When you market to home buyers and sellers, what are you selling?  Yes, a home.  Real estate.  But, to the first-time buyer or seller your services hardly stand out from another real estate professional.  The one way you can stand out is to ensure your marketing is consumer-driven.  Consumer-driven content and offers connect with home buyers and sellers.  Consumer-driven material appeals to the consumer and speaks to their needs and wants.  When you reach home buyers and sellers through their needs and wants, they are more likely to reach out to you when they are ready to buy or sell a home.

Customer-driven materials are not hard to find.  All of Gooder Group’s products offer consumer-driven direct response marketing.  If you want to reach home buyers and sellers on their level, feeding their need for solid real estate information, provide them with useful real estate content and information.

Share your experience with customer-driven marketing efforts.

Think about the home buying and selling consumer’s frame of mind and their needs first. You want to make your sign up attractive to all visitors.

• Is it more inviting to “sign up” or to “subscribe?”
• Which is more appealing, “an email newsletter list” or “weekly tips to buy or sell real estate in today’s market?”
• If you offer something of value, make sure it’s something that will strengthen your relationship with that consumer — and not something that they will sign up for just to get the freebie/offer and then promptly unsubscribe. (Movie ticket versus a report on the real estate market in your area.)

The key to a successful email list is making sure that home buyers and sellers want to be a part of the list.  If they want to be a part of the list, they are more likely to be involved and engaged with you and are more often qualified leads.  In turn, they are more likely to be able to be converted to a client of yours too.

Share your ideas on how you make your email sign up inviting and worthwhile to home buyers and sellers.

However, it’s just as important to look at all other marketing elements to determine what marketing worked best (and which didn’t).  What follow-up programs converted the most leads?  What past client contact generated the most referral business and repeat business?  If you track this information as well, your decision making for the next marketing plan will be easier and your marketing dollars will be going toward programs that are proven to bring you more business.

Tracking marketing isn’t easy.  It takes a bit of sleuthing and a bit of asking the client (or would-be client) what moved them to start working with you.  Gooder Group has historically tracked all of its marketing asking all inquiries where they heard about us and/or what promo code (marketing piece) they have in hand.  It’s work that useful to ensure that marketing dollars are spent wisely and effectively.

Share with us how you track marketing and what you’ve learned analyzing your marketing.

If you have prospects who are still understanding the home buying (or selling) process, a webinar can allow you to make a complete presentation on the steps necessary to buy a home.  The webinar can move prospects to action in their home buying or selling decision making.  Also, new leads can be had from webinar attendees who find your webinar as their first introduction to your real estate services.

The webinar format allows viewers to ask questions as well, getting their concerns addressed quickly and easily.  Best of all, many times you can record the webinar and use it as a feature on your website or blog to allow new leads and prospects benefit from the information at any time!

Much of the sales information you present in-person right now can be used in a webinar, allowing you to reuse what you have and not have to create an entirely new program.  And, webinars can include very current information which is a benefit to today’s home buyers and sellers.

Let us know what your experiences have been using webinars.

How do you keep these leads in your pipeline, knowing that it may take a while before they are ready to make a move?

Nurture them.  Easily said, but how?  You use all the methods you use to find these leads to keep them interested, engaged and talking with you about their real estate needs.  Social media, email, direct mail, phone conversations, in-person meetings, newsletters, etc. all work to communicate and nurture these leads.

However, the key to your lead nurturing is not necessarily encouraging them to make a move immediately.  It’s respecting their stage in the real estate process and providing them with additional information, statistics, data, comparisons, real estate market research that helps to answer their questions about home buying and selling.

Your lead nurturing allows you to build up the relationship with the lead.  You gain their trust and listen to their needs.  You develop a clear understanding of what issues are most important to them in the home buying or selling process.  You are able to understand them more completely and work for their specific desires.  The lead feels more in control of the situation as they learn more about the process and you, but you ultimately are still directing the lead as you know exactly what stage the lead is at all times.

Your work is to match up the lead’s needs and timeline with your own business.  You will know when they are ready to buy or sell a home and can move them into the appropriate sales process at exactly the right time.

Share your lead nurturing best practices.

If you’re simply promoting who you are and what you’re about, that’s fine.  Personal marketing is a great brand builder.  Name recognition counts for something in every market.

