Flipper investors know that for every 10,000 postcards are 1–2 contracts for a property. Remember this is a cold marketing approach of a postcard to generate a call, a call to convert to a contract. The tipping point for this approach is 10,000 postcards. That’s why some people are mailing tens or hundreds of thousands of direct mail per week.
There are multiple ways to create engagement and dominate a local market. When you think about a local market, it should be 2,000 rooftops. This allows you to dominate your consumer’s minds. As soon as you start to expand into a marketing radius that is larger than 2,000 rooftops you need to increase your budget significantly.
However, before you start to blitz your market, you can focus and optimize your spending with Audience Segmentation. Who are you targeting? What type of client, or property? Taking a few minutes now to answer these questions will prevent you from generating a list of the wrong people.
How to Dominate a Local Market?
- In-Market Leads aka the 3% Searching online
- Facebook Retargeting your leads
- Google Retargeting your leads
- Postcards based on known behavior Triggers
- Postcards based on seasonal events
- Recent Sales, Just Listed.
- Letters based on known behavior Triggers
- Newsletters based on known behavior Triggers
- Sending one every 3 weeks creates engagement.
- Events
- Facebook Events (Open Houses, Local Training)
- Live Streams
- Open Houses
- Street Parties
To remain top of mind for your market your audience needs to engage with your message 7–13 times. Then you need to engage them when they are ready with buying intent. This means you don’t know who is close to taking action, and who is ready to take action.
The results from a print newsletter campaign start to be experienced in the 3rd month. This means sending 3 issues to your list and then continuing to engage. This gives your newsletter enough time to re-engage your audience as long as you are delivering value with your content.
Follow-Up Creates Winners
This sounds simple but it is far more complicated than you think. This is the golden rule for any salesperson. To be clear let me define it in detail. Get leads, and then follow up with leads until they are ready to take action. This sounds simple and like something you don’t have to worry about. However, that’s the difference between awesome agents and real estate agents that are losing the game.
The real estate agents that fail are constantly chasing new leads. They apply the speed to lead principle and attempt to contact the lead in less than 5 minutes. However, it is shown that contact is made with less than 75% of leads for various reasons.
This means you are going to make contact with 1 in 4 within 5 minutes. To continue this 24/7 is impossible and at some point, you are going to have more new leads coming in than you can respond to in 5 minutes. What we have noticed is that the average realtor will drop a lead if there is no response within 3 days. However, this approach does not support the buyer’s journey theory.
The Action of Buying or Selling
The Buyers Journey Theory assumes that every lead has a path they are going to take to get to their destination. This means there is a timeline and motivation sequence of events that needs to occur for them to take the action of buying or selling. This timeline varies based on their buying intent and the urgency of required action.
- If there is no buying intent with no urgency to take action no matter what you do the lead will not sign a contract.
- If there is buying intent with no urgency to act it is harder to motivate the user to act.
- If there is an urgency with no buying intent the lead will leave it to the last possible minute to act. You just need to be in the right place at the right time.
- If there is an urgency with buying intent you have commission cheques.
- This just reinforces the Rule of 3%. Only 3% of your leads are ready to sign today. But isn’t the answer to just get more leads?
Well yes, and no. Because each lead has a price for the acquisition. Even free leads are costing you. What you might realize is that your “free leads” are your most expensive type of leads.
Buying Leads
You are buying leads from your lead source each month. If they give you 100 leads per month, that means 3% of them are ready to take action today. The question is at what point will the remaining 97% take action? What you can expect is that there will be another 3% of the 97% within 30 days. Then another 3% within 45–60 days. This is assuming you are regularly connecting with these leads. Yes, it means you need to activate touchpoints every 24–72 hours on multiple channels.
Tip: If you are buying leads every month and don’t have a campaign that follows up with your leads for at least 90 days you are leaving money on the table.
FACT: 40% of leads convert with long-term follow-up. The problem with this fact is that in real estate that can be 18 months of engagement before a lead is ready to purchase. Buying a house requires multiple variables that influence the decision.