As a real estate, insurance, home services, or marketing professional, having an effective prospecting strategy is essential to the success of your business. Prospecting gives you access to new leads for potential clients and helps you create relationships that can result in long-term engagement. Whether you are just starting out in your career, looking for ways to stand out from the competition, or wanting to increase sales opportunities – developing an effective prospecting plan could be key to achieving your goals. In this blog post, we will discuss how to develop a targeted approach that focuses on hyperlocal lead generation so that you can put yourself in front of the right clients and build a healthy pipeline.
What is Hyperlocal prospecting?
If you’re new to prospecting or just looking to improve your prospecting game, crafting a new strategy around hyperlocal prospecting may be precisely what you’re looking for.
Hyperlocal refers to a type of marketing strategy that focuses on a highly specific, targeted area of a city or neighborhood. This could be as geographically restricted as necessary to suit the needs of your business; down to just a few city blocks or specific houses within a neighborhood.
A typical hyperlocal marketing strategy aims at generating organic search traffic through near-me searches, though using a hyperlocal approach has other key benefits as a powerful tool for your prospecting.
Near-me searches are keyword search criteria that use a geographic location for targeted search results. Ranking for near-me search results on google takes some strategy to implement correctly since “me” isn’t, technically a location. Don’t worry, we will give you some tips to help with your near-me strategy later on.
Are you ready to start prospecting smarter? For over 75 years, Cole Information has been delivering the tools sales leaders need to think strategically about their prospecting.
Why is hyperlocal prospecting effective?
So, what makes a hyperlocal strategy effective for real estate, insurance, and home services prospecting?
Hyperlocal prospecting creates brand awareness and trust.
If you’re in real estate, insurance, or home services, your brand is your reputation; it’s the promise you make to your customers and clients; it’s delivering an experience that your clients will talk to their friends and family about (whether good or bad); your brand is what others will associate you with when they hear your name- you get the idea.
Why is this intangible thing so important? Prospecting for real estate, insurance sales, and home services isn’t easy. These services typically involve several discussions, multiple decision-makers, and ideally, some time spent developing a relationship and building trust between the salesperson and the client. Creating brand awareness establishes a relationship or opens up the possibility of a relationship. Someone is much more likely to engage with a familiar name or company. Brand awareness simplifies the relationship-building process by assuming a level of trust is already present.
Hyperlocal prospecting creates an association with your business
Selling in real estate, insurance, and home services, as we said already, is hard! People don’t impulsively sell their homes or purchase home services. When buyers are making these decisions, they are doing so after taking their time to evaluate their needs, weigh options, and decide on a budget; however, in some cases, an emergency forces the decision sooner than expected. Whichever the case, hyperlocal prospecting allows your target clients to familiarize themselves with your name and with the service you provide before making a buying decision, creating an association between you and the problem you solve and effectively placing you top-of-mind when the time is right to buy.
Hyperlocal prospecting creates a qualified lead list of high-intent buyers.
Hyperlocal prospecting targets a particular area and target audience. Within that target area, it is crucial to qualify leads and identify high-intent buyers.
As the name implies; a high-intent buyer is someone who is most likely to purchase from you. Salespeople use purchase intent scoring, which is just a fancy way of assessing the likelihood of a conversion. How a business evaluates purchase intent is determined by the product or service they sell. Purchase intent signals for home services, real estate, and insurance products can vary, as these services require lengthier relationship building and establishing trust, not to mention the nature of the decision-making process for higher ticket items of this nature.
The best way to establish a healthy pipeline of high-intent customers is to spend time qualifying your leads.
How to qualify leads
- Start with a powerful lead list. Cole Information has been serving sales leaders with powerful lead lists since the days of door-to-door prospecting. Starting with a list of quality leads is a great first step. This coupled with your own lead generation strategy is sure to deliver results.
- Identify your ideal customers and build an ideal customer profile for each. For tips on how to build an ideal customer profile, check out our blog post here:
- Do your homework. The more you know about your target audience, the more focused your prospecting efforts are and the higher your chance of a conversion.
- Knowing the demographics of your target audience and your target area can help your marketing strategy and can help better qualify your leads. Later, we will talk about using content marketing as a hyperlocal prospecting tool.
Who uses hyperlocal marketing and prospecting?
Traditionally, Brick and mortar stores use a hyperlocal strategy to rank high in “near me” searches on Google, but hyperlocal strategies for marketing and prospecting can be effective in any industry. From small business’ “buy local” campaigns to prospecting a neighborhood that’s reaching the 30-year mark and new roofing may be in the very near future; hyperlocal prospecting and marketing campaigns infuse awareness of your brand into that community and place you top of mind.
Getting started in hyperlocal and multichannel prospecting.
Developing a hyperlocal strategy for your prospecting starts by first identifying who your target customers are. If you’re in real estate, insurance, or home services, this could look like identifying the target area you want to sell, also referred to as a Business Development Area. A typical BDA will consist of around 1500-2000 properties in a target area. Here are some best practices for getting started with a hyperlocal prospecting strategy in your BDA:
- Track what’s happening in your BDA
- Familiarize yourself with the homeowners in your BDA
- …and develop a relationship with them
- Have a lead generation strategy to generate even more leads
- Start an email drip campaign
- Nurture your prospects via valuable email and newsletter content
- Analyze your data: how are your prospects engaging with you?
What is multichannel marketing?
Multichannel marketing simply refers to the many different channels a business uses to market its products to its customers. Mixing and matching marketing channels, like a podcast and YouTube channel, is often a good strategy for reach and can potentially be low-budget since a video can be recorded at the same time as the podcast. Instagram reels and Tiktok are other great examples of a combined, multichannel campaign that has the potential to be impactful, easy to share, and effective at communicating a clear message.
Potential downfalls of multichannel marketing and how to be effective at it.
Multichannel marketing has the potential to be great for your business; furthering your reach, generating organic leads, and creating brand awareness. However, if done poorly, a multichannel campaign can actually damage your brand image and create a ripple effect that hurts sales for a long time to come.
When choosing a multichannel strategy, do your research. If your client isn’t on Tiktok, don’t start dancing on Tiktok. This could simply be a waste of time, resources, and energy or could actually discredit your brand if your audience is more likely to be found on a platform like LinkedIn.
No matter what platforms you choose, be consistent. You’re not going to reach number one on google after one campaign. Consistency and measuring your efforts will guide your strategy going forward.
On the topic of being consistent. Keep your message clear and consistent across all platforms. Stick with your messaging and brand guidelines across all the channels you deploy.
Create useful content. Your messaging and content should either be about the problem you solve for your client or valuable information they can get for free.
Not all content needs to be dry and informative. Depending on your product or service, you can educate your customer about the problem you solve while delivering entertaining content. Your customer is looking for clarity and consistency, not the next-best Superbowl ad.
So, how do you leverage content marketing as a hyperlocal prospecting strategy?
Content marketing as a hyperlocal prospecting strategy.
First, let’s discuss what content marketing is and why it’s so effective.
Content marketing refers to producing content that generates interest in your brand from current and prospective clients; delivers valuable, useful information, and establishes authority. Certain forms of content marketing can also improve search engine optimization and how you rank in a search engine search result.
Content marketing is an effective and powerful way to create brand awareness across multiple channels and even generate new leads organically. Blog posts, social posts, videos, podcasts, downloadable PDFs, brochures, infographics, and testimonials are all common forms of content marketing.
In real estate, insurance, and home service sales, content marketing works much the same as in any other industry; creating awareness, developing trust, and nurturing relationships.
Because content marketing is such a powerful marketing tool, applying a hyperlocal approach to your content elevates your authority in your prospecting area.
How to create hyperlocal content.
We compiled our best practices for developing hyperlocal content and some content ideas to get you started!
Get local! Seems like a no-brainer but in order to produce area-specific content, you need to know your target area. You’ve likely done your research to identify your target audience within your BDA but having your finger on the pulse of everything that is going on locally can help you start to formulate your strategy for content marketing.
Consider this:
Take into consideration the history of the area, gentrification, and how this has affected local businesses, home prices, and demographics. Taking time to understand the history of the area and acknowledge the implications on reception your marketing strategy has, is key to being effective.
Be the expert and guide. Are there resources (free is great!) available in the area that locals would find useful? Events geared toward families with young children, a community center hosting a webinar about preparing for retirement, fitness classes, meetings, or donation drives? Boosting these local events can bring awareness not only to the local community but to your business and your involvement as well.
Deliver tips and advice for free. Sending a newsletter, email campaign or mailer is a great way to engage your community while bringing awareness and establishing a relationship. In order for your prospects to find it valuable, the content must be informative, useful, and relevant.
Examples of some relevant, educational content you can deliver to your prospective clients:
Hyperlocal content for real estate
- Statistics on recent just listed/ just sold properties in their area
- Home value estimator
- Historical home sales data
- Case studies
- Upcoming local events
- Local deals
- Host a holiday event
Hyperlocal content for insurance products
- Host local events or webinars geared toward insurance-related topics like physical health, and staying active after retirement.
- Sponsor a charity event or donation drive
- Partner with local businesses for giveaways.
- Host a holiday event or banquet for current clients
Hyperlocal content for home service providers
- Seasonal tips for homeowners
- Deals and specials
- Infographics with stats about your services
- Sponsor a local little league team
Have your clients write online reviews. Online reviews are one hyperlocal marketing tactic to boost your “near me” rating on google. Why is this important? Even when you’re equipped with a powerful lead list, like Cole’s products, you should always be prospecting! Ranking for “near me” searches, regardless of what service or product you sell will generate organic leads and invite them into your sales funnel. Then you can begin the work of evaluating and qualifying those leads.
Leverage backlinks. Hyperlocal backlinks are a backdoor into your funnel. What makes them valuable is how prospects fall into your funnel through the backdoor, via a trusted source, and establish authority early on. Guesting on a local podcast, television broadcast, or being featured by another relevant vendor are examples of backlinks you can target in your strategy.
Hyperlocal-multichannel prospecting is a good tool for your prospecting toolkit. The more research you do, the more qualified your leads and prospects will be and the more fruitful your efforts. Starting with a quality lead list from Cole Information ensures you’re off to a strong start.
For more information, contact us to learn how Cole can help you build your prospecting pipeline.
