@Edgar Gomez Rios I hear that a lot lately. New customer lead generation is tough and the way to go about it has and is changing.
Right out of the gate we need to know that marketing is a vast field and there is no one super best solution, it's also ever evolving. That's part of why most are frustrated because the target keeps moving and the applications are not hands on anymore. It's a combined effort of a handful of mostly online applications that deliver the best results overall.
@Patricia Steiner has a great point when she says that doing business with people that know you is the way to go. This can be achieved in a few ways, networking is one. Unfortunately, it's very time intensive and results demand our patience. I approach this strategy with a sense of "I need to eat and drink anyway, I enjoy socializing, I might as well go to a place where I can meet a few new people who may or may not turn into leads at the same time. This keeps it a pleasurable experience rather than a nuisance.
As @Sam Shueh points out, the SFR sales have started to dwindle, according to my realtor and broker friends, noticeably - and it's only the beginning. This is due to many factors, I might get into on another thread or blog some other time. I disagree with him though, to the extent that door-knocking is not the way since it's the most frustrating and unpleasant experience for both sides, as the prospect is not ready for you.
We need not work harder but smarter by going digital, being where the eyeballs are, and not doing it all by ourselves by outsourcing the online marketing activities to experts that have invested their years and have embraced the online tools that most have a hard time getting their head around.
What we need is "Warm Calling". The whole idea of good marketing is to attract leads by education. This way they will become the exact customer you need and enjoy serving when they are ready.
In our experience as real estate investors, cold calling and most of the old school print and physical approaches don't work well anymore and don't yield good enough results for the time and money spent - by far.
If you want a new pre-qualified customer who’s ready for you, you need to be on their smartphone screen. The attention to smartphones versus stationary or laptop computers has reached more than 70%, climbing.
I have tried quite a few lead gen apps and other workarounds in the past, most are not helpful. Some were good enough to spend some exploration time on, but at the end of the day, they don't really solve our problem of generating true, current, repeat, targeted and motivated leads tailored to our needs.
Anyone of these "solutions", contrary to what some users or SaaS providers will try to make you believe, need not days or weeks but months of learning - been there, done that.
All of the above derives from years of experience and conviction. A few other marketing activities, such as SEO, blogging (article marketing) and others, will appear on your radar as the first strategy of Facebook ad campaign marketing starts yielding incredible results to fund not only your next level of marketing. It's a beautifully fine-tuned machine when it starts working in concert.
So the real question we need to answer for ourselves is:
Do we want to be and stay stuck with the immense repeat time investment and painful learning curve, which no software alone will solve for us, or do we want to focus on growing our team (with the appropriate skills) and business by doing what we do best (and outsource the rest):
Buy & Sell real estate.
Food for thought ;-)
On a side note, I'd be interested in what strategy and process exactly was applied by your marketing team that yielded zero results. Feel free to share so that I might shed some light from a different perspective. I'm always curious to learn more.
A great book on the subject of leverage, minimizing, outsourcing, focus, effectivity, efficiency, to gain more time for what matters most comes by best selling author Timothy Ferriss, The 4 Hour Work Week. This book alone added a few years of higher quality life to my family for sure. Give it a try.
Enjoy ;-)