However, if you promote what you can do for home buyers and sellers and how to solve their home buying and selling dilemmas, those buyers and sellers are more likely to tune in and engage with you.  You will be speaking directly to their needs and answering their real estate questions.

Through your marketing and online presence, build yourself up as the real estate expert.  Answer home buyer and home seller questions — before they’re even asked!  Stand in buyers’ and sellers’ shoes for a while to understand what their concerns are.  Develop your marketing to portray yourself as the trusted real estate advisor.

With your expertise out there, leads are more likely to respond to your marketing.  And, with early engagement with leads, you are more likely to be able to convert them to prospects…and further down the line to clients!  Your expertise builds trust.  Share your expertise freely!

Let us know how you capture early engagement with your marketing.

You really need to take the time and energy to analyze your email and mailing lists and determine who is a cold lead, a hot lead, a prospect, a client and a long-term contact. And, you need to determine among those groups who are buyers and who are sellers. Further still, you should work to find out other details among the buyers and sellers including those who are relocating, down sizing, moving up, first-timers, etc.

The task is time consuming, but it is also vitally important. Consumers — like your home buyers and sellers — are bombarded with marketing messages constantly. The minute that you mistakenly market to them incorrectly (sending a seller-topic message to a first-time home buyer, for example) you lose them. Because it’s obvious to them that you don’t know what their real estate goals are, they are less likely to tune in further to your messages and trust you with their real estate needs.

If you’ve fine tuned your marketing to speak to the recipients’ specific needs, you are more likely to hold their attention, gain their trust and continue the conversation to build a relationship toward new business.

Segmenting your email and mailing lists is a necessary task. Building off of yesterday’s post about getting more detail in your database, be sure you track all the details you can about the leads, prospect and clients you communicate with daily. This depth of information will help you create marketing messages to your lists that are relevant and engaging.

Share your list segmenting successes with our readers. How do you keep the messages relevant for recipients?

If you go one step further, you can ask for personal preferences, which is more like qualifying the subscriber and finding out more about them personally.  Personal preferences tell you exactly what they are looking for (sell, buy, relocate, invest, etc.), what their time line is, where they want to buy or sell, type of housing they’re looking for, price range, etc.  The personal preferences give you insight into the person and what they are looking for in terms of real estate services.

Offer both subscriber and preference options on your email subscriptions and you’ll learn a lot more about your email list!

However, as you are working to find these new home buyers and sellers, step back for one minute and think about the individual home buyer’s or seller’s potential lifetime value to you.  You may or may not know the answers to these questions, but always assume that buyers and sellers you work with know many people!  (Also always assume that they will talk about your service — or lack thereof if there is a problem!)

• Are they local and well connected in your community?
• Do they — or someone close to them — work for a large firm?
• Do they have the potential to invest in real estate?
• Are they entering the real estate market with an eye for moving up later?
• Do they have a strong involvement in social media?

Getting their home purchase or sale today is wonderful, but think about the long-term value of this customer.  If you lay the foundation for excellent, unparalleled service, this single customer can — over time — send you a sizable number of referrals, helping you build your business even more.

Analyze the marketing communication you send and be sure to segment your contact list so that you not only gain new business today, but set the framework to increase business from past clients.

Share your proven methods for gaining referrals from clients.

Flash forward five days later. I just got an email from a sales consultant at the dealer. To protect the innocent, I’m blocking out the identifying information:

“I am NAME from CAR DEALER. I noticed you brought your 20XX MODEL in for service recently. We have had a number of customers looking for the older MODEL body style. I was wondering if you have put any thought into selling your MODEL (or trading it in). As you may know, MAKE has redesigned the all-new 2011 MODEL and we have more than twelve in stock now. Please let me know if this is of interest to you. You may reach me directly at PHONE #.”

Interesting way to see if I’m interested in buying a new car, or possibly filling in their used car selection. Either way, it got me thinking — albeit very briefly — about selling my car and upgrading.

Now, houses don’t go in for service, but neighborhoods still have sought-after, desirable homes. Do you have buyers looking in certain neighborhoods, but not finding what they want? Create a direct mail piece to go directly to specific homeowners (who own homes that fit the style/size that your buyers are looking for) in that sought-after neighborhood and ask them outright if they’ve been considering selling their home.

You might be surprised after your inquiry to find you have some new listings, or better yet, happy new buyers who found exactly what they were looking for!

Let us know if you ever contact home owners on behalf of buyers who have their eye on a specific home.