Coaching For Real Estate Agents

I'm always intrigued and excited to come across creative marketing ideas, aren't you?

That's what magnetic marketing is all about:  keeping my mind open to the possibilities of reminding leads and prospects of the value and benefits of what I do in a way that catches their attention and matches my personality and my brand.

(Leveraging every marketing opportunity is also important, and how you are going to do that should be considered well before implementing any new marketing strategy.) 

Jim Cronin over at The Real Estate Tomato reported on the marketing genuis idea of one of their clients, realtor Michael Bergin of Alexandria, Virginia.

The goal was to increase subscriptions to his new blog, GWSleptHere.com (The GW reference is to the first president of the United States, George Washington.).

To that end (and with the GW branding in mind), Michael created a mailing that included an announcement of the new blog, a business card, and a dollar bill replica (George Washington's face is on the dollar bill).  The promotion on the back of the dollar bill offered a $5 Starbucks giftcard to the first 50 subscribers to GWSleptHere.com.

They sent the mailing to at least 300 people on all of their lists, including clients, church members, and the neighborhood association, to name a few.  As Michael elaborates in the comments of The Real Estate Tomato's article, he and his partner also use every free opportunity to hand out their dollar bills and announcements during their day-to-day activities.

From my rough calculations, their total investment in this promotion was just under $700 for the cost of printing, postage, and Starbucks gift cards.  This did not include the design work, which was traded in exchange for dinner.

Perhaps if Michael had gone to a local printer rather than Kinko's and offered some sort of trade with a local coffee shop instead of Starbucks, he may have even further reduced the cost of this promotion.

Does this give you any ideas for promoting your real estate blog?

The goal, of course, is to drive quality traffic to your blog.  Your job, then, is to provide a consistent stream of interesting and valuable content that keeps your new readers coming back for more.

As for Michael, the next thing he should be thinking about (besides creating quality content) is how to leverage this great idea, capitalizing on the buzz he's generated.

How else will he continue to add value to his potential clients?  What can he do for those subscribers who were not among the 50 to receive a Starbucks card?

What would you do?