It's President's Weekend -- Spring Selling Season is Around the Corner!

It's true: we're just about to wrap-up February -- and that means the Spring Selling Season is kicking off! This week offers a great time to take stock and develop plans to kick-off new Spring new home sales/marketing efforts.

How do you create a great Buying Experience?

We'd like to suggest several ideas to help generate visits to your sales office and better engage home shoppers when they're there:

(1) Start Reaching Out to Realtors, Now -- We've blogged about the value of co-op agents before (here's an earlier Solutions blog -- Builders, Co-Op Agents: Reaching the Asian Community.)

BuilderOnLine reports Spring is the busiest season for Realtors and suggests offering incentives to make sure they are up on the latest about your community.  How about putting together a Get Ready for Spring Open House -- maybe offering a "spa event" raffle for attendees?  Or, a Wine & Cheese evening with a several bottles of your favorite?

Keep the buzz going: don't stop with one event!  If you start now (in dreary February), you'll be ahead of 90% of your competition!

Don't forget Realtors often focus on specific demographics -- relocations, ethnic or religious groups, 55+ buyers, etc.  Try reaching out to the demographic-centric agents, often.  They always will have a group of interested buyers available to visit your community -- provide them with a reason to stop by.

(2) Work to Create a Great Buying Experience --- You want to be your customer's #1 choice; what can you do to make that happen? First, embrace the idea that home shoppers visit your office because they're interested in buying one of your homes.. in many cases, today!

Next, we'll suggest that it makes sense to start looking at your sales office as a customer does. What will help you stand apart so the home shopper rates your community #1?

Think about: what are you doing to create a great buying experience! From the minute a prospect drives (or walks) up to your office, they're using all of their senses to evaluate the experience...from smell to sight to touch!

Mollie Elkman, a Philadelphia-based marketing expert, reminds us that pictures offer "virtual curb appeal."  Why not build on standard imagery and Go Interactive to make your office stand apart and grab home shoppers' attention?

An interactive touch presentation actively engages prospects from the minute they step into your sales office and can continue the conversation with interactive floor plans, the ability to select and place furniture inside your homes and e-brochures.

CPS offers software to help you zero in on the co-op agent community (that's CPS CRM) as well as SalesTouch, our interactive touchscreen system for both the large and small (think tablets) screen. We're here to help -- even when it's snowing and raining!

How to Leverage Your Social Media into Engaging Experiences

There's a great recent article in Multifamily Executive featuring an interview with Holli Beckman, VP Marketing at WC Smith.  She's distinguished herself as one of the industry's leading social media experts.

One of the takeaways was this question/response:

Start Social Media conversation in your sales/leasing office!

Q: Is Social Media more about engaging with current residents or attracting new ones?

A: Both. Social media is where your customers are every single day and multiple times a day. 

Take a look at CPS' Social Media Wall and consider how it creates opportunities for leveraging your social media content creation and conversation to your community location.

The Wall takes traditional marketing copy and content (think video, images) and integrates social media content to create an ever-changing, constantly evolving story about your brand, community and audience -- Instagrammable moments, engaging experiences.

Everyone in your audience (current residents, home shoppers, your marketing staff) can join the conversation with a post to specific Twitter and Instagram hash tags -- and you have the ability to curate posted content before it displays on the Wall. Now, your social media content is available to everyone walking into the sales/leasing office.  You're creating a new conversation space!

Some hashtags will always display -- as will traditional marketing copy and images.  But...have a St. Patricks Day event coming up? Create a special hash tag and generate specific audience content just for a couple days. Same for your upcoming Spring Special Savings event and Homeowner's Friday Night Mixer!

Have you seen the recent Reevoo study finding 70% of consumers place peer recommendations and reviews above professionally written content?  Take advantage of 2016's marketing hot topic, CGC (consumer-generated content), to engage your audience and start conversations in your sales or leasing offices with CPS' Social Media Wall.