Tips For More Referral Business in the New Year

by | Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Tips, Social Media Marketing, Uncategorized

The real key to success with clients and prospects in the new year is staying “top of mind.” Your goal is to be the first person a client thinks about when making a referral. It sounds simple, but when you are working with current clients and managing your everyday business activities, it’s far more challenging to keep in touch (and stay in touch) with your ever-growing database.

 

Here are a few tips to consider when you are working to keep your company top of mind to gain referral business in the new year:

1. Give the Gift They Actually Want

When you’re competing in a sea of emails, it’s important to avoid being quickly deleted or ignored. Email smart. Include content that interests your target markets, and make sure your subject line is powerful. For newsletters, consider simply copying the title of your lead article into your subject line field. Some newsletter platforms, like ours, have an automated feature to help you easily set the first article title as your subject line by default. Clients are far more likely to open information that is targeted and relevant to them versus a generic mass email. This extra step will not only prove that you add value but will highlight that you are paying attention to both their needs and interests.

2. Keep Testimonials, Online Reviews and Case Studies in the Forefront

If you haven’t started sharing client testimonials, reviews and case studies in your email marketing, on your blog, and on social media, maybe it’s time to start. Begin interviewing clients who have had positive before and after experiences with your company. Turn these real life situations into stories that can be shared as content. Testimonials are a powerful reminder that your business is the go-to company for new prospects or referral opportunities.

3. Maximize Social Media

Use content from your email newsletters, blog posts and other online resources to share social media updates on a regular basis to gain referrals. Consistent posting will help you engage your social followers, and it is one of the best ways to keep your company fresh in the news feeds of your followers. Various social media management tools offer free or affordable options to help you schedule out posts days in advance to help you easily manage multiple social channels.

4. Take a Multi-channel Approach To Getting Referrals

When it comes to staying top of mind, content is king. Remember that your email newsletters, blog posts, social media reviews, client case studies and testimonials all offer content that can be shared via email and on social media. Maximize your content resources by posting them to all your relevant online avenues and you’ll always be the first thought when referral opportunities pop up.

>> CLICK HERE to Check Out Some More of HomeActions Lead Generation Tools

Trick-or-Treat Yourself to Better Lead Generation

by | Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Management, Uncategorized

While it’s certainly true that some of your leads will be generated by word of mouth and referral source connections, that doesn’t mean your lead generation strategies should only be a skeletal effort.

As a professional, you understand that investing a bit of effort behind a worthwhile initiative can help it gain momentum. The same can be said for lead generation.

There are three basic strategies you can use to scare up more lead generation:

1. Feed Your Beasties

Your website, blog, email campaigns and social media marketing all work together to feed lead-generating content to your clients, prospects and referral sources. These access points help interested onlookers find your business and give “tire-kickers” an idea of the benefits they’ll get when they connect with your business.

Take the following steps to move prospects from cold to qualified:

  • Provide relevant and engaging content that connects with your target markets
  • Amplify your content through multiple access points, such as your blog, website, email messaging, social media and other online channels
  • Include calls to action in your messaging
  • Maintain consistent communications to create repetitive touch-points
  • Experiment with a fresh approach as needed – be willing to try something new

The key to successful nurturing is to consistently position your content in front of your onlookers.

    2. Feast Your Eyes On Your Metrics

    Without the reporting and metrics tools behind your efforts, you’ll never know who is responding to your marketing. You’ll also miss out on determining which content is garnering the most interest. Metrics and reporting pull double-duty by helping you connect with nurtured clients and prospects while also giving you a feel for what’s resonating with your audience.

    3. Pursue Your Lead

    Frame out a system for maintaining consistent communications, and include clear calls to action in your messages. Your efforts truly begin building momentum when you tap into the results generated by your marketing and proactively follow up on your warm leads.

    Identify your rainmakers, offer incentives based on achievement and build a system of lead follow-up accountability into your strategies.

