Archive for the ‘real estate marketing tools’ Category

In this blog we usually talk about ways that you can gain real estate sales leads using technology.  In this posting we are going to kinda – sorta deviate away from this idea a bit and talk about a time tested method for marketing to your target real estate market.  I am speaking specifically of real estate marketing postcards and how you can use them to gain more listings and prospects.

Just a Little Deviation Away From Technology in Real Estate Marketing

Actually, we really aren’t getting away from marketing with technology aspect of selling real estate because we will still be using technology in the delivery system of the real estate postcards.  You can easily go to an online service and order post cards for your marketing campaigns.  Most of these online services will not only allow you to design your postcards using stock photography, but they will print them up in the quantity you need and then send them out to the address that you give them.  This saves you a tremendous amount of time.

However, don’t expect the printing service that you choose to write a marketing message for you.  For that task, you will either have to learn how to write the message yourself, or hire someone that is real good at it.  At any rate, you will want to have a call to action somewhere on the real estate marketing post cards so that people or potential real estate sales leads will be spurred onto to call you.

The best call to action that a real estate marketing postcard can have is something that is tangible for free;  just for getting together with you and talking about your services.  You can always get boat loads of inexpensive gifts to give to people that make an appointment with you. There are tons of online companies that gratuitous gifts that have your company’s logo and contact information on them, from pens to desk clocks.  Generally, offering a free consultation is what many real estate professionals use, but this does not work and does not have a strong enough pull for real estate leads to actually take action and meet with you.

Make Your Real Estate Marketing Postcards Unique!

Another thing you have to consider when dealing with marketing with this type of vehicle is that on average, people make a decision whether or not to read or keep an advertisement sent to them within three seconds.  You have to really have a unique post card that initially arouses a person’s interest enough to make them read it.  Many of the online companies that make these types of post cards have templates that are like this.  Look, if you get a post card in the mail with a pink penguin on it that has big yellow letters on it that says “NAKED”, wouldn’t you at least look at the back of the card to read it???  So, make sure that you have a mind blowing picture with a caption that makes the prospect interested enough to read the back side of it.

To recap on how to Get Real Estate Sales Leads With Real Estate Marketing Postcards, remember to have a good free offer with something tangible, make sure there is a good call to action, and always have a compelling picture and text on the front to ensure that the prospect will read your message.

Usually, this blog covers the area of how real estate professional can sell real estate utilizing technology. Well, I guess I have been ignoring a certain segment of the market that is also involved in real estate; the mortgage professional and their industry. Yes, that’s right; we are going to talk specifically to mortgage professionals in this post, particularly professionals in the reverse mortgage industry. So, this article is going to talk about how mortgage professionals can utilize Internet technology to get prospects for reverse mortgages.

The reverse mortgage industry, as many of you already probably know, is a growing industry because of all of the baby boomers that are getting older and moving into retirement age. So, when you consider the fact that many people that still have mortgages can get a loan that is like this, it really doesn’t seem to be too daunting of a task to cultivate these folks as prospects. It would be foolhardy for any mortgage company to ignore the reverse mortgage industry and not have a focused marketing plan in place.

To get quality leads from the Internet, you need to know several different things. First of all, you need to know as much about your target market as you possibly can. You don’t want to be chasing the wrong herd of people that don’t have a need for what you or your services have to offer. If you do your research enough and it is thorough, you will at least find out that most homeowners over the age of sixty two are the target age of the prospects that you are looking for. The value of the home that the target prospect is currently living in is another factor to consider when you are looking for a good reverse mortgage lead.

Not only should the value of the house be an important factor, but also the equity that has been built into the property is an important factor as well. Also, a person that has been subject to medical bills in their older years would make a good candidate as well because they can probably use some help with finances. Some of the ways you can use the Internet or technology to help you with looking for reverse mortgage leads or prospects is by visiting a forum or blog that talks about mortgages and real estate issues. Many times, people will be looking for information or advice when considering an action or financial decision. You want to make sure that you visit the most reputable sites, because if you are going to forums that look or act unprofessional, then you will get a reputation that you, as a mortgage professional; could probably do without.

