|
|
|
Postcard Marketing Tips For Real Estate Agents
f you've been practicing When creating your postcard
real estate for any length message, start by identifying
of time, you've encountered your audience. This is a critical
postcard marketing in some form step because the rest of the
or fashion. process depends on it. To
identify your core audience, you
Real estate agents use postcard simply have to ask yourself a
marketing (also known as direct series of questions.
mail marketing) for a number of
reasons. Among other things, Here's an example of how your Q&A
postcards are cost-effective, might go:
versatile and targeted.
1. What area do I want to
But the purpose of this article represent? Happy Town, Vermont.
is not to tell you why you should 2. Am I focusing on buyers or
use postcards to market your sellers? Buyers.
services. The purpose of this 3. Any particular type of buyer?
article is to address the "how" First-time buyers.
of postcard marketing. 4. Where might I find them?
Apartments. Perhaps living with
To be exact, this article will relatives in the area.
show you how to use postcards to 5. What's important to them?
outperform the competition and Learning about the home-buying
increase your ROI. Now that I've process.
made a huge promise to you, let 6. What else is important to
me deliver the goods: them? Finding an agent they're
comfortable with.
Step 1 — Identify Your Audience
Step 2 — Create Your Audience
Statement
And that leads us to our next
When your list is complete, you step...
should be able to combine the
answers into a paragraph. This Step 3 — Determine Your
paragraph is your audience Objective
statement, and it will help you
set your postcard marketing Now that you know your audience,
objectives (Step 3). you can set the objective for
your postcard marketing campaign.
Here's what the audience Ask yourself, "What do I want to
statement might look like from happen as a result of sending my
the example above: postcards?"
"I want to reach people looking Here's the key to this step.
to buy their first home in Happy Don't ask your postcards to do
Town, Vermont. Being first-time more than they're capable of
buyers, they probably live in doing. For example, don't use
nearby apartments or with postcards to try and convince
relatives (so I should send my recipients that you offer
postcards to homes and apartments superior service. That's a common
in my farm area). These people mistake, and it's too much to ask
will want to learn about the of an 8"x5" piece of card stock.
home-buying process in order to
feel more comfortable with it." "Superior service" cannot be
conveyed through a postcard. It
You're probably starting to see can only be conveyed through a
the value of an audience working relationship.
statement. In fact, you might
even have ideas popping up on how So let's scale back the objective
to connect with such an audience. until we find something that (A)
gives the postcard a more
realistic task, (B) follows a This step will vary depending on
more natural sales progression, your audience and your objective.
and (C) capitalizes on known But you've done the most
consumer behavior. important parts already. You've
determined your audience. You've
Let's use our postcards to identified what it is you want
generate a response from your audience to do. And you even
recipients. have some ideas on how to
motivate them in that direction.
Now that's something a postcard
can handle — especially if you Continuing our first-time buyers
create a compelling message with example, this step might involve
a strong offer. And since we know sending a postcard that promotes
from statistics that most a free home-buying seminar.
consumers end up choosing the
first real estate agent they Step 5 — Evaluate Your Response
contact, we're capitalizing on Rates
known consumer behavior.
Make sure you have some way to
Following our first-time buyers track the responses you get back
example, maybe we will promote a from each mailing. This will
free home-buying seminar to allow you to compare one postcard
generate interest and response. message to another to see which
After all, anyone can benefit one performs better.
from a home-buying seminar —
but especially those who've never In the first-time buyer example,
bought a house before. this could be as simple as
tracking the number of RSVPs, or
Step 4 — Conduct Your Mailing asking people in the seminar how
they heard about it. Record the your audience. Create your
number of people who attend the audience statement. Determine
seminar as a direct result of the your objective. Conduct your
postcard, and you've measured mailing. Evaluate the response.
your response rate. Five easy steps!
Armed with this information, you And here's a step that will
can experiment with other follow automatically — succeed.
versions of the postcard to see
which one performs or "pulls" the
best. ** You may republish this article
on your website as long as the
Conclusion byline, author's note and
hyperlink are left intact. Please
There you have it — a include the article in its
structured and logical approach entirety.
to postcard marketing. Identify
About the Author:
Brandon Cornett is the editor of http://PostcardSmart.com, the Internet's largest website dedicated entirely to direct mail marketing with postcards. For more expert articles on postcard marketing, visit http://www.PostcardSmart.com.
Source: www.isnare.com
|
|