    Using the example of an email campaign, your marketing and lead generation workflow could resemble a plan following these basic steps:

    • Gather contact information for your clients, prospects and referral sources and create a marketing list
    • Create email messages with informative, timely information that will be of use to your target markets
    • Launch your message and monitor readers clicking on content that has a direct tie-in to your service offerings
    • If possible, set alerts on such content to inform your rainmakers as new leads come in
    • Follow up via phone or email to contact your warm leads and begin a conversation that may segue into a new opportunity for your firm

    Granted, these are simplified tips, and there is some work involved in launching and maintaining strategies that consistently generate warm leads. However, today’s professional marketing options are endless. It is often possible to outsource a number of the steps along your prospect’s journey.

    Consider which steps your firm would like to maintain in-house, and which would be more efficiently handled by a third-party resource. With a little push behind your marketing and lead generation initiatives, you’ll be scaring up more new opportunities in no time.

    >> CLICK HERE to Check Out Some More of HomeActions Lead Generation Tools

    Your Guide To A Cleaner Marketing Database

    by | Database Maintenance, Email Marketing, Uncategorized

    Marketing database maintenance can be a chore, but taking the time to tidy up is vital.

    Deliverability is determined by algorithms using a wide variety of signals to determine if an email list gets through. When your subscribers open your emails, click through on email content or have some other positive responses to your messages, this helps your deliverability.

    If readers simply delete your emails without opening them or mark them as spam, they are sending negative signals that can hurt your deliverability.

    Here is your guide to help you keep a squeaky-clean marketing database and improve your deliverability.

    Suppress Or Fix Bad Email Addresses In Your Marketing Database

    A bad email is marked as such by ISPs because it has one of the following errors:

    Bad Format – A format error could indicate that an email address is missing a period, contains a misspelling, or has other incorrect or duplicated characters in the email address. This type of error could simply be a typo that needs to be fixed. When the format error is obvious, like a double period, this can be corrected by making a small adjustment to the email address in your subscriber record.

    Bad Domain – Sometimes domain names are changed, merged with other companies or simply deleted. When this happens, it renders the domain portion of your email (or everything after the @ sign) ineffective. Watch out for company name changes, mergers, email service provider domain name changes and other domain name issues in order to avoid bad domain issues in your database.

    Bad Account – When an employee leaves a company, their email often becomes invalid after a certain period of time. For example jsmith@abccompany.net may have retired. In the case of professional office environments, staff emails might be forwarded to a third party for a period of time before they are rendered invalid. When this occurs, there are often autoresponder emails sent out asking you to delete or update a former employee’s contact information. Pay attention to these autoresponder messages and take action to update information in order to avoid bad account issues.

    On occasion, it will be impossible to tell why an email was marked as bad. If you have attempted to remedy format, domain and account issues, and the email is still being marked as a bad email, it is time to suppress the contact record to ensure that future messages are not launched to the bad email address. Some platforms will automatically suppress bad emails for you.

    Remove Generic Email Addresses 

    When an email address is publicly available, it is able to be harvested by unethical list sellers. Because of this, generic email addresses are often heavily policed for spam. Unless you absolutely know that the person or people behind a generic email address expressly consent to receiving your messages, you should remove any of the following generic emails from your account:

    • accounts@
    • admin@
    • billing@
    • billings@
    • contact@
    • help@
    • info@
    • inquiries@
    • manager@
    • sales@
    • subscribe@
    • support@
    • webmaster@
    • welcome@

    Additionally, generic emails often have low open rates and low engagement, which also negatively impacts your deliverability.

    Remove Inactive Subscribers

    To keep up to date with email deliverability best practices, we consult with some of the top delivery and anti-spam engineers from major mailbox providers, as well as senders that are like our company, in order to coordinate better ways to get wanted emails to the readers.

    One of the most important email marketing best practice trends we identified is to track user engagement and remove inactive subscribers. Engagement means that your readers have opened, read and/or clicked a link in your email. The major mailbox providers such as Gmail, AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo all track how long a message is open and whether the links within it were clicked. They take note if a message was deleted without opening it. They also detect when messages are sent to accounts that no longer check email at all.

