Real Estate Marketing Blog

Here are eight marketing ideas to help new real estate agents kickstart their business by generating leads. While digital technology provides fantastic opportunities to market your business, it’s important not to forget the human touch can be just as effective–it’s definitely what helps clients and potential clients remember who you are.

1. Engage Clients and Prospective Clients on Social Media

Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are all great platforms to engage with your audience. However, blowing up your feed with market updates, listings and tips isn’t the way to go about it. Think strategically, and notice what’s working on each channel, then focus on developing that content further for each platform you use. For example, Facebook users love contests but Instagram viewers might prefer a look behind the scenes of your business.

2. Stand Out with Handwritten Notes

Go old school to differentiate yourself in the market by ordering branded notepads with your business information on each page. Provide these to prospective clients as a courtesy gift, which also nets great advertising opportunities for you! In addition, people love to get handwritten notes thanking them for their time and business. Remember to write them on your branded notepad and enclose a magnet or other small token with your information on it. This gives your clients something to pass on to new leads.

3. Host Local Neighborhood Tours

Personal engagement is the best way to market your business, especially if you’re great at coming up with fun, useful events. Host neighborhood tours that show your expertise and knowledge of the area. Whether you live in a historic metro area or an idyllic suburb with lots of charm, find memorable ways to showcase each neighborhood. Remember to take down contact information to send thank you messages and soft-sell your real estate services.

A great way to get the word out about your neighborhood tour would be to send EDDM postcards to your farm and customize the design with your event details! Our professional real estate marketers can help you craft a design that really stands out!

4. Claim Your Business on Google

Claiming your business on Google opens up another marketing channel and protects your professional identity. Here’s how to do that.

Go to https://www.google.com/business/ and sign into your Google business account or create a new one.
Once you’ve logged in, search by your business name and address in the search box. Results appear in list form and on a map. Choose the business you want to claim. Click on “Add Your Business” to add a new business and follow the instructions to complete the appropriate business type and service area or brand.
You also need to verify that the business you claim is yours. The verification code is mailed to you within two weeks. Once you enter the code, you can manage your Google business information.

5. Giveaways Help People Remember You

Customers appreciate the freedom and convenience of digital communication. However, first impressions matter and everyone loves to receive gifts. Order a good supply of business cards, magnets, and pens with your name and brokerage information on it. Remember to give a few of each item to potential leads so that they can pass your information on to friends and family members looking to buy or sell a home. When pens, notepads and other swag with your contact information gets passed around, it increases your exposure and provides new opportunities to gain clients.

6. Offer Free Home Valuations on Your Site

Capturing seller leads online is very difficult. One way to get sellers to give up their information is through a free home valuation tool. Real Geeks has a tool that you can add to your website. Once a seller enters a few key pieces of data, they receive a valuation report with frequent updates available. In return, you collect email addresses for your distribution list.

7. Make Your Website Your Storefront

In the real estate market, your website is your storefront. Build a mobile-friendly site to attract lots of organic traffic to increase your lead generation. Make sure to hard sell what differentiates you from the competition and pay close attention to the quality of any listings you post. For example, photography on every piece of your marketing needs to be top-notch.

8. Fun Staging with Quirky Items

The common wisdom is that staging should be tasteful and use subtle tones that appeal to a wide array of buyers. However, adding one or two quirky items gives clients a talking point and helps make your listing memorable.

Staying in touch with clients and reaching out to prospective clients keeps your real estate business at the forefront of their minds. A person may not be ready to buy a house or sell his or her house just yet, but if you keep reminding that person that you are the real estate agent that can get the deal done, you’re going to be the one that person calls when it is time. So, just how do you stay in touch without being pushy? Send your prospective clients little reminders in the form of gifts that are usable.

Pick the Right Time to Send Reminders

In addition to sending the right gift, you need to pick the right time to send the gift. If you are sending a baseball schedule, you need to send that a few weeks before baseball season starts. If you send it in the middle of the season, or even worse, at the end of the season, it’s going to be chucked in the trash. Calendars should be sent before the end of the old year. If your prospective client buys a calendar, guess where yours might end up. Timing is everything, so when you choose a reminder gift to send out, keep that timing in mind.

