As a luxury real estate marketing professional, you live and breathe real estate day in and day out. But, if you think referral marketing is primarily about real estate, think again. The best referral marketing is peripheral. Peripheral means tangential or secondary, only slightly relevant to your primary subject of real estate.
This is important to understand when it comes to staying in touch with clients who just purchased or sold a home and also with contacts in general. If you are a blogger, droning on about real estate alone will bore your audience to tears!
Traditionally, a person, couple or a family buys a new home every seven years, on average. For most people, moving is stressful. They have given quite a bit of attention and focus to real estate as a buyer or a seller. But, once they have completed the transaction how much interest do they actually have in the real estate market as a consumer? If you come at them, bombarding them with real estate related information they simple will tune you out.
Perhaps they want to keep abreast with market trends, but on an occasional basis only. Or, maybe they are interested in what the home up the street just sold for. But, after that they are more interested in their lifestyle and enjoying the locale than they are in real estate matters.
One of the masters of peripheral marketing is Ralph Lauren. They provide the outfits for the Olympics Wimbledon and the US Open Tennis Tournament. To get a visceral experience of this company’s peripheral marketing check out: L’Art de L’Automobile—Masterpieces from the Ralph Lauren Car Collection. It is an exhibit in Paris that closes on August 28. You may not be able to attend, but you can go there virtually. Be sure to click on each of the classic car photo to hear the actual engine of the car.
Ralph Lauren is not selling clothes at this exhibit. But, they are selling the affluent lifestyle, peripherally, the lifestyle that characterizes their brand. You do not have to be rich to “join” the brand; you can simply purchase a Polo shirt at Macy’s. But, more likely than not, if Ralph Lauren holds your interest as a brand, you aspire to live the affluent lifestyle.
Think of ways you can stay in touch with your sphere of influence and your audience on the periphery of real estate more so than as your core subject in your communications. If you do your chances for referrals will be much stronger.
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