These ideas were accumulated through years of coaching great real estate agents. If you have some other great ideas, please share!
103 WACKY MARKETING IDEAS TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS
•1. Deliver 100 seed packets to a local neighborhood. Go door to door and label each packet "Plant your listing with me and I will help you grow many happy memories".
•2. Yard Sale Season! Send a flyer to your SOI or to an entire neighborhood offering your FREE Yard Sale Kit.
•· Packets will include small For Sale Stickers
•· Signs for the Neighborhood Advertising the yard sale "sponsored by YOU"
•· Offer to loan your Open House signs but cover the "open house" with "yard Sale"
•3. Your customer closes...send a cake to your buyer or seller's office with a big bouquet of balloons. The cake should say "As a buyer/seller...you take the cake! Congratulations!"
•4. Host a community yard sale at the office.
All proceeds go to charity!
•5. Find an article about the real estate market then write a commentary on that article and summit it to the paper.
•6. Write and distribute a press release about you and your business at least four times a year.
•7. Host a speed networking event or just a networking event for your local chamber.
•8. Financial planners often do workshops. Partner up with someone and offer to give advice on buying a home and facts about the tax credit.
•9. Post a video biography about your business on YouTube.
•10. Post property tours on YouTube.
•11. Each Friday night- host a pizza and movie night for your top client of the week. You deliver a cheese pizza and a movie to their home.
•12. Start a community Facebook page and update it regularly... be the expert!
•13. Host a "Trash Out" day for a local neighborhood. Advertise in advance and rent a neighborhood dumpster.
•14. Take a booth at a local home show (offer to display painter, landscaper, contractor, giveaways and advertisements for a fee to subsidize the cost)
•15. Gas station approach. Also, make up some flyers with a pull tab on them with your name and phone number and ask every 7-11, convenience store, gas station etc. that you can find if you can hang one on their bulletin board; most will let you. Do as many of these as you can and you will start getting calls.
•16. Brown bag it. Start a monthly program called Women and Investing Brown Bag Lunches. One day each month hold free, no sales meeting for women only, who want to learn more about investing, in your office conference room. They bring their own lunches and meet for an hour where you show them the ins and outs of investing
•17. Attend a wedding expo! Tons of great leads! Download those leads to leadstreet!
•18. Stage a protest for "good customer service." Imagine what would happen if you had picketers outside your place of business with pickets signs that read something like "We're protesting good customer care service at this location!" or "This place is full of nice people interested in customers!" First, you'll get noticed. Second, you may get coverage by the local media. Stage a repeat visit of the protesters and next time publicize their intent of returning. You never know what might happen, who might take notice and that it'll do for your business
•19. Conduct a random act of kindness. Pay the toll for the car behind yours and ask the toll collector to give your business card to them, telling them you paid their toll. Sure this is a crapshot, but it's imaginative and you never know who might be on the road. It's A low cost guerilla marketing tactic that has imagination written all over it.
•20. Hold a wacky contest. The beauty of contest is threefold. You can announce the contest to your prospects, customers and the media. You can then announce the winners to the media and hopefully get press each time. Have multiple winners to delight multiple customers. Contest can be fun, wacky and imaginative: a messy desk contest, ugly tie contest, pet/owner look-alike contest, etc.
•21. Suggestive Sell Everyone!
•22. Buy or Sell With Me and Everything will be a "pizza" cake! Find a pizza parlor that will allow you to advertise on their pizza box!
•23. Do you LIVE home buyer seminar during the busy hours at your hair salon.
•24. Host a Client Appreciation Party! NO DOUGH? Do it for free!
•· classic car night
•· Book swap
•· Yard sale
•25. Mother's Day- Buy 200 carnations or seed packets- go to the busy local breakfast joint and give them out with your flyer "Your Local Neighborhood Expert"... helping moms, dada, and well... just about anyone with their buying and selling needs!
•26. Father's Day- Do a giveaway for dads outside the local breakfast joint. ( Or reverse pop by)
•· Seeds- 50 cents
•· Neckties- 5 bucks www.briteties.com or cheap
•· neckties.com or "Don't put your neck on the line when buying or selling a home!"
•· Golf balls- 25 cents
- Baseball hats- 2 bucks www.tansclub.com
•27. Hold a FSBO Seminar!
•28. Adverblog! If you're not blogging, you should be. Use twitter and FB to increase blog exposure.
•29. Deliver 10 CMA's a day to local FSBOS.