    Clean Up Dead Weight

    A common suggestion for cleaning an email list is to remove all disengaged or inactive subscribers. What this means is that you will be determining all the people who have not opened or clicked on one of your emails in a given period of time and simply removing them from your list.

    Why Does This Help?

    You may feel like it stings a bit to remove members from a list that you’ve worked hard to grow, but if they are sitting in your marketing database in an inactive or disengaged status, they are actually hurting your sending reputation. A bad sending reputation means you’ll be less likely to be successfully delivered to those who really want to hear from you.

    Improve Your Reach

    If there is no engagement for a large portion of your list, then it is more likely that your marketing emails will not reach a majority of your audience. To increase the chances of reaching inboxes and not getting filtered out, take steps to remove all list members who are not engaged.

    Take a Tiered Approach

    You can begin removing people in waves. First, remove those who have not clicked or opened in the past year. Then change your email strategies to see whether you can boost engagement among your existing members. When you see open and click rates improving, take some time to do a second purge of all those who have still not engaged within the past six months. You may also repeat this process as a last step, and look at all those who have not engaged within a three-month period as your final purge.

    Purging long-term inactive subscribers also means you’re much less likely to end up in a spam trap. An extremely inactive list with long-term disengaged members can be “gravestoned” by ISPs. This means that ISPs will flag your messages as irrelevant or meaningless to your subscribers, thus negatively impacting your deliverability.

    “Healing” Your Deliverability

    Even though this process will cause the number of active list members in your database to go down, you will receive the benefit of better delivery rates among those recipients who enjoy your messages. When you view your metrics and reporting, you may notice that the number of opens and clicks will remain steady, but since fewer inactive email addresses are on your list, the open and click rate percentages will gradually increase as mailbox providers begin to recognize your improved sending reputation.

    Over time, this process will result in more emails getting into the inboxes of your recipients, producing higher traction and engagement with fewer complaints and filtering issues. When the mailbox providers detect the higher percentage of recipients reading and clicking on links, they will tend to give those messages more favorable treatment by keeping them out of the spam folder. The absolute numbers of clicks and opens will likely go up as well, based on experience from testing this strategy with our existing customers.

     

     

    Do you need help organizing your marketing database? We’ve got you covered.

    CLICK HERE for more info about how HomeActions can help build your marketing database.

    Reduce, Reuse and Recycle Your Marketing Content

    by | Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing Tips, Real Estate Marketing, Uncategorized

    Are you trying to make the most of your content resources? Check out these smart tips for getting more from the effort you put into creating marketing content.

    Repurpose existing marketing content across multiple channels.

    Repurposing content is a logical way to make your content marketing work smarter, not harder. A single marketing article can turn it into multiple resources. Maximize the life and exposure of a single piece of marketing content by turning it into:
    • A blog post
    • An infographic
    • A digital presentation
    • A LinkedIn article
    • A series of short social media posts
    • A call-out quote that becomes a social media graphic
    • A chapter in an e-book
    • A video discussion or podcast
    • A series of short video stories
    • An interactive quiz
    • A downloadable info sheet or whitepaper
    • A handout at your next conference or in-person event
    Be creative, and consider all the ways you can stretch the life of your marketing content. As a result, you will consolidate your resources, be more efficient with your time, expand your digital footprint, and maximize the exposure of your key articles.

    Utilize multiple social networks, but be selective.

    More social media exposure is not necessarily better publicity. It pays to be choosy about which social networks your company decides to use. Consider your target markets. What networks are your customers and prospects most likely to visit? Before you build a profile on the latest and hottest social network, take a look at the demographics of their typical users. Make sure you will find your target audience on that network. You should also be sure you have the time and staff available to post consistently and respond to activity on any network you choose. Social media management platforms are excellent tools to help you manage your marketing content across multiple networks.

