Real estate professional, John Marshall, published this blog post on ActiveRain earlier on in the month and he makes some exceptional points. It’s such a good post that we think it deserves a re-blog.
In this post, John mentions that when he looked 
at where his business was coming from last year, he discovered that the vast majority of it came from referrals or people who he already knew. This post highlights the importance of maintaining and building relationships with those people you already know and who know you. Focus on these people and grow your business based on referrals and past clients.
In order to ensure that relationship building with your contacts do not fall through the cracks, you need a CRM for real estate to help you organize everything. A real estate CRM will give you automatic prompts when it’s time to get in touch. It will also allow you to group and categorize your contacts so you can send out personalized mass emails and letters to specific niches, like John discusses.
If you’re interested in trying out a great CRM for real estate, please visit www.ixactcontact.com for a FREE 5 week trial.
The post is below:
If not how do you know who to market too? Or do you just buy into all of those marketing gurus that are helping you spend your money. Good plan!
Who is your target audience? How do you know? I read an interesting stat the other day, only 2% of all Agents have a niche, the rest must just be winging it. The amazing thing is that I would bet every agent knows a top producer and can tell you exactly who that top producer markets too, and yet the sad truth is they do not even have their own audience to market too, can you say burnout.
Most agents will try typical marketing, FSBO’s, Expired’s, cold calling lists, NED lists, door knocking, power hours, just listed/just sold cards etc, no wonder these agents burn out, or go belly up before they even get started.
For years I have believed that the Agent was the first cog in the wheel of the home buying process, the one that gets it all moving, the one that spends all the money trying to get the customer that will put 30-40 other people to work. Well I still believe that is the case but once you get specific it is so easy to target your marketing and quit spending those dollars foolishly.
Lets look at a couple niche markets, I know an agent in Denver that is the Harley Davidson Agent, everyone that owns a Harley and is looking for a house knows that she is the go to lady for real estate, she does not have to spend a dime on her marketing, now that she is known, the word gets spread for her, everyone has a commonality with her and immediate trust is established.
Another example, the newlywed Agent, this agent targets her marketing to, yep you guessed it Newlyweds, and guess who always recommends they give her a call, wedding planners, photographers etc, anyone involved in a wedding knows that she is the one to call for real estate as it relates to newlyweds.
There are literally thousands of niches that are not being directly targeted too, think of what you really love to do, I mean outside of selling homes, do you golf, boat, play hop-scotch, hunt, ski, para-sail, like waterfront property, anything at all that you are into. You can find clubs to join to get involved with like minded people and sooner that later your business will take off, and the beauty is you do not have to stop doing what is already working, this will just be extra business.
One more beautiful thing about this type of marketing, it is not taught anywhere and most agents will not believe that it works, so you do not have to worry about having much competition.
So back to my original comment, are you tracking where your business comes from? Last year I went through every transaction I could recount from 2000-2010 and long and behold 87% of my business came from people that already knew me or were referred to me by someone that knew me, the other 13% came from all of my marketing efforts combined, magazine and newspaper ads, websites, flyer’s, brochures, open houses, sign calls, floor calls etc, boy did I not only waste a lot of time I wasted a lot of my money, because nearly 95% of my marketing budget was being spent to attract only 13% (at best) of my business.
Now, any marketing I do is targeted directly to those that I can make an instant connection with and more than likely it wont be marketing at all, it will probably be a round of golf with friends that will refer me to those that they know are in need of my services.
In case you are wondering what my niche is, I work with buyers that are seeking low-no maintenance lifestyles, in the south metro Denver area, so that they can do other things besides paint the house, mow the lawn, rake the leaves etc. I now know exactly who can refer these people to me so those are the ones I spend my tine with, not just the next sale, but the guy/gal that will hand me the next twenty clients.
The original blog post by John Marshall can be found here.