Maximize Your Real Estate Marketing Plan

real estate marketing plan
Real estate is a people’s business, built on relationships, customer service and great marketing.

Real estate is a people’s business, built on relationships and customer service. But how do you nurture relationships with customers? And more importantly, how do you get in front of them in the first place? Here are some effective real estate marketing strategies to build into your annual plans.

In Person Real Estate Marketing

Event marketing is a useful marketing tool for generating real estate leads. Home-buying and home-selling seminars help create excitement and give you the opportunity to speak to large groups of people at a single event.

Networking at business events, joining relevant associations (chambers of commerce, BNI’s or referral clubs, etc.) and being active in your community are equally important. They’re all worthwhile avenues for finding new customers.

Online Real Estate Marketing

Constant Contact emails, Facebook, YouTube, a blog and your website are all effective distribution channels for content marketing. These channels need not only be for sales pitches or social conversations. Use them to provide educational activities and visual storytelling, allowing your content to stand out from pages of copy.

You need to offer web visitors interesting features that encourage them to engage. A whitepaper, Q&A discussion on YouTube, or a free consultation are excellent ways to begin a conversation with your potential customer. Plus, you can ask viewers to register with your website before they can download your content. This gives you access to contact information you can use to engage with them in the future.

Before you get started, check out what the competition is doing. It’s great to leverage the same channels they use, but certainly lead with different content. Be bold, yet approachable, and most importantly, be credible. Position yourself as an expert in your field, and provide clear examples of how you can best assist your customer.

Bring this all together, and you have the framework of a solid real estate marketing plan. Need inspiration? Download our free SWOT analysis guide. SWOT analysis is a useful tool for organizing your thoughts by examining your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and strengths. Once you’ve completed the exercise, take a look at your  marketing approach to see if there are opportunities to further differentiate your services and skills.

Here are three things to remember when you’re ready to write your real estate marketing plan:

  • Be interesting and helpful. Include educational pieces that are relevant to your local market and/or your target audience. By listening more carefully to customers, you can dramatically improve lead quality.
  • Creatively brand all content. Each time you interact with a potential customer, be sure your communication takes full advantage of your brand by prominently presenting your company colors, logo and related images. Even if the reader does not buy from you on the first visit, they are more likely to read another post and click through to your website again. The more quality interactions you can generate the better chance you have of doing business with the reader.
  • Track and measure your return on investment (ROI). If you aren’t doing this you will never know what is and is not working. Measuring marketing success doesn’t need to be difficult or expensive. Tracking can  be as easy as asking every person who contacts you–either by phone, email or otherwise–how they found out about you. If they mention that they saw your ad on a bus bench, you know it’s working. Take advantage of social media tracking tools. You can easily see how many people your posts reach and keep track of how many calls you generate from your efforts. CRM software can help you stay on top of your outreach efforts and store data on your customers that you can use for future marketing.