Planning out your marketing strategy for the quarter – or even the year – is a great way for busy agents to ensure that their marketing efforts don’t fall by the wayside when they get distracted by client meetings, closings, and paperwork.
But knowing when to send real estate direct mail postcards can be as much of an art as a science. Most agents assume they should hit the big events, like Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and the 4th of July. Sports schedules, like baseball calendar magnets or RE/MAX football schedule magnets, are also a popular choice due to their ease of use and long shelf life.
But many agents struggle with smaller events and holidays. Should you send out marketing messages for Halloween, for Easter, for Valentine’s Day or Daylight Savings? The answer is unequivocal: YES, you should absolutely take advantage of these smaller holidays as marketing opportunities.
One of the best parts about marketing on smaller holidays is that there’s just less competition. Sending a marketing message for Thanksgiving or New Years is, if not par for the course, at least extremely common. Black Friday sales are so well attended that they can sometimes be deadly, and many stores offer great deals for the new year as well.
Marketing messages that reference a smaller holiday like Halloween are much less common, typically just a standard message (that you would have received anyway) with a couple of clip-art pumpkins and witches’ hats in the corner. When you take the time to create a RE/MAX farming postcard that focuses on Halloween, you’re truly setting yourself apart in the mailbox.
Similarly, some real estate marketing that focuses on smaller holidays offers a real benefit for your prospects, and helps them to feel less “marketed to” and more appreciated. Daylight savings postcards are one example of this, as are postcards for new homeowners with reminders about changing air filters and smoke alarm batteries.
Consumers these days are incredibly savvy. They know that just about anything you send to them is a marketing message in one way or another. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t appreciate when you pair your marketing with a message or a product that is genuinely useful!