The real estate sphere of influence marketing involves knowing how large a network of people you have. You can never know how distant your reach can be unless you start connecting with all people in your sphere.
Many people do not know the importance of personal sphere marketing in their profession.
A sphere of influence is a vast pool of prospective clients that may not know your present occupation. You can land a project or a sale with anyone inside the sphere.
What Is a Sphere of Influence in Real Estate?
As a real estate agent, your personal sphere of influence is the same as with any profession. It starts in the core of your sphere with immediate family, close friends, and regular acquaintances.
Members of the shell surrounding the sphere include extended family, coworkers, church members, and friends. The outermost shell of your sphere can extend as far as your distant relatives, neighbors, and acquaintances.
People you don’t personally know or to whom you have not yet been introduced belong outside your personal sphere.
What Is an Example of Sphere of Influence?
Any architect can have a client base composed of closest relatives and friends, and they can tackle design projects for people inquiring about their marketing website.
But an architect can miss out on several projects because of the lack of constant communication with members of the personal sphere. This example is very similar to business transactions regarding real estate.
A cousin twice removed might know someone looking to purchase a house, and a long-lost friend might have a brother looking to sell.
These are the contacts who will never learn about your real estate expertise unless you try to reach out to the farthest boundaries of your sphere.
Missing a sale for your real estate business inculpates no one but you for not reaching out to the edges of your personal sphere in the first place.
How Do You Grow a Sphere of Influence?
There are plenty of ways to increase the size of your personal sphere. It starts with organization and profile creation, and it requires to be thrown out to the world for people to see.
Once your business profile reaches the farthest stretches of your personal sphere of influence, you have to go back through reorganizing and adding a little flare for a more personal touch.
Organize Your Business Into a Single Database
Make a list of members of your sphere of influence. Start with the people closest to you, and complete the list until you account for everyone you know who has a piece of contact information.
Having a single, central database on modern CRM software ensures that you have a thorough list with no redundancies. It even takes the hassle out of updating information because of features such as its mobile interface and easy-to-use templates.
Build a Professional Profile
Before making yourself known to the world as an up-and-coming real estate agent, you have to create a professional profile that will describe everything you can do.
Come up with a website, a business card, and a portfolio that you can use to let people understand what you do. Building a professional profile is one way of marketing your business, and it may be expensive or affordable.
If you don’t have any creative background, outsourcing a professional profile design may be more costly. But remember that initial marketing costs all count toward your capital fund.
Socialize
Once you have organized a database and initiated a professional profile, bring several business cards with you wherever you go.
Strike up a conversation with anybody and tell them about what you can do. After easing into the conversation, hand out your business card or show them your portfolio.
Socializing is the best and easiest way to practice sphere marketing. You can do it every time you attend public gatherings or social events, and it can take your business reach to the next level.
Use All Available Channels
With all the available online tools for organizing and tracking leads, one might think it is enough to use email and social media networking.
Keep in mind that many people can be quite traditional, and they prefer hard-wired landlines and handheld letters. Increase your reach by taking advantage of all the communication formats available to your business.
- Utilize Social Networking
The easiest way to expand your network is by engaging in social networking through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Social media messaging is like an informal way of meeting and greeting people. Each social networking account is an addition to your profile, and every one of them can expand your reach tenfold.
With social media accounts, getting a new contact is as quick and easy as a flick on a mobile phone screen. What’s more, the beauty of social media networking is that it is almost always free.
- Maximize the Email Features
If you want to make things more formal, shift from social media to writing emails. The only thing you need is a mailing list and the right message.
The good thing with email is that you can create templates and automated messages to ensure that every addressee receives feedback for a particular string of conversations. Propopen has a great tool to help automate and make sending emails a lot easier.
Like social media marketing, email collaboration is free, and messages can be interchanged anytime without disturbing either of the opposite parties.
- Invest in a Reliable Phone
Having an office with a landline can be the status quo for the recognition of a legitimate business.
But as transportation modes are getting faster and cities are growing ever busier, a fast-paced workday could mean you are not always sitting in the office.
Having a reliable mobile device adds an edge to communicating with other people while on the go.
This statement may not even be warranted because anyone who wants to run a real estate business needs a mobile phone before everything else.
Although mobile phones require overhead costs to make calls to other devices and hard lines, mobile internet also allows social media and email to function through mobile devices.
- Exploit the Dependable Snail Mail Features
Another communication format that would require some expenditure is with the use of the postal service.
