Introduction

Geographic Farming, or geo farming for short, is a new addition to our lead generation offerings. This feature aims to help Chime users dominate their local markets by boosting brand awareness and driving cost efficient lead generation. This feature provides neighborhood specific data, including sales volume, sales price, competitor market share, and GCI potential. 

Note: This feature is not available in Canada

Summary

• Why Use Geographic Farming?
• How Should I Choose a Farm?
• Selecting a Neighborhood
• Analyzing the Neighborhood
• Adding a New Campaign
  • Setting up the Farm
    • Homeowner Shop
  • Choose Subcampaign Designs
  • Display Information
  • Track Your Campaigns

Why Use Geographic Farming?

Geographic farming is a proven real estate marketing method you can use to focus your lead efforts on a single neighborhood. It involves identifying a local area and marketing directly to that area. When done correctly, farming can help you identify opportunities, increase brand awareness, capture leads, gain listings, and earn referrals. One technique that has been used for many years is to select a geographic area and send postcards to households in that area. These postcards may contain market statistics, recently sold homes, and often encourage homeowners to work with you as their agent. While real estate agents have been using Geo Farming for years, it still works because it makes strategic sense.

1. Farming helps you gain awareness locally: This strategy will be useful to you if you want to become the "preferred agent" in a particular market. As you put more effort into marketing to a specific neighborhood, over time and with the right marketing, you will become known for that area.
2. Farming gives you a consistent plan: A farm will tell you the exact marketing demographic and the geographic area to focus on. In Chime, we provide a steady 12-month recurring plan with preset postcard templates. All you need to do is choose a farm and set up the campaign, then the postcards will be sent out each month automatically.
3. Farming connects the ideal clients: By working in a smaller area, you can learn more about the movements, lifestyles, and interests of potential local sellers, and help you connect with customers smoothly.

How Should I Choose a Farm?

Step 1: Select an area that you want to target. The Chime system will provide the market analysis information.

Step 2: Look at the Turnover Rate. This indicates the number of homes that sold over the past 12 months, divided by the total number of homes in the selected area. Generally, 5%-7% turnover rate is considered acceptable. 

Step 3: Look at the Absorption Rate. This indicates the number of homes that sold over the past 30 days, divided by the total number of active listings in the selected area. For example, if the absorption rate is 3%, that is, only 3 listings are sold each month. You need to make at least 33 listing appointments to get 1 listing. This number indicates the competition, your stats, and the market stats.

Selecting a Neighborhood

To get started, first locate Geographic Farming in the Campaigns section of the CRM.

Enter the name of the neighborhood you want to target in the search box, or select the pencil icon in the lower right corner to manually draw an area. The selected neighborhood will appear on the map. Once the marketing area is an adequate size, click "Start Analyzing". 

After analyzing the area, you will receive some information:

Analyzing the Neighborhood

Once you've selected your neighborhood, we provide some key data points, as shown above. These data points are defined here:

• Total Properties: The number of properties within the selected boundaries
• Total Sales: Total sales amount in the selected area in the past 12 months, based on MLS data
• Average Sales Price: Average sales price for all sold listings in the selected area in the past 12 months, based on MLS data
• Average GCI: Average GCI for all sold listings in the selected area in the past 12 months, based on MLS data
• Turnover Rate: The percentage of homes sold in the selected area in the past 12 months, based on MLS data
• Absorption Rate: The percentage of homes sold in the selected area in the past 30 days, based on MLS data

This section also outlines what agents hold market share in the selected area, and how you stack up against them. This will give you insight into whether or not this is a good market for you to break into! If you're ready to move forward, click "Save" and give this Neighborhood Marketing area a name.

Adding a New Campaign

Once you have saved your neighborhood, scroll down to start a campaign.

Setting up the Farm

After the campaign has been purchased, the first step is to select the addresses for the farm. There are four options to add addresses.

1. Select leads that already exist in your CRM
2. Upload a spreadsheet with address information. Please note, this will not import leads into the CRM
3. Select homeowners from our Homeowner shop
4. Manually add a homeowner

Homeowner Shop

The Homeowner Shop allows you to see who lives in your selected area. We provide filters, so you can quickly identify the types of homes and homeowners you would like to market to.

Once you have purchased this information, you will see the homeowners added to the recipient's list for the campaign.

Purchasing the Campaign

Once the homeowners have been selected, you will be walked through the process of selecting the following settings of the campaign:

1. Farm Size
   1. The number of addresses postcards will be sent to
2. Farming Frequency
   1. Postcards can be sent once or twice per month
3. Postage Type
   1. We offer standard or first class postage
4. Postcard Size
   1. We offer 6x9 inch or 6x11 inch postcard size
5. Date to beginning billing
   1. Billing can begin right away, or be delayed until the next monthly billing date

Choose Campaign Designs

The next step is to design your postcards! This is very similar to Chime design center tool. The campaign will have 12 total postcards sent, scheduled either 15 or 30 days apart, depending on if you opted to send 1 or 2 postcards per month.

Here, you have the ability to edit the postcard templates. 

Display Information

Once the postcard templates are designed, the next step is to add your personal display information. This is an important step to boost your brand awareness in the neighborhood.

Track Your Campaigns

The final step to set up the campaign is to determine how you will track your responses. Here, you can control exactly what a lead will see if they scan the QR code on the postcard or send their text code.

Questions?

If you have any questions regarding this topic or any others, please reach out to our Support Team via email at <support@chimeinc.com> or by phone at 1 (855) 981-7557.