A familiar term to all involved in the practice of real estate is “farming!” Farming is the most effective prospecting tool for cultivating and identifying new potential leads that will generate sales and income for our business. The term "farming," is an analogy for the prospecting seeds we plant in a successful marketing campaign to a targeted audience. If the farm is nurtured over a period of time with direct marketing materials, such as mailers, cold calls, postcards and brochures the desired effect is that the leads generated can be cultivated so that your business will bear a great fruit or harvest!

The downside to farming is no immediate return, it is costly, and labor intense. It is a strategic commitment. The nuts and bolts of a farming campaign are: brochures, affixing labels to envelopes, designing materials and presentations, mailings, sorting letters, making trips to the post office, cold calling, and even making personal visits door to door!

Wow! That’s a lot of work! We should also consider and evaluate the costs to see if it is worth it! For those of us in real estate that do this regularly, the results are often disappointing for the effort we expend.

During the last few years in our boom economy, the return on farming may have diluted with the ranks of fellow real estate practitioners and REALTORS® competing with one another for a fixed number of leads. Instead of one person mailing a subdivision, or cold calling we now have several persons or teams competing for the same target market. The consumer now is faced with too many choices, and our own worth is now compromised after we worked so hard to develop our market image! The perceived worth of our professional services is now diminished and diluted by a saturated farm area. It is the unique marketer that stands out and gets noticed that will now capture the leads.

As real estate professionals that aspire to be successful in a more competitive market, we have to start viewing our business differently. We cannot do what everyone else does, and think that we will have a better chance of success.

Only the mediocre are ever truly satisfied. However, we can reap the rewards of prospect marketing by creating a market strategy and focusing a niche or a target market. The focus must appeal to our intended market the buyer or seller. You need to have them chose you over the competition when they buy or sell their next home.

So let's go through some basics first. Successful farming results involve first identifying a target market, strategizing, developing marketing materials, deciding a frequency of contact, and finally contacting your target audience. Whether we are farming a subdivision for listing leads, mailing an apartment complex for buyers, or hosting a first time homebuyer’s seminar looking for potential business it is something familiar to all of us.

The marketing image we choose and create should nurture and enhance our own professional image and abilities to the intended target. The fruits of a successful farming endeavor is when anyone in your farm thinks “real estate” they should think of your name first! In today’s saturated real estate sales market, that is not an easy thing to do. We must not forget that as we've become inundated with many more practitioners, they are prospecting for leads also. So the key must be to getting your message to your target market ahead of the competition, and staying ahead! That's what real estate farming is all about!

So why not with the Internet? It has some great advantages. First, we are not limited to concentrating all our efforts on one subdivision, street or apartment complex. The Internet is quite different than traditional marketing in the sense is that if someone discards your marketing material, it is forever lost! That is where the Internet differs! The WWW (World Wide Web), delivers your message 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year, and it is global!

We can successfully target similar farming areas via Internet marketing. The implementation is a little different, but the ideas are the same. To be successful on the web, we must first have a focus, or a target audience that we are trying to attract. You have to determine, whom are you targeting? If you currently own a website, have you created your website with any particular view in mind? Or, do you just own a website?

Through a successful web presence, we can attract any target viewer, if you design your web, and content to do so. The common mistake is that most REALTORS® assume the only persons looking at their website are buyers. What about sellers or for sale by owners? Can we entice them to our website with the dangling carrot of a “FREE CMA”? The answer is “Of Course!”

What about niche marketing or “Branding” our website to an even smaller more focused group? It is very effective marketing if a person doing a web search for “retirement homes in a gated community” finds your website isn’t it? What about a niche in: Golf Homes, lake homes, luxury homes, land, first-time buyers, listings, tennis, acreage, estates, new homes, cluster or town-homes? Will that work for you?

If you can be effective on the Internet, there are loads of advantages. You will be amazed at how much you can save in overhead. There are no: mailings, stuffing envelopes, labels to buy or to gum up your printer, toner to purchase, copying costs, postage, or Fed Ex , or relocation packages. You can display all marketing materials on the web at a very reasonable cost, and develop more leads than you know what to do with!