How to stay relevant in the holiday hubbub

Right about now, most of our prospective customers are busy with their families and not necessarily thinking about buying or selling their homes.

However, this time of the year makes staying top-of-mind that much more important. Following up with your referral sources, past clients and other contacts in your network will create relationship capital that will help you build for a strong 2016.

With that said, it’s hard enough to keep in touch with your database. When you add in a crazy season to the mix, it only becomes more difficult to stay relevant with your key contacts during this time of year.

Here are some tools to stay relevant and top-of-mind during the holiday season:

1. BuzzSumo

Millions of pieces of content are published every day, and people are consuming that content at even faster rates. BuzzSumo analyzes and shows what content is performing the best based on the topics searched.

You’ll be able to see the most relevant and best content to send out to your network. While your buyers and sellers might be drowning in holiday deals, your thoughtful message with a piece of insightful content found in BuzzSumo will go a long way.

Pro tip: For instance, this month I looked for articles related to saving money on heating costs for homes during the winter. This content was relevant to the vast majority of my network.

2. Contactually

Contactually is a contact relationship management (CRM) and a simple, effective way to get more from your network. You won’t miss out on opportunities to follow-up, and you’ll be able to stay consistently top-of-mind with your most important leads.

As your network gets caught up with the day-to-day madness, they won’t forget about you. With Contactually, it’ll be simple to stay engaged with every part of your network no matter the time of the year.

Pro tip: I send holiday cards to a few “buckets” — my most important referral sources and my past clients in Contactually. I was quickly able to export those contacts, and I used Touchnote to quickly send a personalized holiday card to them.

3. SaneBox

SaneBox is a tool that keeps your inbox organized. This tool will not directly send messages for you, but it will allow you to keep your inbox clean and manageable.

With an updated and organized inbox, qualified and hot opportunities will surface to the top more easily than before. SaneBox provides a frictionless way to know what’s important in your inbox, so those messages don’t get lost with all of the holiday promotions.

Pro tip: I use this to reach inbox zero, which allows me to focus more of my time on proactive outreach and other important, non-urgent tasks.

4. Mention

From monitoring your own mentions to your top contacts, use Mention to your advantage. Mention is a tool that actively tracks conversations with your network or influencers.

According to Pew Research Center, 74 percent of online adults are using social media, which is a good opportunity to stay on top of relevant conversations during this busy time.

[Tweet “According to Pew Research Center, 74 percent of online adults are using social media.”]

Avoid crossing the line into intrusive territory, but don’t be afraid to add valuable, personable thoughts to the conversations through Mention. Going into 2016, your most important buyers and sellers will think of you first.

Pro tip: This is part of my social network strategy. I spend around one or two hours per week in it. No more than that.

5. Touchnote

We all know how much time it takes to write and send our own personal holiday cards. So, imagine doing that for your entire network. Without looking like you’ve cut corners, Touchnote gives you beautiful stationery online — and printed too — to send out to your network.

You can pick customized holiday notes and easily distribute them. Touchnote allows you to import a CSV file, so it makes it super easy to reach your most important contacts.

[Tweet “It took me about a total of 30 minutes to send 100 holiday cards.”]

Pro tip: I use Contactually and Touchnote together. To send out my personalized holiday cards, I simply exported contacts from specific buckets inside of Contactually and then imported the CSV into Touchnote. It took me about a total of 30 minutes to send 100 holiday cards.

These tools, especially used in combination with each other, will help you keep in touch with your clients and stay relevant in their minds.

Brandon Doyle is a Realtor at Doyle Real Estate Team — Re/Max Results in Minneapolis. You can follow him on Twitter.

Email Brandon Doyle.