Posts Tagged ‘real estate marketing’

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.

Before the advent of the Internet, real estate marketers had to rely on media such as radio, TV, the Yellow Pages and newspapers to generate leads for their real estate sales and listings. Despite the power and draw of the Internet in the real estate marketplace today, a Realtor or agent can still use offline medial to generate interest in their listings and services.  Newspapers, TV, radio, and especially direct mail, plus all of the other traditional ways of advertising should still be a part of your marketing plan.

Here are a couple of tips that you can use to build your print media off-line marketing plan in generating real estate leads:

1. In the real estate realm, there are many related publications that you may be able to use.  Now, you don’t want to use real estate publications, but if there are magazines that focus on local issues and articles, then you may want to get some ads or articles placed in those periodicals.
2. You should know your real estate geographic target market.  If you are in a big city, you should have a good idea of who you will be selling to and in which location.  In these areas, try to find out which publications are popular and then try to target the publications that are most related to your business.  If you are dealing with upscale people then the local upscale metro magazine should be a great place for you to put a small advertisement with your web address and contact information on it.
3. If you are a pretty successful Realtor that handles vacation properties, try to find out which national publications that you can get into that will help you market seasonal properties.  Seasonal rentals, vacation properties, time shares, etc. are great for this type of marketing idea.
4. To break down the best method to generate the types of real estate leads that you want you can run print ads in different publications and have your web address a phone number in the ads that you run.  If the prospect calls your toll free number, then you can have a service set up (at a modest price, of course) so that it will automatically take their contact information.  If the prospects go to your site after seeing your real estate ads, then they can simply fill out a form that is on your website so that you can call them and talk to them about what you have to offer them.

Bear in mind when placing these advertisements to generate real estate leads that you are getting collateral prospects that quite possibly most other real estate professionals and Realtors may not be considering.  A large number of people are looking on line these days so don’t expect a flood with printed media.  Also, you may want to start collecting small advertisements from several magazines which will give you an idea of how to write a small ad with a call to action on it.  If you want to write a bigger ad with a larger advertising space, expect to pay for it.  These types of advertisements, even in local periodicals and papers can still run you quite a bit of money.

In the last blog post, wrote about how you could use Google Maps to get prospects to come to your open house.  In this blog post, I will show you how you can create great, effective and professional looking real estate flyers to generate qualified interest in your real estate services and listings.

Real estate advertising has evolved from the printed page into internet marketing from the old days when people used to use news paper ads and even flyers. Today, most real estate advertising is usually done online, which has become the predominant method of selling real estate.  As a matter of fact, over 80% of all people looking for a home that was surveyed stated that they look for homes on the Internet first over any other method.  However, real estate leads and letting people know that your client’s home is up for sale in the bricks and mortar world with a flyer would definitely attract possible buyers to visit your location. Fliers are an integral part of real estate marketing, because these are the marketing vehicles that people will look at if they bump into you or come to your open house.  In this article I will give you step by step directions on how you can create great flyers for your own real estate marketing plan.

I have listed here, a step by step guide as to how to create a great real estate flyer that you can use to promote any open house or event you might have.

Identify your Real Estate Market Before You Make Your Real Estate Flyer

When you are trying to decide what type of flyer content you are going to need, you must consider your audience and ensure that you make different types of flyers that can be used for different situations. You should make flyers that relate to the different types of people it will be used for in order for it to be effective and interesting. You will also need to consider what understand what the different groups of people will need and think about how you can design an advertisement out of that market.  If you can make the real estate flyer relevant and hit a particular need, then this will help you increase their interest in what you have to offer.

Decide On What Type of Art and Layout You Will Need

When you are trying to figure out the best type of design for a real estate flyer there are a couple of things you need to think about.  First of all you will want to consider the size of the flyer, color of the background, as well as the number of pictures and types of photos.  The reason you need to first consider the size of your flyer is because the price depends on the size, and when you think about all of the information that you will be putting on them they will have to be easy to read. We will also need to think about the text fonts and the finish on the paper.  Now, when you begin thinking about your color scheme, you will want to consider your company’s branding and use of color. Try to use a color scheme that will catch a person’s eye while using the colors of your company’s logo or advertising design.  You don’t want to use colors that are too bright or florescent because it makes the flyers, as well as your real estate business, look cheap.

