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Sphere of influence in real estate – what should your expectations be as a realtor, how many seller leads can you get?

What should your expectations be when doing personal real estate agent marketing to your personal contacts or sphere of influence? There are a lot of variances when answering this question. It really depends on what’s happening. Unfortunately, we are in this ‘give it to me right now’ world—the McDonald’s drive-thru world where I’m in and out in 42 seconds.  It doesn’t work that way. So the expectation is, you’ve got to give your real estate marketing strategies enough time to take effect. Because, in touching your sphere of influence list, each touch is another layer of effectiveness in your real estate agent marketing.

Marketing to your sphere of influence list is one of the best long term real estate marketing strategies to employ as a realtor

Here is an effective analogy. Let’s assume you have watered-down, white paint and you have a dark-colored wall. You want to paint the wall white but, in one stroke, you can see right through it. It almost makes no impact at all. That’s a ‘touch’ in marketing. So you have to do another stroke and wait for it to dry, then do another layer. Before long, when you get enough layers, it is solid white and you can’t see anything through it.

That’s the expectation when marketing to your sphere of influence list. It’s going to take time for your real estate marketing products to do their work. It’s about how many touches you do, and not just any touches, but touches of a significant nature. You want these touches to increase the value that your real estate leads hold about you as a realtor.

What we typically tell our real estate agent clients is this. If you are going to be touching your list 80 or 100 times a year—yes, 80 to 100 times a year so you are always there—you need to do it in a way that you aren’t overwhelming them. Let’s go back to real estate agent marketing expectations for a moment. The average realtor thinks they are going to mail just listed postcards or real estate letters every three months (once a quarter) and that’s enough. That doesn’t even begin to cut it. So let’s talk about expectations in terms of how many touches it takes.

Be consistent with realtor postcards and other types of real estate mailers to get the most benefit when marketing to your sphere of influence list

Ideally, you need to be focused on 30 – 40 touches every single year. They don’t have to be 30 – 40 realtor postcards. These touches can be all kinds of things. They can be handwritten notes, emails, just listed postcards, or real estate farming letters. The touches could be as simple as seeing someone in your sphere of influence at the park. Whether you are doing this or that, you want to make sure your real estate leads are constantly seeing you as a successful real estate agent.

When you do enough touches, then in the second year, you should be hitting those averages I talked about earlier. You should be seeing 17 sales a year for every 100 people on your sphere of influence list. In that first year, you are growing your real estate marketing strategies. You are just touching the real estate leads in your sphere of influence. All of your efforts are just starting to educate them.

You’ll see a few results early on, but the second year is really where results come in. Here is the expectations we give our clients: If you are starting from scratch—you’ve never really touched your sphere of influence list and they haven’t received much from you—then you’ll have maybe a third or a fourth of your results the first year. The remaining results will happen in that second year. It’s that type of a growth rate, so that’s the expectation.

The bottom line is to stay plugged in and keep consistent with whatever you choose to send out, whether it’s realtor postcards or real estate letters. You want to consistently send some type of real estate mailers to your sphere of influence list at least 30-40 times a year. It’s your most profitable list. You’ll make money in your first year. You’ll cover all your marketing costs if you do it right. But the second year, you’ll mint money because of how fast it works.

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