Creating a real estate marketing strategy is crucial to every agent’s journey in the real estate industry. It’s the best way to keep your business on the right track, grow your clientele, and ensure that you meet your client’s needs.
As a real estate agent, you’re probably familiar with marketing basics — social media, websites, and email campaigns. But that’s not all. A complete marketing plan covers both offline and online marketing tactics.
So, you’ve just started a real estate career and are looking for ways to attract clients. Your marketing plan can help you, but it can be hard to start. Where do you begin? What do you need to include? Here’s a real estate marketing plan and how to create one for your business.
What is A Real Estate Marketing Plan?
A real estate marketing plan provides information on your business plans and strategies, guides you on the steps to take, and outlines different roles in the plan.
Every successful real estate agent has built a foolproof real estate marketing plan at some point. It’s not wrong to say your marketing plan will determine whether or not you will succeed in whatever field you choose. Before anything else, it will help you with lead generation, and leads are vital in the real estate industry.
A marketing strategy seeks to develop credibility and presence, two characteristics real estate agents need to generate leads. Promoting your business and putting it out there is easier when you have a strong marketing presence.
Even though you can build your sphere of influence from a few trusted clients, you still need a strong foundation for building connections and gaining trust. You can build credibility by creating a real estate marketing plan based on your business objectives. However, make sure to evaluate your goals before creating a marketing plan.
Steps to Create a Strategic Real Estate Marketing Plan
You need to get organized if you want to formulate a strategic and effective real estate marketing plan. Ensure you include the end goal you’re trying to achieve and the steps you need to take to reach it.
Every real estate agent’s journey is different, and your plan may take a different shape over time with trial and error. In any case, the following steps will prove helpful, regardless of your goals or objectives.
Identify Your Objectives
Before you start building a real estate marketing strategy, you must first choose your goals. What do your marketing strategies aim to accomplish? Is the plan to build your brand’s image or generate more leads?
Every successful goal or objective deals with specifics. It isn’t easy to measure your progress or keep track without specific objectives. Here are a few ideas to help you know what to do.
- Don’t apply a broad concept. Keep your goals as narrow as possible.
- Measure your progress and monitor how close you are to your goals.
- Set realistic goals using available and potential resources.
- Whatever your objectives are, make sure to put them in writing so you can monitor and evaluate your development.
- Have a deadline so that you can monitor your progress.
Your marketing strategy should directly advance your corporate objectives. Therefore, establish clear business goals before you finish your real estate marketing plan.
You should also know your yearly targets for transactions and the number of clients you hope to work with. All these details will shape your ultimate plan. I know it’s impossible to get the numbers precisely, and things may not go according to your projections. But these projections and estimates are necessary all the same.
Study Past Deals
You’ve probably already closed some deals if you aren’t a brand new agent. Analyzing previous transactions and operations can help you create a foolproof strategy if this is the case.
Analyze these:
- How you got your past deals
- Where you got those deals from (did they mostly come from recommendations or a marketing avenue)
- All the advertisements you ran (if you ran any) and how successful they were.
Note how you landed each deal and how each transaction went down. Doing all this will help you improve and build a new and improved real estate marketing plan.
Finally, consider the areas of your marketing that had success the previous year. Remember that cost is not only monetary. Consider how you can improve anything productive yet time-consuming or draining last year.
Set Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
A key performance indicator is a quantifiable figure that shows how well a business accomplishes its primary goals. Businesses use KPIs to gauge their progress toward their goals.
Your KPIs will help you monitor progress weekly, monthly, and yearly. Setting goals and KPIs requires consideration of both lead and lag measurements. You use lead measures to produce lag measures. For instance, you can create a social media presence or start a YouTube podcast to boost organic traffic.
While you have control over your lead measures, you must constantly monitor the results of your lag measures. Your lag measures may not always produce the desired results. However, if your lead measures give you the desired lag-measure results, then it’s time to shift your focus.
Determine Your Target Market
As a new real estate agent, you must take time to identify your market or target audience. You can’t build an effective real estate marketing strategy without knowing whom you intend to reach.
Knowing your target audience will help you more effectively tailor a message that makes your point. To connect with your audience, you must comprehensively understand your target audience’s identity, priorities, wants, and concerns.
The foundation of relationship-based marketing is having a profound grasp of your ideal client and approaching them with a sense of service. Fill out your target client profiles in the marketing plan guide so that you may customize your marketing efforts.
Different Segments of Target Markets
There are several segments of target markets when it comes to real estate marketing. Your audience will most likely fit into a few segments. You may feel the urge to spread your marketing campaign across many segments, but it’s best to focus on a couple of them after determining which ones need your effort.
Consider the following segments while determining your target market:
- Location
- Career
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Search Standards
- Experience
- Lifestyle
- Passions & Hobbies
Focus on a primary marketing channel at the beginning of your career. You can quickly build credibility and gain your audience’s trust. After you’ve built credibility, you can establish your presence on several other platforms.
Knowing these details about your target market can make your real estate marketing strategy more effective. But to develop the right content for your target markets, you must understand them.