Baseball Schedules

The 2019 MLB season is set to start on March 28 this year. You still have time to order baseball schedules for your local teams and get them to your current and prospective clients. Schedules may be ordered on full magnets, magnetic business cards, magna cards and laminated wallet cards.

4^th Of July Postcards

It’s always nice to be remembered on holidays and that goes for clients. Show your clients some love by sending them a 4^th Of July postcard. Choose from several designs including recipes for July.

Summer Recipe Postcards

During the summer, people are always looking for new recipes to try for summer gatherings. Pick our recipe cards for the summer months to send to your clients once every month. The recipes are all mouth-watering and easy to make, so your clients are sure to keep them around—and will see your name every time they make the recipe on the card.

Football Schedules

Preseason usually starts in August of every year, so you have plenty of time to order those football schedules for clients that are football fans. As with the baseball schedules, pick a format that goes best with your clientele.

Market Updates

People who are selling their homes want results, which means a quick sale for the best price possible. This means real estate agents are usually questioned about the number of sales they made in the past few months plus the number of sales that were within a certain percentage of the listing price. You can answer your clients’ questions by sending out market updates every month. By choosing a custom “Just Sold” postcard, you can add up to 10 photos of sold homes to let your clients know you get results.

Magnetic Memo Pads

Something that is always used is a memo pad. Many keep a magnetic memo pad on the fridge to write down items they need to pick up next time they go to the store. Or they may use it to jot down a phone number or other information. This is one “reminder” that you know will keep your name in your clients’ minds since it’s hanging on the fridge. And, your clients’ guests will see it too—you may even get a prospective client who inadvertently sends you a new client.

Visit ReaMark for Your Advertising Needs

Stop by our website or contact us to order a catalog with all the personalized items that will help keep your business in front of your prospective clients’ minds.

One of the most trusted, proven marketing strategies for real estate professionals is direct mail postcard campaigns. There are several reasons real estate postcard campaigns are so effective.

• They can be targeted to a specific “farm” or zip code
• They can be custom designed
• They build brands and gain attention
• They are less expensive when sent in volume

In addition, real estate postcards and mailers can be sent to serve as timely reminders or include pertinent valuable information creating a longer shelf life. Examples include time-change postcard reminders and sports schedules or home and garden tips.

When real estate professionals build year-long campaigns using these powerful marketing tools, their effectiveness increases as potential prospects turn into leads and leads become sales.

One of the biggest mistakes those in real estate can make in planning a postcard campaign is not setting the right objectives. Here are some thoughts to keep in mind.

Four Tips for Setting Postcard Marketing Campaign Objectives

Know the Value of a Qualified Lead and Prospect

When setting objectives it is important to know the value of a quality or qualified lead and prospect. In real estate, this value can be quite high. Knowing this helps set the proper expectations for a real estate postcard campaign and the resources you invest in it. A single quality lead can ultimately be worth thousands of dollars to a real estate professional. If a postcard campaign returns several of these quality leads, it can pay significant dividends.

Determine Your Core Objectives

If your core objective is to gain immediate leads, your message may need more urgency than if you are building your brand and nurturing potential leads. For example, a postcard that touts the sale of a nearby home or new listing, or other area real estate-related news may have more urgency than a postcard that has a seasonal recipe. Keep in mind any contact with a postcard still increases name recognition and exposure.

Know Who You are Targeting and Why

Real estate postcard campaigns are not meant to be “mass marketing.” Real estate postcard marketing campaigns are generally targeted to a specific geographic area, demographic, income level or style of home. This eliminates waste by focusing your efforts on the group of prospects with the most potential value to you. The better you define your target market, the clearer your objectives can be and the more likely you will achieve them.