Start Your Own Reverse Mortgage Blog

One way to establish yourself as an expert in your field of expertise online is to start a blog dedicated to your profession. If you are an expert at a particular area in the field of mortgages, then you can establish an online presence for yourself. All you have to do is get a blog either with Wordpress or with Google’s Blogger (both are free platforms and services) and start writing good articles on reverse mortgages. Don’t worry about the design of the blog, like everyone else does, just grab a blog theme or set of colors and start writing.

If you really want to bump it up a notch, you can always write an e-book that you can give to people to read as well. One other thing that you can do to find good reverse mortgage leads is to go to a site that is, a lead generation firm. You can buy leads for your target market and start a direct mail campaign through the regular mail. Do not buy email leads, because you don’t ever want to run the risk of being blamed of spamming people.

As always with any marketing plans that you have, always make sure that you do your research before approaching any segment of the market. That way you will be much better prepared for other plans that you may have to implement a different strategy or segment of the market.

It is vital to know how to get real estate leads if you are going to be successful at selling properties.  As a matter of fact, the only way that you can guarantee that your real estate business will succeed is if you know how to prospect in a way which is conducive to your business goals.  It is very important to know how to keep the clients that you have and market back to them, but without your initial client base, that is going to be very hard.  It probably goes without saying, that if you want to become successful in the real estate business then knowing how to generate real estate leads is vitally important.

Most people usually go through the route of handing out business cards, advertising, attending community events, running newspaper ads, and cold calling, but without a proper system in place, your marketing plans as well as your prospecting efforts will go unrewarded.  The best system to have is an automated one wherein prospects contact you and then your system automatically collects their contact information for you.  There are several ways to do this, which is what we will be discussing in this article.

Getting Real Estate Leads Using a Call Capture System

A call capture system is a system wherein you place an advertisement talking about your listings or services and then people call you and leave you their call back number.  You can actually have the number placed on a real estate website asking the potential prospect top call and leave their information, or you can use an online service like Aweber to place an opt – in box on your website to get them to leave their contact information.

Usually, a call capture system has several features that go along with its services.  You can have your own unique 1-800 number system put into service from the company that provides these services for you and these numbers make it very easy for you to capture real estate leads with.  One of the best innovations that is included with the call capture system is what is called an “Automatic Number Identification” or “ANI”.  Basically, this system allows you to store in memory any numbers that call your number so that you will have their number to call back.  Having this system in place will also protect you from the dreaded “do not call” list because it will give you proof that the prospect initiated the contact with you.

Once a real estate agent or Realtor has the call capture system in place, they can begin to publish and use their number whenever they begin to market their business.  You should put your number on every advertisement, website, business card or any other marketing vehicle that you are using.  You ought to use the number liberally with your ads and you should display the number prominently in all of your marketing ads no matter where they appear.

Call capture systems can sometimes be rather extensive on learning how to use them; this has been just a brief overview on how to set up and use a call capture system to generate and get real estate leads for your business.  The best way to see some of these phone systems and ads that are in actual use is in the various opportunity magazines that you can find at the store. Looking at these ads will allow you to not only see how ads are set up to use this phone-marketing vehicle, but it will also let you take a look at the ad copy and call to action that is used by each business.

If you really want to get people to go to your open houses and know exactly where you are, here is a tool that is very easy to use and costs nothing to put on your blog or website. Google Maps is an easy online tool that you can use to get people to connect to you with ease. One of the things that you can easily do on Google is go to their map site (http://maps.google.com/maps) and follow these simple instructions:
How to Send Your Real Estate Leads to Your Open House Using Google Maps
1. Type in the address of the house or place of business into the Google Maps field.

2. Once you get to the page that has the address that you wanted, you can then go up to the top of the map page and highlight and copy the web address of the page you are on.

