Hyperlocal Marketing 101: for Real Estate Agents, Investors and General Contractors
With hyperlocal marketing, you’re not playing everybody else’s game. You’re not spending all of your time posting on Facebook praying for Likes. You’re not trying to “build brand” across every social media platform invented in Silicon Valley.
You’re playing your own game.
You’re identifying your best local clients and you’re reaching out to them proactively. It’s that simple. But because it’s so simple, you need to make 100% sure that you are targeting the right folks. So how can you do that?
As a business owner who serves local home or property owners, you need to combine smart digital insights (we’re talking about the big D word…data) with the time-earned expertise that you have in your unique, local market.
To do hyperlocal marketing right, you need…
- The right message – Unique advertising materials that only a local would think of or connect with
- The right prospects – Locals who can afford your services AND have a need for them (a need to sell, a need to remodel, etc.)
- The right channels – Marketing channels that let you reach out to your best prospects directly
This post will show you how to use hyperlocal marketing to your strategic advantage. Let’s get into it!
Table of contents:
- What sets hyperlocal marketing apart
- Why hyperlocal marketing is perfect for businesses that serve home & property owners
- Best channels for hyperlocal marketing
- Examples of hyperlocal marketing
- Hyperlocal marketing in four simple steps
- Hyperlocal marketing for real estate agents
- Hyperlocal marketing for real estate investors
- Hyperlocal marketing for home & property businesses
- What to prioritize and optimize
What sets hyperlocal marketing apart
Hyperlocal marketing means that you’re combining your local expertise with digital insights to discover your best potential clients and then you’re reaching out to them proactively.
Even with that definition, you might be wondering…what is the difference between local and hyperlocal marketing?
While local marketing can be done by businesses of any size, hyperlocal marketing can be done only by local businesses, because you need local expertise to be successful.
For example, a big chain cleaning company (I’m looking at you, Merry Maids) would likely use the same style of online ads in every region they served. They would just change the name of the city in the direct mail or ad copy.
Meanwhile, a home cleaning services company that only worked in one town would be able to creatively address their target audience, by using phrases or images that only a local would know to use. That is hyperlocal marketing.
Take a look at this template for a direct mail postcard for a real estate agent:
It’s a clear, eye-catching template, but it could be used by any real estate agent, anywhere. There’s nothing that would tell us that the agent sending us is an expert in their local market.
But this example shows clear expertise in a specific market.
The agent has included…
- A photo and message relevant to the season
- The market of expertise
- A stat that shows their local authority
Not only is this example hyperlocal, but it’s also highly memorable.
But creativity is just one component of successful marketing. Targeting property owners who can afford your services is essential. We’ll dive into that in just a little while.
Why hyperlocal marketing is perfect for local businesses that serve home & property owners
Hyperlocal marketing is perfect for local businesses that serve home and property owners because…
- It gives you an advantage over businesses using generic local methods.
- You can use a variety of criteria to target your ideal clients (specific neighborhood, home equity, interests, and more).
- It’s proactive, meaning you don’t have to wait around for your best leads. You can reach out to prospects before they go searching for your competitors.
Did you know that 122 people over the age of 35 purchased a home in Roseville, California with 100% down in the past 365 days? Now you do. Maybe those criteria don’t matter to you and that’s fine, because PropertyRadar has over 200 targeting criteria to help you find the right home and property owners.
Best channels for hyperlocal marketing
Even with the right marketing message and the perfect mailing list of prospects, you need the right channels. With hyperlocal marketing, you don’t wait around for potential clients to find you. Instead, you reach out to them directly.
Because small businesses owners are currently being fed a diet of cool marketing (Instagram, blogging, YouTube etc.), they may believe that direct marketing is wrong.
The opposite is true.
When you proactively reach out to the right prospects who need your services, they are highly likely to thank you for your outreach and do business with you. When your marketing message clearly demonstrates your expertise and authority, that’s hyperlocal marketing gold.
So don’t let fear—or an obsession with trends—stop you.
