Real Estate Marketing Blog

Postcards are among the real estate world’s best-beloved marketing tools, and it’s easy to see why. These high-impact visual attention-grabbers let agents strike up conversations that personalize advertising and make it less obtrusive. To keep your marketing dialogue heading in the right direction, however, you’ll need to plan an effective, goal-oriented postcard marketing campaign.

What makes an outreach push worthwhile? How should you pick your postcard advertising objectives? It all depends on the agent and market in question, but that doesn’t mean you have to gamble on random chance. Follow these goal-setting tips to empower your next campaign’s success.

Set Direct Mail Objectives That Hold You Accountable

While it’s fine to start by declaring that you want to increase your sales or contact more clients, you need to back those goals up with actual numbers. This is the only way to keep yourself honest and evaluate your campaign’s performance critically.

Helping Your Marketing Team Stay on Point

Defining your goals around objective standards is also essential if you work with others. If your marketing team members or partner agents have clear, numerical targets, such as increasing weekly callbacks by ten or sustaining a specific number of monthly website visitors, they’ll most likely demonstrate enhanced focus.

Being specific may prove critical to laying the groundwork for a successful campaign. Vague objectives only make life harder for everyone involved.

Define Your Direct Mail Audience Before Reaching Out

Always know who you’re targeting with postcards. For instance, if you’re trying to open up a new farm area by making inroads into a competitor’s territory, you should do demographic research first. If you’re selling homes in a luxury development, then you might not want to reach out to quite as many first-time buyers.

Be Considerate of Your Potential Conversation Partners
Real estate postcards are great because they let you initiate contact, but don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s a one-way discussion. The most rewarding interactions occur when agents take the time to understand the people they’re speaking with beforehand. Whether this means using census data or chatting with neighborhood locals and recent buyers to get a feel for their concerns, increasing your knowledge does wonders.

Experiment With Contrasting Approaches
Not every campaign succeeds with every potential client, but that shouldn’t surprise you. Everyone is different, so their responses to the same marketing materials will be accordingly diverse.

It’s your responsibility to adjust the way you address people. Once you’ve completed your demographic research, experiment with reframing your message in various ways to accommodate distinct audiences. For example, a well-to-do couple might appreciate a postcard with a funny image or popular meme more than a nervous first-time homebuyer would.

Choose a Tone That Strengthens Your Message

Even though postcard marketing often serves as an introduction, focusing on who you are shouldn’t be the primary goal. Your personality will come through in your choice of language, so concentrate on selling the dreams that you know you can help clients attain.

Consumers lead busy, hectic lives, so do them a favor by making it easier to evaluate your work. For instance, instead of writing a generic blurb that reveals how many homes you’ve sold, differentiate your services: Mention that you’ve made moving fun for dozens of families or share how you’ve already connected with potential buyers who might be interested in a given area. Including a subtle value proposition is far more convincing than merely boasting about your stats.

Work Incrementally for Sustainable Returns

Since postcards are easy to customize, take this opportunity to break your audience into subgroups and segments. Target each with different variations to hone your outreach practices. Only once you’ve played the field for a while should you finalize your tactics and start marketing en masse.

In some cases, maintaining separate campaigns for different areas and populations is the best strategy for minimizing outreach expenditures. For instance, bilingual agents might promote themselves in varied ways to accommodate unique cultural nuances.

Make Your Direct Mail Visually Distinctive

Finally, remember that people have plenty of other things to look at besides your marketing materials. No matter what your personal tastes are, your postcard’s general aesthetic must appeal to a broad audience and look good in a variety of settings. Do some opposition research, and then partner with a design team that can help you create something fresh enough to land crucial first impressions.

Real estate postcard campaigns enjoy enhanced success when agents take advantage of well-oiled marketing machines. Plant the seeds that help you farm more effectively by discussing your campaign goals with a Reamark specialist.

Photo by Chris Kristiansen on Unsplash

Name recognition is important for real estate professionals. Your name is part of your brand. Building a recognizable brand creates trust within your community. How can agents build name recognition that eventually generates sales and commissions?

First, realize that networking, marketing and name recognition all work together. Done properly, using this triad ensures people know who they can trust when it is time to buy or sell real estate.

Here are eight ways real estate agents can establish name recognition in their communities.

1. Become the go-to person for your chartered local association of REALTORS®. If you don’t have a local chapter, take the lead toward forming one.

2. Stock up on pocket-sized business cards, refrigerator magnets or pens. Never miss an opportunity to introduce yourself, and hand out your contact information.

3. Get caught volunteering. Images in the local paper of you ladling soup at the local shelter, or handing out water during the charity 5K, go a long way toward building your brand – without investing marketing dollars. Since the giving season is just around the corner, this might be a good time to designate your office as a drop-off point for  a Toys-for-Tots drive, or host a giving tree in your lobby.

4. Offer to write a guest blog for local builders, lenders and other industry connections.

5. Give something away. Marketing expert Jay Baer explains in his book, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype,

“if you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life.”

This concept is why items like customized memo boards and recipe calendars are so popular. Update your print and online content that adds value with no strings attached. Think real-time weather and traffic updates added to your website or social media channels. Print media updates might include names and contact numbers for city officials.

6. Speaking of providing value, make sure your social media posts aren’t all about the priced-right-two-story-home in the perfect neighborhood. Share content that teaches people ways to make their life happier, easier or more convenient.

7. On social media, share-worthy contests and quizzes are a great way to expand your brand. Host a photo contest where viewers vote, or maybe create a quiz that tests followers’ home buying knowledge.

8. Build relationships with local and regional influencers. You know who these people are. When they talk, everyone listens. Look for online and on-the-ground community members. Remember, you want to form long-term relationships that complement each other, no one wants to always be on the giving end.

Building name recognition is all about making an emotional connection with your community. ReaMark customer service agents can help you explore customized promotional material that seamlessly complements your marketing and networking strategies.