Due to popular demand by the community we're extending the deadline by another week.
New Deadline is now 12 midnight July 1 (Sunday)! We look forward to reading more of your amazing entries!
Some Things Never Change
No matter how much real estate changes, and technology has dramatically altered the playing field in the last 15 years, there are still some tried and true methods of building your business. Because real estate remains, as much as anything, a contact sport, the number of people you interact with on a daily basis will often have a direct coorelation to the amount of business you actually close. For this reason, traditional marketing efforts like farming, allow you to get in front of real live buyers and sellers in your choosen market and enhance the chances your target demographic will do business with you when the time comes.
The Challenge
In our newest challenge, sponsored by SmartZip, we are asking you to share with us, in a blog post, one technique that you use to connect with local people in your geographic (or even your niche) farm.
For this challenge, we are going to offer 5000 ActiveRain points for all participants. If we choose your entry to use in our 'Best Farming Techniques' round up blog post and webinar (we'll be taking all of the entries and hosting a webinar where we share the best farming ideas), we will award another 5000 points.
In addition, we will randomly select one entry to win a ticket to any Ben Kinney Training event in the future. It could even be our next event.
An Example (or Two)
Here's an example of something similar to what you might choose to share.
For Portland, Oregon, agent Bev Blume, getting her foot in the door is all about systemizing her outreach and focusing on visibility. She introduces herself through automated marketing campaigns, including mailers, so that her community begins to know her name, face and brand. When members of her farm respond to her mailers or ads, she follows up with them personally, then sends a handwritten note to them to ensure that they won’t forget her.
In every note she writes to members of her farm, Bev mentions that the homeowner may see her and her dog out on their daily walks. In offering this connection point, Bev is gently reinforcing that she doesn’t just sell real estate in their community; she lives there, too.
Last, Bev remembers to invite these prospective clients to events like her client appreciation parties; fall harvest event and Christmas tree event. Over time, these events become a part of her network’s annual traditions.
If I might critique Bev's entry, I'd simply ask her to really expand on what she does in each step of the process. How does she execute her automated marketing campaigns? (In her case, she uses our sponsor, SmartZip). Does she use some kind of service to do the handwritten postcards or does she sit down each morning as part of her routine and commit to sending 5 hand written cards each day? When she's out in her neighborhood and someone recognizes her, or approaches her while she is out walking her dog, does she have some tried and true script that she uses to get them talking about the real estate market?
I'll share one of my own, from the agents who sold our last home.
In November, we would get an invite (They'd mail one, they'd email one and they'd even text to make sure we got it) for early december to come and get photos taken with Santa, hosted by our real estate agent. They could have just as easily had Santa posted up in their office or tucked away unseen by anyone but us special few past clients and sphere that had been invited. But instead, they set Santa up in a local shopping area, in the middle of their farm. And you can believe they did a great job with strategically placed marketing to let you know which real estate team was hosting Santa for pictures with the kiddos.
The next thing they could have done, after picking that really visible location was make it exclusive to just their own sphere and past clients. But what fun would that be for the people with kiddos that would walk by and haven't done business with them in the past, but might in the future? Yep, you guessed it, it wouldn't be any fun for those kids! ("Sorry Jimmy, Santa only takes photos with little kiddos whose parents bought and sold with this Grinch real estate team!"). So, anyone strolling through that day, who wanted their kiddos to get a photo with Santa could join the fun! All they had to do was fill out a little form with the parents name, email address (so we can send you the copies of the photos) and phone number, as well as a little option to request a free home valuation or buyer consultation. Each year, they add a significant number of people to the database by taking an event they were already planning to do for their sphere/past clients and holding it in a location designed to get them in front of other folks in their target market.
Our goal with this challenge is that our awesome ActiveRain members might share some executable strategies with other folks in the Rain! The more details the better so that someone else can R&D (Rip off and Duplicate) your great idea and maybe put their own spin on it for their unique target market.
Make Sure To Do This Part (and some details and deadlines)
One last thing, we are really going to be highlighting these posts over the next month. One week, later in June, we will be using one post from the challenge each day as the headline in our Daily Drop Newsletter. We will also be pulling some of the best entries and creating a roundup blog post so you can easily access the best ideas in one place. And as I mentioned above, we'll present the best ideas in a webinar in July. So, in an effort to get as many people to participate as possible, we ask that each entry include this paragraph at the end of your entry:
This blog post was written as a submission to the ActiveRain Challenge - My Best Farming Technique (Sponsored by SmartZip). If you would like to share one of your favorite farming techniques (and earn up to 10K ActiveRain points as well as a chance to win a free ticket to a Ben Kinney Training event) head over to the blog post announcing the challenge.
(You can just copy and paste that little blurb to the bottom of your entry post).
Then, once you have written your post, in order to submit it to the challenge, just come back to this blog post and leave a comment with the link to your blog post below in the comments. Entries are due byJuly 1st at Midnight (Pacific Time)
We look forward to reading all of the great entries and sharing them far and wide here on ActiveRain!
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