On the flipside, overly focusing on cool, trendy marketing can sap your time and resources. What works for marketing Tesla and Nike isn’t likely to work for you.
These are the channels that do work for hyperlocal marketing:
- Direct Mail – Directly reach out to the best-fit home and property owners that you have identified based on the criteria that matters to your business, like age, income or equity status
- Online Ads – Upload a custom audience of your current customers into Facebook so that you can stay top-of-mind with them. Target these customers with digital ads to generate repeat business and referrals.
- Phone Calls – Reach out to your list of best-fit prospects via phone.
- Email – Send direct email to your leads.
- Social Media (Direct) – Connect with your prospects on social media. Add them as a friend on Facebook, or send them a message.
- In-person – Think you found your next best investment deal? Want to tell nearby homeowners that you’re contractor responsible for a beautiful new remodel? Go ahead and do some door knocking to reach out to your best leads.
Use PropertyRadar to find the home and property owners that are your ideal clients with over 200 targeting criteria (age, income, equity status and so much more).
Examples of hyperlocal marketing
What would hyperlocal marketing look like for your business? Here are some examples of what type of lead a business owner might be looking for and which marketing channels they could utilize.
Hyperlocal marketing in four simple steps
Hyperlocal marketing saves time, gets alarmingly better ROI, and helps you stop wasting money marketing to the wrong people. Even better, you reduce your dependence on passive marketing and tech giants.
The four steps of hyperlocal marketing are:
- Discover your best prospects
- Understand their needs better than anyone else
- Connect directly without waiting for customers to find you
- Automate your hyperlocal marketing to win long term
1. Discover your best prospects
The first step in hyperlocal marketing is to discover who your local potential customers are. Who should you reach out to?
Let’s say that you own a moving company. You would want to know who in your area had listed their home for sale in the past 90 days. That would be a good indicator that they are very likely to be moving soon.
In an instant, you’ve gone from wasting marketing dollars on anyone in your surrounding zip codes, to actively marketing to people who are getting ready to move! Now that’s hyperlocal.
How about another example? Maybe you own a landscaping business. You might want to market your services to homeowners who have a certain amount of equity in their home, which shows that they are established homeowners and may have more money to spend.
In addition to equity, you can target homeowners based on the value of their home. Depending on your area and your target client, you might target homeowners of homes that are worth $250k and over, or maybe more than $1 million.
This is hyperlocal marketing at its best. Remember: hyperlocal isn’t just about location. It’s about getting super smart and strategic with other criteria beyond location. The real magic lies in layering all of those criteria together.
For local businesses, percentage of equity and home value are insanely valuable pieces of information that can have a huge effect on how you market and who you market to. Mind blowing, isn’t it?
2. Understand their needs better than anyone else
The second step in hyperlocal marketing is to understand your potential customers. You’ve created a list of best-fit prospects, based on location and dozens of other factors. Now it’s time to examine your list and look for trends. Can you group your list together in any way? Can you pick out any specific detail that would really stand out?
Let’s return to our landscaping example. Let’s say you’ve got a list of several hundred high-equity, high-value homeowners in your area. Maybe there are a couple golf communities in your area, and you sort every prospect who lives near a golf course into one subset. Then in your marketing materials, you can write something like “Get a lawn as smooth as the green” to appeal to homeowners who clearly love to golf, or at least love to live near a well-manicured golf course.
3. Connect directly without waiting for customers to find you
Once you have your list of best-fit customers (Step 1) and you understand their needs and interests even more deeply (Step 2), it’s time to reach out to them.
The beauty of hyperlocal marketing is that it’s not passive. It’s active. It lets you take control. You don’t set a bear trap and hope a bear falls into it. You go hunting. Bad analogy? Okay, moving on.
As previously mentioned, there are 6 ways to reach potential customers with hyperlocal marketing:
- Direct mail
- Online ads
- Phone
- Social media (direct outreach, direct messages, following, etc.)
