Selling real estate without a solid marketing plan is like baking without a recipe. You might include all the right ingredients, but the end result might not be as good as you hoped.
39% of sellers find their agents through referrals from family or friends. 83% of homeowners don’t use the same agent again, often because they can’t even remember their past agent’s name.
You want a marketing plan for your real estate business that will keep your name top of mind with buyers and sellers in your community.
Here are the four things you need to do to ensure a marketing plan for real estate business success.
4 Ingredients for A Marketing Plan for Real Estate Business Success
You already know that a strong marketing plan should result in a competitive advantage in the market. This will help you attract new clients and nurture and delight current and old clients. To see success, you’ll need a combination of traditional marketing strategies and some new tips.
- Automation: Chances are you’re already using automation in some part of your business. It’s one of those traditional marketing ingredients that helps you avoid spending precious time marketing when you could be out there making connections. If you’re not already, consider automating your CRM, marketing emails, and social media messages. There are tons of CRM, email and social marketing platforms that are affordable and even free for you to choose from.
- Videos: Using videos for real estate marketing is one of the most powerful tools you can have and, again, it’s probably one that you’re already using. If so, great! If not, keep in mind that your clients are expecting you to use video as a marketing technique in real estate in 2020 and beyond. But if you feel like you’re making the same videos that everyone else is, there are ways you can do it differently.
- Turn your camera lens away from your listings and towards the people and businesses in your community. Share interviews with your favorite local businesses or of popular events. Showcase the community to potential buyers and not just your inventory to bring a dash of spice to your video marketing game.
- Collaboration: While it may feel like real estate is a solo gig, collaboration and partnership is key to a successful real estate marketing plan. Collaborating to market your business might look like:
- Profiling local businesses (using your trusty CRM and email automation to get in touch with these contacts will be helpful)
- Inviting other business owners to participate in local events together
- Showcasing these businesses on all of your available platforms, like social media and your website (for example, those marketing videos where you turned the camera lens towards your community rather than your inventory is a great way to showcase your collaborators).
Collaboration has a two-fold outcome: first, you get to be a good person. When we market other businesses in our community, we’re helping our local economy and that’s good for everyone’s bottom line. Second, collaboration and partnering with other local businesses is a great way to get more referrals. Business owners are perfectly poised to hear from their staff and customers (ie. the buyers and sellers in your community) about when they’re looking for a new home or if they’re ready to upgrade. Because you’ve gone out of your way to promote their business, your real estate brand will be on the tip of their tongue when they hear about a new listing or buying opportunity.
This kind of approach to real estate marketing is called the community-minded approach. Want to learn who the first 10 people you should collaborate with in your community should be? Download this checklist.
We promised you 4 ingredients for a marketing plan for real estate business success and the fourth one is…
- Time: You’re probably thinking, all this sounds great but where am I going to find the time to learn how to create videos, to reach out to my network, and to keep it up week after week? You can do it yourself but it will take time and time is one of the most precious resources a real estate agent has. The real estate lead and referral generating platform, Parkbench, believes this, too. They created a community-minded, referral generating system so that you could have more time to do what you do best: buy and sell real estate. Parkbench builds the online platform for you, giving you a place to feature your local business interviews (as well as on your social media channels). They also teach you everything, from how to reach out to local business owners to how to create videos. Parkbench works with one agent per neighborhood and they pack your platform full with local news, coupons, sales and specials from local businesses, and help you capture leads from site visitors.
Now that you know the recipe to create a marketing plan for real estate business success, there’s nothing stopping you from getting into the kitchen to start cooking.
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