Campaign Fundamentals and Ideas
Over the next few Zebra Reports we are going to be covering campaigns. At The Lones Group, we define campaigns as a series of communication points geared towards a specific audience. For example, if I send an annual property report to my past clients, that is part of my past client campaign. If I send a monthly postcard to my farm area, that too is a campaign.
Today we are going to touch on audiences, frequency, media, and content - the four pillars of any campaign:
Audience
Most real estate agents have different buckets of clients. You have your past clients, of course, potential clients, current clients, your database, maybe a farm area, niche market, or other lead generation target. For the purposes of keeping your campaigns simple, I am going to group them into four buckets:
Almost every real estate business I know should have a model similar to this. Potential, Current, and Past Clients are buckets within your Sphere Database bucket and there is a separate (usually) bucket for lead generation because those are generally targets who don't know you.You may have additional buckets of clients who you want to market to in a specific way or that you do special things for. As a result, you may need to add additional buckets to keep those campaigns separate. For example, if you are a member of your country club and do nothing more than show up, play golf, and sponsor golf events, but you don't want to do anything more than that, that is still a separate campaign.
Frequency
Now that you have your audiences defined, it is time to start thinking about your campaign structure and that starts with frequency. I kept my frequency as limited as possible since I had so many clients and transactions, but I made sure my content was top notch. We will get to content more in a minute. However, I have some clients who prefer to increase the frequency with past clients by way of pop-bys (it was not in MY DNA to do those, but many of my clients love them). The key is to find a balance that works for your time and money resources.
I structured my frequency as per the table below:
Because my Potential, Current, and Past Clients were also in my Sphere Database, they received communication monthly PLUS whatever else I was doing with that specific bucket of clients. As you can see, I really didn't have a specific campaign for my Current Clients, I just did whatever the transaction dictated. For Lead Generation, I was mailing to a Farm, so this was something I did monthly as well. In truth, I also ran an Expired Listing Campaign which was much more complex - I targeted 40 expired listings and sent them a weekly campaign for eight weeks, then it went to monthly for another 12 months. You can certainly adjust the frequency as needed for your target market.
At this point, I have to define Media for my Sphere Database, Potential Clients, Past Clients, and my Lead Generation Farm.
Media
Media is simply the means of transmitting your message. It might be a postcard or newsletter, a report, a phone call, video, social media, a notecard, a live visit, or more. Because I had a lot of clients, I needed to be very careful with my time and kept most of the focus on mailers that had my brand, my voice, and a lot of solid content that I could rely on to build a relationship built on expertise. When I included live events, I also leveraged my time by seeing many clients at once.
See how that translated to my different campaigns below:
As you can see, my Sphere Database and my Farm both received monthly newsletters from me. Because my Potential, Current, and Past Clients are in my Sphere Database, they also received those newsletters as well. I kept my Sphere Database and Farm newsletter content simple enough that I could use similar content between the two but then really hone in on hyperlocal data for my farm.
My Potential Clients received at least one communication point from me every two months. That might be a quick phone call, or I might print information out from the MLS on inventory changes in their neighborhood. Of course, this is dependent on how far along they are in the process. If they were 6 months or a year out, every two months was fine, but if they were mere weeks away from listing or buying, I would have increased the frequency. But all communication to my Potential Client bucket was custom to their particular situation.
For my Past Clients, I did two things - I created an annual property report (called Annual Client Review) in January that was custom to their property and I held a Breakfast with Santa client appreciation event in December. Since they also received my monthly mailing to my Sphere Database, this was plenty to keep us connected.
Content
The last thing you need to think about is content. It is important to remember that you have all four personality types in your audiences: Promoters, Supporters, Controllers, and Analyticals. They all like different types of content and they want it presented a certain way. If you aren't sure what your personality type is, you can take our quick quiz.
Below is a guide so you can think about the different types of content to include in your campaigns. The items in the orange column on the far left are items that appeal most to Supporters, the red to Promoters, the green to Controllers, and the blue to Analyticals. As you are determining what information to include in your campaign, make sure you choose a little of each column to personality-proof your content.
Then it is time to pull your campaign together and begin implementing! Once I decided what I wanted my campaign to look like, I created templates for my monthly newsletters and my annual client reviews so I wasn't reinventing the wheel every time I had to send out a campaign piece. Here is what my final plan looked like:
We will be touching more on content and consistency in the coming weeks. If you haven't taken a look at your campaigns in a while this is a great time to do so. 2022 has just started, Punxsutawney Phil says we have six more weeks of winter, and it is a great time to communicate with your clients!
To schedule an appointment, call us at (360) 527-8904, email solutions@thelonesgroup.com.
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By Denise Lones CSP, M.I.R.M., CDEI - The founding partner of The Lones Group, Denise Lones, brings nearly three decades of experience in the real estate industry. With agent/broker coaching, expertise in branding, lead generation, strategic marketing, business analysis, new home project planning, product development, Denise is nationally recognized as the source for all things real estate. With a passion for improvement, Denise has helped thousands of real estate agents, brokers, and managers build their business to unprecedented levels of success, while helping them maintain balance and quality of life.
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