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Tech Meets Traditional: Today’s Effective Lead Generation Strategies

by Jason Porterfield

LeadGenInsideEdFinding quality leads can be a challenge for many realtors. Agents often find personal relationships to find new clients and close deals.

Maggie Dokic of Special Miami Homes relies on people within her sphere of influence, meaning her family, friends and acquaintances. She uses social media to keep in touch with clients and is trying out Facebook’s advertising options. Her ads focus on the same area where she sends her mailings so as not to dilute her efforts by trying different locations. Dokic has also picked up leads by blogging about the Miami real estate market.

“I think blogging works,” Dokic said. “I realize that it’s not for everybody, but there’s incredible free blogs. As long as you’re sticking to your key phrases and you’re blogging often, you will be found by leads.”

Dokic’s focus wasn’t always so narrow. When she first started out in 2005, she would drive far out of her area to show a house. She now refers clients who are out of her area to other realtors and advises others to concentrate on one area. Dokic also uses targeted mailers to reach the areas she works.

“Buyers will find you on Zillow, Trulia or Realtor.com and call you regardless, when you have a listing,” Dokic said. “There’s no point in spending a dollar to get a buyer when that same dollar will get you a listing and ten buyers to boot.”

She is unafraid to cut loose a lead that isn’t panning out. Instead of simply deleting their information from her database, she reaches out one final time via phone or email to let them know that she is there for them if they need her. She also recommends that realtors who are just starting out avoid spending money needlessly on advertising when they can reach out to others to find leads, a lesson that it took her about a year to learn.

“Phone calls are free,” Dokic said. “That should really be where a new realtor should be spending his time and effort. Making calls to people who know him and love him. Nothing beats picking up a phone and actually talking to someone.”

Piper Rothan of Keys Real Estate has been sending her quarterly mailings to the same neighborhoods for about 12 years. Shortly after getting into real estate in 2002, she learned how to design her own materials using InDesign and Photoshop. She works to make her mailings as educational and informative as possible. People who have been getting them for years contact her when they’re ready to sell their homes.

Rothan also sends out e-blasts to a contact list that includes about 30,000 people, but prefers to built her network through personal referrals rather than through online sources. She maintains a website that includes all of her listings, including those that have sold.

“For every single listing I have I create a web page so if someone Googles my name, all my listings will come up, even if the listing’s been sold,” Rothan said. “Because they’re still there it gives me a certain credibility with sellers.”

Rothan advises that agents pay attention to what other, successful realtors and do what they can to improve on those methods in order to generate new leads, from their signage and open house events to their listings. When she started out, she worked to make a good impression on other realtors and included them in her e-blasts, a tactic that boosted her name recognition among her peers.

“Having good relationships with realtors is truly dynamic,” she said. “It’s what helps create your business as well, because even though I don’t work with a lot of buyers, if I call a realtor to show a property and we’ve done business before or they know me it’s easier to get them to help me later.”

Rothan said she usually refers leads that are too far out of her area or that she can’t service well. She also turns down buyer leads because she isn’t interested in that end of the market and they could take years to convert.

“The seller leads, if I know someone’s thinking about selling their house that’s a different story,” she said. “That’s already a strong lead, so you show up in their lives in various ways.”

Rothan considers her quarterly mailings to be her strongest lead generation source because they get into mailboxes and give evidence to sellers that she’s working on their behalf. While she spends a lot of money on printing and mailing, the response justifies the cost.

“Why reinvent the wheel?” she said. “Watch those who are already masters of their craft and you can extrapolate to see what works. So I think that’s what I did.”

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