Why Should Top Producers Use HomeFolio Media?
Many top producing Realtors segment their business into separate and distinct categories such as email marketing strategies, direct mail strategies, social media strategies, etc. Really, the bigger picture is, what is your “communication strategy?” At the end of the day, is your message really reaching the people who need to hear it in your community? Often times there is no real way to know.
To employ an effective communication strategy, you’ll want to consider the following questions:
Who do we want to communicate within the community and why?
How do you do that?
With these questions in mind — we’ve devised a way to effectively and consistently represent our clients to their prospects for less than what it costs to typically send 1000 postcards.
Defining the Prospects
For every Realtor, there are essentially two types of prospects, the potential home buyer and the potential home seller. The potential homebuyers are going online, and there are literally thousands of websites where someone can go to find inventory.
The harder prospects are those people in your community that actually own the homes you want to list– the selling prospects. There is no clear way to tell how many of those local homeowners are visiting your website on a regular basis. Studies show that most people aren’t visiting real estate websites consistently because they don’t have a perceived need for a Realtor. Often times people are unaware that they are going to have a real estate transaction in the near future. In other words– they don’t know they are going to get transferred next month or whatever that life changing event is that inspires people to sell their home and use a Realtor.
Reaching Nearly 100% of Ideal Prospects
The foundation of our strategy is targeting the potential home seller in the community through direct mail. These are the people who are not going on your website.
If they are not visiting your website– it is really important you visit them in their mailbox. Otherwise if you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind.
The first step in introducing yourself, your business, your listings, your service and what you’ve done for other clients, is reaching those people in their own home.
Through the direct mail publication HomeFolio Magazine, we’ve taken proven direct mail strategies that top producing agents have been successfully using on their own for years such as: farming specific geographic areas and direct mail to keep their name and face in front of past clients– except we are doing it on a much larger scale.
HomeFolio Media Clients
Our typical client runs a referral based business and is a luxury top producing listing agent. We start by pulling a list of every single family residence in target cities, and mail on a consistent and frequent basis to those homes; all in an effort to get in front of those homeowners and potential future home sellers.
Most of our clients don’t see us as “traditional” print media– they are looking at us as an alternative for them running a direct mail program on their own. Since when we pull 100% of single family residences in their city, we are hitting everyone in their local sphere, plus we hit everyone else in town that isn’t necessarily in their database.
Benefiting Our Clients
We act as a marketing umbrella policy so we are able to target 100% of the potential home sellers in a market place for our clients. Unlike websites where they might measure success in “anonymous unique visitors” there is nothing unique and there is nothing anonymous about the visitors we want to touch. We know who they are. They are the people who own the homes in our community and we want to touch them over and over again.
It’s the consistent and frequent touch over time that builds the benefit for our clients. So it really is similar to the strategy that top producing Realtors have been using on their own in terms of farming a specific geographic area to keep in touch with their current sphere of past clients.
The first step is getting in front of people who aren’t seeing them on the web.
The second step is figuring out ways to identify the local buyers in a community. Typically in our markets somewhere between 50% and 60% of future buyers are already living in those markets. Usually they already own a home and they want to stay local. They may be upgrading or downsizing, moving from one side of town to the other, but want to stay within the community, within the school district or within a certain proximity to employment.
Defining the Strategy
There is a way we can identify those and we do have a unique online research method that we use that can identify the people within the community who are most likely to be making a local purchase decision in the near future. we can identify those people and we can mail them a copy of the publication — and that is what we do every single month.
Currently we have three territories that we cover with our direct mail publication. Our first one was launched in 2008 and includes San Ramon, Danville, Blackhawk Area. The second market is the Lamorinda area of Lafayette, Moraga, Orinda, Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill, and our 3rd most recent area is the Silicon Valley.
The Silicon Valley is currently the #1 real estate market in the country, encompassing Menlo Park, Atherton, Woodside, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Portola Valley. We also include about 3,000 of the top homes in the Mountain View area. Altogether we have a total of about 49,000 single family residences –which is essentially 100% of potential home sellers in that area.
When we pull the list and mail it on a consistent and frequent basis, we don’t have to segment it by income demographic or any other factors. So we are essentially getting 100% of internet company CEO’S in that market, 100% of CFO’s, venture capitalist, real estate tycoons, etc. Since we are mailing to 100% of single family residences, we don’t need to look at ways to target our message because we are hitting everyone. There is lots of power in mailing to 49,000 households– especially as we hit them consistently and frequently over the coming years.
Our Function in the Community
Our clients will look at this service and don’t even compare us to most print media because frankly, most of our clients are not even using traditional forms of print media; but they have been doing a direct mail program on their own.
So we either function as a complimentary service to what they are already doing, or we are their direct mail program simply because, we are hitting tens of thousands of mailboxes for less than what it would typically cost to send 1000 post cards.
Interested in learning more about our communication strategy that includes direct mail, blogging, and social media consulting? Contact me, Kirk Bailey or Melissa Backshall at:
(925) 202-2426
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