Nearly every single “How-To Business Book” says that the key to success is to FOCUS your business’ goals. Why then do Real Estate Agents insist on marketing themselves as agents representing properties throughout all of a huge metro area (e.g. San Francisco, Washington DC, Bay Area, etc)?
Ask yourself what neighborhoods you’ve sold properties in repeatedly over the last several years. Do these sales represent the vast majority of your total sales? Now, think about how you received leads for the minority of your remaining sales that were in miscellaneous neighborhoods.
What we hear from agents is that the lead path for their miscellaneous neighborhood sales is typically quite random. Maybe it was a referral from a close friend or maybe it is someone they met while serving on a board. Regardless, the leads came to them as already well qualified. How many of these leads started with conversations like, “I know that you primarily work in XYZ Neighborhood, but I could use your help in my neighborhood. Are you interested?”
Instead of marketing yourself as knowing the entire regional area, why not market yourself as an expert in the neighborhoods you’ve sold in the most? Most agents do not take this approach as they fear they will miss that one opportunity in the across town neighborhood that they know little about. They also fear that someone will not think of them as an agent because they make the assumption that they work ONLY in these targeted neighborhoods. We think this likelihood is actually quite slim. Also, if compared against the upside of focusing your marketing on your deep knowledge of your prime neighborhoods, the more realistic upside is more sales in your focused neighborhoods.
About 85% of our clients are Real Estate Agents. But, this does not mean that we do not care deeply for the other 15% of our Small Business clients. When it came time to design our new website we found ourselves in a quandary. Should our home page messaging focus entirely toward 85% of our clients or should we take the risk of watering down our message by trying to focus simultaneously on the needs of Real Estate and Small Business Clients? As we audited through our Small Business Clients, it became clear that every one of them would have been a client of ours irrespective of the messaging on our website; they all came to us via a myriad of channels separate from a cold lead landing on intersect.marketing. This simply isn’t the case for our Real Estate clients, many of them started as cold leads originating on the home page of our website. Therefore, we decided to take the risk and focus our entire home page messaging toward the majority of our audience … Real Estate Agents.
We challenge you to do the same. Focus your website and other marketing efforts toward this same majority. Like us, we expect your business too will grow with this added focus and subsequent change.