How big is your target market?
How often to do you touch your target market with marketing?
What share of the listings are you taking in your target market?
These are all good Help-U-Sell questions. Our success has always come from geographic target marketing. We always begin with a serious marketplace analysis. We look for those pockets in the market with higher turnover, with 4% – 5% being acceptable and more than that being exciting. Then we hit those target households hard, with simple, easily understood marketing pieces.
All of that changed when the market went into the tank. When turnover rates plummeted because houses simply weren’t selling, when it became more important to have a ready, willing and able buyer to work with than a seller, the targeted, rifle approach to neighborhood domination went out the window in favor of a shotgun blast spread over a much wider geography. We were no longer attracting business from 5,000 – 12,000 households. Now we were serving 40,000 or 50,000 (or trying to).
But here’s the thing: it is not possible to target market to 50,000 households. It’s just too expensive. If you did a monthly EDDM outreach to that big a group you’d be spending about $15,000 and running the wheels off your car.
Instead, what you end up doing with a broader geography is trading on the name, the Brand. A certain number of people in that broad geography already have some familiarity with your program, understand that you can save them money, and will reach out to you if they know you are close by. These are the home sellers who contact you even if you don’t market.
It’s almost impossible to build market share on that.
This is a challenge to you: put down the shotgun and refocus. Do your market analyses. Find the 5,000 or 7,000 homes in your broad area where turnover is highest. Pick one and do it right. Do a monthly EDDM there, crank up a Facebook and/or Google campaign. Put out your blitz signs. Faithfully do arounds and just listed/just sold postcards (remember: arounds are around someone else’s listing).
6,000 homes x 5% turnover = 300 sales. Get 10% of that and watch your business explode! Once your signs are prominent and you have listings to market around, you can begin to pare the expensive initial marketing and expand into an adjacent target.
This is how we do it.