•30. Halloween- bring a card reader to the office and offer clients and soi discount readings.
•31. Support pooches! Put together a flyer about your experience and put together small bags of dog biscuits. Hit the local park and handout your giveaways as the "Realtor Who Loves Pooches!"
•32. Approach a local hardware store (ACE, Home Depot, Lowes) and offer to do a free buyer seminar.
•33. Approach local businesses and offer to do lunch and learns about tax credit for their employees.
•34. Offer a service coupon to a local company where employees of their firm get a discount if they work with you.
•35. Support New Businesses- Be the welcome wagon when a new business moves into town. Stop by with a basket of goodies and lots of your real estate services. Ask if you can leave your flyers at their establishment.
•36. Start your own BNI- with a twist!Find sales people from Lia Sophia, Mary Kay, Avon, Malalueca, Tupperware, etc. Each month host a party highlighting one of these companies. Everyone in the group invites friends and family. Of course, one night will be a real estate night hosted by you!
•37. Host a Monthly Sales Star Meeting. Invite people who are in other sales industries. Each month the person shares techniques, articles, and ideas for helping everyone become better in their business.
•38. Start a Bank Owned Caravan
•39. Hold a buyer or seller seminar at your church.
•40. Award a "Customer of the Month" award and have many, many Award a plaque or certificate; these won't get thrown away and will remain at your customer's place of business as a reminder of their relationship with you winners. Customers like attention, especially if they're in a special group.
•41. Set up a referral Company- market to agents who are no longer agents!
•42. Dog Was Pop By! Hire a dog wash vehicle. Do a pop bye for those interested or try to attract people to an open house!
•43. Put pictures of buyer and sellers on FB with the sold sign... Make them all FB friends!
•44. Host a house warming party for your buyers/sellers.
•45. Prepare branded "just moved" cards for buyers and sellers. Make sure their stamped and ready to go!
•46. Hold a buyer seminar at the local laundramat.
•47. Do a customer appreciation INTERNATIONAL POT LUCK event. Have everyonr bring dishes from different countries and nationalities.
•48. Use BALLOONMAN at your next open house $25/hour.
•49. Do a monthly Newsletter and ask a client to write an article each month.
•50. Do a blood drive for all your clients and the town.
•51. Host a summer read-a-thon for kids. Market it to all your clients. Give a summer reading list to kids and any kid who reads a book and writes a book report gets a $5 Amazon Gift card!
•52. Do a real estate round table forum about today's real estate market. Invite the general public and business people from the area. Include industry experts... Including YOU!
•53. Use your Youmail or Voicemail as if it were a radio spot! Market listings... Your services...etc! Make it different!
•54. Advertise on FB! There aren't many agents doing it but it's a genius idea!
•55. Is your kid on a sp-orts team? Take team photos and make a Design Center web commercial to email to all moms and dads!
•56. Do a quarterly open house raffle... People get entered each time they visit one of your open houses. Collect emails so you can remind them of all upcoming open houses.
•57. Offer free short sale webinars through Craigslist.
•58. Start Your Own "Biggest Loser" group of local office workers that will walk with you each day at lunch. Use this as a unique networking tool.
•59. Host a burger bash for friends and clients at a local eatery. Negotiate discounted burgers based on head count.
•60. Host an ASK JEEVES day for your past clients. Hire a laborer to pick up and transport stuff all day long. Lunch, breakfast, or anything that needs to be couriered!
•61. Do a boxed breakfast Sunday... Deliver bagels, a newspaper, and a coffee to past clients.
•62. Holidays- Host a Santa delivery program for past clients. You hire a Santa that will stop by and visit families.
•63. Have a bartering section on your website where friends and clients can barter services.
•64. Print out maps o local towns where you advertise your services. Leave them at the town hall and Chamber of Commerce.
•65. Hire high school kids to leave door hangers at a local neighborhood. Distribute info about other listings, your services, or about the tax credit.
•66. Design a catchy, cool, placement for the local café or sandwich shop. Offer to print 2000 if you can be the sole advertiser!
•67. Use your car to advertise your business!
•68. Always hand out 2 business cards... One for them and one for a friend who may need your services.
•69. At a local fair host a booth for child id and fingerprint cards. Everything branded with YOU!
•70. Host a community clean up event with a local Girl Scout troop.
•71. FREE MAID SERVICE Campaign- List Your House With Me- and I'll help you clean up all the way to the bank!
