Top Tips for Dominating Your Local Market this Spring

Are you ready to make the most of the spring buying season? Here are the tools you need to maximize your time and productivity.

The stage has been set for a competitive spring season in most markets. In the whirlwind of these busy times, it might start to feel like you're stuck putting out fires left and right and tending to the squeakiest wheels without focusing on a strategy or engaging a holistic approach to managing your business.

Don't let the overwhelm get you. And don't get bogged down in admin tasks and marketing campaigns that could be put on auto-pilot. Here are the best ways to stay organized, keep on top your prospects, and leverage the right tools to do the heavy lifting.

1. Have a Smart System for Lead Organization

Segmenting and categorizing your leads (making your monster-of-a-database manageable) will help you sort your leads quickly and allow you to target specific groups for your marketing efforts.

This will save you SO much time this spring, and make your marketing much more effective.

Start by creating categories to bucket your leads in based on similar situations:

• hot buyer
• long-term buyer
• unqualified, etc.

This lets you sift and sort your contacts with ease, and put groups of prospects on automated campaigns to keep them engaged.

Brandon Brittingham of Long & Foster, says that using technology to segment his database was a game changer:

You can take 1500 leads and scale it down to 10 based on the segmenting. And that's made our conversion rate go up significantly. It's made our efficiency go up significantly. And I mean just the power of segmenting. What we can do with that—it's crazy to me the amount of information that you can drill down to be so specific, which in the long run will create better conversion. But also that turns you into a full CRM. It kind of turns you into having knowledge of the consumer almost on an intimate basis before you even talk to them. Again, I think that's an absolute game changer. And pairing that with the drip campaigns and custom drip campaigns. You can create a dataset and market specifically to them through segmenting.

When you apply the right categories and tags to your leads, your database becomes infinitely more manageable. You gain insight into what is happening with your leads, how your clients are being serviced, and who is getting things done. You can also quickly communicate with large, similar groups of leads, and automate your marketing efforts for those that are further out in the process. Hello, autopilot!

2. Revisit (or Create!) Your Drip Plans

Now that you have all leads segmented with clear categories and helpful tags, each specific group should be on a drip campaign (automated email or text messaging marketing plan). When your database is powered by a predictive CRM, and you've organized your leads appropriately, you can create follow-up plans that are also automatically triggered based on lead behavior.

Create campaigns that are relevant to different segments of your audience like:

• a neighborhood update for those searching in the same area
• comps and market updates for your seller leads
• emails to help generate referrals from past clients
• birthday and anniversary check-ins

Customizable templates in a real estate CRM allow you to tailor emails and text messages with a lead's information and create a message to address their needs and keep them engaged. And if you use a CRM that tracks every action, you'll easily understand how a lead's search is progressing and what level of engagement they're showing.

3. Get the Tools to Manage Leads On-the-Go

When you're out in the field and on the go, to-do lists are often thrown out the window and your work style shifts to "on the fly." This is a recipe for things slipping through the cracks, so take advantage of that powerful smartphone. Leverage scheduling features and reminders, or better yet, a mobile CRM app.

Here's what you should look for in a mobile app:

• Alerts and reply options to increase your responsiveness
  • You can quickly call, text, or email leads based on the way they reached out to you, so you're guaranteed to follow their preferred method of communication and deliver an amazing experience.
• Prioritized tasks to keep you productive.
• Predictive insights to eliminate the guesswork
  • When smart, actionable insights are available from your phone, you can take action whenever you have a moment, wherever you are. Look for technology that provides push notifications, or real-time alerts so you know immediately what's happening with the most active leads on your website who are likely to initiate or re-engage in conversation.

If you don't have the tech options you need, try to carve out time each evening to get your tasks noted in your phone so you can have access to any notes and to-dos when you're out and about, and can start working through your list when you have a free moment. It might be worth including your daily and weekly goals and worksheets in a Google doc on your phone too.

4. Find the Right Technology Partner

Competition moves quickly. If you are not thinking about how to structure and leverage your database for multi-channel marketing, it will become steadily more difficult to compete in the future. BoomTown takes all the pieces and elements into consideration in every feature of our system.

To view the original article, visit the BoomTown blog.