- In-person
If you own a local retail store or restaurant, you can send a postcard with a coupon or promotional offer. If you’re a contractor who just renovated a showpiece of a home, you can call nearby homeowners with a high amount of equity to let them know that you’re the contractor who completed the job. If you own a yoga studio, you can add Facebook friends with wealthy female locals and message them about getting their first class free.
4. Automate your hyperlocal marketing to win long term
Marketing is super simple: discover your best potential customers and connect with them.
You’ve made a list, studied it, and reached out to people on that list. It’s so simple you wondered why you never did it before. Why were you waiting for customers to find you?
Why were you letting them find your competitors in Google first? Why were you convincing yourself that marketing was complicated?
You’re so excited about all of the new revenue being generated by hyperlocal marketing that you get so busy satisfying your customers and you have no time for marketing. Then the slow season hits and you freak out and fall into a pit of despair that not even your spouse’s homecooked pot of chicken soup can pull you out of.
Step 4 won’t let that happen to you. Step 4 is going to prevent the feast-or-famine cycle that small business nightmares are made of. Step 4 is when you automate. Here’s how:
- Set up notifications so that whenever someone in your area matches your criteria for an ideal customer, you get notified
- Hire an assistant or get help from your current team reaching out to all new prospects and following up with existing contacts
- Set up weekly, monthly and quarterly processes to keep your hyperlocal marketing engine running—this might be weekly phone calls, monthly mailers, and quarterly reviews of results
Hyperlocal marketing for real estate agents
As a real estate agent, you want to grow a client base with your ideal clients. Maybe that’s all-cash buyers. Maybe it’s first-time homebuyers. These three components will help you formulate the only real estate agent marketing plan you’ll ever need.
The right message for real estate agents
Consider your favorite clients. What do you love about them? What do they love about you? Is it the fact that you grew up in the market you serve? Is it because you understand the fears and frustrations of first-time homebuyers? Is it because your children go to the same school as theirs?
Hyperlocal marketing requires that you dig deep and understand what sets you apart. It’s not just about who you’re looking for. It’s also about why those buyers and sellers choose you. The right message will open up the opportunity for you to build new client relationships that are similar to the great client relationships you already have.
The right prospects for real estate agents
For hyperlocal real estate marketing, you need the right leads. Our hyperlocal marketing app features these Quick Lists. All you have to do is select your city or zip code to get started building highly targeted prospecting lists.
- Just listed / just sold
- First-time buyers
- Absentee owners (landlords)
- Absentee owners (landlords) out of area
- Free & clear homeowners
- Underwater owners
- Potential short sale listings
- Cash buyers
- Preforeclosure
- All foreclosures
- Bank owned (REO)
- Death of joint tenant
- HAMP loan mods
The right channels for real estate agents
As a real estate agent, there are a variety of channels that will bring you buyer and seller leads consistently. Essentially, all six of the hyperlocal marketing channels are worthwhile. However, you should reserve in-person door knocking for potentially highly motivated sellers, such as potential short sale listings.
Hyperlocal marketing for real estate investors
When you find great deals, you need to move on them quickly. Market to known underwater homeowners and properties that you discovered to be in disrepair while driving for dollars.
The right message for investors
Just like any other type of business, real estate investors need a message that resonates. Maybe your postcard copy might ask, “Does your house feel like a liability?” That statement will hook readers who are experiencing this problem. In addition to the hook, you’ll want to include information like purchasing with all cash, buying homes as-is, paying off mortgages, how long you can close in, and other unique selling propositions that will sound like sweet relief to your target property owners.
The right leads for investors
As a real estate investor, you need to spend your marketing resources on the best potential deals. With PropertyRadar, you can search our Quick Lists of these types of leads within your own market.
- Absentee owner
- Absentee owner (out of area)
- Free and clear owners
- Equity owners
- Underwater owners
- Cash buyers—check out what the competition is up to!