•72. Give away personalized Frisbees in the dog park on Sundays
•73. Hire a high school student who works 10 hours a week delivering your pre-printed Expired packages. A flyer that says "CALL ME ABOUT YOUR EXPIRED CONTRACT- I'LL HELP YOU HIT PAYDAY!" with payday candy bars.
•74. Send all of your clients' earplugs "Have you heard the market's bad? You're listening to the wrong people. Call your local neighborhood expert." 76. Methodically call past clients and invite each to dine with you. Don't fail! Be relentless during the year. Make a list of the clients so you don't miss anyone. Never give up, until it is clear they are sick of you. Staying close to satisfied past clients, for their next sale and for their referrals, is the best, best, best use of your time and money. Better than other marketing that you can ever do! Mailing them useful stuff is okay, but nowhere near as important as face-to-face contact.
•75. Refer you expired listings to someone that wants them!
•76. Have a customer appreciation playoff party at a local VFW. Make it a potluck to save $$
•77. Set up a zany website that unique...- UglyHomes.com or You WouldntWantThisHouse.com
•78. Expired Listing Seminar!
•79. Recipe swap for friends and clients.
•80. Sponsor an FB fan page for a local business.
•81. Sponsor a face painting booth at a local fair.
•82. Concierge service for past clients
- 3 referrals- rake your leaves spring and summer
- 1 closed referral- mowing for a month
- 1 closed referral- plowing for a month
•83. Holiday Light Tour for clients
•84. FB Fan Page for a Condo Complex
•85. Send out ONE "I Just LOVE your home" personal note card per day. That's 365 cards a year. Will you get a listing? Probably!
•86. Make up branded bookmarks and leave them at your local library and book stores!
•87. Pull a publicity stunt! A Harley-Davison dealer in up state New York advertised what it called a "cat shoot". This sparked calls from the Humane Society, police chief and even the mayor. On the appointed day, the press and a large crowd showed up to find a six- foot high card board cat waiting to be plugged with a paintball gun. All proceeds went to charity-and the dealer got a lot of buzz.
•88. Local service clubs, churches, community organizations and special interest groups are hungry for speakers. Discuss the goings-on in your sector (for free) and weave in a soft sell. Answer all questions directly. If you can't help, direct the person to a competitor who can. Your honesty will astound.
•89. Send off-season cards to good customers. Impersonal Christmas cards often are little more than holiday clutter. Instead, send out First Day of Spring, Summer, Fall or Winter cards or peg the mailing to a customer's personal milestone, such as, "Congratulations on your daughter's graduation from high school".
•90. Catch them by surprise. Make sure your company's name, address and phone number appear on the upper left corner of the envelope. People will call to say the envelope was empty, and this will lead to a friendly, low-key chat about the product or service behind the headline.
•91. Infiltrate the stacks. Stuff business cards into real estate related books at the library.
•92. Different Giveaways. Pass out rulers with catchy taglines such as, "How do we measure up to your expectations?"
•93. Go CRAZY! At your next open house line the drive way and streets with 20 open house signs
•94. Have your listing run a yard sale on the same day as your open house.
•95. GO EAGLES! Pass out flyers for your local high school football teams game with "Go EAGLES" (or whatever their mascot is) on one side. On the reverse side , your logo and phone number appears. Every time the flyer is displayed, the fan stares right at your company information.
•96. Hold a course for the community on Facebook and Linkdln for small business.
•97. Hold a Care Packages for Soldiers Drive!
•98. Money Stamping! Grab a rubber stamp from your local office supply store and stamp a funny phrase along with your website address on it. Have a make money investing in real estate blog. Stamp something like "learn how to make thousands by investing in real estate: www.MyWebsite.com".
•99. Looking for a way to get noticed in the huge pile of advertising mail potential clients get? Send your promo material in a big manilla envelope and put 39- 1cent stamps on it. Out of 100 envelopes, who's do you think will catch the eye first?
•100. Top 10 reasons to choose YOU. Instead of leaving business cards or other promo material at a business or in some ones email box, create a list of the top 10 reasons why the prospect should choose your company. Make them 100% true, humorous and memorable.
•101. Write an E-book. You can do this for 2 reasons: 1 you can write a free e-book on a topic in your niche and circulate it so people will start to see you as an authority in your niche, or you can also sell the book for a small profit and use that money to fund some of the other Guerrilla Marketing tactics.
•102. Have an outdoor movie night. Rent a projector and find a smooth wall and an outdoor location.
•103. T-Shirts. This is great for turning yourself or others into walking billboard. \
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