During the holiday season, Tarheel Realty, a small brokerage in Statesville North Carolina, hits the ground running with its marketing. Tarheel has always been an innovative, outside-the-box brokerage with under 20 agents, and we try to always rise to the occasion in our local market.
We are currently No. 1 in units sold year-to-date, and we are gaining on the big-box franchise companies in our town by using some of these unique marketing strategies.
1. Company Christmas photo
We begin the holiday season by scheduling a company Christmas photo. We have always been a family-first company and a team. We feel that it’s important for the community to relate to our company by gathering everyone’s family together for an afternoon of fun and a few photos at the same time.
This photo becomes our message throughout all of our social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and our website. We not only take our company photos, but we also have our photographer shoot photo sessions with the agents and their families on the same day.
2. Holiday music video
Video marketing has been a tremendous marketing tool for our company in the past year. With the momentum we have created using video, we decided to do a Tarheel Realty Christmas music video as our 2015 Christmas card.
We shot the video in four days, used all of our active agents and shot at key areas within our community. We used downtown Statesville, the Historic Sharpe House and some beautiful acreage that we sold to a recent client in the country.
At each location where we have shot, we have assisted the owner at some point in time with a home purchase or sale, so we weren’t just picking locations — we were selecting clients.
Our music video was a collaborative effort with all agents. We picked our song and then started our process of what scenes we wanted to do and who would be in each scene.
What makes our video unique is that our children are in the video, and they had just as much fun shooting it as we did. Our message at the end speaks volumes as to what we are about: our family helping yours.
You can see throughout the entire video how much fun we were having and that’s really how much fun we have when we are together, whether it’s a sales meeting or a music video shoot.
The community has really embraced our video and shared on their social media accounts to their friends and family along with wonderful testimonials about how much they love our company, a specific agent and just our family and team.
3. Social media contests
Tarheel Realty has the leading edge in our community on our successful social media contests. Each year we have Halloween costume contests, snowman contests, and this year, we’ll have our first annual holiday light contest.
We love to interact with the community, and contests are the absolute way for us to do that. All of our agents reach out to their spheres on Facebook and encourage participation in the contests.
4. Local Christmas parade
We end the holiday season by making an appearance in the local Christmas parade. This year we wanted to tie together our Christmas video branding with our parade float, so we played “All I Want for Christmas is You” while holding up our custom riders with the same message.
Our kids get to be part of this as well, and we really enjoy the time together as a company in promoting our brand to the community.
It truly feels like the holidays when you get to do what you love and incorporate your family in the process.
What are you doing in your area to spread holiday cheer and enjoy your family, whether it be your work or home family? Please share in the comments section below.
Suzanne Hedrick Osborne is the broker in charge and owner of Tarheel Realty. Follow Tarheel on Facebook or Twitter.