    CLICK HERE to learn more about our content.

    3 Attention-Grabbing Marketing Strategies

    by | Email Marketing, Marketing Tips, Uncategorized

    We all know the problem: your readers are busy and their attention is hard to grab. People are multi-tasking, checking email on mobile devices, and powering through their days. You need to rework your marketing strategies to appeal to distracted readers. 

    What is the savvy marketer to do? Here are three tips to help.

    1. Keep it Classy

    Write relevant, quality content, and your readers are sure to respond. It may be easier said than done. However, when you take a close look at what your readers need to know, and respond by providing them with that information, you deliver on their needs. This cultivates brand awareness and helps generate leads.

    You don’t have time to write? We get it… And we can help.

    Our digital marketing tools build professionally written content into your communications for you, saving you time. Learn more about our content.

    To get an understanding of what your clients really want to read, interview them. Select several key clients and ask them what kind of information they would like to be receiving from your firm. Conversations with your clients may help you brainstorm multiple topics from a single point. This type of direct client feedback is a valuable asset to your content marketing.

    2. Style It Up

    Visual content helps boost the appeal of your articles and blog posts. Engaging images, infographics, formatting styles, graphs, charts and other visuals can add a pleasing aesthetic to your articles that help quickly and easily carry a reader through an article.

    It’s also a good idea to create a style guide for your writing so you can keep formatting elements consistent.

    Here’s a list of visual clues your readers eyes can follow to hold their interest and carry them through an article:

    • Formatting styles and changing typography
    • Linked text driving readers to learn more about key points
    • Quotation call-outs
    • Bullet points
    • Images that have a direct relationship with an article or point in an article
    • Infographics
    • Videos
    • Charts and graphs
    • Tables with comparative information
    • Summary sections

    It may also help to keep articles between 300 to 500 words in length. Condensed snippets of information are easier to digest. Plus, this approach may also help you spread long-form articles out through a series of articles, maximizing your efforts.

    3. Invite Friends

    Guest blog post or newsletter articles from business partners can provide you with thought leadership pieces that your team won’t need to write. This is often a simple strategy because guest writers are often thrilled for marketing opportunities that help them get in front of new audiences. Often, these collaborations also open up opportunities for reciprocity, allowing you to reach new markets as well.

    Guest contributors offering meaty content can grab your readers’ attention. Think about your connections from conferences, industry events, trade shows, seminars and community events. Even your clients and service partners may make ideal contributors to your content marketing calendar.

    Keep these three marketing strategies in mind when crafting content and you’ll catch more readers’ eyes and win the competition for their attention.

    How Can REALTORS Market Themselves to Millennial Homebuyers?

    by | Best Practices, Client Tips & Tricks, Email Marketing, Marketing Tips, Prospecting, Real Estate Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Uncategorized

    Millennial home-buyers are a big part of the home-buying market. While they’ve gotten a late start in homeownership compared to previous generations, there is now a significant uptick in the number of house hunters who identify as millennials.

    This new group of home-buyers requires unique tactics when it comes to marketing yourself to them as a REALTOR®. If you’ve been in the biz for a long time, your old tricks might not work on millennials.

    Use these tips to market yourself as a real estate resource to millennial homebuyers.

    Be Comfortable Texting During Off-Hours

    Millennial house hunters are going to expect you to use text as a means of communication. That doesn’t mean that calling is out the window, but millennials prefer texting to get quick information at their convenience. Not every question requires a long conversation — millennials may see phone calls in response to quick questions as time-wasters.

    It also makes sense to anticipate the typical evening and weekend contact from millennials you would typically expect from someone working a job in a standard workweek. Millennials may also be attending college courses in order to advance their careers or chance vocations altogether, so be prepared to work around busy schedules.

