5 Agent Best Practices to Dust Off Your Sphere this Spring

Spring's here – dust off your sphere!

Your sphere of influence (SOI) is more than just a catalog of people you've met. It's the lifeblood of your business—where everything from referrals to listing opportunities and buyer leads can come from. You need to keep your sphere engaged in order to realize its true benefits.

Agents are taught to constantly focus on growing their sphere, but the size of your SOI alone does not necessarily equate to success. To ensure your sphere is the gift that keeps on giving, try these tips to give your SOI a shot in the arm.

Tip #1: Up Your Social Media Game

Social media can be a great tool to keep your sphere engaged. But it can be a huge time-suck if you aimlessly scroll your news feed looking for engagement opportunities. With a little bit of strategy, you can utilize social media to your benefit. Here are a few ways to spur your creative juices:

• Export your contacts to a .CSV file and then upload it to Facebook Business Manager. Once these contacts are uploaded, you can created targeted campaigns and boost your social media posts.
• Try Instagram Stories or Facebook Live to engage your audience with "day-in-the-life" content via video.
• Stay personal, but also use easy tools to automate your social media. Consistency is key to crushing it. Combining your personal touch with more regular posts through automation will give you the biggest results. Cool tools like PIXsocial regularly post fresh, dynamic content per your specifications (plus it gives you lead generation opportunities as well).
• Spend 30 minutes each week personally reaching out to your sphere on social by liking, commenting and engaging with their content.
• Utilize a landing page. Some CRM platforms (like kvCORE) can create a custom landing page for you. A landing page can help expand your SOI but also help nurture those already in it.

Tip #2: Make it Personal

Data suggests that personalization in an email body has an open rate of about 30 percent and a click-through rate of 5.03 percent, as compared to non-personalized emails. What's more, a personalized subject line can help increase open rates by upwards of 29 percent.

If you've tried to engage sphere members who have not responded to other touchpoints, sending a quick and personalized email may do the trick. But what agent has time to send personal emails to members of their sphere? There are tools out there that make this easy and keep your responses personal without you lifting a finger.

Tip #3: Use Automation to Stay Top of Mind

You can't expect your sphere to remember or engage with you if you're only communicating with them sporadically. A great marketing drip-campaign can keep a steady flow of touchpoints rolling so you stay top of mind.

Automation features can work behind the scenes to keep a steady flow of communication going, and use behavioral automation to know when and what to send to your leads and prospects. Marketing software like PIXmarketing automatically posts your listings to your Facebook and Twitter profiles, plus creates an entire suite of digital and print marketing materials. Tools like this keep you top of mind and also free up your time, both critical for top producing agents.

Tip #4: Use Technology to Your Advantage

Perhaps the hardest thing for agents trying to dust off their SOI is determining who to reach out to and when. This is particularly challenging if you have a large sphere that has been accumulated over years of being in the business.

Enter technology. With advances in predictive scoring, state-of-the-art CRMs can help you identify who within your sphere is mostly likely to transact based on marriage or divorce records, birth records, and other publicly available data. This can also be combined with behavioral data alerting you to who is most active (looking at properties, viewing your site, opening your emails, etc.), which can help you make smart and hyper-targeted decisions about who to contact and when.

Tip #5: Pick Up the Phone

When in doubt, pick up the phone to make that personal connection and help move mid-funnel contacts into active leads. It's a tried and true method. But there's a 21st century solution to help make this less painless, and strategic.

With a mobile dialer like Call Q from kvCORE, agents are given a daily list of contacts they need to reach out to. What's more, the mobile dialer allows you to see who the lead is, why you should contact them, and then allows you to dial with one-tap. It's a no-brainer for streamlining the agent workflow and for making strategic sphere touchpoints.

Engaging Your Sphere with the Right Tools

At the end of the day, being able to engage your sphere (and not spend hours each day doing it) rests on what type of tools you have in your lead nurturing arsenal. Even the best agents can get quickly overwhelmed with the volume of touchpoints needed to keep leads warm and referrals coming in. But they don't have to with the right tools and technology in place. When your marketing, social media and lead nurturing are on autopilot, you can focus on showing more homes and closing more deals.

To view the original article, visit the Inside Real Estate blog.