3. On the right hand side of the map just above the picture of the map you will see the word “Link”, click on it.

4. Take the piece of code that is on the page and highlight the top one that looks something like this: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=3836+Cambria+Street,+Lynchburg,+VA&sll=37.97783,-84.523981&sspn=0.007933,0.01929&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=3836+Cambria+St,+Lynchburg,+Virginia+24502&ll=37.387498,-79.169862&spn=0.007996,0.01929&z=16

5. Now go to your blog and paste the link into your blog or website page.
6. You can also take the same link and paste it into an email to your real estate leads. If people click on this link, they will automatically be switched to the Google map that you wanted them to see.
7. Double check the map to make sure it is right. Sometimes Google maps are inaccurate, but most of the time they are correct.
8. Send out your email or post your web or blog pages. It is just that easy.

If you do have hot real estate leads that want to come to your open house or event, then you can actually type in their starting address into the field on the left side of the map page that has the letter “A” in a green circle. Then type the destination (the place that you want to meet them) into the field that has the letter “B” next to it in a green circle. When you click on the button that says “Get Directions” Google Maps will then give you the exact directions from the starting point all of the way to their destination. You can email them the directions so that they will know exactly where your open house is.
Don’t forget that in any email or posting, you are dealing with potential clients so you will need to be cordial and courteous in your communications with them. It may also be a good idea to give your real estate leads your cell phone number, just in case the Google map that you generate or its directions are flawed.
Google has a wide variety of high tech tools that you can easily use for your real estate business, and I will be covering more of these in subsequent blog posts.

Email Marketing for Real Estate Agents Part II

In my last blog post I discussed the most important aspects of marketing your real estate blog or website with email and in this episode, I will attempt to talk to you about how to divide those lists up into the different groups of people that you will need to service in your real estate sales cycle.

You know, I have already quite extensively talked about why email marketing is so important and attractive to your marketing strategy.  For one thing, email is cheap and it can be sent quite frequently. Heck, you could send it just about every day but I would recommend at the most three times to once a week.  You also don’t want to start selling to people right away with them either.  I will go over more of these basics later, but right now I want to talk about setting up different lists tailored to your marketing efforts and real estate sales cycle.

Categorize Your List When Using Email to Market Real Estate

As you now, there are different cycles to the real estate market and depending on where your readers and subscribers are at, you can send out different messages to different groups.  These are what are sometimes called subgroups.

Here is a bullet list of some of the different subgroups that you could email market to:

• Young couples just looking for that first starter home
• People that have already bought a property from you and you want to stay in touch with them so that they can give you referrals.
• People that are looking for rentals for their college students
• People that are becoming empty nesters because their children have moved on.  As you know, these are people that want to downsize.
• People that want to move into the country.
• People looking for retirement communities.
• Other agents that you are networking with across the country.

In using email to market real estate, you can tailor messages to your subgroups very easily.  The reason you want to do this is so that you can cater to the needs of these people that you have either serviced or will be in the process of serving.  In the case of the above list, it would be a very large stretch of the imagination to try to write a good, fresh message to every one of your subgroups every week.  However, you could cycle through the subgroups and that way you would not have to come up with tons of content; your recipients would probably not feel like you have been emailing them to death either.

When you consider these subgroups, you may have very small lists in them.  This is good believe it or not because a tightly targeted group is far more receptive to you message that a group that is too generalized. I know of a marketer that has 500,000 people on his list.  Guess what? He is a very frustrated individual because he barely does any business.  The reason for this is because he sends out a message that is far too general and hard to maintain.  If your audience feels like they are not being addressed on a level that concerns THEIR NEEDS then they will either delete your message or unsubscribe from your list.

I once had a friend that was trying to sell a piece of land from two states away.  Since the prospect seemed like he was pretty interested in a property, my friend who was really prone to taking action, wanted to send an email and attachment with photographs.  However, when he did so, the photographs were disorganized and he had a hard time explaining to his client over his cell phone certain aspects and features of the property in question.  One of the ways my friend could easily overcome this problem would be with virtual meetings.

