Real Estate Marketing Guide
Become the Local Expert
As stated, if you want to dominate your real estate market, you first need to identify your niche and your territory. This focus will help you brand yourself. Are you the go-to luxury real estate agent of Orange County or are you the townhouse expert of San Diego? Clearly defining your niche as a real estate agent will help you dominate the market because you have a clear focus.
From there, you’re going to actually want to become an expert about what you’re selling. Part of this will come from experience as you get to know the area better and get to know the ins and outs of the many features of homes and get to know what buyers care about most.
The other part is getting to know the trends in the market. Develop insider-level knowledge of local and nearby home sale prices, know how long properties are on the market, know if there are any news stories affecting the market such as a shortage or surplus of housing options, new employers in the area, areas becoming more popular, fast- growing areas, trends in upsizing and downsizing, millennial/baby boomer buying habits, etc.
Know your market
In addition to knowing about housing, as a local real estate specialist, your main task will be to get to know your area on a deeper level, know the people better, know the ins and outs of your market, from home price trends to your target market demographics.
Introduce yourself to your community, meet people where they gather, be an active citizen in the community you seek to help. You are helping residents and and sell housing. You’ll also be assisting people that are new to the area and their dream home. Working as a real estate agent, you will be the middleman in the crosshairs of people’s lives as they make the change to move.
Also, get to know your competition. Who are the most popular agents in your target market? What are they doing to market themselves? How did they build their business? Study the tactics they are implementing to achieve success and do more. Real estate often comes back to the number of hours you put into it.
Be everywhere
Another important aspect of dominating your market is to be everywhere. This means that everywhere your target market goes, they see you and are reminded of you. This means that you’re top of mind when they are actively ready to buy or sell, they remember you, they trust you and they want to work with you.
Being top of mind takes time, and means you built a strong brand that has powerful visibility. You are top of mind in Google search, social media, local community, video channels, review sites, community groups, message boards. Online advertising like print in high-quality magazines and event hosting is also another viable channel to promote yourself and build your brand visibility.
Digital marketing and branding tools offer a lot of features, and there’s no doubt you want to spend considerable marketing dollars there. However, digital alone can’t build your brand and keep you top of mind in your local market. Diversifying your marketing ensures you have a physical in-person presence as well as an online presence.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has somewhat put a damper on many in-person activities and events, the real estate industry is essential, and in-person showings and open houses will remain, although socially distanced and safe of course.
Allow your digital automation and online efforts to complement each other. Network with new potential clients in-person and add them to your digital automated digital channels. On the flip side, invite your digital audience to your online events (whenever those become a thing again) and so on.
Build trust
The best marketing plan as a real estate agent is to diversify your marketing efforts. You want your personal brand to be everywhere in your niche community to build brand awareness, trust, and word of mouth among your target buyers and sellers. Referrals, repeat business, reviews, and recognition all contribute to an agent’s success long term. The clientele is built on trust, and people trust who is top of mind that stand out as the local market leader that has the skills and knowledge to sell their home quickly and for the best price.
Diversify your efforts
Taking a diversified approach to real estate marketing ensures that you’re doing the things that your competition isn’t. You're building brand awareness in more places than they are. You are cultivating multiple lead sources, and not putting all your eggs into one tactic to depend on.
You are building awareness both online and offline; as a face in the community but also being savvy on social media and connecting with your prospects through your website, texts, email, and friendly calls. Being a successful agent is all about sincerely caring about the people who you serve.
In this guide, we’ll show you the top strategies for diversifying your marketing strategies, and how to dominate your real estate market.
Find what makes you stand out
With so many real estate agents competing for business, the name of the game is standing out if you want to dominate the market. What things make you interesting? What sets you apart from other agents? What niche or tagline best describes you?
The real estate market isn’t something you can “hack”. It requires putting in the work, getting in front of people, going the extra mile for your clients, and treating it like a full-time job. What makes an agent stand out is the specialized niche they target and also what they’re willing to do for their customers and to attract new ones.
Things such as thoughtful social media engagement, new homeowner gifts, taking the time to document and create thoughtful content will help you stand out. Standing out involves doing what most real estate agents won’t do.
You’re going to want to make your social media presence pop, your open houses pop, your home tours pop, and your community farming efforts also pop! Even something as simple as fresh lemonade and cookies at an open house will help you stand out.
