Passive Marketing is how we build brand recognition by showcasing our product or business to potential clients. Anything that has your brand on it and is out in the world can be classified as passive marketing.
How can it be used in Real Estate?
Basically, passive marketing includes print marketing and static marketing such as seat ads, bus stops, banner ads, billboards, backs of buses, and anywhere and anything you can get your face and details on. It is advertising that profiles you, your company, your brand, or your product and gets you out in the marketplace.
The blog on your website and the ability to find it through search engines is also included in passive marketing, as the information is always sitting there ready for the customer to find.
While social media is usually seen as a means of Active Marketing, it can also be used for passive marketing. The idea is very similar to your more traditional seat and bus stop ads, it’s all about brand exposure and recognition. By distributing content such as blogs, news, useful resources, and user-generated content, you are building your brand recognition in a passive way. However, it is important to make sure this content is valuable to your audience.
So why use Passive Marketing?
Passive Marketing is a great way to confirm that you are who you say you are and that you’re a trusted and credible real estate agent in the community. It also gets consumers comfortable with your brand name, even if they’ve never done business with you. Brand recognition is built through repetition and familiarity. By having the general public be comfortable with your brand, the more willing they will be to listen to you if you knock on their door, resulting in growth and more business.
While passive marketing is a great way to get your name out there, on its own, it won’t create an attraction-based business for you. If you are brand new to the business, the very first activity you should be doing is building 1,000 contacts on your database from your community. You can’t go out there and put 6 or 7 seat ads up hoping that the phone will ring, because it will not. I’ve seen this happen time and time again, people go and spend thousands of dollars putting their face up, nobody knows who they are, and it means absolutely nothing.
I wouldn’t look at doing any type of passive marketing until you’ve been in the business for at least a year or two. Once you’ve got a consistent stream of income, then you’ll be in a better position to make passive advertising just one layer in your multi-layered prospecting system.
In the end, passive marketing will take a lot more time and a lot more money in attracting people to your business. For this reason, it’s important to use passive marketing in moderation. It is also very important that you use both passive and active marketing in the right situations.
To learn when and how to use Passive Marketing to your advantage, make sure you attend to my upcoming FREE 2-hour Real Estate Brilliance webinar.
