In the following sections, we will
discuss all the different types of lead generation. This will include everything from referral marketing to
online advertising. This will
provide an overview of each strategy, then later in the book, we will go more
in-depth with what we have found to be the most effective methods.
Let’s start by addressing the
oldest marketing method around: word of mouth. Many real estate agents feel that this is the most effective
method for growing their business but many don’t focus on improving in this
area. Do you have marketing
material to fuel repeat business or referrals? Do you mention referrals on your business cards? Do you offer any incentives for a
client to make a referral? If you
do, great, if you don’t use these techniques don’t worry; we will show you
examples and discuss the psychology behind the marketing.
I’d like to begin by discussing
referral letter marketing. I’m not
talking about getting a referral letter from your happy past clients. This is a good idea but this letter is
going to be focused around other professionals who have a high affinity to your
clients. I’m talking about getting
a constant stream of clients referred to you from professionals like mortgage
brokers, financial planners, accountants, attorneys, contractors and
inspectors. All you need is a
letter from the world’s greatest real estate agent, you.
This is not new information but
nonetheless when we tested all different lead generation techniques and
surveyed our clients we found that this technique is very effective and also
provides higher quality clients. The best part is this is very easy and cheap to get started with. All you need to do is sit down and put
a list together of professionals that are likely to have similar client
demographics to your own clients. I recommend starting with people who have a direct connection to the
real estate industry and after saturating that market, then move on to more
diverse and unique affiliated professionals.
There are a couple different ways
to hook these potential professionals
into working as part of your referral network team. I have seen many different letters used extremely
effectively. It is just a matter
of picking one that fits your style and testing it. By testing I simply mean sending out maybe 5%-10% of your
list the letter and seeing the response rate. Based on that, you can determine if you should try to
improve the control or if you should roll it out to the full list.
I will show you an exact example of
a letter I have used and got tremendous results with every time I send it
out. I will explain all the
details of how this letter should be mailed and everything that should be
included with it. Let’s first
discuss the list of professionals that actually have the same clientele you
could work with…
- Certified Public Accountants
- Mortgage Broker and Lenders (obviously)
- Financial Planners and Advisors
- Attorneys
- General Contractors
- Interior Designers
- Real Estate Appraisers
- Title and Escrow Officers
- Electricians
- Plumbers
- Landscapers
- Roofers
- Tree Service Companies
- Handymen
- You get the idea...
This list should get you off and
running, but remember that the possibilities are literally endless. Okay, so now we know the professionals
we are going to target, but we need to determine where this list of
professionals will come from. You
have a couple different options to find their contact information. These options will be dependent on how
much money you have in your marketing budget but we will discuss everything
from the $0 budget all the way up to the unlimited budget.
Option one is to simply search the
yellow pages and the local search listings on Google or Yahoo. You should already have a geographic
area that you want to target within your region. With this option, the time consuming part is going to be the
manual labor involved in taking down the contact information for each
professional. If you have the
time, the employees, or a low marketing budget, this can be the option to go
with. Another really affordable
option to use with this method for searching the names is to use Amazon.com and
their Mechanical Turk service. You
probably have not heard of this service but I have used in on numerous
occasions and have had great success with it. Mechanical Turk is a network of virtual laborers. Collecting and organizing data is
really the best use for their service from my experience. Simply go to www.mturk.com and click on the Get Results link. This will take you to a sign up where
you can set up your account, post your project, set your budget and activate
your campaign.
