What Is the Best Real Estate Marketing Campaign?

When it comes to our website and our Internet traffic, one thing I love is analytics. I love digging in, seeing who is hitting which pages, finding out where our traffic is coming from, which Facebook ads are outperforming others, and even which blog posts are getting the most reads.

The other thing I really love is reading through the lists of keywords people are typing into their search engines to find us. One thing that I see time and again has to do with what the "best" or "perfect" real estate marketing campaign is. To that end, today I'll share with you some key considerations in implementing the best real estate marketing campaign possible.

Love the Farm You Pick

This may sound like an obvious thing to focus on, but I cannot tell you how many times we come across Realtors that are spending thousands of dollars on a farm area they don't like, with homeowners they don't like, in areas of town they don't like. This is not the way to start a successful real estate farming campaign.

Remember the saying, "Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life"?

The same holds true for your geographic farm area. If you choose an area of town you love, that has homes you love, with a community of homeowners you like and truly want to serve, you are just going to do better. People are smart animals. They will see how genuine your desire to help is, you will give them a good feeling, and they will gravitate towards you when the time comes to choose a Realtor.

Aside from being well liked in your farm area by homeowners, loving your farm area will also psychologically benefit you. Real estate is a demanding job that requires lots of hours of work, morning, night and even weekends. It can take a toll. If you love what you are doing and where you are doing it, though, that will ease some of that tension and stress, ensuring you get everything done and succeed.

Do Your Research

Researching your real estate farm area before you pull the trigger on a marketing campaign is critical on two fronts.

First, research the market activity in the area. Even though you may be in love with an area, if there is zero sales activity, or very low activity, you may want to reconsider and look for a similar area that has a higher turnover rate. Remember, you are going to be spending your hard earned money on this campaign. You want every opportunity to build your business and get a good return on your investment. Picking an area with a very low turnover rate will pretty much ensure you either will get no return, or it will take many, many years to realize a return on your investment.

Second, research the people that live in the farm area you are looking to market your real estate practice to. Every marketplace is different and therefore every homeowner is different. The whole point of a real estate farming campaign is to educate homeowners with content they deem relevant and valuable, making you the thought leader in your farm area. When you are deemed the thought leader in your farm area, it is an automatic guarantee that, at bare minimum, you will get a phone call to at least present at a listing appointment when a homeowner is thinking of selling.

With the Internet being what it is, background and demographic research on any  farm area is not only possible, but pretty easy to put together.

Pinpoint and Own Your Shortcomings/Weaknesses

At a certain point in this process, you are going to have to sit down and have a very honest conversation with yourself. First off, there are going to be things you are good at and things you are not. If your campaign is going to require anything you are not good at, before you send out anything at all, you are going to have to find someone that knows how to perform that service/skill, thus ensuring you don't have any holes in your marketing plan.

Additionally, you have to consider that there are only 24 hours in the day and you have to figure out if you have the bandwidth (translation: time) to carry out this campaign on your own. If you currently do have the time, you also have to consider what would happen should you get very busy with clients and listings.

Remember, consistency is everything when planning a marketing campaign. You simply MUST remain relentlessly consistent if you want to succeed in farming and want to grow your business.

If you are finding you may not have the time available to devote to a consistent marketing campaign, you should consider hiring a firm that specializes in planning and executing marketing campaigns for Realtors.

Plan Your Budget

Equally important to having a plan in place is reviewing your budget to ensure you have enough funds available to succeed.

Deciding how many homes you should farm can be a very difficult question to answer. While real estate postcard farming is a numbers game, again, the key point here is that you want to be relentlessly consistent, hitting mailboxes every single month, without fail. Additionally, geographic farming is a process, so you have to keep in mind that if this is a new farm, it's going to take a good six to eight months to build a presence and start making money in your farm area.

So the key best practice here is to do as many homes as you can, but only as many as you can comfortably pay for, every single month, without fail. But you also need to afford to pay during the ramp-up period when you are getting your name out there and building your momentum.

Plan Your Campaign

Another key element is planning your campaign in advance. When our firm helps Realtors with their marketing campaigns, we create an outline for the agent that specifically details every month and what the topic of each postcard is going to be. This is critical to the success of a farming campaign.

The fact is that you are eventually going to get busy, or simply one day run out of marketing ideas. If you plan everything out in advance, it doesn't matter how busy you get, you will have everything planned and just happening in the background.

Does that mean you can't make changes to your campaign? Of course not. The key takeaway is to pre-plan for the worst case scenario. As long as you have every month covered, should you get slammed with clients and listings, you will never fail.

Measure Your Campaign

Most obvious to us, but something we see tons of Realtors missing the boat on, is the idea of measuring the results of your marketing campaign. Simply thinking, "I'll know the campaign is working when I get a call and list a home," is not measuring your campaign.

Tracking each individual mailing, and actually each individual piece to every homeowner is critical if you want to find out who is interested in what you are sending, who is immediately ready to sell, who wants to sell down the road and needs some extra attention to nurture them, etc. To do this, you need to have some sort of tracking mechanism in place.

My personal favorite farming measurement tool is capture marketing. That said, there is more than one way to track your campaign. No matter what you choose, just be sure you are measuring your farming campaign and regularly analyzing the results.

Analyzing these results, and adjusting your campaign accordingly, will make sure that you maximize your chances of success with your farming campaign, grow your real estate practice, and get the results you so richly deserve.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.