Test and Track Your Results

There are a lot of variables that need to be taken into account in creating real estate postcard objectives. Is it a buyers’ or sellers’ market? Do you already have a reputation in the business or are you building one? What are you asking recipients to do? If, for example, you are giving away a valuable prize and only want recipients to sign up on your website, you will likely get more responses that if you initially ask them to request a free in-home appraisal. Test various types of cards with differing calls to action to determine expectation and objectives for your next campaign.

We Can Help!

For almost two decades ReaMark has been helping real estate professionals create, design and implement successful postcard campaigns. We can assist you. Our professional staff will help you develop a campaign that will be effective and that meets and exceeds your expectations. We offer free design assistance and a wide selection of products created to deliver results. We can even help in creating your EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) campaign. Contact us today and meet your objectives for real estate season with ReaMark!

Photo credit: Natalia Łyczko on Unsplash

Hello I’m Richard Brown, President of ReaMark. I have been in direct marketing for over 30 years with the last 18 years helping real estate professionals like you, to substantially increase their listings, sales, and ultimately, their income.

There has never been a better time to improve your business by using a consistent strategy to contact anyone who knows you and can refer clients. All signs are pointing to a steady rise in the real estate business since interest rates are at record lows. In addition, home inventory  is still low so listings are being sold quickly and for top dollar.

Each year I take hundreds of calls from realtors. The same question comes up time and time again, “Rick, what works best? How can I make more money?”

So, last week I sat down, got away from the kids, and really thought about all of the success stories, trials and errors that realtors have told me during the past two years.

• With all being equal why are some realtors more successful than others?
• What does actually work?
• What makes top agent?
• How can my business survive when I have less money to spend because I am making less money?

One fact that kept coming up is that my business only makes money if the programs we recommend to you makes YOU money. To that end, I came up with a few things you should be doing if you are serious about increasing your yearly income.

Four Real Estate Marketing Strategies for 2019

Reach Out to Past Clients

You MUST reach out to your Past Client contact list at least every month. Over 50% of your business should come from referrals. If you are not mailing to this specific contact list you are losing money. Your Past Client contact list should includes your colleagues, past buyers and sellers, friends and family. The larger the list, the more successful you will be. You really need to sit down and put this lists into a workable database.

Utilize Postcards to Market Yourself

Announce your success! Since referrals are the largest part of your business and you want to build up your contact list, these are the second most effective tool at your disposal. You should mail the entire neighborhood and also your current contact list. Our Just Listed/ Just Sold, Market Updates and Open House postcards are a great way to showcase the strength of your business. If your budget is limited, these could be part of your planned monthly marketing, but for maximum results, you should be doing these mailings in addition to the ones you send out to your Current Contacts.

Track Your Results

The beauty of direct marketing is that is affordable and track able. If you have 400 contacts, you could be mailing them twelve times per year for as little as 47 cents each or $188 per month. One sale and you’ve paid for the entire year!

Become Known as the Specialist of Your Farm

A business with no prospects will die. You need a reliable, consistent source of leads. Since most consumers perceive all real estate professionals to be pretty much the same you must find ways to differentiate yourself. I get calls every day from past customers offering thanks for orders placed two years ago. These agents and brokers tell me they now get 50% plus of all listings in their neighborhood because of our marketing materials!

Walk your neighborhood twice per year, create compelling online content, submit articles to local publications, and/or advertise in neighborhood newspapers, send out newsletters and be the one to consistently educate your community on the local real estate market.

I feel great about sharing these strategies with you for a very simple reason: if we can help you become more successful in your business then ReaMark will be more successful in our business. Call one of our Marketing Specialists today at 1-800-932-2957 and we will work with you to create a real estate marketing plan to help you meet your budgets and sales goals!

I hope this letter has been helpful, confirmed the efforts you are already making or inspired you to call us. If I can help, please don’t hesitate to call me directly.

Regards,

Richard J. Brown
President
ReaMark

Photo credit: by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash

Traditional mail and email may seem like opposites, but in the real estate world, they go together like peanut butter and jelly. You can use these tools to target different audiences, build authority, nurture leads or reinforce your current message, so there’s no lack of strategic outreach options. Here are some reasons realtors love combining traditional mail and email.

