packet.
Personally branded agent magazines
Consider a personally branded agent magazine to level up your real estate presence in a way that few agents do. Homes & Life Magazineis a done-for-you magazine with rich, full-color content.
It includes compelling, direct response-driven articles, and engaging lifestyle content, and costs less to send out than a greeting card!
Sphere or farm scheduled postcard campaign
When clients need a real estate agent, it pays to have an easily recognizable name at their fingertips. But coming up with fresh, eye-catching content and sticking to a regular schedule of sending this content out is incredibly time-consuming.
A scheduled, recurring postcard campaign is the easiest way to maintain brand exposure and stay relevant while freeing time for more high-level tasks.
According to Lenskold Group, 78% of marketers reported that marketing automation increased revenue.
And 75% of brands saw a return on investment within 12 months due to using automated marketing campaigns (Focus Research study).
Launching a scheduled marketing campaign is the best way to make every moment count in your business, raise your brand profile, and stay relevant.
PLUS: When you have time…below are some marketing tools to help support your success.
1. Put Your Real Estate Business a Step Above with Your Own Branded Magazine
Homes & Life Magazine is a customizable magazine with rich, full-color content and a sharp, professional aesthetic. It includes compelling, direct, response-driven articles written by real estate industry experts and engaging lifestyle content. Send out Homes & Life Magazine in Just Minutes – No Minimums Required. Or we’ll ship it to you. Homes & Life Magazine is the ultimate “Coffee Table Lingerer”! …and it costs less than sending a greeting card! – Click Here
2.The Free 6-Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan
The Real Estate Marketing Planner is a powerful 6-Month Guide that strategically defines what marketing to do and when. Four key market segments include niche Markets, geographic farming, sphere of influence, and past clients. – Click Here
3. The Free Interactive 6-Month Real Estate Business Review
The Free Interactive 6-Month Real Estate Business Review allows you to enter your business goals for the remainder of the year and get a breakdown of how many prospects, listings, closings, and so on are needed to reach your goals. – Click Here
4. The 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
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