Learning the best methods for brand growth in your local real estate market can be challenging. Clients want your time, your advice, and your know-how, and they want it immediately. As you race to respond to current clients, develop new leads, and keep in touch with former clients, there’s a high risk that daily tasks will get overlooked, fall through the cracks and cost you the very business you’re working so hard to build. Everyone in your contact list wants to experience a personalized, white-glove experience. How do you deliver?
Here are five sure-fire ways to develop (and convert) prospects in your local real estate market.
1. Keep Track of Your Leads
Having too many leads that it becomes hard to stay organized is a good problem to have, right?
It most certainly is, but your local marketing efforts will be so much more effective if you segment your leads into categories and tailor your marketing for each segment. You can organize your database of leads by location, their readiness to buy, the types of real estate they’re looking to buy, their current stage in the buying process, etc.
Say you’ve got a database of 2000 prospects and you can boil those down to 10 categories, each sharing common needs and characteristics. With segmentation, you can target each segment with its own specialized drip campaign, which will drive better conversion than a one-size-fits-all campaign across all leads, and is infinitely more efficient compared to trying to take on your lead database a single lead at a time.
2. Use Drip Campaigns to Nurture Your Leads
It’s hard to convert prospects into clients, in any industry. But, in real estate, where big money and big assets are trading hands, it’s even harder to build the trust and overcome the inertia to achieve conversions. A recent report by the Online Marketing Institute estimated that up to 13 marketing touches are needed to move a lead through the sales funnel. How does a real estate agent find time?
Drip Campaigns. Drip campaigns send targeted marketing messages to each of your segments at established intervals, which makes it much easier to reach those 13 marketing touches you’ll need for conversion. Drip campaigns allow for targeted, digestible pieces of your marketing strategy over time in order to build trust and awareness with your prospects.
3. Get a CRM
Maybe you’re relying on a spreadsheet, a Word document, or your email account to keep track of your clients, tasks to accomplish, and prospects to develop. A CRM (customer relationship management tool) will help you manage your contacts, relationships, tasks, and your business.
CRMs not only track your leads, your current clients and your past clients, they also provide structure in organizing, cultivating, and keeping your business organized. Not convinced? Say you want to send a message to clients in a particular neighborhood or to past clients who you haven’t heard from in six months. With a CRM, creating that list of clients only takes the push of a button, not hours rifling through computer files, or worse, written notes and business cards, looking for names and email addresses to include on a list.
4. Go Mobile with Your Lead Management
The world doesn’t wait while you’re away from the office. Get a mobile app that helps you track your leads while you’re in the field. Good apps will allow you to prioritize your leads, remember to return their calls, texts, or emails, and alert you with notifications before a to-do item gets forgotten.
5. Keep on Top of Technology
Personal computers were once leading-edge in real estate technology. Much more recently, it was smartphones. These days, technological advancements like online mortgages, virtual reality, and the internet of things (IoT) promise to keep changing the face of real estate. Monitor the trends and determine which can bring your business to the next level. Technology broadens our abilities, and helps us serve our clients more quickly, efficiently and effectively.
Stay on top of technology and it’ll help you respond to leads, develop new clients, and satisfy existing ones. Tracking leads, delivering relevant drip marketing campaigns, and investing in CRMs are all strategies that can build your brand and business, while driving conversion and engagement. While investing in and implementing meaningful best practices can be challenging, the return you’ll get in client engagement, retention and referrals will pay into the sweat equity you’ve invested into your business and position you for future success.
