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Marketing Plans for Real Estate

Posted In: Uncategorized

Tags: business plan, Career in Real Estate, marketing mix, New agent, real estate agent

One of the things that a lot of Real Estate Agents struggle with, particularly those who have just started a new career in real estate, is finding consistency in their marketing efforts.  Often, agents are too reactive in their marketing efforts – choosing to market themselves only when they have listings, when they have just had properties close, or when their business gets slow.  The reality is, good businesses have marketing plans that are designed well before they are executed, and that show a consistent brand and theme across the program.

Here are steps to create and execute on a great marketing plan for your business:

1. Set Goals – Setting measurable goals for your marketing is a key first step in your marketing efforts.  You should define what success will look like for you in your marketing efforts.
2. Define Your Target Audience.  Although most real estate agents will typically do business all across their marketplace (and I think you should), your marketing efforts should be very focused.  Just because you sell homes rurally, in the suburbs and downtown doesn’t mean you should advertise in all those areas.  Focus on one target audience and reach them more often.
3. Determine your Media. This is the most difficult choice that you will likely have to make – how are you going to communicate your message?  There are endless possibilities for you to reach your audience, but my suggestion is always to consider what media is YOUR audience most likely to be exposed to, and also trust.  Balance your costs with the exposure that you are likely to get.
4. Define your message. What is the message you are going to communicate to your audience?  Are you the condo expert?  Are you offering an incentive of some sort?  What unique proposition do you bring to the marketplace?  All this should be considered before you start to spend time and money on marketing.
5. Track it. By far the most overlooked part of any marketing program that agents implement is the tracking.  Are you asking people how they learned about you?  Do you have a way to know what is working and what isn’t?  This is the key to refining your plan.  Some suggestions would be use a unique email address or even phone number for your marketing, so if you get a call or email to that address, you will know it is directly as a result of your marketing efforts.  Another idea is to direct people to a specific page on your website through your marketing, and track page visits.

In my sales career, there were a few marketing things that I thought helped me out a lot.  The best one that I used was unaddressed mail to my neighbourhood.  This helped raise my profile in the area, and led to my phone ringing more from my street.  I think that the second thing that worked was any support pieces around that direct mail (ie. some ads in the small marketing piece that went out in my neighbourhood).   Finally, we also chose to do some “presence” pieces – ad in the Real Estate Book which went all across the region and the Chronicle Herald – the Provincial daily newspaper.  This mix represented a budget of about 7% of our income, and drove enough new leads for our business to be consistently growing.

This is what worked for us – what is working for you?

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