How Realtors Can Use Direct Mail and Email Together

The Value of Direct Marketing in the Digital Age

Think you’ll win the most hearts by enabling your farms’ addictions to email and social media? These marketing channels have notoriously low response rates, so you’ll need to work extra hard if you restrict yourself to digital opportunities.

Direct marketing statistics for 2018 and 2019 seem to reinforce this concept. Only about 1 percent of people respond to emails, social media and paid search, but 9 percent will reach out to brands that send them mailers, such as sports schedules or postcards. Even if you catch someone’s attention via email, your time in the spotlight is fleeting — About 78 percent of inbox marketing gets diverted to spam folders or deleted instead of being read.

Understanding Outreach Response Behaviors

The persistence of direct mail may have something to do with neuroscience. Research by Canada Post Corporation used eye-tracking and electroencephalography, or EEG testing, to survey people’s brain responses to promotional media. They determined that direct mail was associated with lower cognitive loading, or the amount of mental effort needed to understand the material. They also found that it was more persuasive and likely to drive behavior than emails were.

While some digital ads leave deeper impressions than others, they’re generally not as good at keeping people engaged for the long haul. Direct mail takes less time for people’s brains to process, so they may be more willing to interact with the brands it promotes.

How Direct Mail Makes up for Email’s Flaws

Data from 2017 suggested that combined outreach approaches drove success rates 35 percent higher than what might be expected from direct mail or email alone. There may be a few reasons for this trend, including the fact that you’re reinforcing the message by giving people the chance to view it from numerous angles.

Other research showed that people were more likely to spend when businesses used both tools together — Patrons sunk about 25 percent more money into these companies. More pressing for realtors, 75 percent of one study’s subjects could remember brands after seeing direct mail as compared to only 44 percent for email.

People also said that they felt like they were being treated with increased regard when receiving physical mail. Such sentiments could prove key to establishing respectful, profitable relationships with consumers. Even if email blitzes are faster routes to certain customers, they don’t always send the right messages.

Implement a Hybrid Approach

Neither direct mails nor emails can solve all of your marketing problems. There’s no anticipating which of your ads a potential client might be staring at the instant your branding clicks with them, so cover all of your bases.

Emails and direct mail serve distinct purposes, so be discerning about which branding objectives you use them to achieve. For instance, Every Door Direct Mail, or EDDM, postcards capture the attention of entire neighborhoods economically, and you can follow up with those who respond via email. Mailers like branded sports schedules and market updates get people to associate your name with useful information, but emails may be helpful for those doing their own in-depth market research.

Quality marketing materials are the keys to a perfect real estate advertising approach. Unify your digital and physical marketing campaigns by talking to a Reamark expert today.

What is your 2019 real estate marketing plan? What methods will you use to ensure this is a year of growth? Gaining more referrals? Building name recognition with customized dry erase memo boards mailed to your farm quarterly? Sponsoring a charity event in your neighborhoods? These are all excellent marketing ideas.

Did you know . . .

Fifty percent of home-buyers surveyed for the 2018 National Association of REALTORS® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers report found their home on the internet.

With half of all completed sales originating on the web, your best marketing strategy must include building a strong digital footprint. Here’s how to get started.

Get to Know Your Local Market

NAR found that the average seller in 2017 earned just under $100,000, had lived in their home for 9 years and was 55 years of age. If you don’t already know how this compares to residents in your area, find out. Invest in data analytics — this helps you fine tune your marketing campaigns with an understanding of who your audience is and which product type and locations to promote.

Create an Impressive Digital Footprint

Building a website and business Facebook page is rarely enough to put your agency at the top of an organic search. Use professional grade images and videos to showcase your listings. Make sure your brand is well-represented on social media and local business listings. Your name should be everywhere and in different formats so people doing a search can easily discover who you are when searching for local inventory and investment properties.

