What Makes Fall Marketing Different?

From mid-June to October, people return to life’s routine after a summer of vacations and kids running around everywhere. Think of this time as a roller coaster climbing the big hill before the drop. As temperatures cool off and leaves change color, the purse strings loosen little by little. 

Your fall marketing reaches leads and clients at just the right time to start warming them up to buy, sell, or lease. Using a multi-faceted approach, including social media, email, and direct mail (among others), allows you, as a new real estate agent, to build trust with your audience, and trust opens those purse strings all the way.

Let’s tackle three elements of fall that support your overall marketing strategy. 

Seasonal Changes

As we approach fall marketing, the beginning push starts at the end of summer. The mid-July to October span is lengthy, but it considers locations from the deep south where warm temperatures last longer and the far north where it gets colder earlier.

For instance, it feels like fall way earlier in New York City than it does in Miami. 

With seasonal changes also comes weather changes, and, believe it or not, weather influences consumer behavior. 

“Weather affects consumers’ emotional state, drives their purchase decisions, and dictates how much they are willing to spend. The effects are far more pervasive than the obvious examples that spring to mind; ice cream selling on hot days, and umbrellas when it’s raining,” says WeatherAds. 

Warmer Colors

Marketing color theory has been studied for decades. Warm colors bring with them warm feelings, but that’s not all. Check out the feelings warm colors in fall marketing for new real estate agents evoke.

Orange: energy, success, encouragement.

Red: action, passion, determination.

Yellow: happiness, warmth, joy.

Green: optimism, rebirth, growth.

Brown: stability, honesty, friendliness.

That’s not all, Inverve Marketing shares:

• “93% [of customers] rely on visual appearance when considering new products.”
• “85% say color alone is a primary reason for purchasing a product.”
• “90% say their impulse buys are based on color alone.”

Seasonal changes and warm colors set the stage for nurturing and converting, but there’s something else at play.

Approaching Holidays

Have you ever heard of Pavlov’s dogs? The scientist trained dogs to associate a sound with feeding time. Soon, whenever they listened to the programmed sound, their mouths would start watering in anticipation of food. They didn’t see the food in advance, only heard the sound. 

Consumers act like Pavlov’s dogs out of sheer repetition. Cooling temperatures mean we’re nearing the end of the year, bringing Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and tons of other holidays that have something to do with spending money. 

Think With Google claims more than “50% of holiday shoppers say they are open to purchasing from new retailers.” Fall is a time of change.

Real Estate Agent Marketing Tips

Fall marketing offers a two-fold payback to new real estate agents. First, it connects them with the target audience they’re attempting to swoon; plus, it’s perfect for building the brand awareness necessary to gain significant traction in real estate.

Here are a few things to consider when writing your fall marketing plan.

Social Media Marketing

Posts, Pins, & Updates: The golden rule in marketing is to offer free, valuable content to followers 80% of the time, the kind of content they’d be willing to pay for. The remaining 20% can be used to sell. 

What posts, pins, and updates work best for fall real estate marketing when you’re not selling? 

• Home improvement tips
• Community announcements
• Engaging questions
• Gratitude and appreciation

Genuine Communication: There’s a lot of focus in fall marketing on reaching as many leads and clients as possible with a single message. In direct mail marketing, we’re going to tell you exactly how to do that with personalization, but you can’t personalize messages at scale on social media, but you can genuinely communicate one-on-one.

Imagine you posted an update explaining your business to followers, and it received ten comments. Three of those are in the form of questions about you and the practice. This isn’t the time to send one long message addressing the three questions at once. Instead, it’s time to get personal. 

Post a response to each comment. Use the follower’s first name, if possible. If not, use their screen name in the introduction.

Answer the question or respond to the comment and leave any indication of sales language out of your response. Finally, end with an engaging question for them. Here’s an example:

JunieCleaver asks, “Where is your office located?” You answer, “Hey Junie, thanks for the question. My office is located at 123 Main St. in Alpine. Anything I can help you with?”

Shares & Likes: To master seasonal social media marketing, you must keep in mind that your feed should show content from your followers and your brand.

Randomly retweet followers’ status updates or shares, comment on content published by a follower or ask permission to repost a follower’s Instagram update. 

Marketers say, “Go to where your target audience hangs out.” We agree 100%, but we also know many marketers are missing an essential message in the statement.

You can find the demographics of your real estate followers on social media, and twenty-five-year-olds certainly use different social platforms than sixty-five-year-olds. 

We believe there’s a difference between knowing where your audience hangs out and meeting them there. The best real estate marketing agents must go to the platform, visit the follower’s page, share, like, and comment in person.

Don’t use automated programs like Hootsuite or Buffer; they’re great for consistency, but nothing beats personally connecting with your people one at a time.

Emojis: We’re genuinely surprised by the fantastic popularity of emojis. They started on social updates, moved into email subject lines, and today emojis are finding their way into blog posts. 

Every major social media platform shares the ability to add emojis. Some word processing programs, like Google Docs, have added the option.

Why are emojis important to fall real estate marketing? They make people feel good, and emojis evoke feelings of laughter, happiness, and nostalgia. 

With that said, don’t overdo it; use emojis occasionally throughout messages and text, but every sentence shouldn’t be packed with tiny doodles.