How to Conduct Target Audience Research
In the past, handling your marketing through one channel—the newspaper—was sufficient to generate the needed traffic. But the internet changes everything. Real estate agents now have to use numerous online platforms to do their research.
An excellent place to start is examining your present and past clients if you’re not a fresh agent. Additionally, social media is a powerful tool for discovering helpful trends.
Farming
After determining your target market and segments, start a study if you have a particular area or neighborhood of focus. While you can analyze an area using property values, or vacancy rates, the web can give you vital information on your target market.
For instance, you can find out how much online information about your field is available in your target location. If there is little or no information, that’s an excellent opportunity to market your business in that area.
Interviewing or Surveying
If you already have a history of sales, you can poll both your present and former clients to find out if your previous strategy was effective or not. Before you start your interview or survey, ask yourself what the things are that you want to find out about your audience. Their feedback will help you create an improved strategy.
Reasons to Identify Your Market
The effectiveness of a marketing strategy will be affected by the particular demographic in question. Identifying your target market will help you maximize your tools and resources. With this knowledge, you can use the ideal concepts to create your marketing plan.
Assumptions don’t work well with marketing. Using the wrong concepts may send your message, but it won’t be effective. Clearly defining your audience will help you analyze and examine the market and use the right tools, resources, and media to your advantage.
Analyze your Competition
Your marketing plan isn’t complete without a section describing what your competition is doing. Even if you’re out to help people get the best service possible, you’re also in the real estate business to grow and make a profit.
You could list the advantages and shortcomings of your competition’s strategy. Take some time to analyze what other real estate agents and investors are doing. Each has a marketing strategy, so examining their efforts and effectiveness can help you build an even better one.
Analyzing your competition’s tactics will give you a better sense of where to start and may help you learn which strategies to avoid. Knowing your competitors’ moves can assist you in avoiding the outdated “trial and error” method. Doing this will also keep you abreast of any developments or changes in trends.
Indicate Your Unique Selling Points
We all have strengths, and the real estate industry is highly diverse. Your unique skills or strengths can give you an advantage when building a marketing strategy. What real estate activities interest you, or what are you naturally good at doing?
It’s okay if you’ve not yet discovered your thing. One way is following a few different real estate brokers or investors. Use their techniques and approaches to determine which one makes the most sense to you. In the process, you’ll discover new ways that suit your style and give you an edge over others.
Avoid selling whatever you can do too soon. Find out which skills you can employ to your benefit because you never know which one can help you advance.
Find out what makes your brand unique from the competition by taking an objective, honest look at it. What services or skills can you provide that are hard to get anywhere else? Try to identify a skill that you have that no one else has, no matter how insignificant it seems.
Whatever makes you stand out doesn’t necessarily have to relate directly to real estate. Maybe you’re good at communicating or convincing people. It could be charisma too. No matter what it is, there’s a way to use it to your advantage when creating your real estate marketing plan.
The Benefits of Coaching and Mentorship
Furthermore, you can always find a coach or a mentor. Sometimes, you may need to pay a mentor or coach a monthly fee, especially if they’re not in your brokerage. But if you choose a brokerage like eXp Realty, you’ll have access to an excellent mentorship program that can help you navigate the industry quickly.
However, your mentor doesn’t have to be a paid coach. You can observe brokers or Realtors of high standing and mimic their strategy. Find a way to do this while sticking to your unique style.
Get Your Finances in Order
Every excellent marketing plan needs a budget. And every experienced real estate broker or investor can tell you how vital money management is. One of the main factors affecting your real estate marketing plan, besides goals, is your budget.
When making a budget, don’t expect the lowest price to do the job. That doesn’t mean you should make a budget that doesn’t work well with your personal finance. That’s why it’s ideal to set your marketing objectives first because your goals will determine how much money you need to invest.
Your budget should align with your services, target market, and the resources you intend to use to reach your audience. It might affect your credibility if your audience believes you’re working with discounted or substandard resources.
Budget and Timing
In addition, timing is a crucial part of budgeting. If you spend less money on your budget, you may need to spend more time working on your marketing program. There will be busy periods and some downtime between closings. Set a reasonable budget for money and time, and be honest about your financial situation.
The key is to plan as far as you can with your budget, acknowledge that it may vary, and devise a strategy to account for adjustments. You can allocate time and money to the appropriate marketing channel once you’ve determined how much each will spend.
The marketing budget will also make sure you don’t overspend. It is a crucial component of your real estate marketing plan because it is the driving force behind success or failure.
As a novice real estate agent, focus on gathering your financial data, choosing where to allocate your marketing budget, and then making necessary revisions. Avoid setting unrealistic expectations for how much time they’ll devote to marketing and how much money they’re ready to spend.
Choose Your Marketing Platforms
I firmly believe putting certain things like your goals and budget in order should come before marketing strategies. You can’t expect your strategy to be effective without making adequate plans.
Perhaps you want to create a YouTube podcast or increase your Instagram following by 1,000. Now that you know your business objectives and target audience, it’s easy to get right into the actual marketing.
A well-rounded marketing plan should incorporate both outbound and inbound strategies.
