For real estate agents and mortgage brokers, social networking is about increasing your number of friends. Whether online or offline, social networking means sharing your expertise, growing your reputation and building a vast network. There’s a strong correlation between the size of your network and the depth of your bank account.

Social Networking Sparks Sales and Cuts Expenses

When you’re in a service industry, such as real estate and finance, using a sales approach shortens your professional life span. Too many real estate agents spend their resources hunting for the next sale when longevity comes from nurturing relationships; you get constant referrals and repeat business while advertising expenses are deferred. It’s the epitome of working less to earn more.

You can achieve it by way of changing your approach. Unlike hunting where agents spend exorbitant amounts of money to get leads, like direct advertising, radio spots and even TV commercials, you let prospects find you.

Think about your most valuable clients. Did they come from advertising or from word-of-mouth? Did they come from something you did or did they find you through someone? Chances are your best clients discovered you.

How to Get Discovered

How do prospects find you? From networking. Even if they didn’t know there was a particular name for it; they found you through people. What does social networking have to do with it? It’s a fundamental change in your business for getting more clients. Stop advertising and start networking. People are more comfortable meeting you if they discover you first.

Joining a social networking website can be a place to start. You can experience first hand what is social networking by joining Zillow and Trulia; excellent real estate networking sites. Broker Outpost is a good mortgage broker networking site and Active Rain and Wanna Network are good peer-to-peer networking sites.

Once you’re networking with peers and prospect, it’s how you connect with members of a community and nurture relationships to produce a constant flow of referrals - the best outcome for what is social networking.

There are plenty of good marketing strategies that can help you produce clients. What’s important though is you find ways to differentiate from competitors and get prospects to trust you quicker. For a prospect, selling or buying a home is their most important decision. You have to convince them you are the one who can make it all happen before your competitor does.

Education, Not Solicitation

Too often Realtors are in a hurry to make a sale. Instant gratification rules the day and a huge marketing opportunity is missed to build your empire and become a great Rainmaker. The opportunity being missed is education. Education is a commonly known, but seldomly used, marketing strategy. 

Like all other marketing strategies, its purpose is to get the attention of the clients you want. With consumers having the Internet at their fingertips, they can get any information they want in a nano second. In the past, if a consumer suffered because of inaccurate information, he or she would get some sympathy. However, today it is different.

Consumers expect other consumers to do a check on what they have been told. A traditional approach would be to tell the client why he or she should list their property with you. Today’s consumers do not want to be sold, they want to be educated. If you offered a free report about the five top mistakes when selling or buying a house they would listen. This is something that could benefit them and you would be using education to establish a dialogue. It builds trust and accelerates the relationship process.

Make Education Special

Being able to offer your client accurate information is proof that you are doing your job. Most clients shy away from setting up meetings in order to give a Realtor an opportunity to advertise. To be honest, most clients find it offensive because they feel manipulated. On the other hand if you used education as your initial approach, you would find clients happy to meet because they perceive you as an expert not a salesman.

You can package education in the form of special reports. A special report is a well crafted message that educates clients and shapes their perception of your expertise. Once they perceive you as an expert, it’s much easier to generate quality leads. Since purchasing or selling a home is no simple task and involves large sums of money, clients are more comfortable choosing experts.

Instant & Affordable Leads

Using email is a preferred method for offering special reports. You eliminate graphic design and printing expenses and postage keeping your marketing costs minimized – combined with Magnetic Email and you can see which clients are paying attention you can convert into leads. You can promote special reports in different ways:

• Send an email message with an invitation to download the report.
• Promote as an advertisement inside your electronic newsletter.
• Offer to guests at open houses to secure more registrations

Here are some examples in the table below you can test. The main article is written in first person with a conversational tone. For instance, you could send it as an email message and then offer the special report as an incentive. Recipients who click the link to download or request the free report become a potential lead.

Content is King

Being visible isn’t enough to generate a steady flow of referrals. Heck, even delivering exceptional service isn’t good enough for today’s customer. Your content strategy has to be at the top of it’s game. But wait, what is a content strategy? It’s not a coined phrase thrown around in real estate circles.

Your content strategy has everything to do with how you keep visible with clients, produce referrals, improve word-of-mouth and position yourself ahead of competition. In today’s competitive marketplace, you’re judged beyond what you say in an advertisement. With the help of the Internet, people can express their opinions to the world about you.

Many real estate agents confuse content with advertising. They believe the message in their advertisement is content. It’s not – it’s solicitation – something consumers have grown tired of. Content is information that educates, even inspires someone to action. And unless you were born to be a persuasive writer, it’s a skill Realtors are missing.

Magnetic Articles 

Fortunately, persuasive writing isn’t a skill you need if you know where to find the right content. Voila! Right here in the marketing center is where you can get content. Now you can send great email newsletters filled with eye-popping information.

The table below includes main articles accompanied with their supplemental articles.

In most likelihood, the majority of your visitors aren’t ready to buy or sell a home today. But when they are ready, if you haven’t stayed in touch and built trust and rapport, you’ll miss the easy sale. Are you making that same mistake? If you are, that’s about to change.

A healthy relationship between a loan officer and real estate agent means the agent is never alone. Are there times when you feel you are alone in business? It shouldn’t be that way. My goal is simple…to help you build loyal clients. Imagine how your business would prosper if we worked together and focused on that single goal? In a short period of time you could be earning more income and enjoying a better lifestyle.

This next file you can download is an email campaign comprised of 9 messages so you can stay in touch and reap the benefits of future sales & referrals. Just take each message and modify to fit your preference, and then you email each one in sequence to your open house leads. Of course, if you have a Magnetic Email account, you can use it to give yourself X-Ray vision and see who’s paying attention to your marketing.

Download Email Follow Up Campaign 

(right click link and select “save target as”)

The flyer highlights the features of the home, a personal invitation from the owners, an offer for additional free information about home purchasing and date & time of the open house. I wouldn’t recommend including too many pictures or the listing price because those are the biggest elements that peak the neighbors curiosity the most.

The free additional information is the report giveaway mentioned in the previous section “The Right Strategy”. And of course, you know what to do after giving each guest a copy. That’s right…ask for their information. As you know, the value of your open house is your ability to collect each visitor’s information so you can continue marketing to them. As your database grows, so do your sales and income.

Download Sample Open House Invitation

(right click link and select “save target as”)