What I Learned From Attending Conference All Month ... It's A Lot!

I am finishing up a very long month of being on the road at conventions.  I've talked to hundreds of agents and sat through many education sessions this month.  As I listened to agents, other vendors and presenters, one thing was very clear to me... whew, there is A LOT to think about when it comes to marketing! 

I thought back to when I first started in the real estate marketing space and the biggest question a marketer had to answer was whether you wanted to pay the up charge for your ad to be color.  Then websites hit the scene and out of that morphed the conversation of optimizing SEO and thinking about how to advertise a website.  Five years later social media hit the scene, and that in itself is a big nut to process.  Then came syndication.  Now it is extremely important to layer a mobile strategy on top of everything.

And gone are the days that you just have to return your clients' phone calls!  Now we have return the calls, answer emails, watch for texts, monitoring reputations and keywords with Google alerts, DM and RT  tweets, respond to blog comments, post on Facebook - and oh yeah, check the snail mail from time to time.

No wonder we are tired at the end of the day!  It's a lot. 

To be all these things to everyone is overwhelming and leaves very little time in the day to actually sell real estate. 

While I learned about a lot of great websites and apps this month, and got some great tips from other professionals, here is my big take away to be successful:

1)      Make a plan.  Pick a few things that are going to work well for you.  Maybe it is only 2 things like blogging and Facebook to start.

2)      Do them well and do them regularly.

3)      Be present in the medium you choose.

I believe an agent would get a lot more bang for their minute (because most of this is an investment of time and not money, which is a shift) if they just did blogging and did it very well, rather than if they participated on 15 social media platforms in a half baked way.

Once you master your starter platform, layer in the next thing.  Ramp up methodically and with a purpose.  Soon you'll be doing all of these things as second nature, but don't try to do them all right out of the gate.

 So go grab a pen, or your computer, or maybe even your ipad - and plan out how you are going to build an actual strategy.  Without a plan and a purpose, one risks wasting the valuable resource of time and overwhelming oneself to the point of doing nothing.