For many real estate agents it seems that their concept of "lead generation" is something akin to playing lotto. Place the right ad, in the right space, at just the right time, and you win the transaction. No wonder so many of them go broke playing this game.
Its all about relationships people. Lead generation, if you want to call it that, is all about attracting responses; then nurturing them to the point where there is sufficient trust to do business.
Trust is the natural result of repeated, escalating contacts wherein both parties recognize mutual benefit potential through communications that naturally build credibility and confidence. That sentence is a mouthful, to be sure, but when you fully understand it, you'll be well on your way to much more effective lead generation.
What's the key to attracting responses? Make information offers that you know your target prospects will find easy-to-say-yes-to.
What's the key to nurturing relationships? Continue making information offers that escalate in intimacy.
For example, your first offer might be to show current listings, without any cost, obligation or sharing of personal information; that would be an easy-to-say-yes-to offer for most buyers to accept.
Your next offer might be to save the search profile and automatically send all future listings that fit the profile. This would escalate the intimacy of the relationship, because in order to accept this offer the potential buyer would have to provide, at the very least, an email address.
The next series of offers might be more information about local lifestyles, schools, shopping, health care and anything else that would help the potential buyer visualize living in the community.
Or it could be a series of escalating offers about financing the home purchase; you know, online calculators, current mortgage rates, lender requirements, loan shopping, etc.
The trick is to keep inviting your prospect back to high value information that you control on your own Web site. Over time these offers will position you in the prospect's mind as one who is very knowledgeable, skillful and a high level performer in all things real estate. Year after year NAR surveys show that perceptions of agents' knowledge, skill and performance are the most important agent selection criteria.
When you think about lead generation in real estate; think courting. You know, the tentative first meeting. The awkward line of questioning until sufficient mutual interest is discovered. The escalating series of offers; coffee, lunch, dinner, day-trip . . .etc. The acceptance of each offer enables more time spent together, more sharing, greater intimacy.
Do all that long enough and, well, serious and meaningful relationships will develop. Continuing a futile search for just the right, "Hi! Will you marry me?", kind of line is just going to get you smacked.
Want more leads? Then set a system up to make a lot more easy-to-say-yes-to offers, to a whole lot more people, on a regular and continuing basis. Here are a whole lot of free offers that will show you how.
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