How Distraction Real Estate Marketing Pieces Help Your Farming Efforts

Real estate postcard farming is a difficult thing for many real estate professionals to swallow. First off, you are spending your own hard earned money on it. Secondly, geographic real estate farming is a process. It takes many months to build your brand awareness and start to pick up measurable results.

It also requires lots of planning, ensuring that you truly understand who your "ideal client" is, and what materials and content would not only appeal to them most, but also make them consider you the thought leader in your marketplace. That planning the content part is where many quickly figure out that the devil truly is in the details.

Even if you avoid the traps of making your marketing about yourself only, and inconsistently hitting your farm area with marketing pieces, even the very best content can fatigue homeowners, thereby working against your plans and reducing the chances that you will become dominant in your marketplace.

The question becomes, what do you do? The answer is simple:

To effectively keep the attention of homeowners in your marketplace, you have to sometimes give them a "shock to the system." The easiest way to do this is with a distraction marketing piece.

What Is a Distraction Real Estate Marketing Piece?

A good real estate marketing distraction piece has two elements:

1) The piece has nothing to do with real estate

You have been sending real estate related marketing pieces to homes in your farm area for many months. Once a homeowner becomes familiar with your brand and your image, they’ll see your pieces, immediately look at them and then think, "Oh, it’s a just another piece from Company XYZ and they want to tell me about how they can sell my home."

What happens if they aren’t yet ready to sell their home? The answer is simple. Over time, your messages become less and less a part of their consciousness, as they are still not anywhere near the point of selling their home. You are not building a relationship with them anymore.

2) The piece you send has to be value added

This is where the rubber meets the road with these real estate distraction marketing pieces. You have to truly find something that is not real estate related, BUT also will be deemed value added by homeowners in your marketplace. If you can do this, you will win.

Value added pieces that are not only just nice to send, but also resonate with a homeowner, give them the feeling of, “Oh wasn’t that nice of Your Name to send this to me. It is really cool and I’m going to hang onto it." You are now continuing to build a relationship with this homeowner.

Okay, I Get It. Now How Do I Figure Out What a Good Distraction Piece Is?

There are many, many ways you can find content for distraction real estate marketing pieces. For instance, my marketing firm specializes in creating content such as this for real estate professionals all over the country. That said, there are multiple places online where you can find information that would serve as distracting and value added as well. You just have to have a theme or subject matter in mind and Google it.

Some Ideas To Get You Started

My favorite suggestions for distraction marketing pieces generally revolve around things that will last more than a few days or a week. In fact, the longer, the better. For instance, how about one of these?

1. An Art and Wine Festival Postcard - Many towns have nearby festivals and concerts that span many months.

2. A Holiday Events Guide - Tip: Choose events for ALL religions and interests. That makes it span a much longer period of time.

3. A Seasonal Piece - Highlight things like best golf courses, or any other local attraction type that there are a lot of in your marketplace. The idea is to create a sort of checklist for homeowners to check out.

So as you can see, many different types of pieces can be created that will not only “flip the script” on the mindset of homeowners in your marketplace, but also give them a great feeling about you and how thoughtful you are, thus nurturing and building the relationships you have with homeowners in your marketplace.

Want To Boost It with Even More Power?

As they always say, “Why go to 10, when you can go to 11?” If you really want to get the most out of your pieces while still leveraging them to build up other your marketing platforms, giving the homeowner “some of the info” on the marketing piece and using something, such as a capture marketing tool, to get them to give you their contact info in order to get an entire schedule, list, etc. is a great idea.

When you do that, you are using one form of marketing to build up another one (like your email marketing list), AND also finding out, in real-time, how much value homeowners think your value added real estate farming pieces offer.

It doesn’t get much better than that!