The holiday decorations are put away, the leftovers have been devoured and the inherent craziness has settled down – welcome to 2018! A lot has happened in the world of digital marketing over the past 12 months, and the cold days of January (for those of you in the north) bring forth the realities of a new quarter, new goals and new expectations.
And it’s time to ask yourself the tough marketing questions if you want to get ahead of your competition in 2018.
- What’s my plan for keeping in touch with clients?
The holiday season gives us great inspiration for reaching out and reconnecting with friends, family and past clients. If you only reach out to past clients once a year, you’re missing an opportunity to build a lasting relationship – one that could bring you referrals down the road.
Staying in touch with clients doesn’t take much time at all when you use IXACT Contact. With a contact-specific dashboard you can see every single one of your important contacts and easily manage all your keep in touch activities.
- Is my agent website helping grow my business?
An agent website that is professionally designed, mobile optimized and effectively communicates why a buyer or seller should trust you can help grow your real estate business. The most effective agent websites are built to capture sales leads and automatically add them to your CRM for follow up.
If you don’t have an agent website, make sure this year you get one. If you already have an agent website up and running, think about enhancing the design, functionality and content. One thing to keep in mind is that your agent website needs to be fully optimized for mobile devices.
Launching and maintaining an agent website is easier than you may think with IXACT Contact Agent Websites.
- Where are my leads coming from?
Sales leads are the lifeblood of the real estate business, you need to know where they’re coming from. If someone has contacted you through your website, you want to know how they found your website in the first place.
One way to understand where your online leads come from is to ensure that your website is set up to capture leads and automatically populate them in your real estate CRM, including what brought them to your website in the first place – social media, Google, a blog post and so on. Use this information to your advantage. For example, if you see a lot of leads enter your website via your blog, then blogging is an area to continue to focus on this year.
- What does my email marketing game look like?
Email marketing is still one of the most effective forms of direct digital marketing due to its targeted and personal nature. The frequency and types of emails you choose to send your clients and prospects is in your hands.
Many agents choose to send a monthly email newsletter that shares interesting articles and industry information just to stay in touch regularly. Others prefer to deliver specific, targeted messages to different groups of contacts in their CRMs by using a strategy known as Drip email marketing. Some do both. Either way, don’t let the thought of creating and sending emails deter you, there are simple solutions for running email campaigns.
- Could I be more active on social media?
Social media is a great tool to connect with your audience one-to-one. And when you develop content that educates, entertains and inspires – you’ll find that consistency is the key to developing an engaging community.
The common roadblock that most agents find is that maintaining their social media properties with great content can be incredibly time-consuming and expensive. Social Stream shatters that barrier by automating the process of finding and streaming high quality content from many of the world’s most admired, tier one publications.
When prospects read the article, or view the video, they do so while seeing your name, picture and contact information – it’s a controlled, branded experience designed to keep you top of mind and help grow your business and sales.
- Is technology on your radar?
We know that growing a real estate business has its challenges, many of which, technology can help alleviate. It helps keep you organized and optimize your time so you can focus on growing your business. Make 2018 the year that you embrace real estate CRM technology and see the difference it can make to your bottom line.
Start your FREE 5 week free trial of IXACT Contact now.
