The key word is “new.”

These new home sellers and buyers haven’t heard everything you’ve already said about home buying and selling.  The content they are looking for is likely something you’ve already covered in-depth many a time before.

With that in mind, don’t just cut and paste old content, but update it for today’s real estate market and add your new insights.  These new home buyers and sellers aren’t going to tire of the topics you cover as they’re new to them.  Keep these leads and prospects informed with informative content, but don’t reinvent the wheel every time you need new content.  Some of your tried and true information about buying or selling a home in your area is still relevant and useful to new home buyers and sellers — and effective in bringing in new leads and prospects.

Let us know how you recycle, reuse and repurpose content to find new buyers and sellers.

As you set, analyze and refine your goals for direct mail this year, Gooder Group can help.  During the month of January, all Print and Ship Postcards are on sale for 50% off! Take advantage of this money-saving opportunity to find new buyers and sellers in your market, but make sure you order by Monday, January 31, 2011 to take advantage of this huge sale!

Don’t forget that until the end of January, Gooder Group is offering brochures and handbooks for 50% off too — essentially, buy one, get one free.  Check out the 19 buyer, 28 seller and 11 general brochure titles and see which ones work best for your market.  REO, Foreclosure, Sell Fast, Short Sale and #1 Best Seller TAXES are moving fast!  Don’t miss the in-depth 24-page handbooks for buyers, sellers, financing and relocation too!

Gooder Group brochures and handbooks are designed to be included as a free offer for a “special report” in your marketing.  Prospects respond for further info and you engage the home buyer or seller in further discussion to assess their needs, timeline and exact situation.

Let us know how your New Year’s business resolutions are doing!

If you’re looking for content for your content marketing efforts, you’ve come to the right place.  Gooder Group prides itself on providing useful content for real estate professionals to find new prospects.

Gooder Group brochures and handbooks are designed to be included as a free offer for a “special report” in your marketing.  Prospects respond for further info and you engage the home buyer or seller in further discussion to assess their needs, timeline and exact situation.

For the month of January, Gooder Group is offering brochures and handbooks for 50% off — essentially, buy one, get one free.  Check out the 19 buyer, 28 seller and 11 general brochure titles and see which ones work best for your market.  REO, Foreclosure, Sell Fast, Short Sale and #1 Best Seller TAXES are moving fast!  Check out the in-depth 24-page handbooks for buyers, sellers, financing and relocation too!

Let us know how you use Gooder Group brochures and handbooks in your content marketing.

Setting goals also works for direct mail.  If you simply mail without specific goals, you aren’t making the most of your marketing budget.

Create your message — and offer. What are you giving your recipients in your direct mail?  Is it a free consultation, a brochure, an offer to sign up for email newsletters, an invitation to visit your blog or website, local real estate information or something else?  Determine what you provide in your direct mail.  If it’s a “billboard” about you, consider if that will meet and further your marketing goals.

Identify your target group(s) for the mailing.  If your direct mail piece is targeting buyers, what kind of buyers are most likely to respond to your mail piece?  Is it an individual in a certain neighborhood, of a particular age/life stage, a renter, a move-down buyer, a move-up buyer, an investor, those looking for distressed properties or just anyone?  The more narrowly you define your target market, the more successful your direct mail will be.

Determine what you want from your direct mailing. Do you want more email sign ups for your newsletter (at your website)?  More Twitter followers?  More likes on Facebook?  Just more phone calls or emails?  You need to determine what your goal is so you can measure how your direct mail is working.

Ensure your data is correct. If your mailing list is incomplete — missing names, empty fields for address information, guesses for house numbers, you’re not quite ready to mail.  Take the time to make sure your data is current and complete or your direct mail will fail before it even hits the post office.

Once your goals are in place, your direct mail can go out and your results can be measured.  (Remember, determining goals for email marketing campaigns ensures success with email as well!)

When you set your goals for direct mail this year, Gooder Group can help.  During the month of January, all Print and Ship Postcards are on sale for 50% off! Take advantage of this money-saving opportunity to find new buyers and sellers in your market!

