The Focused Strategy for Generating Real Estate Listings

How much effort and money are you putting into direct mail marketing to generate real estate listings? Farming a neighborhood is a popular and very productive activity, but for many agents, there could be a more effective approach. For our example, we'll assume you're mailing postcards into a farm area for listing leads.

The Results-Oriented Plan

Using our example postcard farming campaign, we're mailing postcards into a neighborhood to generate real estate listings. Often this strategy involves postcards with your previous and sold listings in the area—always of interest to potential sellers.

For our new strategy, we're going to do some of that as well, but we're going to reinforce the strategy with market data and hard numbers, not just telling them how great we are.

Action: Create a Landing Page on Your Website

Create a website landing page for this farming area on your website. Its role is to present information and statistics that will be valuable to and appreciated by the residents who see the link on your mailers and go to the site. Keep it simple for typing, such as http://yoursite.com/Neighborhood. You want them to see the name of their subdivision or neighborhood to build curiosity.

Build a Growing Pressure to Take Action

Each of your postcards is a call to action for the homeowner to go to your website or email you with a question. This is your real estate listing lead, and you want to keep adding to your offerings to build enough curiosity to get them to take action.

Action: Make Contact Easy

In every postcard, have your landing page URL prominently displayed, as well as your email address and phone number for those who have a more urgent need for information. Have some new neighborhood-specific information in each email, as well as a specific call to action.

Information, But Not Too Much

Your goal is to provide something of value in each postcard, so some local sold property data or other specific details are important. However, don't give away the farm, as you need for them to want more so they will contact you or visit your landing page.

Action: Use the Monkey's Paw Strategy

You can get a more complete explanation of the monkey's paw marketing strategy here, but the concept is one of a low barrier to entry offer to get some commitment from the prospect on which to build a relationship and make your sale (get your listing). Here are some examples of using the strategy:

1. You send out a postcard with the information that in the past six months, the average days on market for a listing in the farm area is ## days. You put it in the form of a caution to have a home ready for market and priced properly to cut the time its on the market. Then you offer them the link to your landing page where they can get more market information like this data item.
2. The same situation, but in this case your informational data stated is the average discount to list price at which homes were sold over a previous period. You would say something like, "Homes sold in your neighborhood on average 5.6% below the listing price. Get more information and data to help you in your sales process at [your landing page link]."
3. You're doing the same thing on each postcard, and one could present the average home sold price for a 2-bedroom home as $###,### over a previous period. Then you present your landing page link with the offer of information about the sold prices of larger homes.

You're getting the idea. You present a valuable piece of data, but you offer much more information if they'll go to your landing page. You can also tell them you'll send them a complete market report if they'll email you with Market Report in the subject of their email.

The Landing Page

You can't then give up everything on the landing page, as you will not yet have their contact information. So, give them value, but offer them more with a call-to-action form. Make it something like a complete market sold data report for the previous year or longer.

Action: More Info—Call-to-Action

Once they're on the landing page, you can offer them a number of things to get their contact information. One offer can be a free home valuation. Another is the longer period sold market report. Another could be a customized email alert search of the MLS for new sales in the area.

The point is to take them through a process that offers value at every stage, but it also has a call-to-action at every stage to get that valuable contact information so you'll reach your goal and generate real estate listings.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.