Connect With Regional Businesses

Prioritize building relationships with HR teams throughout your community. Ask for help getting the word out to new hires about rental properties you manage. You may even offer a discount or other incentive. Many HR managers are willing to send a monthly email to employees announcing new listings, give you a guest spotlight in their company newsletter or provide copies of your newsletter. Slowly building these relationships improves referral rates

Earn Referrals

Most people would rather work with people they know — or that a friend or neighbor recommends. Roughly six percent of people buy a home based on a recommendation from someone they trust. Gain trust by focusing on service delivery, solving problems and asking for a personal testimony from satisfied customers.

Be Flexible

One successful real estate investor agent recommends you “try everything you can afford,” but realize that what generates high traffic today may not work tomorrow. While you are optimizing SEO web content for mobile viewing and posting high-quality virtual property tours on YouTube and your company website, remember that nothing beats pounding the pavement. Knock on doors, keep a stack of business cards or personalized refrigerator magnets in your briefcase, car and backpack. Introduce yourself to people in the doctor’s waiting area, and when standing in line at the grocery store. The key to creating a growth strategy that works is measuring everything. Keep what works. And, be willing to let go of old ways of thinking that are draining your energy and the budget without producing any real return on investment.

Leverage People Power

Building relationships is vital. The best growth strategies always include organic marketing, the kind that relies on building a network of clients, prospects and colleagues. Reach out to brokers, attorneys, contractors, inspectors, appraisers; — anyone with a vested interest in seeing your agency succeed. In keeping with the digital focus, invite these professionals to become guest bloggers, and offer to return the favor. A strong network amplifies your online presence and your net worth.

Get on a First Name Basis With Every Client

Whether you’re looking to grow a property management revenue stream, attract single-family home sellers or connect with investors interested in commercial properties in your area, invest the time to build a database of property owners. Start by scouring public records to ensure your marketing efforts fit the criteria of your prospects. When you know every potential seller by name, you are well positioned to close more deals and garner organic referrals.

This is the perfect time to rethink your 2019 marketing strategy. Be authentic and stay true to yourself, but make a lot of noise on social media channels, knock on doors, build relationships.

ReaMark can help. If you need help designing a postcard, door hangers or dry erase memo boards, simply contact a customer service rep day. Alternately, request a physical catalog by mail or browse over 2000 products on our website.

Photo by Daniel Hjalmarsson on Unsplash

Securing leads isn’t always easy, but as a real estate agent, it’s essential to get over the hurdles. As consumers evolve, their tastes also change, and 2019 is almost certain to bring new norms in outreach. Your old campaign strategies might not cut it. Confused about how your marketing plan fits into an uncertain future? Here are five simple pointers for better real estate branding in the coming year.

1. Coordinate Marketing Across Multiple Channels

Realtors who want to establish ties have a variety of touch points at their disposal. For instance, sales agents commonly send out calendar magnets at the beginning of the year to ensure people keep them in mind for months to come. House flippers, on the other hand, might focus on image-packed social media posts showing their latest before-and-after successes.

Start coordinating your efforts. For instance, your calendar magnets should definitely include social media links. When people subscribe to your email newsletters, your database software ought to place them in a different mailing list reserved for nurturing established leads. You’re fighting a war for attention on multiple fronts, so ensure that your attacks support each other.

2. Regularly Refine Your Marketing Metrics

Tired of feeling like you’re drowning in a sea of campaign stats? Effective marketers periodically reassess their data collection and analysis practices. This highlights trends and helps you make wise branding choices.

If you’re like most agents, then you’re probably tracking social media engagement on several platforms. For clarity’s sake, organize your dashboards to automatically show the few sites with the highest numbers and group the rest into a general low-performance category.

Sanitizing your data will make you less likely to mistake noise for noteworthy trends. The new year is also a logical time to conduct a strategy audit and identify the most important performance indicators.

3. Recognize the Power of Good Timing

People respond to the same messages differently depending on when they receive them. Although you can’t always anticipate when the mail carrier will deliver your latest greeting cards or door hangers, you can definitely set the pace for followup interactions.