- Trustee sale buyers
- Preforeclosure
- All foreclosures
- Foreclosure auctions
- Bank owned (REO)
- Corporate-owned
- Multiple owners
- Death of joint tenant
- HAMP loan mods
The right channels for investors
Once they’ve found their target deals, the best hyperlocal channels for real estate investors are in-person, phone, email, and direct mail. Online ads won’t likely make sense for your business. You could potentially do direct outreach on social media (sliding into the homeowners’ DMs) if you’re having a hard time getting in touch with the other channels.
Hyperlocal marketing for home & property businesses
Marketing a construction business the trendy way can lead to wasted marketing dollars. For general contractors, landscapers, painters, plumbers, and other businesses that serve home and property owners, you need to focus all of your marketing efforts on the locals who are most likely to convert to a client in the future. No more wasted time or expenditures!
The right message for contractors and other property businesses
Similar to real estate agents, you need to know what makes you unique. What sets your service apart? Is it your number of 5-star ratings? Your design aesthetic? Your focus on historic homes? Your reliability? Your craftsmanship?
Across every channel you use, you’ll have the best results with hyperlocal marketing when you hone in a marketing message and design style that speaks to your ideal client. If you’re not sure what makes you stand out from the rest, ask your favorite clients why they wanted to work with you in the first place, and what they enjoyed most about working with you. This will help you craft your marketing materials.
The right leads for contractors and other property businesses
Your ideal client has a certain budget rand and a certain set of needs and requirements. You can find your ideal client in PropertyRadar. Just add your zip code, city, or another service radius.
- Pre-movers
- New homeowners
- Land buyers
- Large lots
- Poolside living (check for homes that either have a pool, or don’t)
- Wealthy locals
- Recent 2nd mortgage—probably getting ready to make improvements!
- New wealthy locals
- Cash buyers
The right channels for contractors and other property businesses
Undoubtedly, direct mail can have a huge impact on making your lead generation more consistent and reliable (when sent to the best-fit leads mentioned above). Because your service is higher priced than say, a yoga instructor’s would be, you can also benefit from cold calling and in-person door knocking. You’ll get the best results with phone and in-person when you can share a recent project in the area. This establishes immediate trust.
If yours is the type of business that occurs repeatedly, such as landscaping or pool servicing, online ads to your current or past customers can also work well. These types of ads are really smart if your work is seasonal, and you want to remind your previous customers to get their service with you back up and running. But of course, a phone call helps you reinvigorate previous accounts too!
What to prioritize and optimize
- Know what sets you apart – Work on developing a marketing message and design style that is highly relevant to your local market, memorable and unique to you.
- Choose your best channels – Experiment with the six channels over time. When you get a new client, always ask them how they found out about you. Keep track of which channel is working the best for your business. While each of the six channels present a great opportunity to connect with your ideal clients, it will take real experimentation to know which is worth a higher proportion of your resources, whether time or monetary or both.
- Create timely promotions – Especially with direct mail and ads, you’ll have better success if there is something timely that you are offering. Maybe it is the first home for sale in a brand new development. Maybe it is a discount on your services.
- Define and redefine the criteria of your best fit client – Maybe when you first get started with hyperlocal marketing, you build lists of leads using only location and percentage of equity as your criteria. As you go along, experiment with different types of lists. When you get new clients, see which lists they were on. Overtime, you’ll learn to perfect the criteria that matters most to your unique business.
- Follow up with prospects – Hyperlocal marketing is direct, proactive and highly specific. Any direct marketer (regardless of whether location matters to their business) will tell you that follow up is key. If you fail at follow up, you fail. Be sure to trigger multiple postcards sent over time, show different ad variations over time, send additional emails, make follow up phone calls, etc. etc. It takes multiple touch points to convert a lead to a client, so never give up.
- Automate and streamline your processes – Hyperlocal marketing is efficient, practical and reliable. But without the right processes, it can get overwhelming. Use a project management tool like Trello to keep you and your team members on track with follow up and optimizations across every channel you’re engaged in.
Hyperlocal marketing is the perfect weapon for local businesses that serve home and property owners.