Many prospects will enjoy the personal touch of a postcard or a handwritten letter when it comes to advertising, marketing, and communicating.
The personal touch can even go a long way in obtaining new clients because people may feel more inclined to refer you to some of the members of their sphere of influence.
- Increase Face-to-Face Interactions
Nothing beats closing a business deal through persistent and enthusiastic face-to-face interactions. It will need a lot more practice than emailing and messaging, but it is the epitome of doing business.
With personal meetings and upfront conversations, people will have the chance to get the gist of who you are and what you can do. Moreover, it would be better to close a deal with the shake of a hand.
Categorize Members of Your Sphere
Once you have organized a database of contacts, built a professional profile, and increased your influential reach, you will need to do some reorganization.
One way to keep your database organized is by categorizing all the members of your sphere. Note the ones who can introduce many more people and rank them based on how they can help you and your business.
Always remember that a large chunk of your business will come from the members of your sphere of influence.
The easiest way to rank people in your sphere is by considering which people are currently the best leads. Any business lead can be categorized as a hot lead, a warm lead, or a cold lead.
Let’s talk about the differences between the three.
- Cold Lead
A cold lead is anyone who doesn’t know many things about you and what you can do in the real estate business. It can also be someone who isn’t looking to buy or sell a house anytime soon.
Anyone in the same business can also fall under this category, but you can still rank them otherwise.
Another real estate agent can be competing against you for several leads, or they have too much on their plate and would consider referring you as an alternative.
Although a significant number of cold leads can make your business stagnant for a while, they can immediately turn into a warm or hot lead. It is not advisable to remove them from your social media campaigns and mailing lists.
Instead, keep ahead of them with random promotional emails so that they’ll think of you when they suddenly turn into hot leads.
- Warm Lead
A warm lead is just hinting to buy or sell a property. Anyone in this category has no indications of selling or buying anytime soon, but they already think about it.
A family that is increasing in size or a young man planning to move out of his parents’ house are both examples of warm leads.
Your previous clients also fall under this category. They may have just settled into a house from conducting business with you, but it doesn’t mean they won’t be moving after several years.
One thing that’s for sure is that change is the only constant, and they’ll be thinking about you the next time they move.
Keep in touch with warm leads more than with cold leads. Let your presence known by providing them with community information and useful market hacks or by sending them appreciative gifts and informational postcards.
- Hot Lead
Focus your promotion efforts on every hot lead you may have because they are the leads planning to purchase or make their property available in the market.
Hot leads are actively searching for a real estate agent, or they can be selling their property on their own. In our example in a previous section about a long-lost friend’s brother looking to sell, the long-lost friend is the hot lead.
You can offer your contact information and business profile to the long-lost friend to capture the lead.
Maintain Connection With Previous Clients
Previous clients will always stay as warm leads. You have completed a sale or a purchase with them, and they will quickly put you up for a recommendation.
Always maintain a connection with previous clients, for they may be the fastest and easiest way to expand your sphere of influence.
Come Up With Creative Advertising Strategies
Every successful business invests in ads and marketing. Some even pay for marketing strategists who advise on trends in marketing practices.
You don’t have to spend too much on ads if you can come up with something unique and original.
Fliers, postcards, streamers, and billboards have been in circulation for so long that the only way to make them unique is by coming up with a special message that any prospect can understand.
Let Personal Involvement Create More Connections
There are several ways to get more involved in your neighborhood and create new connections at every turn.
The following is a list of creative things you can do to open up areas for expanding your network:
- Volunteer for community cleanup drives
- Interview people from the local business sector and include them in your promotions
- Sponsor a community blog where residents can discuss potential issues occurring in the neighborhood
- Raise funds and organize home makeover events
Everyone you meet in any of these activities can become a lead for your business. Be observant and pay close attention to what people say because they may blurt some facts about real estate leads.
Real Estate Sphere of Influence Marketing Tips and Tricks
The trick to practicing the real estate sphere of influence marketing is to reach out to people like you usually would in social gatherings.
Keeping the conversation natural and not so business inclined increases the chances of letting people know that you value their time.
Expanding your sphere of influence doesn’t have to be time-consuming and stressful. All you have to come up with is a functioning system for nurturing and maintaining connections.
Not everybody in your network is ready to be a hot lead, and you’ll be sure to stay ahead of them whenever they become one.
Equip your real estate business with a reliable marketing platform and let its components do the work while growing your sphere of influence.