Why You Should Focus your Real Estate Marketing on your “Inner Circles”

If you’re like most agents, you can probably define your professional network as a series of concentric circles — starting with a small inner circle and growing outwards to a larger outer circle.

The inner circle are your clients (past and present) and your current hot prospects. You know them well, and they know you.

The next circle out represents your longer-term prospects and residents in the real estate geographic farm you target.

After that is a circle comprised of casual contacts and online leads that tend to go nowhere.

Finally, the bigger outer circle represents those people you don’t know at all. Strangers.

Of all these circles, which group is most likely to be a lucrative source of real estate leads and/or real estate referrals?

Obviously, your inner circle — past clients, hot prospects — are a prime source of new business because they know you and, ideally, like and trust you. As we’ve said in our real estate blog before, the average client is in the position to recommend you to a friend or neighbour two to three times a year.

The next circle out is also a potential goldmine of real estate leads. Homeowners in a geographic farm, who see you as the area’s go-to agent, are likely to call you first when they’re ready to move.

So here’s the question…

Where do you invest most of your real estate marketing efforts? Do you focus on those inner circles most likely to generate real estate leads? Or do you sink your marketing budget into trying to convert from that outer circle — mostly strangers?

The reality is, the more you grow and nurture those contacts in your inner circles, the more real estate leads and real estate referrals you’ll generate. And the best part is, those leads and referrals will tend to increase year after year, without any additional effort by you.

The lesson is clear. If you want to improve your real estate marketing, you need to be:

• Adding new contacts to your inner circles. (A great real estate CRM will help.)
• Staying in touch with past clients and geographic farm residents, and building those relationships.

If you’re not focusing your real estate marketing on those two things, you may end up constantly scrambling for new clients and listings for years. Who wants that?

The good news is, getting the right real estate marketing systems in place will not only make it a lot easier, but also maximize real estate referrals from past clients and leads from your geographic farm.

Takeaway: Review your real estate marketing efforts. Are you neglecting your inner circles? If so, fix that today.