Outbound Strategies
Outbound marketing involves conventional forms of advertising. Your strategy may involve paid advertisements on a search engine or social media ads that direct users back to your website. The main goal is to create more leads and potential clients.
Agents at eXp Realty enjoy some of the most potent virtual and online marketing tools. Below we’ll list some strategies that can help you with outbound marketing.
A Mobile-friendly Website
The first is a unique, mobile-optimized website that potential customers can visit, learn about you, and use to contact you whenever they want to do business.
An Email Marketing Tool
You can stay in touch with clients through email marketing and provide helpful information in all your letters. Not every potential customer who contacts you makes a purchase immediately, so a lead-nurturing system can help you stay in touch.
A Main Social Media Platform
Social media platforms provide some of the most effective marketing channels in the world today. It is not sufficient to just have your content available on Google. For this reason, maintaining an engaging social media presence is crucial.
Agents at eXp Realty already have an advantage since the cloud-based brokerage provides Facebook Workplace. You can communicate with other agents and also market your business. If you’ve developed a website, you can direct your audience to your site, where they can learn more about you and your brand.
Updated Listings And Reviews
Every effective outbound marketing strategy provides a system for customers to give reviews. You should have a technique to gather, manage, and display your online reviews. As a new agent, your sphere of influence will mainly grow through recommendations and excellent ratings.
Inbound Strategies
Inbound marketing strategies are what attract people to you. Your outbound strategies advertise your brand, while your inbound strategies draw in people.
Inbound content can take various forms. It can be blogs, videos, podcasts, or seminars. In this case, content should consist of things that can engage your target market and attract them to you.
You have the opportunity to address any issues that may arise from your outbound marketing via inbound and content marketing. This process can help you establish connections with more individuals.
Inbound marketing tends to be more persuasive since it is targeted directly to your target market. For the same reason, it takes more time and effort to execute.
Every good real estate marketing strategy should be a balanced combination of both outbound and inbound marketing. If you already had a marketing campaign, study what worked and failed, and don’t forget to analyze your competition’s moves.
Place Milestones and A Timeline
Your real estate marketing plan will include a few short-term and many long-term plans. Your plan should include significant milestones to help you stay on the right track.
Just like setting goals, using milestones will provide a realistic goal to work toward that isn’t too far off. Setting milestones will help you feel accomplished when you meet them.
Additionally, your strategy should include a specific timeline. This timeline will help you work with a sense of urgency and help you know how productive you’ve been within a specified time frame.
A well-written timeline will allow you to adjust your approach to meet the goals mentioned earlier. It will enable you to monitor development and determine whether things are going at a good pace.
The Role of An Accountability Partner
If you’re new to the business, it’s easy to lose focus or relent on your effort. One top benefit of working with a team is that you can all work together to support each other’s visions. But even if you work with a team, having an accountability partner can help you maintain focus on your objectives.
Your accountability partner could be someone on your level who helps you stay on track or a coach who supervises you. In any case, it should be someone on the same mission as you. Working with someone like this may get competitive sometimes, but it will keep you active and push you forward.
Review and Refine
No matter how perfect and practical your marketing plan is, it is still a work in progress. The ideal way to approach real estate marketing strategies is to build on past triumphs. Never assume that your work is complete.
Keep checking in on and adjusting the existing elements. Take the components from the last version of your real estate marketing strategy and include them in the new one. Remove any tactics that haven’t been successful or could use further work.
Setting shorter period targets is best if you are a new real estate agent. You’ll need to learn new information up front and adjust regularly. However, you’ll be able to make fewer modifications and adapt at longer intervals as you gain experience.
Benefits of A Real Estate Marketing Plan
When you’re in the real estate business, it’s essential to have a marketing plan in place. You know that the competition is fierce. You must be unique from other agents in your area, and one of the best ways to do that is through a real estate marketing plan. Here’s why you need a real estate marketing plan:
Client Satisfaction
The foundation of your company is its customers. It’s your responsibility to use the tools and resources at your disposal to ensure that your clients are satisfied. An effective marketing plan can assist you in running your business successfully and paying attention to your clients’ needs.
Profitability
The idea behind every business or investment is to make a profit. A strategy is vital to every business, and real estate marketing plays a part in that strategy. Your marketing strategy will determine your reach and how your target market sees your brand. It is a perfect avenue to generate more leads that can become repeat customers in the long run.
Competitive Edge
A foolproof marketing strategy gives you access to precise real-time, historical, and comprehensive metrics that support goal-setting and growth. With these resources, you can formulate more complex marketing campaigns that give you a competitive advantage.
Adaptability
Even though things don’t work out the way you hoped because of outside influences, a good real estate marketing strategy will enable you to make necessary adjustments to maintain the growth of your business.
Conclusion
Real estate is a great career choice, but without a marketing plan, you won’t be able to make the most of it. A marketing strategy is the best way to gain exposure, grow your business, and attract clients to your brand. Building a foolproof plan is something you must do at some point.
There are free and paid resources to help you with your objectives. But as a new real estate agent, choosing a brokerage with the best tools and work culture can give you a competitive edge.
While there are numerous approaches to real estate marketing, eXp Realty provides the best resources to help agents grow, no matter their objectives.