You are going to of course think about the number of photos that you will be placing on your flyer, and as the size of the flyer will naturally affect the size and the number of the photographs on your advertisement.  If you have room to include pictures of the property, then try to use the rooms that people are most concerned with, such as the kitchen. You should also choose your most professional looking photograph to place on any of your advertisements.  One of my pet peeves in real estate marketing is seeing female realtor’s pictures that look like they were made at the photography vendor, “Glamour Shots.”  Ladies, have those kinds of pictures made for your husbands or boyfriends; when it comes to the sales business of real estate, you should get the most professional business picture you can afford.  You are trying to sell and represent a real estate business, not attract the opposite sex.

In my next blog post, I am going to tell you how to write content for your real estate flyer so that it will create a need for real estate leads and prospects to contact you about the services or properties that you are representing.

It doesn’t take very much brain power to figure out that if you are reading this blog you are probably going to hear about the virtues of getting real estate leads through the use of technology. If you are one of the any real estate agents that I meet every day that has not made the leap into the 21st Century, well, then let me just say, “Wake up and get on board!” You are definitely going to hear me advise you to get into technology here because if surveys and demographics are correct, almost a whopping 80 to 90% of the people looking to buy real estate today are using the Internet or at least some sort of technology to find a home.

Many real estate professionals that are not using real estate technology to get real estate leads or at least communicate with clients and past clients only do so because they are intimidated by it. Perhaps you are an older agent that has only been using a cell phone because using a computer and the Internet seems so vast and intimidating to you. One of the reasons for this is because there are so many websites, online services, blogs, applications, tools and software that you can use that you may get confused looking at the list or options that are available to you. Well don’t despair, because you really only need to learn a few of these things well to get ahead in the technology end of acquiring clients.

To give you an example, I have been involved in online marketing for almost 10 years. I have had several online businesses that not only operated in the online world but also in the real bricks and mortar world as well. Now please bear in mind that the tools that I am about to tell you about are the tools that I use, you don’t or won’t need t use all of these if you don’t want to.

Tools for Acquiring Real Estate Sales Leads

The technology tools that I generally use from day to day are as follows:
1. Software
a. Adobe Dream Weaver – This is a great software program that allows me to build great web pages.
b. Adobe Photoshop – Over the years this has become a personal passion of mine, but basically it is a high- end graphics program that allows me to alter photographs.
2. Blog Platforms /Websites
a. WordPress Blog – This blog platform is free to use and is the premier blog on the Internet to use. You can also use Google’s Blogger which is actually easier for novices to use.
b. HostGator – I use Dreamweaver to build my site but I use HostGator to Host with.
3. Social Bookmarking Tools
a. Facebook – If you know what you are doing you can leverage Facebook’s social networking attraction to gain clients and get great real estate sales leads. However, you will need to invest time and patience in building your network online.
b. Twitter – Twitter is great to use because after you have used their application considerably and posted your links on the site from time to time people will find and come to your website.

Jott.com is an inexpensive and powerful tool for real estate marketers and sales people. Jott is a system that allows you to send voice messages out to other people’s cell phones as a converted text message. This voice messaging system can save a real estate sales professional precious time because it creates short 60 second messages that deliver exactly what you want to say concisely. Here are a couple of other things Jott can do for your business:

1. You can utilize Google’s Calendar program to post times for call in meetings or events that you will be having.
2. You will have the ability to convert voice messages into text messages and then send them to specified contacts on your list.
3. Reminders can be set in the Jott system which will send you a text message when you need to be reminded of an event or important task.

Setting up Jott is relatively easy, just go to www.Jott.com and set up a free account. Once you are finished with that, you will be able to input clients and business partner’s names so that you can send out a message to everyone on your list. You can then enter your message enter your message by voice which will then be converted into a computerized text message (These short messages are called Jotts, just like Twitter calls its short messages “tweets”.) The Jott system will then send out the voice message to everyone on your list.

I used the free account that Jott offered just to see how well it worked. When I called into the system a voice came on that said, “Who do you want to Jott?” I then sent myself a converted voice into text message by simply telling the system to send it to my account. It was really a very easy system to learn and use.

Jott is a Great Tool for Real Estate Agents to Save Time With

I can easily see where this service would save a Realtor or sales agent a lot of time. For one thing, it would help you avoid lengthy conversations that usually occur whenever you need to tell a client or business partner something. For example, if you wanted to tell a buyer that their offer has been accepted, then all you would have to do is say the name of the client when you called up your Jott account. Just like magic, the Jott system would send out the voice message in the form of an email. Jott will also send you an email confirmation letting you know that it has delivered your message.

Jott also can be used with other online applications like Google’s Calendar. By simply calling into Jott, you can tell the system what app to use by using one word commands. If you wanted to place an event into Google’s Calendar, just simply say the word “Google” and say something like, “Meet Freddy at 4:45 on Monday at Fanzoli’s Restaurant for meeting.” Jott will then convert that message into text, and then send it to your Google Calendar where it will appear in text form.