Things aren’t rosy once again, but we’re moving forward with a new perspective.  The biggest piece of knowledge you might have gained is that one-to-one interactions work the best — just as you knew before the downturn, working directly with one person allows you to see clearly and exactly what their needs and wants are leading you to more closed business because of personal and reactive service.

You’re likely adapting this one-to-one knowledge to your marketing — separating your prospects into niche groups based on what their needs are, what their timelines are like, what their budgets allow.  Following up personally with past clients who are ready to move up (or down) or send referrals your way.  Looking for new leads by providing useful, detailed content about your local market — information these leads cannot find in the national and even regional news.

Most importantly you’ve learned that staying in touch and remaining visible allows leads, prospects and past clients to reach out to you when they are ready to make a move.  Continuing to market during the down times means continued business; cutting out marketing to save money means no business during the down times.

With personalized marketing, you’ve learned what works in any kind of economy.  Share what you’ve learned about marketing during lean times.

Were retail sales up in your area? If so, consumers may have a renewed sense of security, edging toward making purchasing decisions that they have been holding back on for several years. Besides buying electronics, household items, etc., they may now be back in the mindset to purchase something larger — like real estate. If there have been fewer layoffs by major businesses in your area, new growth in a niche business in your area, or simply stability where there was none, these consumers may be ready to make a move in real estate.

Take advantage of the momentum after the busy holiday season to ramp up your marketing. Reinvest in your business with renewed efforts at lead generation to attract the attention of new home buyers — and sellers too! Reassess your marketing — add appropriate electronic and print campaigns to find leads in niche areas you may have dropped in the recent past. This spring’s real estate market could be a different one than in the past. Are you ready?

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?

Direct mail is meant to be held. To be read, studied, examined, tucked away, posted up. It has lasting power unlike many email messages.

The imagery and layout you choose for direct mail can have impact on the recipient. They are more likely to linger over your message, especially when it’s sitting in their hand.

Direct mail’s unique tactile feature allows it to transcend the sterile barriers of email to reach home buyers and sellers unlike other electronic methods.

Don’t rely solely on electronic messages, ads and interactions to build — and sustain — your business. Sometimes a simple postcard, flyer or letter in the mail can have more impact than you’d ever expect, only because it’s something that can be held.

Let us know what your direct mail/electronic marketing balance is.

• If you’re really interested and feeling like you can get a word in edgewise, you will likely interrupt the person and ask for clarification.
• If you’re tired or not super interested or don’t feel comfortable stopping the conversation, you just let the issue slide and walk away not really getting all the information you could.

The key here is to be very careful when you are talking to buyers or sellers.  And, this includes more than just face-to-face conversations.  When you are blogging, tweeting, writing a mail piece or email newsletter, an online or printed advertisement or any other communication, it’s important — imperative — to be totally clear.

• Very few people outside of real estate professionals know what all the designation abbreviations mean behind your name on your business card.  Clarify them, and if you don’t have room to explain them, reconsider their value in winning over new home buyers or sellers when they aren’t explained.
• Acronyms about buying a home such as FHA, VA, HUD, LTV, REO, BPO, etc. should be defined somewhere for those brand new to the home buying world.
• Often used abbreviations or short hand should also be made clear.  Not all people moving to your area are locals and will automatically know that SHB means Sandy Harbor Beach in an advertisement or property description.  Not everyone — seller or buyer alike — knows what a short sale is; be sure to enumerate what it is for those considering buying one.  Think of other shorthand you use that isn’t clear to a new home seller or buyer.
• Understand what home buyers and sellers in YOUR area use in terms of terminology to refer to an area, a type of home, a process.  If you can use the terminology that they are familiar and comfortable with, they are more likely to tune in to your marketing and conversations.

You are an expert in real estate.  However, those you are working with and for aren’t.  Don’t make them “pick up the lingo” you are using; educate them as to what everything means and discuss the topic completely — asking if the person has questions as you go along.

Let us know how you keep your communication clear and complete.