Description: Back in the day, real estate agents used to do colouring competitions for kids in their neighbourhood.
The problem with this antiquated strategy is that you end up with two or three happy kids who won your grand prize and a few dozen badly coloured Bambis you can do NOTHING with. Let’s get the community involved in a different kind of competition – a photo or video competition.
Leads and outcomes:
- Gets you involved and connected with your community
- Builds your email and contacts list in your area
- Creates content for your blog
- You will end up with a blog full of local visual content that you can use and reuse, many email addresses, a big following on your blog and an image of someone who goes beyond real estate to reach his community.
How: Title the competition Season in Sampleville for a photo competition or Why We Love Living in Sampleville for a video competition.
Get local businesses to donate prizes in exchange for marketing coverage and goodwill. Make sure some of the prizes are relevant - a digital camera or a digital video camera.
Participants could submit photos or videos in a number of ways:
- By emailing them to you and you post them to your blog – the post with the most comments wins.
- By posting them onto your Facebook page – the post with the most Likes* wins.
- By using an application like Wildfire (http://bit.ly/wfirereg) – at a minimal cost you can delegate the whole process of submitting photos and choosing a winner to your audience, freeing you to focus on marketing the competition.
Promotion: Market the competition on your blog, Facebook page, in the local paper, your 10K flyers and even your open home. Consider printing the top twelve photos and organising an exhibition and prize giving in the local community centre, then submit a story about the event including the winning images to the local paper.
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Cost: The cost associated is for prizes and using the Wildfire app. You can avoid costs by getting local businesses to donate prizes in exchange for promotion and using Facebook or your blog to present the images.
This is the ninth chapter from my guide:
