Being successful in real estate means standing out in a crowded field, making an impact on your target audience, and establishing your company as a reliable partner in the home-buying process. Effective real estate marketing is critical for that.
But it isn’t enough to stick branded “For Sale” signs in a few yards or put up a billboard with your company logo on it. In today’s highly competitive real estate marketing landscape, connecting with the right buyers and sellers means targeting your audience with tailored messages, building a unique and identifiable image, and approaching all of it from a digital-first, multi-channel perspective.
A real estate marketing plan is a powerful tool for managing those challenges. By providing a detailed overview of your marketing goals, audience insight, budget, and strategies, a real estate marketing plan ensures consistent and effective marketing, boosts awareness of your company, and helps you reach your target audience.
What is a real estate marketing plan?
A marketing plan for real estate agents is an essential component of your overall business plan. Your real estate marketing plan is a snapshot of your business aspirations — it includes your sales goals and where you’re hoping to take your business in the coming year. It also identifies your target audience and describes important information about them, from key demographic data to the marketing channels and tools they most respond to.
In addition to sales projections and demographic data, a real estate marketing plan includes:
- A detailed marketing budget
- An outline of your marketing approach
- A method for tracking marketing performance
- A description of the metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure success
Whether you work for yourself or run a company with other agents on your team, a real estate marketing plan keeps you focused on a specific mission and ensures that all the work you do is aligned with your goals.
What are the benefits of a real estate marketing plan?
There’s no way to overstate the importance of a strong, smart marketing strategy when it comes to success in real estate. Advertising and outreach are how you find and engage your target audience, entice them away from the competition, and ultimately sell properties.
A real estate marketing plan helps you:
- Chart a course of action: A marketing plan for real estate agents enables you to build a clear outline of marketing activities, timelines, and budget allocation. This helps you focus your marketing efforts and cuts back on wasted resources and costly mistakes.
- Tailor your message to your audience: A solid marketing strategy gives you a comprehensive understanding of your audience. Through market research and analytics, you’ll gain a detailed portrait of your audience that tells you who they are, where they are, and what they like, enabling you to tailor your marketing efforts to their exact tastes.
- Boost awareness of your company: Your real estate marketing plan helps keep your marketing consistent across every channel where you encounter your audience by streamlining your efforts and ensuring cohesion.
- Generate better leads: A real estate marketing plan helps you choose the most effective marketing methods for your audience, which enables you to locate and contact higher-quality leads.
- Stand out from your competitors: By identifying your unique selling point as an agent or company and effectively communicating it to your audience, you can distinguish yourself from the competition.
- Improve your customer relationships: Your real estate marketing plan helps you discover opportunities to connect with and engage your audience, allowing you to build trust with them and earn their loyalty.
How to build a real estate marketing plan
There are a few necessary steps whether you’re a large company or a single real estate agent.
Step 1: Identify your target audience
Knowing who your target audience is and understanding what they want and need is arguably one of the most important activities you’ll undertake.
Why? Your target audience influences all of your marketing decisions, from the types of marketing you use and the channels you market on to the company persona you project. All of it needs to be tailored to your specific audience, including their:
- Age
- Gender
- Geographic location
- Income level
- Education level
- Needs, likes, and desires
- Pain points
- Buying habits
By pulling together a detailed portrait of your target audience, you’ll be better able to choose the best marketing channels to reach your audience and launch effective, impactful campaigns that get results.
Step 2: Assess your competition
It’s also important to know who you’re up against so that you can make decisions that give you a competitive edge. Furthermore, by identifying and analyzing your competitors, you can see the real estate marketing techniques they use. There’s a good chance that what works for them will work for you, too, so don’t be afraid to borrow successful strategies. Similarly, your competitor’s failures are a good indication of strategies to avoid.
To begin, take a look at their online presence. Investigate their websites, social media accounts, and other types of digital marketing to get a sense of:
- The style or tone of their interactions with consumers
- The strategies they use to boost engagement, like special offers, event marketing, and the like
- The specific messages they’re using to target consumers
Your real estate marketing plan should also include keyword research. Find out the keywords your competitors use to improve their ranking on online search results pages. According to the National Association of Realtors, the process of buying a home involves an online search at some point for 97% of buyers. That underscores the importance of optimizing your digital marketing so that potential buyers can find your company when they go online.
Step 3: Identify your unique value proposition
Your competitor analysis will give you insight into the services currently available in your market. You’ll understand what your target audience wants from a real estate broker and how the competition is or isn’t meeting consumer expectations. That’s vital information for identifying a niche — the gap in a market where the audience is being underserved — and establishing your unique value proposition.
What’s special about you or your company? What do you have to offer consumers that they can’t get from other companies or agents? It could be that you only sell the most luxurious, high-market properties in your city, or that you have a passion for helping first-time homebuyers close a deal on their dream home. Maybe your company is a community favorite with an unimpeachable record of providing incredible services.
Every company has a unique value proposition. To discover yours, consider the following characteristics of your brand:
- Unique or specialized service offerings
- Special skills or experience
- Industry connections or reputation
Step 4: Finetune your message
For real estate marketing to be effective, it must be consistent. This is especially true when you’re chasing consumers from channel to channel and using a mix of digital and traditional strategies. Keeping your marketing consistent across every channel, from Google to your business website, your social media accounts to your print, radio, or television ads, is an integral part of communicating your brand values to your audience, establishing your credibility, and earning their trust.
The best messaging for your company speaks to your target audience in a voice they respond to. It’s familiar and reassuring, reflecting their experiences and concerns. It also speaks to your company values and communicates your unique value proposition.
Here are a few tips to help you develop your unique messaging:
- Connect with your audience’s needs: Review the information you collected when you were identifying your target audience. What does it tell you about their biggest pain points and challenges? You can tailor your messaging so that it speaks directly to the concerns of your audiences.
- Sell yourself as the solution: Don’t stop at speaking to your audience’s challenges. Go a step further and explain how your company offers a solution. For example, say your audience feels overwhelmed by the complicated process of buying a home or feels that they don’t understand it. Your messaging might empathize with that feeling, and explain the steps your company takes to guarantee transparency and openness.
- Lean into your brand image: Your marketing messaging is a fantastic opportunity to do a little brand building. You can take advantage of the opportunity by sharing your background, communicating your values, and providing consumers with the information they need to connect.
Step 5: Choose your focus channels
Once again, this step requires that you go back to your audience research. Among the insights it contains is information about the marketing channels that are most popular among the consumers you’re targeting. It goes without saying that those are the channels most worthy of your time and resources — after all, that’s where your audience is.
You’ll most likely be resorting to a few different channels to connect with them. The “right” channels depend on your audience, but among the most popular in general:
- Mobile: Consumers are becoming increasingly accustomed to using their mobile devices to browse the internet, including to connect with real estate agents and companies. If you want to meet your audience there, turn to mobile marketing strategies, such as building a mobile-friendly website, developing a mobile app, or marketing to them via text message.
- Social media: Social media marketing on platforms like Facebook and Instagram is an important driver of organic web traffic and a popular marketing channel for businesses from nearly every industry. You don’t need to set up an account on every social media site in existence, but building a strong presence on the one or two platforms most favored by your audience is a good idea.
- Email marketing: Although it isn’t as new as social media or mobile marketing, email marketing for real estate agents offers a number of benefits, including cross-demographic appeal and personalization options.
Step 6: Set your marketing budget
For real estate marketing, the general rule of thumb is that you should set aside around 10% of your revenue for your marketing budget. The appropriate budget amount varies from business to business, but that rule is useful for estimating roughly what you’ll need to spend.
To develop a more precise budget, take the following factors into consideration:
- Your specific market
- Your specific business goals
- Your marketing methods and channels
When developing your budget, it’s also important to keep sight of your desired ROI and use it to guide how you allocate money and resources. To maximize your budget, prioritize your most important success metrics first, whether they be web traffic, engagement, lead generation, or any other metric. Allocate resources according to the channels and strategies that have the most impact on your audience according to the metrics you’ve chosen.
Step 7: Develop your tracking and analysis system
At this point in the process of building your real estate marketing plan, you’ve identified your sales goals, researched your target audience, analyzed your competition, and made decisions about how you’ll manage your marketing efforts. Now it’s time to make a plan for how you’ll gauge whether your marketing is working.
Essentially, this boils down to choosing the specific KPIs that are most indicative of success for your business. These may differ slightly among businesses, but the following metrics are usually a pretty good indication of whether or not your marketing is making an impact:
- Website traffic
- Conversion rate
- Cost of acquisition
- Time to close
- Time on market
- Cost per lead
- Appointment to listing conversion rate
- Operating expense ratio
Once you’ve chosen the metrics to track, decide on how you’ll track, analyze, and decipher related data. For this, many in real estate use a customer relations management system (CRM) for real estate agents. These are software systems that streamline data collection and analysis processes and simplify related tasks, like storing customer data, tracking leads, and automating communications.
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Now, spend some time thinking about how you can apply these insights to your business. What sets you apart? What marketing channels are best suited to your needs? Which metrics and KPIs offer the most insight into the performance of your marketing efforts and your business overall? Download our free guide for more ideas on how you can reinvigorate your real estate marketing strategies, from connecting with your target audience online to the best tools to grow your company.
