Andrea Geller: Are you chasing leads in real estate or cultivating clients?

This post is contributed by Andrea Geller of HOT PROPERTY® The Chaz Walters Group at Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Chicago.

Are you chasing leads in real estate?

Do you focus your time chasing after that phone call, email, text or private message from someone you don’t even know or who doesn’t know you or even appreciate if you have expertise in the market?

With the growth of real estate portals and social platforms, the past decade has brought a shift in mindset among many in the real estate industry.

Agents think that if they get some stranger to go look at a property because they contacted you about a listing in a zip code you “bought” on a portal, they can sell somebody something.

This is lead chasing.

After years of fumbling around in the digital world, I now can distinguish between cultivating a client and chasing leads. Personally, I prefer to have a potential lead contact me from something she read in my biography, or presentation of my listings online, or an article I have written or been quoted in.

My favorite source of business is a referral from another agent or a past client. Regardless of how that contact is generated, cultivating a client comes full circle via the digital world.

Listening is the key to learning.
And reading is the new listening.

Through conversations with my clients either in real life or through email or social media, they have let me know how and why they came to work with me. They read something I wrote or saw me quoted in an article. Then they Googled me. The decision to have me represent them in their real estate transaction ultimately came from my digital profile. Not from one site, but from click to click.

Your digital profile should be the result of a larger digital strategy. That is the 2016 version of a marketing plan. That strategy should answer question such as:

What is it about yourself that you want people to connect with?
What are the most effective ways for you to communicate this?
What platforms will you utilize?
Which platforms will you link to?
What content will you include?
What is it that makes you stand out from your competitors that sways the client?
How do you get the consumer to click through to you to begin with?
What is it that retains past clients?

For those of us that have been around since print, the basics haven’t changed. It’s just the means of delivery that have changed.

Digital is another segment of our industry that is dynamic. Creating and maintaining my digital presence is an ongoing process. The one thing that doesn’t change is what I bring to the table as a real estate professional. It just needs to be communicated on mediums that will reach my clients.

Andrea Geller strives to provide her clients the greatest customer experience. She has gained knowledge and expertise that only result from experience and ongoing professional development.