Do you have some favorite hobbies such as motorcycling, or guitar playing? If so, you could become the “drag racing agent” or the “guitar- shredding agent” to help brand yourself. Your niche, your brand, and your thoughtful actions will help you stand out in a saturated real estate market.
In addition to creating brand awareness through your advertising, content marketing is a key component to adding more value to your personal brand and building a better connection with your prospects.
Marketing Plan & Budget
How to make a real estate business plan
You can make a real estate business plan a simple, easy to follow along with plan for your entire year of what marketing activities are you going to conduct, how much are you going to spend on marketing and where you will invest it, you will set goals for how many leads you expect to bring in each month.
Your business plan will include activities like community engagement time, follow-ups, home tours, open houses.
Essentially, you create your real estate business plan to mirror what you would like to see yourself doing each and every day. Following a set business plan allows you to focus on income generating activities, such as home tours, open houses, and closing on deals.
Regarding how to create a real estate business plan, you can simply follow a template to make sure you consider all areas of your business, including your financial investment into yourself, and how you plan to grow your business.
Your realtor business plan will consist of your marketing channels, your marketing budget, your target market, your niche, your personal key differentiators, and your strategies for community outreach. Your real estate business plan will include both online and offline content. Prepare to be on video and live video, be in photos, prepare to be knowledgeable about your target area, and your audience. Prepare to educate homebuyers and home sellers, prepare to learn advertising, content writing, video production. Your job and your business plan will consist of diverse, yet consistent actions and strategies to rise above the competition.
Your real estate marketing plan will be part of your business plan. It will be a schedule of all the different marketing channels you will be working on, it will consist of campaigns you will launch throughout the year, some that are seasonal, others that target your specific niche. First things first, you need a written plan of action. Your marketing plan will include the following information:
your proposed budget for advertising, real estate marketing materials, promotions
the key characteristics, demographics and personas of your intended target audience.
the key marketing channels you intend to focus on to most effectively reach that audience.
yearly calendar of proposed content, scheduled events, and set working hours to focus on your business.
the marketing tools you will use
Your budget will continue to evolve over time as you make more money and are willing to spend more on advertising and marketing to grow into selling even more commission generating homes.
You will need to formulate a plan that dictates how much you will spend promoting yourself and how you will convince potential sellers that you will sell their home quickly for top dollar. This eBook will give you the tools and strategies you will need to put your marketing plan together.
Your real estate marketing plan will include some key goals:
Earn more seller listings
Develop an effective and efficient system for promoting those listings
Develop a plan for promoting your personal brand
Earn buyer leads
Freeing your time to become a better real estate agent that is more highly sought after
Once implemented, your real estate marketing plan should work for you, allowing you to focus on the part of the job you love – talking to people and helping people find their next home.
Listing presentation
One critical element to success is to create a listing presentation for would-be sellers that goes over each marketing channel you will deploy. This is your presentation deck for selling yourself to would-be clients. It’s also something you can offer on your website in exchange for meeting to discuss your pitch. A listing presentation shows prospects how hard you are working for them, and spells out your plan for selling their home. This is a public facing version of the marketing plan you have implemented and the “system” you use for success; which results in a desired outcome for your clients as benefactors of your success.
Your presentation deck should include the following points, at a minimum:
What websites are you putting their home on?
What paid advertisements are you using to promote my home? Are you offering virtual tours?
You will offer open houses and tour appointments regularly
You offer to stage
You will create high-quality promotional materials, including flyers, postcards, photos, video, slideshow
You will promote the listings on social media
You will email the listings out to potential buyers
You will negotiate the best pricing using recent sale numbers from the area and home value increase projections to show the value of your home
You will regularly be prospecting and following up with prospects regularly
As an example, here’s a 19-point plan from Tom Ferry.
Creating a marketing plan for your personal brand is also something you want to establish right away. What types of content can you begin creating regularly? Will you post a photo or video to social media every day or create a new real estate agent video once per week? You need to decide how much time and money you will be putting into your business monthly. Your marketing plan should outline what activities do you plan to conduct every day, every week, and every month. Set your goals. How many tours do you want to give? How many prospects do you plan to contact per week?
Once you’ve identified your recurring marketing activities, you need to assign an estimated time value for each so you can plan out your week, and work schedule. Setting a schedule is important so you allow yourself time to rest and recharge to stay fresh each day.