Virtual Meetings May Soon be a Reality

There are several online companies that have services which allow you to use the Internet to hold virtual meetings.  One of the companies that is excellent in what they do to provide a platform to give you the ability to hold a virtual meeting is an online company called Go To Meeting.  (www.gotomeeting.com)  With Go To Meeting you can use a webcam to talk to each other while sharing visual documents like pictures, charts and anything else you can think of.  This platform is very versatile because it will allow you to alert people not just by email that you are going to have a meeting, but also by phone.  (Please bear in mind that this system will only work if the other parties involved in the meetings have Go To Meeting’s platform and software installed on their computers as well.)

This system is really pretty versatile in its applications as well.  For one thing, you can have a conferencing session by way of phone and computer at the same time.  If a person is even in their car, they can hear you and other online attendees to the meeting over their phones.  If a client can’t meet with you due to conflicting schedules, you can easily record online audio and video sessions with them and play them back later.  So if a person wants to see a piece of real estate by way of a virtual meeting and their business partner or wife can’t be there, you can always record the session and the client can play it back later for the absent party.

I predict that for businesses and individual clients, virtual meetings for Realtors will be a commonplace reality.   It will save gas and traveling to offices, as well as allow people clear across the country to see pieces of real estate that they might be interested in.

Other Uses of Virtual Meetings for Realtors and Real Estate Professionals

Not only are the presentation opportunities available for this type of a platform, but also you can train staff with it as well.  Go To Meeting has interactive training features that allow for assessments that you may need such as tests, quizzes and polls to gauge the effectiveness of your training even if you are still clear across the country.

If you think for one second that marketing on the Internet is easy, then I have got some real news for you.  It is not.  It is not easy, nor is it something that you do not have to work at.  You have got to write, write, and write to keep that wonderful, fresh content coming that Google likes so much, plus you must implement different strategies. These will be strategies that are spread throughout the week while working off line methods of marketing as well as online.   So, when I mention marketing real estate properties on the Internet, please bear in mind that there is much work that needs to be done.

Learning From Other Real Estate Web Sites

There is another strategy that you can use, that will help you gain an insight and education as to what your real estate prospects are looking for, as far as an agent is concerned.    If you go into Google and look at the top real estate blogs, you will notice that there are certain articles that people are reading and commenting on a lot.  One of the articles I have read recently was from the Your FSBO Expert Blog (http://www.yourfsboexpert.com )

Even though, I fully understand that Your FSBO Expert is for people that are trying to sell their properties without the help of a Realtor or a real estate agent, a realtor or agent can learn some valuable insights from reading the postings as well as comments.  One of the things that I discovered from visiting this site was why people were not satisfied with using an agency to sell their properties.  Most people would probably think that the only reason a seller would rather sell their own property, was because they just wanted to save money.  While this is true in many cases, it is definitely not true in all of them.

Find Out What is Bothering These Sellers

Some of the reasons that people did not want to use a real estate agent were along the lines of unprofessionalism in the agency’s website, lack of caring and attention of the agent, as well as sellers felt that not enough marketing methods were being used by the agency and agent.

When you can easily get insights to the reasons why people try to sell homes themselves, you can adjust your own marketing message and try to address some of these issues in your own sales and marketing plans. How can you, as a real estate professional overcome some of these objections?  If your agency’s website isn’t good enough, perhaps you can hire someone to build a professional one for you or at least start a blog with a professionally built platform.  You can always link your site to the agency’s site even if they have given you your own web page to sell from.

Your Own Website or Blog Can Make All the Difference

If you have a blog, you can write, display pictures and load videos of the properties you have listed and are showing.  This will overcome the objection of not caring for your client or prospect.  How could anyone legitimately say that you are not putting effort into selling or representing a property if you are making blog posts, displaying pictures and videos of their properties?  If you use multiple channels of marketing for your clients, and show them great care, they will always come back to you and refer others to you as well.

By looking at other real estate web sites, blogs and forums and paying attention to what the people there are saying, you could learn to adapt your own marketing strategies.  You could also learn what concerns that your clients and potential clients have and get ahead in the game of marketing and selling to them.

