How To Stay On Top Of Your Marketing During The Offseason

The summer heat is dying down and with it, the frenzy of buying and selling real estate. While other agents are already cozying up by the fireplace, some are eager to push their business forward even in the offseason.

If this sounds like you, you’ve come to the right place. Here are excellent ideas to help you make the most of the downtime and set yourself up for success — no matter the season.

Network, network, network

You should be doing this year-round anyway, but building out your connections during the offseason is a great way to fill up your sales pipeline when spring comes around. Attend real estate conferences, sign up for sales workshops, volunteer for worthwhile causes, or simply chat up a stranger as you order coffee — you never know who’s in the market to buy or sell their home.

Sharpen your marketing chops

Digital marketing is ever-shifting and if you don’t brush up on your skills, you’ll be left behind. Need a place to start? How about mastering the basics of TikTok marketing? Or giving your website a much-needed SEO tuneup? Maybe you’d like to learn how to use ChatGPT to make your day easier? The more tools you have in your marketing arsenal, the easier lead generation will be for you when the market heats up again.

Review your marketing plan

As they say, failing to plan is planning to fail. With the selling season slowing down and with more time on your hands, now is a golden opportunity to assess your marketing plan.

Specifically, ask yourself these questions:

• What should I continue?

• What should I stop?

• What else can I try?

Start a drip email campaign

In a perfect world, your prospect buys or sells a home upon first contacting you. In reality, you may need to follow up eight times to turn a lead into a deal. This is where drip email campaigns shine because they let you send pre-scheduled messages that range from cold emails, to listing updates, to success stories.

The great thing about drip campaigns is that you can segment your audience and craft different cadences for them. Each time a prospect opens your last email, it’s a signal of intent and triggers the next send-out. This means that you can automate this process — and what agent doesn’t love automated lead generation?

Create downloadable resources

A house is a big purchase so it’s natural that prospecting homebuyers are hungry for information. As an agent, you’re well-positioned to share insights about specific listings and neighborhoods. But why not get something in return for imparting your hard-earned knowledge? What you can do is create valuable resources like market reports and neighborhood guides that prospects can download in exchange for sharing their email address with you. This is a win-win situation because people can learn more about the local real estate market and you get a new entry in your lead database.

Clean up your database

Your user database is a lot like an attic: it’s filled with stuff, but not all of them are important. So do a little bit of belated spring cleaning, but this time on your client list. Weed out outdated or duplicate contacts, and update the ones you currently have. After pruning the entries, start segmenting your contacts so it’s easier to devise drip campaigns for them (see Tip #4). It’s something you can do in between tasks, but will have a major impact on your lead generation moving forward.

Prepare a content calendar for the rest of the year

Content marketing is all about giving prospects the information they need and positioning yourself as the agent most qualified to give it. Sporadic social media posts, blog entries, and email send-outs don’t exactly engender trust, however. Since you’re fielding fewer calls and doing fewer showings, why not draft a content calendar? That way, you know exactly what content you have to make and when they should go live. And don’t worry, we have a simple but proven content strategy you can use!

Update your marketing materials

The offseason is also an excellent time to update your online and offline marketing assets.

Start with your social media accounts. Are your profile pictures and business details up to date? Are your pinned posts still relevant? Do you have the right privacy settings to screen out scammers and nuisances?

Then turn your eye toward your offline collateral. If your business has changed addresses and contact numbers recently, make sure that’s reflected in your brochures, door hangers, and calling cards. Likewise, if you’ve done a rebrand, make sure your assets are consistent with your new design direction.

Develop seasonal marketing campaigns

If you operate in an area where fall and winter are fairly mild, you can run a campaign targeting snowbirds. That way, you can still attract leads even when most agents are wrapping up their selling season. To help you decide which pay-per-click platform to run your campaign on, we offer this helpful guide.

Speaking of refreshing your marketing assets, now is an excellent time to revamp your website. With Agent Image’s help, we can build you a site that elevates your brand so you are the clear choice for prospects – one that’s impressively designed and built for lead generation year-round.

For a FREE consultation, call 1.800.979.5799
or send a message here.