    Be Active on Social Media

    Millennials, like no other generation before them, are getting the bulk of their news online — even through social media. These days, you can follow all kinds of news outlets to get quick updates about what’s going on in the world. Being active on social media is a great way to get in front of millennial home-buyers. Be sure to post about your listings, share what sold, feature open houses and give other real estate updates. Also keep your social media content varied by sharing interesting tid-bits related to home-ownership. Millennials will follow the businesses they frequent in order to stay connected with ongoing events.

    Provide Reliable Reviews

    Since the internet is inundated with reviews, millennials know they can’t trust all of them. That’s why you need to provide reviews in more than just a written format. If you can get a past client to submit a video testimonial, it will come off as much more authentic than a written review that could have been faked easily.

    Not only that, but make sure your business website as well as your Facebook and LinkedIn pages have verifiable reviews. Facebook is now following the online review trend, offering review posting to its users.

    Be an Educational Resource

    A great way to promote yourself to millennials is to be a real estate resource for them; position yourself as a voice of authority in the industry to increase your clout and gain their trust.

    Millennials will engage through experiential learning, so give them just that. You can host events at your office or at a local restaurant or pub as a networking opportunity for newcomers to the area to get to know their local real estate agent. Or you can offer first-time home-buyer classes in person or online. Sessions like these give your audience a taste for the kind of expert advice you can offer.

    Be Consistent With Your Real Estate Newsletter

    One of the best ways to stay top-of-mind with home-buyers from every generation is through consistently reaching out with your email newsletter. Millennials in particular are accustomed to this kind of communication from businesses dealings, and they typically subscribe to a variety of email newsletters as a means of accessing deals or keeping up with offerings from their favorite businesses.

    Providing bimonthly e-newsletters featuring great content about real estate news and trends will give you an edge with millennial home-buyers. If you don't have your own real estate email newsletter yet, click here to get started with HomeActions™.

    Learn More About HomeActions

    How to Handle Objections from Real Estate Clients

    by | Best Practices, Client Tips & Tricks, Email Marketing, Most Asked Questions, Uncategorized

    Are you unsure about how to handle objections from potential real estate clients? Sometimes certain questions can throw you off your game, but it’s important to deal with these situations head-on. These tactics will help you do just that.

    You will find that these tips are actually quite simple but will have a lasting, positive effect on your real estate business.

    Get (a Little) Scripted

    Anyone in the real estate game knows that they will be faced with objections from clients. Since you know it’s coming, prepare yourself for some of the most common objections agents receive. There’s nothing wrong with getting a little scripted in your response. It’s much better than floundering in your answer and not coming across as confident when clients push back.

    Take this common objection for example: I want to list the house myself and avoid paying commission fees to a seller’s agent. 

    Your response can be something along the lines of: “I hear you. You want to save wherever you can. However, are you prepared to do all of the legal paperwork after the sale of the home? After the home is sold, there is a slew of legal legwork that the listing agent typically handles to make sure that the sale goes through. If you decide to sell the home on your own, you have to be OK with the fact that you could potentially be sued if you don’t file the paperwork correctly — even if it is just a simple mistake. Are you willing to take that risk?”

    Also mention, “Consider the fact that it may be tricky to get a buyer’s agents to work with you. Many of them won’t even consider working with the homeowner directly because of the risk it poses to their own business.”

    Know Your Worth

    Realtors get faced with this request often: “Can you lower your commission fee?” The short answer should be, no, but you can present your response in a way that highlights the kind of value you offer and why agreeing to a lower fee would be a detriment to both parties.

    If a client asks for a commission cut, lay out the marketing plan, your negotiation skills and your track record, and don’t waver. For example: “Let me take you through a breakdown of where that number comes from. Part of what you’re paying for with that fee is the marketing strategy I will put together to sell your house as quickly as possible for the best price. You’re also paying for my expertise. Perhaps there are agents out there who will settle for a lower fee, but they don’t have the same track record as I do when it comes to selling homes. And they definitely don’t have the same level of negotiating skills as I do. If I instantly gave in when you asked me to lower my fee, what does that say about how I’ll perform when we are negotiating the sale of your home?”