Real Estate Marketing Materials
For your marketing materials, you will want to make sure you have:
Your own real estate agent website Business cards
Make sure you create a simple, easy to read business card with a good headshot, your phone number, website, and email. Make your business card stand out with a high-quality paper stock, a splash of color, or QR code.
Optionally you could link your QR code to your LinkedIn profile or to your website, with a custom landing page for business cards so you can track visitors. The best realtor business cards are the ones traded when a conversation occurs. Business cards handed after a conversation creates a lasting connection with a potential customer, as oppose to a business card left or stuffed somewhere.
Your listing marketing presentation (digital and print copy)
Your brokerage probably provides most of the print materials you need like branded flyers. You will want to have a great listing presentation to win over sellers. Email marketing templates will also be crucial to nurture your leads and keep yourself top of mind when they’re ready to buy or sell. I’ve included some in this eBook.
Multi-Channel Marketing Campaigns Overview
What is multi-channel content marketing?
The multi-channel approach to content marketing for real estate professionals takes the view that the best way to brand and promote yourself is to reach your target audience everywhere they are - from local events, social media, web, and print.
You’ll need to create original content that addresses the needs, wants, and desires of prospective home buyers and brands you as the expert on the subject matter.
Becoming a local market expert, as well as the trusted name to sell your home quickly using all available marketing strategies is what home sellers want to hear and it’s why people choose you as their agent. They want their home sold fast and for top dollar. Your marketing tells the story of how you connect with your audience.
In diversifying your marketing strategies, through your personal brand storytelling and content development, you’ll reach your prospects across all the platforms that spend most of their attention on. Through your expertise in your local area, you will show, rather than tell, your knowledge and your sincere desire to help buyers and sellers find or sell their home.
Consider some statistics regarding the effectiveness of integrated marketing strategy:
82 percent of consumers report they feel more positive about a company after reading custom content, according to marketing research firm Demand Metric.
Website conversion rates — the percentage of website visitors who fill out a form requesting more information — is nearly six times higher for content marketers than those who only advertise their services, according to marketing research firm Aberdeen Group
Engaging, local content is the lifeblood of multichannel content marketing. Social media, email and direct mail are the top content marketing channels for real estate agents. Your marketing strategy will include community engagement, networking, paying for some leads through services like Zillow, creating content, building your personal brand, building up your expert reputation that people trust, creating blogs, videos to connect with your target audience.
Adopting a multichannel approach to the social media, email, and direct mail methods outlined above, agents can cast a wider net in their local target market and increase their brand awareness as an agent. A diversified approach to marketing yourself creates a synergy effect across all your efforts - and increasing the odds your prospects will run across your content across platforms.
A multi-channel marketing strategy casts a wider net for your name recognition and your advertised listings. As an example, don’t put all your eggs into the Zillow basket. Yes you can definitely generate leads from it, but you are vulnerable because you are competing with all the other agents bidding for space there, and this competition to rise to the top can inflate the price of a lead.
Putting out your own content on your own website means you control it and don’t compete with all the other agents on the platform vying for attention on the same eyeballs.
Build your brand by creating content and engaging with your audience. Comment and engage with users posting in your community. Become part of the conversation. Spend time replying and engaging with your audience to boost some attention on your expertise.
Real Estate Farming
Real estate farming is simply the practice and the effort of putting the work in to learn as much as you can about your particular target market neighborhoods you wish to specialize in. By getting to know the particular nuances of your target neighborhoods in great detail, you effectively become an expert on it, and can better server the wants, needs, and desires of the homebuyers and sellers in your chosen area.
Much like regular farming, you will plant seeds, cast a wide net, and continue to nurture and grow your relationships and connections in your target communities. You will meet shop owners, teachers, doctors, parents, and residents from all walks of life. You will seek to find out why they’ve chosen the area they live in. You will begin to discover the personalities of your selected areas. When the time comes for these “farmed” connections to come to harvest, you will be well positioned to be their go-to agent to help them through the process.
Real estate farming is considered a long-term approach, but that’s ok, because your career in real estate will be long-lasting, and your brand will take time to establish itself. By cultivating a long term strategy, this shows potential clients that you are serious about what you do, it’s not a side hobby, and that you’ve taken the time to plant seeds and built a stable career.
Your farming strategy will consist of in-person marketing, direct mail, local social media groups marketing, and events. More on all of this later in this guide.