3 Ways to Guarantee You Are ALWAYS Consistent with Your Geographic Farm

Over the 20 or so years that we have been doing marketing and branding for real estate agents, many things have changed–but one thing always remains the same. The people that come to us for help are always failing because they are inconsistent in one fashion or another.

If I've said it once, I've said it hundreds and hundreds of times. Consistency is CRITICAL to the success of your real estate farm sreas. So many agents miss the mark on consistency, though, simply because of the rigorous demands of the real estate business itself. As a Realtor®, you are your own boss. You wear many hats and, at times, you'll be pulled in a direction you didn't anticipate, forcing you to drop everything you had planned and simply focus on what is immediately demanding your attention.

While it is certainly hard to always stay consistent, given the difficult schedule agents face, there are some pro-tips I can offer that will help ensure nothing slips through the cracks and you get the results you so richly deserve. Here are three simple ones:

1) Create a COMPLETE Marketing Plan

This one is super, super important. While there are lots of parts that should go into creating a comprehensive marketing plan for your farm area—such as creating client personas for homeowners in your farm area and analyzing your brand's value proposition at its core level—creating a COMPLETE marketing plan is one of the most important things you can do.

So what is a complete plan, you ask? It's exactly that. Complete. Craft your marketing plan so that you have postcard mailing topics figured out for every month of the year. This doesn't mean that all the mailings are set in stone and can't change. After all, on any given month, you may have a huge closing and prefer to advertise the home you just sold instead. That is perfectly fine.

Planning everything ahead of time puts you in the driver's seat for when things get out of hand. If something comes up last minute (and it will, inevitably), when it's time to mail out your next marketing piece, having that marketing plan already sorted out in advance will be the difference between you getting your farm mailing out on time and being late—or, even worse, missing a month.

2) Be Realistic (Translation: Honest) about Your Available Time, Skill Set and Interests

One other important exercise to go through is simply analyzing what your true amount of free time is, given the marketing plans you have. If you are already overworked, I can guarantee that you are going to run into issues with consistency. Rather than tempt fate, your best bet in this case would be to find a marketing firm that can represent you and handle your marketing needs.

Additionally, there are things your real estate farming plan is going to require that you may not know how to do or, frankly, just have no desire to do at all. Again, if that is the case, being realistic about it and hiring a marketing firm to help you, from the start, is the perfect way to start off on the right foot and ensure your success.

3) Keep Your Marketing Schedule Handy, and Review It Regularly

Assuming that many, if not most, of you will end up hiring an outside firm to help you with your farming campaigns, one very, very important thing to remember is to review your campaigns frequently. I cannot tell you how many times we gain a new client, and when asked what made them want to switch to our firm, the response we get is that the agent's prior marketing firm was not actually keeping to the schedule they set, thus making their postcard farming useless. THIS IS NOT GOOD!

While there is a great amount of trust involved anytime you release your marketing responsibilities to an outside firm, it is always important to keep track of what is supposed to be going out and verifying that it is going out, on time, as agreed upon.

Consistency in your postcard marketing never is easy. If you plan ahead, avoiding the pitfalls many agents crash into will be much easier for you– ensuring the success you so richly deserve.

To view the original article, visit the Leading Agent blog.