In today’s hot residential real estate market, winning a new seller client is a big deal. There’s an undisputed supply shortage and many properties are selling above list price and faster than ever. It’s a real estate agent’s dream, except that these conditions mean that competition for listings is fiercer than ever.
When the stakes are this high, you need to outshine your competition. Blanketing your farm area with Just Sold postcards isn’t the tactic that will help you achieve wide success. It’s a great tactic—don’t get us wrong—but it’s much more effective when used as part of a targeted, multichannel strategy.
Don’t worry, we’re not talking about a Madison Avenue-level advertising strategy. It’s easy enough to improve your marketing, and your outcomes, by making it targeted and including digital ads to complement your Just Sold postcards. Let’s walk through what this strategy looks like in action so you can see how simple, yet effective, it could be.
Optimize Your Just Sold Postcards
We’ve talked before about how casting a wide net (i.e. sending a real estate postcard to every house in your farm) is a low-reward drain on your advertising budget. Postcards aren’t cheap and neighborhoods are filled with renters and owners who aren’t interested in moving. Don’t let your message fall on deaf ears when there are tools that can help you find homeowners who will be receptive.
Targeted Prospecting Using Likelihood to List
As a Homesnap Pro agent, you have access to a free in-app tool, called Likelihood to List, that identifies homes in your farm that are likely to go on the market soon. Behind the scenes, our intelligent software is continuously evaluating data on every off-market property and identifying which are likely to go up for sale in the next 12 months.
Agents see the results as color-coded homes on the area map, classified as Most Likely (orange), Likely (yellow) or Least Likely (blue) to be listed. You’re able to click into each property listing to see the factors that our algorithm used to make this prediction.
It takes mere minutes to apply the Likelihood to List filter and see all the seller leads in your farm area. You can deselect the Least Likely properties filter so you only have a view of homes that are worth your postcard dollars.
Reinforce Your Just Sold Postcards
Your postcards will now be targeted to homeowners who may be more interested in selling soon. But you still need a way to stand out from the crowd. (You aren’t the only real estate agent sending Just Sold postcards. Shocking, right?)
Social media ads are the digital equivalent of postcards, and they happen to be highly effective in promoting brand awareness and keeping your brand top of mind. Think of Facebook as the modern-day bus stop ad + billboard + grocery store ads. Your prospective sellers are scrolling their feed everywhere they go, and your ad could be shown to them every time they log in.
This is what makes Facebook such a great channel for nurturing prospects. First, they see your Just Sold ad on their feed. Next, they receive your Just Sold postcard. Then you’re back on their feed, but this time the light bulb goes off and they remember receiving your postcard and know they’ve seen your ads somewhere before (on Facebook!). By the time they warm up from considering selling to being ready to sell, you will be top of mind.
Even better, Facebook allows you to be targeted in your advertising, too. You can create a custom audience using the homeowners you found through Likelihood to List who are Most Likely and Likely to sell soon. When you tap into each property listing in Homesnap Pro, you’ll see a homeowner profile that includes their contact information. You would simply add their email address and/or phone number to your custom audience in Facebook to ensure your ad is only shown to that group of people.
With real estate advertising experts who set up, launch and manage campaigns for real estate agents across the country, Homesnap Pro Ads lets you promote any of your existing transactions as Just Sold, Just Listed, Coming Soon and Open House ads. And remember how we mentioned advertising only to a custom audience of specific seller prospects? We’ll manage that entire process for you, too.
See how easy it is to get your ads live on Facebook with Homesnap Pro Ads.
