Most Real Estate Agents still take the shotgun approach to their marketing, putting out as many business cards, post cards, and bus benches as they can afford. While these time honored marketing strategies can result in qualified leads, they can also be expensive and unreliable. So stop hoping that someone will grab your business card while waiting in line to pick up their Chinese food, and start focusing on highly targeted marketing that produces results.
Marketing to the individual is about creating and leveraging relationships. People are hard wired to build relationships, our survival for the last few million years has depended on our being social creatures. Marketing to the individual is about forming positive networks through mutual friends, past customers, organization affiliation, and almost anywhere else. Everyday you are presented with opportunities to build your network of contacts through your activities. The person handing you your dry cleaning is your next potential client.
A key part of relationship building is treating those people in your "network" as valued individuals, not as nameless prospects that you can add to your monthly e-newsletter. How do you accomplish this? By marketing to their individual needs. Do you know what their values are? Do you know what their life's aspirations are? Do you know who they really are? The girl behind the counter is probably going to school, waiting until after graduation to start her career in accounting. Your buddy on your softball team probably recently had a baby and is looking to move to a nicer neighborhood. What can you do with this information?
Marketing to the individual means knowing enough about your prospect that you can deliver a timely and relevant marketing message to them, so much so that it seems like a service or a favor rather than a sales pitch. What if you could sent the girl behind the counter that has been ringing you up for years a graduation card and a recommendation on a great condo complex for young professionals. What if you sent a hand written note on your personal stationary congratulating him on his new addition, and a recommendation on a neighborhood that is near his work and has great schools. Personalized stationary is a great way to sent out personal notes to friends and prospects in a professional yet highly personal manner. It is an effective tool for marketing to the individual. Those two contacts would be much more effective then sending out a hundred post cards. While these are simple examples, you will find these opportunities everywhere.
Handwritten notes of congratulation and personal notes on your own stationary are a great way to show people that you see them as individuals. Personal notecards are an inexpensive way to start the process of marketing to the individual.
