Touching Your Sphere of Influence – Real Estate Marketing Basics
As real estate agents, we all know how important it is to stay visible to our sphere of influence. In the old days, that meant being active in the community, attending dinner parties and other social events. While being “social” we made sure to wear our name tags and try to spark conversations about real estate. Today, those things still stand, but the savvy agent uses technological tools to augment being social in the real world. Today, people spend an enormous amount of time “online”, whether that be checking e-mail, reading the news, surfing websites or just hanging out on social media.
Why is staying in touch important?
Its happened to each and every one of us, we are in the grocery store and see an old acquaintance and they say “I forgot you were in real estate, I just listed my house last week”. Granted, a portion of those people DID remember you were in real estate and just didn’t want to use you—but most of them really did forget. Who’s fault is that? In today’s real estate world, its your job to remind your sphere of influence that you are in the real estate business. That means its YOUR responsibility to reach out to your sphere of influence in as many ways as possible. Lets go over some of the ways that you can keep in touch.
Drip e-Mail
You still need to stay active in the community and continue to be social, but there are other ways to “remind” people that you are an agent. One easy way is to use drip e-mail. Drip e-mail should be a friendly reminder to everyone that you are successful and activity working. Most drip e-mails should be informative in nature and not directly soliciting business. You may want to send some real estate specific information on their neighborhood or their city. You may want to talk about some change in local real estate taxes or assessments. The point is to periodically remind everyone that you are a source of information as it pertains to real estate. You will want to use some type of e-mail system to send your e-mails so they don’t get caught in the SPAM filter. Many systems incorporate e-mail campaigns—some good and some not so good. If you choose to use an existing campaign, I would recommend editing it somewhat to give it your personal touch.
One very easy e-mail system that you can use for FREE (up to 5,000 contacts) is MailChimp. Mailchimp has a variety of ways to add new customers to your groups of past and potential customers including uploading a list or even having a pop-up on your website and when someone fills out the form it automatically added to a Mailchimp group.
Blog
A real estate blog can be a powerful tool in staying in touch. It lets you write about real estate showing off your knowledge of the market. The blog itself can generate new business if it is designed properly for Real Estate SEO, as it can be found for real estate specific search terms. Your blog posts should be a vehicle for driving traffic to your website. Every blog post should heavily be promoted on all of your social media platforms. DEAN Knows provides our proprietary system we have named Social Media Syndication which actually chops up each blog post and sends each piece out to multiple REAL people to be posted on their social media accounts. This results in hundreds of social media touches per each blog post.
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