Don’t think that timing is a big deal? Try cold calling someone late at night or early in the morning, and you’ll quickly realize how important it is. You might be making social media posts in the wake of a printed mailer blitz or sending emails, but it’s critical to accommodate your audience’s habits.

4. Organize Your Campaign Analyses to Complement Your Market Segments

Whether you’re farming different neighborhoods or sending out cards for different holidays, you need clarity. Why not make it easier to track leads on a per-campaign basis by including unique QR codes for each group of mailers? From there, you can use engagement software or normal spreadsheets to organize the response data to reveal which types of outreach correspond to the biggest successes.

Client personas are essential in an era where people expect highly personalized marketing. Facebook and other tools may give agents unprecedented access to fine-grained consumer information, but it’s vital to associate the feedback with the right audience pockets.

5. Create a Brand, Not Just a Campaign

Your marketing doesn’t have to be super sleek, but it must be polished and coordinated. It doesn’t matter if you’re targeting consumers who might favor the appeal of quaint aesthetics and plain language. Using consistent marketing elements reinforces your message and highlights your professionalism.

You’ve probably already got a few core brand assets, such as your logo, trademark or tagline. Start the year off right by finding a design team that can help you create universal marketing standards using these critical components.

Imagine that you mail out completely different postcard designs every few months. You might restrict your use of fonts to make your value proposition more noticeable or keep the contact information in the same position so that people know where to look. These advertising design fundamentals will become even more essential as 2019 forces you to compete with new marketing techniques and technological distractions for people’s attention.

How do you plan on making an outreach splash this year? Maintain an inspired marketing outlook by subscribing to the Reamark blog. Call us to request a catalog or free product samples! 800-932-2957

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.

Real estate agents are constantly looking for new ways to farm for new leads. While word of mouth, signage and networking are effective ways to build a base of potential customers, nothing beats effective direct mail strategies as a way to keep the pipeline of buyers and sellers fresh.

Why Use Direct Mail to Farm for Leads?

Direct mail is a proven approach that has been used for decades. Even in the digital era, receiving valuable information in the mail, along with some advertising for those needing real estate services, creates an impression that can linger for those who receive the materials.

Consistent and persistent direct mail strategies also help to drive insights and information about where your best customers are, how they respond to different appeals or products, and how to better reach them. By fine-tuning your messages and products that are a part of your direct mail outreach, you can better use your marketing dollars to reach the best customers.

What’s more, direct mail helps build awareness about you, your agency and your services. Very few of us buy on first glance. Over time, as we begin to develop an understanding of a product, service or brand, we gain a deeper understanding of how a particular provider can best serve our needs. Direct mail is a great way to help create that long-term awareness.

How Does Direct Mail Help Get Your Message Out?

Direct mail is only as effective as the strategy behind it. You need to identify the direct mail pieces, add-ons, and frequency that work best for your region and client base. When creating your direct mail marketing campaign, here are some things to consider:

• Message – What are you trying to convey? Options can include your experience, your areas of expertise, knowledge of local markets, reputation. If you offer quick closings, serve a niche market or live in the community, you may want to focus your message on those particular attributes. Similarly, don’t try to cover too much at once. Instead, make sure people know what you’re offering, who you are and how to contact you.
• Length and Frequency – How long will your direct mail campaign run? You want to keep your message consistent and deliver it several times, but you also want to be sure you hit people enough times that the message sticks.
• Response Rates Understanding – Typical response rates for your real estate direct marketing campaign is important. The first direct mail piece may have a very low response rate but patience is a virtue. The more awareness you provide, the more likely you are to get calls or responses to your follow-up efforts.

What Are Good Real Estate Direct Marketing Ideas?

At Reamark, we offer a full range of products to make your direct marketing campaign more effective. Whether it’s full-color postcards, real estate newsletters or calendars, we offer prompt turnaround to get you products you need. We offer online and print catalogs with thousands of products and titles to keep your message fresh and eye-catching. To learn more about how Reamark can help with your marketing needs, contact us for a free catalog!