13 Biggest Wastes of Your Real Estate Marketing Dollars

I’ve been a little lax in the real estate blog this week…. But hey, it’s the holidays.

I was reading this article in Marketing Profs this week on the 13 biggest wastes of money in your budget. The article is for general marketing purposes, but there are two specific points that bear mentioning as they apply to most real estate agents. The points that the article brings up are:

1) Marketing Waste No. 3: Failing to follow up on leads
2) Marketing Waste No. 4: Killing the conversation
3) Marketing Waste No. 5: Overemphasizing new leads

There are a number of other great points that are made in the article, but I feel that the three that I mentioned are some of the most important. I’m too lax to look up the specific NAR statistic, but I believe that between 70-80 percent of new leads received by REALTORS do not receive timely follow up. My only response to that is create a prospecting engine to automate the follow up. Use autoresponders and click to call features and take advantage of the latest technology to make sure that when a lead is captured that it receives the attention that it deserves.

In conjunction with the follow up statement, I feel that the topic of killing the conversation needs to be mentioned. When a prospect (some people call it a lead, but my version of a lead is a qualified target client) contacts a real estate agent, the conversation should revolve around serving the needs of the prospect as well as qualifying them as a lead. We all love to tell people about what we are selling, and you can quickly kill a conversation with a prospect by jumping right into the features of your most current listings. Use your first conversation to identify the needs and wants of the prospect as well as ask questions that will help you to qualify them as a client. Save the detailed list of properties for when you have them face to face.

As I said before, the article has a number of great pearls of wisdom… 13 to be exact.. but the third plays right into the explanation about the need for a prospecting engine. As I have said many times; out of 100 current home owners, 1 needs your help right now, 20 will need your help within the next two years, and an additional 50 will need your help within the next seven years. Instead of spending all of your money trying to find that one new lead, use your prospecting engine to convert those leads that you have into ready and waiting clients.

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On a completely separate note, my hittail says I need to write more about free real estate flyers. I’m not sure how to effectively incorporate the text into my real estate marketing blog. However, I’m up for the challenge.
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