    State the Facts

    A client may reject your offer because they have a friend who is an agent who they promised to work with. While you should let them know that their loyalty is admirable, it may not be the wisest decision to work with a friend.

    Remind them: “Have you ever given a task to a friend and weren’t 100% satisfied with the outcome? Is that a risk you’re willing to take on the sale of your home?”

    Then, state the facts. If you sold 80 homes in the past year, make sure they know it. If you’ve been in the business for 20 years, state that too. These are favorable attributes that should not go unnoticed.

    You could even be so bold as to bring up their friend’s MLS listing and yours at the same time to compare, assuming that you know you have stronger stats than he or she does. That will really paint a lasting image in their minds!

    Key Takeaways

    Write yourself a rough script to answer the objections you get all the time.

    Don’t waver on the commission fee —  explain where it comes from.

    Reiterate your track record.

    DON’T FORGET! HomeActions provides automated real estate newsletters for you to send out to your clients. We design the newsletter, write the content and send it out on your behalf so you can easily stay top of mind with your real estate clients.

    Learn More About HomeActions

    7 Ways to Promote an Open House Through Social Media

    by | Email Marketing, Marketing Tips, Real Estate Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Uncategorized

    Real estate agents know the value of putting on a stellar open house. But how do you ensure that people show up? One of the best marketing strategies to promote an open house is through social media. You can easily create quality social media posts to get the word out just by following these guidelines.

    1. Post on Multiple Platforms

    As an agent, you should have multiple social media platforms. In particular, you should have business accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. When you begin a campaign to promote an open house through social media, you should be posting across all your platforms.

    2. Pick Images That Will Make People Show Up

    Take good photos of the house. The quality of the photos you post will determine whether people show up. Here are some factors to keep in mind when you’re choosing photos:
    • Use pictures that highlight curb appeal.
    • Use images that capture the home’s best features, like a newly renovated kitchen.
    • Capture impressive views to entice buyers.
    Here are some things to avoid in listing photos:
    • Dark or just plain bad lighting.
    • Bad aspect ratio of the photo.
    • Don’t show off bad décor, messy rooms or property flaws.

    3. Don’t Forget Pinterest

    It’s a common misconception that Pinterest is only for crafting and recipes. Many people use it as a search engine for the things they are looking to purchase. If they type “colonial-style home” into the search bar, they know Pinterest-quality photos will appear. You should use this platform to set up a board specifically for your listing photos. You can link back to your Pinterest board of professional-quality photos when you tweet or post about your open house.

    4. Write an Engaging Message

    Employ good copywriting practices when you write your social media posts. You don’t need to become a copywriting wiz, just follow these simple tips and your posts will be instantly more engaging and make people click through.
    • Avoid using too many adjectives, like beautiful, cozy home. Verbs speak louder. Try, “Check out this historical home featuring all the amenities that the modern homeowner seeks. Stop by this Saturday to take in the amazing views/architecture.”
    • Speak to personal experience. The best way to hook people is to trigger an emotional response. Write about universal experiences when house hunting. People like to be reminded of things they are familiar with.

    5. Consider Your Landing Page

    The landing page is where you will direct people in your social media posts. At the bottom of your post, there should be a clear link to a page that offers more information about your open house. You can drive traffic to a Facebook event page, LinkedIn event page, Pinterest board, your website or a blog post. Wherever you lead traffic, make sure that page has all the details about your open house and great pictures.

    6. Create a Posting Schedule

    Create a posting schedule to promote your open house on social media. If you come up with a couple of messages for each social platform, organize them into an Excel sheet and put the dates and times of when they should be deployed. For more information about optimal times of the day to schedule social posts, check out this infographic from HubSpot.

