3 Ways to Use Offline Real Estate Marketing to Leverage Your Online Properties

These days, the battle between "online" and "offline" has never been more divided in the real estate industry. You've got those that swear by the tried and true of postcard farming, newspaper ads and door knocking—and then you have those that swear those are all the "old way" and instead focusing their pursuits on inbound marketing, Facebook advertising and Adwords.

So what is the right answer? Honestly, in the 19 years or so I've been working with Realtors, I would say there is actually no right answer, EXCEPT this:

The correct answer is the one that suits your business model the best. It's the thing you are most comfortable with. It is the thing you are willing to do—consistently, without stress or effort—to keep building your brand and, therefore, your business.

So today, I'll address three ways you can use the more traditional, offline marketing tools to help leverage some newer online real estate marketing efforts.

Capture Postcards for Farming

To be perfectly honest, I have always been a fan of capture marketing postcards. Why? Simple. By using capture codes on your farming postcards, you get the real-time ability to track the success (or failure) of your campaign.

It has always puzzled me that Realtors will spend thousands of dollars on a postcard farming campaign and have no way to track their results. The most popular answer we get when posing this question to the Realtor is, "I'll know it works when someone picks up the phone and calls me to list their home."

That is not a great way to track your marketing. What about the people that are thinking of selling soon, but now is not quite the right time? What if you had a way to nurture those people, giving them extra "touches" to keep you at the top of their mind until they finally are ready to sell? That is what capture marketing does.

You can watch an entire video demo of our Postcard Capture System here, but the gist of it is this: The homeowner gets a postcard, like the one above. On the card, there is a call to action leading the homeowner to a landing page with a special code.

The homeowner then goes to the page, punches in their special offer code, their email address, and then clicks the submit button to get whatever item of value was promised to them.

Once this happens, you get an instant notification. This is not only important, as it gives you the ability to track the success of your campaign, but if you notice on the image of the landing page above, you are also getting their email address. This allows you to leverage your postcard farming to build up your drip email marketing.

Home Value Landing Page for Door Knocking

Lately, we've been talking a lot about instant home valuation landing pages and how you can use them in a myriad of ways, from everything to Facebook advertising, to your website, and beyond. Home value landing pages are the perfect thing for door knocking, as well. They can work seamlessly with this type of campaign and here is how:

With capture postcards, we know that a specific card is hooked to a specific homeowner, but you cannot know that with door knocking. That is where the landing page comes in.

As you can see, when the homeowner goes to the page, it's just a matter of asking them to quickly plug in their home address.

Once they do this, the system finds their address, lets them know and offers to email them the report. At that point, all they need to do, at bare minimum, is enter an email address.

It's a nice, tight package that is easy to use, and that homeowners will easily fill out since the barrier of entry is so low. It's also a great way that you can actually get someone to move from the "physical" homeowner status into your "qualified online leads" category.

The Open House Item of Value

This as far as I am concerned, is a SUPREMELY underused tool. You are at an open house meeting people in real life, right? That is as "offline" as it gets. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever though that you cannot leverage these "real life" meetings into something online that will help you nurture and capture that potential buyer as a client.

Forget about the sign-in books, the notecards, or whatever else. I would venture to say even forget about the myriad of smartphone apps that are called "Open House Fill-in-the-blank." There is no benefit or upside for the open house visitor. They are not interested in this at all.

FACT: Most homeowners, before they decide to put their home on the market, head out and check out open houses to get a feeling for the market. With that in mind, why not give them something they would appreciate?

My favorite two items we offer our clients that they can use for their open houses are an instant market report that can be sent to someone that fills out a simple form OR the instant home valuation (for their current home).

The point here is just asking someone, "Please sign in," is not going to elicit the response you want. You need to go above and beyond that. You need to offer them something that is deemed valuable to them to get them to "play ball" in a meaningful way with you that will hopefully lead to them becoming a client down the road.

So there you have it. Three simple ways to take "old school" and leverage it into the "new school," all while building your business.

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