Direct Mail Marketing

Nurturing Notecards: There are two types of notecards to consider, printed and handwritten. We’ll discuss handwritten cards next, so what part do printed notecards play in real estate marketing for fall?

All real estate agents, new and experienced, know fall isn’t prime time for the housing market. These months are ideal for nurturing leads and clients, past and present.

But, you also want to stay top of mind during the slow season. When done right, printed notecards are kept and displayed, typically on the refrigerator. Why is that important?

Consider this. You receive a printed notecard in the mail from a local oil change spot. The card offers 50% off your next service. You don’t need an oil change now, but you will in a couple of months, so you hang it on the refrigerator.

One day, months later, you pass by the card and remember you need an oil change. You grab it and head out the door. One card marketed the auto shop for two months with no additional spend, and the consumer bought in when ready. 

Here’s another example. Remember when paper phonebooks were a thing, and a magnet was attached to them every year? We always peeled off the magnet and applied it right to the refrigerator.

Little did we know we were taking the marketing bait. The business card, typically a heating & cooling company or lawyer’s office, would stay in place for years. Though the consumer may never need it, they’d think first of the business on the phonebook magnet if they have an issue.

Handwritten Notes: An old fall marketing tactic turned new is handwritten notes. Many years ago, real estate agents took the time to write personal messages to every lead and client. We’ve heard stories of brands sending more than 10,000 notes a year this way. 

Digital marketing jumped onto the scene, and handwritten notes faded, but they didn’t disappear. There’s absolutely no doubt personalized handwritten notes are one of the most effective marketing tools available today, with a near 100% open rate. But who has time to write 10,000 notes? Technology’s made it, so you don’t have to. 

Handwritten note providers offer scalable fall marketing options that grow as your real estate brand grows. The notes are written by AI-powered pen plotters holding real pens and replicating the exact pressure, slant, and flow of human writing.

An actual stamp is applied, the envelope is handwritten, and QR codes make the notes easy to track. 

To learn more about handwritten notes in marketing, check out Handwritten Notes: The Be-All, End-All Guide You Need, where we’ve covered personalized notes in detail! You can also learn about how handwritten notes work for real estate marketing. 

Post-it Notes: Research finds, “the Post-it leads the request to be interpreted as a solicitation for a personal favor, facilitating a normative compliance response,” according to the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

What’s most interesting is the studies examined involved asking a recipient to complete a survey. The Post-It note didn’t affect the response rate of short, easy surveys but significantly increased the response rate for longer, detailed surveys. 

The handwritten Post-It convinced the reader to do something for the sender without any reward. Imagine what it’ll do when you’re offering help to them. 

Email Marketing

Leaves Changing Color: Fall-specific marketing is primed and ready for fall colors and imagery. Every autumn, people from far and wide travel to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia to watch the leaves change color.

There’s a sense of peace and warmth attached to the experience. Your job as a new real estate agent is to recreate that feeling with graphics, color, and design. 

In addition to leaves changing color, fall marketing can encompass any warm imagery associated with the time of year.

Some examples include pumpkins, wreaths or sweaters, and coffee (tea). Fall colors can be tailored to your specific location and the demographics of your target audience. 

For example, in the northeast, reds, and oranges are popular in fall. In the southwest, yellows and oranges are more common.

In the midwest, people tend to associate fall with greens and browns.

In the west, fall is marked by oranges and yellows. Complementary colors are tan, beige, burgundy, brick red, and chocolate brown.

Community Announcements: Another idea for fall real estate marketing is to include community announcements in your email marketing.

These can consist of information about upcoming events, upcoming home open houses, or any other community-related news. Informational emails are not sales messages; they are meant to educate your audience about upcoming activities near them.

You offer real estate leads and clients free information they may find helpful. Community announcements also work wonders to invite locals to free webinars and in-person events. 

Content Marketing

Autumn Harvest Recipes: We recently came across a printed notecard from a real estate agent to their target audience. The card was branded with the agent’s name and company logo.

An amazing-sounding recipe for cheesy jalapeno cornbread filled the card. The agent’s face was also featured. It was a clever way to promote their services to a local audience. Guess where that notecard likely ended up? Attached to the refrigerator. 

This fall marketing tactic is most effective when real estate agents share quick, uncomplicated recipes. These can be as simple as a recipe for egg nog, red wine hot chocolate, or a simple salad. Stay genuine to your local audience and use ingredients common to the area.

Cards aren’t the only medium to share recipes. Real estate agents also share their favorite recipes on social media or through blog posts. A long blog post with various recipes supplies several social media updates with a bit of reformatting.

Quotes on Thankfulness: Thankfulness quotes hit leads and clients with a one-two punch. First, they naturally carry a positive message, and second, the reader feels appreciated because you took the time to share such warmth with them. 

Social media content is ideal for sharing one quote at a time. Email can include a few more, but the best way to rank on search engine results pages is to share a list of 100+ quotes with unique content describing what the quote represents.

Why Be Thoughtful in Fall Marketing?

Your leads and clients deserve to know they’re more than a $. Sure, in many cases, the relationships you build with your audience come across as thoughtful, but you can’t assume everyone knows they mean something more.

Take the slow season to nurture leads and clients, and celebrate them with thoughtful fall marketing with no intention of driving a sale. Marketing with thoughtfulness in mind means sharing thank yous with no strings attached.