As a real estate sales professional you will have many marketing tasks that you will use to fill up your funnel of potential clients and listings.  One of the smartest things that you can do in any marketing situation is to outsource much of the work you need completed.  In any business, you want to be in a position where you tell others to do the grunt work for you so you can focus on the marketing and sales aspect of your business.   So, in the case of sending out flyers to people you have on your marketing list, you can easily have that outsourced and done so well that it increases the traffic to your open house or event.

Enter Real Estate Marketing Flyers

One of the companies that I have found on the Internet that can get flyers outsourced for you is a company called Next Day Flyers. ( http://www.nextdayflyers.com )  With this company, you can go online and use their already prepared templates to create your marketing message.  You can add your own pictures and logo and easily design the message yourself so that you have full control.  The beauty of Next Day Flyers is that they will also mail the flyers out for you as per your own schedule to the people on your mailing list.   With just a couple of simple clicks of your  mouse buttons, Next Day Flyers can send your marketing message out without any hassle of filling out the address information yourself.  You save loads of time filling out this information,, which will leave your more time for planning, managing and selling personally without doing all of that menial work.

Learn to Write Ad Copy Yourself

I personally think that you should learn how to write your marketing message yourself.   Learning ad copy will save you tons of money because good ad copy writers do not come cheap.  There are quite a few online courses by Dan Kennedy, John Carlton and other great ad copy writers that can show you how to do this.   You may feel that these individuals are charging too much for their courses but you would be wrong.   Ad copy writing is an acquired skill that takes a lot of practice and time to learn, so why not learn it from the best?  If you are really strapped for cash, you may

Marketing Rebel John Carlton

find a copy of their courses on eBay, but you will have to look diligently over a period of weeks.  However, as I said before, you could save both time and money and outsource the work.  If you have a big enough budget, you can hire someone that has experience or you could go the cheaper route and learn to do it yourself.  If you wind up hiring someone just bear this in mind; if the person comes cheap, then chances are that he is not that good because excellent ad copy writers are expensive yet worth it.

Real estate marketing flyers should be considered as a part of your overall marketing strategy; one that you can easily implement without any fuss. In my next Blog Post,  I will show you examples of good  individual ( as opposed to an agency’s site that is given to the agent ) real estate websites and blogs and how you can learn from looking at other peoples more successful sites.

Imagine going to your real estate office and a young couple is sitting there looking through the MLS book and the day before you had an opportunity to go out to several properties they might be interested in and photograph them.  Imagine also, that the properties in question are a considerable distance apart and you would rather not spend all of that gas money and time driving to all of them, especially if a couple of the properties will be eliminated from the list rather quickly.

Before you take the couple out of your office, you reach into your brief case and pull out your Coolpix s1000pj Digital Camera and set it up.  Now the two can look on your wall where you are projecting images of the homes that they are interested in.  Not only are you projecting pictures, but you are also show short video clips that you have taken as well.  They can now see the property and decide whether or not if it is worth their time to drive out and view it.

The Coolpix 1000pj is a great tool or real estate professionals because not only is it able to project clear pictures and videos, but it will allow you to create a slide show with beautiful transition effects. The camera also comes with a projector stand and a wireless remote so you can  present the pictures professionally.

Many of the other features of the Coolpix 1000pj are:

• 12.1 megapixels for high resolution pictures.
• A function called D-lighting which adds exposure effects to under exposed images.
• A skin softening effect from their smart portrait system.
• 5x (5 times) zoom Nikkor lens.
• Subject tracking which helps you track your subject.

Overall, this digital camera will make the job of showing potential real estate buyers properties on the fly and allow you to present them with crystal clarity and professionalism. To find out more about the Coolpix 1000pj – CLICK HERE.

Here is a video from the Nikon Corporation on the Camera:

Here is a real quick video tutorial on how to use the latest in video technology.  Please leave a comment and let me know what you think!

-Mark Ellis