Ultimate Lead Farming Strategy Part II: The ReDeux

This is part 2 of the 3 part Ultimate Lead Farming Strategy Series
(Here’s the link to Part I)

The idea behind the ultimate lead farming strategy is to grow your own organic crops, rather than going to “the convenience store” for your already prepared warehouse packed nourishment.  In part one we discussed a physical mail approach to plant and nurture the seeds.  The goal of a good  farming strategy is to establish yourself as the area expert, and the obvious choice to call when the time is right.  

Reside is the tool from Revaluate that builds a geographic farm for you.  It sets down the boundaries of your acreage. Once a Reside farm is defined, Revaluate clients then score the contacts in the farm using Revaluate’s Reveal service allowing them to begin harvesting the crops at the right time more efficiently.

Harvest Moon

Good farmers know when to harvest. One of the most common mistakes people make when engaging with a Reside farm is that they start picking the fruit before it’s too ripe. It’s not proper etiquette to treat the Very Likely Movers like leads.  While an individual in your farm has been shown as Very Likely to Move by our data and artificial intelligence, they have NOT raised their hand yet, and have not requested any information, so calling them out of the blue and asking for the listing IS NOT the most effective strategy. In fact, we know this is a cold-call recipe for failure. They are not ripe yet.  Utilizing a “land, air, and sea” approach to cultivate the farm, will allow you to convert at a much higher level.   Farming is not fast.  This will take some time, but in the end it will be far more bountiful for you and your business. 

Pro Tip: When (and if) you are looking to the future, you ought to be planning to sell the business at some point not just live paycheck to paycheck. If you buy leads from platforms every week/month you have less of an asset, than if you have a properly cultivated farm and database.

In part 1 we set up the direct mail portion of the strategy, the next step would be to set up a retargeting campaign (google or social media, both if you can). 

When setting up retargeting, it’s important to remember that in 2021 there are so many different methods of communication, and EVERYONE of your prospects has a favorite.  Some people like mail, some people like phone calls, some people like text, some people like FB messenger. If you are trying to contact someone in a way they do not appreciate, then you will never contact them.  For highly effective communication, it’s ideal to connect with the prospect on the platform they most appreciate. This is why it’s important to engage with a multichannel, omnipresent strategy, to ensure maximum penetration and effective communication.  

Using our example of a 10k contact farm, it’s pretty common to have about 50% with emails. Having ~5k emails therein, you can choose whether to dump the entire farm into a custom audience and retarget with billboard style messaging, or you can be more strategic and segment that list so that you have one campaign for each section. Minimally, a campaign for the VLM/EM and a campaign for everyone else is recommended. 

However you choose to create your audiences, think of retargeting as if you were buying Ad space inside of each prospects home so that they can at least passively be getting exposure to your name, face, and branding. 

The next key is a a good CTA (Call To Action). CTA’s can create the same hand raise scenario you are hoping for from your postcard campaigns.  CTA’s are a whole discussion, but include asking about home valuation, value ads and unique information. Remember, these campaigns are running in parallel, so clicking on one vs the other doesn’t automatically negate the effectiveness of the other campaign, assume the results come from the synergy of running them together unless you can prove otherwise.

There are many tools available on the market today that can help run your retargeting campaigns, like Adroll, Perfect Audience, Artudata, Google Ads… but you CAN do it all using the ads manager in FB. (here’s a quick read on these tools and more) Either way, if you’re not utilizing targeted remarketing, this is a big opportunity for growth and additional success in your database and farming strategies. 

Integrate Revaluate into your CRM and advance your business. Who do we integrate with? Some of our integrated partners can be found at www.revaluate.com/integrations and the list continues to grow, so let us know if a tool you use isn’t listed.