There are many more functions and features that you can use with this program, so much more than I would be able to go into here. However, you can jump over to Jott’s website at: http://www.Jott.com to get a free account and start checking the system and some of these features out.

Email Marketing for Real Estate Agents Part IV

In my last blog post I wrote extensively about how a real estate professional should use quality email marketing pieces and never, ever spam anyone for any reason.  Today I’m going to write to you about one of the lists that you should learn to put together called the “announcement list”.

The announcement list is just exactly as it sounds.  It is a list that specifically talks about blog updates, product announcements, or anything that is of a particular interest in your target subgroup or list.  (To see more about subgroups, go to one of my last blog posts on email marketing.)

Now, if you create one of those lists, you can then put on your salesman hat, because people want to know about new products that have either developed or are basically selling from your web site.  This list is probably one of the most profitable subgroups that you can have in email marketing because they are EXPECTING you to send them information on the products that you are selling.  Now, if you have a good readership, reputation and people have come to respect your sage advice, then chances are, you will make good money from a list like this and you won’t see too many unsubscribe notices from them either.

There are marketers that are out on the Internet that make considerable money from lists like this and there is nothing at all wrong with it.  As a matter of fact, there is everything right with doing business this way, just make sure that you have an opt-in list and that you never spam anyone for any reason.

There are however, several basic types of email announcements for real estate agents that can deliver these types of messages and they are as follows:

1. Free Trial Offers – If you are a part of an affiliate program or know of a certain type of item that you can backend and make some extra money, then you can get an individual to try the service or program out.  You don’t have to sell you own product or service and there are loads of companies that will have free trial built into their affiliate programs as well.
2. E-zine Articles – If you publish a regular online newsletter this can be a very viable way of delivering a targeted message to people.  You can easily disguise advertisements as product reviews and critiques without appearing too salesman like.  Also, this type of format could be seen as another entirely different subgroup wherein you could inform other publishers that you have an article they can use in their newsletter.
3. E-books – I have used this method extensively and it works great.  You can make e-books (.pdf files) on specific subjects and have them on your website available for free downloading.  You can put all sorts of affiliate links in those e-books and in some cases the affiliate companies will even let you customize them with your affiliate number so you can make money from it.

In my next post I am going to try to do a recap of some of the most important aspects of email marketing before moving on to another subject.

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 knew a contractor that built beautiful homes, but he made a terrible mistake one time when he decided to build a small subdivision of homes instead of his usual one house at a time business.  Since he had quite a few houses to build, he hired a subcontractor to do the foundations for him instead of doing it himself like he usually did.  Actually, he made two mistakes, the second one being he did not closely supervise and watch the subcontractor that was putting in the foundations.  When he started to build his houses, he noticed that parts of the concrete in which he was building his homes on were beginning to crumble at the edges.  Much to his terror, he found out that the contractor had really screwed up all of the foundations that he had put in, and that he had already started to erect most of his homes.   In effect his multi home project was an ineffective disaster.  Internet marketing is just like that.  You need to have a solid foundation to build your Internet business on and that foundation is email marketing.

Why Email Marketing for Real Estate Agents is so Important

As a matter of fact, it is just about impossible to have an Internet based business or presence unless you use email marketing to some degree.  If you are a Realtor or real estate agent, you will find several good uses for email and email marketing.  The number one principle that you need to be aware of is that your clients, past clients, and business contact lists are your number one priority.  As a millionaire once told me, “the list is gold! “  Your lists, building your lists and their quality should be your number one priority because the better you build your foundation, the stronger your Internet presence (house) will be.

There are four principals that you need to consider in order to build email aspect of your online business:

1. Your email marketing list must be educational.  People are always looking for good, quality information on the Internet.  This is one of Google’s highest priorities when ranking sites in order of their popularity on the World Wide Web.  If the content of a web site or blog provides quality content on a regular and consistent basis, then chances are it will rank pretty high.
2. Your email marketing list must be effective.  You need to have lists that are highly targeted and focused if you are going to make money online.
3. Your email list must be diverse.  You need a set of lists that are broken down into different demographic groups.  You are going to find out rather quickly that while your audience may seem as one group you will find that there are people on it that are looking for different things.  You need to be sensitive to those needs and tailor different messages to each specific group.
4. Your list must also be very proactive.   You must build your lists by aggressively marketing to customers and enticing them to join up to your list or newsletters.

The next post, I will talk more about the different lists that you will build and how you can begin to focus on those small, tightly focused groups to make money or gain real estate clients.

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.