    7. Put It in a Real Estate Email Newsletter

    If you have a real estate newsletter that goes out to your sphere of influence, make sure to include a shout-out to your open house. Whatever messages you post on social media should be reinforced in your newsletter. If you don’t have a real estate newsletter yet, check out the HomeActions automated e-newsletter for real estate agents. A newsletter is one of the most effective ways to stay top of mind with your real estate contacts. Check us out today! Visit HomeActions.net today to start connecting on a regular basis with your real estate contacts and improving your real estate business. Learn More About HomeActions

    How to Reach Your Goals as a Real Estate Agent

    by | Best Practices, Database Maintenance, Email Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, Uncategorized

    Successful real estate agents know the importance of setting goals for themselves. Since real estate agents are in large part responsible for their yearly earnings, setting realistic goals is part of ensuring that they can bring home the bacon. If you want to increase your real estate sales, you have to learn the right way to set goals and the appropriate action steps to complete them. One of the biggest reasons real estate agents don’t achieve what they set out to do is because their objectives are too broad and they don’t know how to follow through. We’re here to help you narrow the focus of your goals and make sure that you reach them.

    Put Your Real Estate Goals in Writing

    Get your goals out of your head and onto the page. Use a notebook or Word document to write them down so they are not just floating in space. Writing down your goals sets them in stone so that they’re tangible objectives to shoot for. Keep your goals realistic by thinking only one or two years ahead at first. Instead of writing down, Run a successful real estate business, narrow your focus to something you can achieve in six months or a year – for instance, Increase sales by 40% by 2019.

    Quantify Your Real Estate Goals

    Part of setting clear goals is assigning a numeric value to them so you know exactly what you’re reaching for. Let’s use the last example, Increase sales by 40% by 2019. Assigning numeric values to your goals allows you to reach higher success levels. If you simply write down, increase sales, that could be as easy as gaining one more sale than you did in the previous year. And that kind of goal setting will not make you satisfied. You will still be left wondering why your real estate business is not as successful as your competitors’.

    Continually Read Over Your Real Estate Goals

    Get in the habit of reading over your goals once you’ve written them down. It doesn’t do you any good to write them on a scrap of paper and place them in a drawer where they will be forgotten. You should keep your goals in a place where you have to see them every day, such as sticky notes on your fridge, above your desk or on your computer’s desktop. Looking at your goals daily will give you a sense of urgency and motivate you to take steps toward what you’ve set out to do.

    Create Action Steps for All of Your Goals

    Goals are useless if you don’t know what to do to achieve them. For each goal, write an action step or two to accomplish them. If your objective is to increase sales by 40% by 2019, here are a couple of action steps to take.
    • Reorganize my database of real estate leads.
    • Have two phone calls a day with new leads in my pipeline.
    Once you act on your goals in these small ways, you’ll see some minor success and start to realize how the rest of your goal can come to fruition.

    Hold Yourself Accountable for Your Goals

    One of the best ways to hold yourself accountable for your goals is to share them with your team and/or colleagues. If you have other agents or an assistant on your team, let them know what your goals are. Making a public declaration of what you plan to do to grow your real estate business – or any business – has been shown to increase your chances of success because you now have people, besides yourself, who are counting on you. If you work in an office with other agents, spread the word about your 2019 goals – seek feedback and ask if they will help keep you on track.

    Stay Organized and Connect with Your Sphere of Influence

    Your real estate contacts should always be up to date and organized. If they aren’t, you will have a difficult time remembering who you have in your sphere of influence and at what stage of the moving processes they are in. Maintaining your database of leads is a no-brainer if you want to increase sales or achieve other real estate goals. HomeActions gathers all of your contacts from places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo and more and creates a spreadsheet of everyone in your sphere of influence in alphabetical order by what platform they came from. Not only will HomeActions jump-start this process for you, we will then send a bi-weekly email newsletter to your real estate contacts on your behalf, using our database of hundreds of real estate articles. Click the button below to read more about HomeActions services and how we can help you achieve all of your goals this year. Visit HomeActions.net today to start connecting on a regular basis with your real estate contacts and improving your real estate business. Learn More About HomeActions