Blending Reality with the Virtual for Web Leads

Real estate professionals spend a huge portion of their available time marketing and networking for business and sales leads. We spend this time in a great many activities, some with measurable results, and others we simply know work, but not how well. We split our time and resources between offline marketing, like networking, business cards, print ads and more, and our websites, blogs and social media marketing campaigns.

Let's take a marketing leap and look at blending our offline and online marketing for better and more measurable lead generation. We're not talking about just putting our website domain name on our business cards and all other media, as we should already be doing that. All we're going to do now is to focus this concept to better target our prospects with information they will find of interest; and we'll improve our marketing results measurement, as well.

If we use our example site as YourRESite.com, then we'll know that you're already placing that domain on business cards, in print ads, maybe on your car signs, and in any other traditional media you're currently using. Our new approach will take some of our existing campaigns and focus them on more specific groups and interests. Let's use an example direct mail postcard campaign that we're sending into a large subdivision that we farm.

We've been mailing these out periodically, sometimes with seasonal themes, and other times just as a part of an ongoing mailing strategy to keep us top-of-mind until residents consider listing their homes for sale. We can continue this approach, but now we're going to change the domain link and suggest a visit to the new site page for specific information of interest to our postcard recipient.

When we're farming a neighborhood or subdivision, we're sending our mailers to homeowners who will want to list their home for sale at some point in the future. We do all of the normal stuff, telling them we're market experts in their area, and even giving them a few statistics on our postcard. However, space is limited so we're not getting too detailed. Of course we're encouraging them to visit our website to learn more. We can still give them a couple of choice stats, but how about adding a teaser headline question in the next postcard, something like: Want more data? See our Market Quarterly Sold Property Statistics Report at http://YourRESite.com/2013Q3.

We create a landing page with that URL, and it's a market report with more detailed data about sold properties in the neighborhood in the third quarter, even linking them to previous reports once we begin to do these regularly. We also create an annual report for the previous four quarters, but this one we offer as an emailed PDF or link to a PDF due to the longer content length; a way to get their contact information for follow-up marketing.

We've accomplished two really important marketing goals here. First, we can check our website page view stats and see precisely how many people visited from our mailer. Since this landing page was created specifically for this mailer, we can see just how much interest there is and how effective our mailer is at delivering traffic. Also, we've set up a lead generation process by offering an annual report in exchange for their email address and name.

These reports are generally easily created right out of our MLS system software. We create the report in the software and print it out to a PDF file for delivery to our prospect. WebsiteBox makes this easy, as we can create a customized lead form for ordering the annual report, and we can upload the PDF to our site and use that URL to put into the delivery email.

It's time to blend Virtual + Reality marketing for more business!

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.