Creating the Perfect Real Estate Marketing Plan: 7 Steps to Formulating a Variation That Converts
Real estate agent creating a rock-solid marketing plan
According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 97% of homebuyers used the internet for their home search in 2020. As a real estate agent looking to create a successful business, formulating a detailed real estate marketing strategy is crucial. With a sound marketing plan in place, you’ve got the edge over most agents and firms in the real estate market as you know the decisions to implement and what pitfalls to avoid.
Most realtors understand the usefulness of creating a comprehensive real estate marketing plan. But there’s a nagging issue — how do you create one?
Thankfully, you can get the job done. To get started, you’d need to integrate the tested and proven real estate marketing ideas spelled out by a professional real estate agent — Teresa Cowart.
Teresa Cowart formed the Teresa Cowart Team in 2005 — a timeline where she left “Corporate America” in search of a better life for herself and her family. Also the co-owner of RE/MAX Accent, her team ranks #1 in sales and volume in the Savannah area of Georgia.
Teresa Cowart stars in Icons of Real Estate Podcast Episode 71 — Teresa Cowart’s Real Estate Lifestyle — and delivers invaluable real estate marketing ideas realtors can employ to attract their target audience. Read the subsequent segments if you’re a real estate agent yearning to create the perfect real estate marketing plan.
What Is a Real Estate Marketing Plan?
You’re probably longing to get a hold of the steps and ideas crucial to curating a real estate marketing plan bound to yield dividends. However, before taking the plunge, it’s vital to understand what a real estate marketing plan entails.
A real estate marketing plan is a detailed document highlighting the goals you’d like your real estate business to achieve. This scheme highlights your budget, potential clients (target audience), advertising plans, and other aspects critical to growing your own business.
You’ve probably encountered other real estate professionals executing related transactions like no man’s business, and you wonder if there’s a set ingredient to success or whether they just got lucky.
Many real estate agents thriving in the saturated real estate industry have a marketing plan dictating their every move. With a rock-solid real estate plan, they’ve got the edge over unexposed realtors by spotting opportunities and pitfalls without hassles.
But guess what? You can also formulate a real estate marketing plan that’ll help you identify the following:
- Appropriate tools and messages required to boost real estate sales
- Techniques you can adopt to satisfy current and future clients, thereby prompting repeat patronage
- Your business’s performance and ways to achieve desired goals
- Mediums to accurately weigh the effectiveness of all real estate marketing materials employed
- Marketing efforts you’d need to correct to steer your business toward greater heights
Although a real estate marketing strategy can help you identify the listed aspects, creating a rock-solid plan takes time and effort. Nonetheless, you should be able to curate one by integrating specific steps. We’ll examine these steps in the subsequent segment.
Realtors must adopt certain steps to create a marketing plan that yields positives
Creating a Real Estate Marketing Plan? Achieve Excellence in 7 Steps
Creating the perfect real estate marketing strategy or plan relies on the combination of these aspects — established goals and persistence to achieve them. Dedication is also necessary as you’ll encounter ups and downs during implementation.
No plan is perfect from the off, and several tweaks to the original variation are required to create the best commercial real estate marketing plan.
Real estate marketing plans are different, as real estate agents work uniquely. Nonetheless, to form a variation that’ll earn you a successful business model, implementing these seven steps are critical:
#1 Determine Your Target Audience
When creating marketing plans for your real estate venture, the first thing you need to consider is your target market. Do you intend to attract home buyers or home sellers? Once you’ve identified your target customer base, consider these essential demographics to achieve your business goals:
- Age
- Geographical location
- Median income
- Interests
- Habits
- Values
After you’ve accurately determined these areas, you can decipher the needs and wants of your target audience and curate vital strategies to meet them without hassles.
As reiterated by Teresa Cowart in the real estate podcast — “Nobody is just a number. Every client that we have is an individual person.” Once you prioritize your client’s needs, the chances of your real estate firm gaining traction are high.
#2 Outline Your Business Goals
In the real estate arena, agents have short-term and long-term goals. The latter revolves around commitments requiring quick actualization, such as incentives you’d like to extend to potential clients and increase patronage. Conversely, long-term goals could feature aspects defining your business’s future in the saturated and topsy-turvy real estate market.
Setting goals is critical to your business, but creating definitive objectives can be challenging due to limited data and a lack of real estate exposure. Rather than waiting on these prerequisites to curate goals, set simple and attainable targets for your business.
If you’re finding it challenging to set business goals, seek help from a revered real estate coach or mentor. Once they agree to help, ask them how they fared in their early years as realtors.
Seek context on how they curated their entire marketing plan and the steps they took to generate leads. If they’re willing to share these aspects with you, your real estate knowledge reservoir increases. Thus, you can avoid mistakes they made and implement goals bound to set your business on an upward trajectory.
#3 Identify and Review the Competition
The Association of Real Estate License Law Officials (ARELLO) estimates over 3 million real estate licensees in the United States. With the NAR featuring over 1.6 million members (October 2022), the US real estate market depicts competition. As such, you must curate strategies to set your real estate brand miles ahead of the competition.
With most agents out to rank high and garner potential customers, sit back and conduct a SWOT analysis on your location’s individual agents and real estate brokerages. By doing this, you’ll get context on their strengths and weaknesses alongside the marketing tactics they adopted to attain their business goals.
One of the most important reasons to conduct a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threats) review on your competition is to validate the marketing strategies they’ve successfully implemented in your target area. This activity also helps you steer clear of any errors they made along the way, boosting your marketing chances and returns in the process.
Analyzing the competition to spot their strong and weak points is vital to create a sturdy marketing plan
#4 Uncover Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Once you’ve identified the merits and demerits of your competition, you have the edge over them as you’ve got a hold of gaps evident in the market and how your real estate business can fix them with aplomb. Now, it’s time to determine your Unique Selling Proposition.
Simply put, a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is what distinguishes you from other real estate professionals within your farm area.
For example, if you’ve discovered that most agents and brokerage firms don’t give potential clients virtual tours of real estate structures, you can integrate this add-on into your real estate marketing plan.
Consider creating in-depth videos of your listings via YouTube. Additionally, you could create a mobile site and showcase these videos to your potential buyers within your vicinity. By attaching this site’s URL to your email marketing campaign, you could seamlessly advertise spaces to prospects without hassles.
Likewise, if most real estate brokerages in your target area don’t personalize their services and attract new prospects via phone calls, you can take advantage. When you apply the art of cold calling — introducing your services to prospective customers confidently — you’ll be able to expand your clientele with relative ease.
#5 Set a Budget
Planning a budget is crucial to bring your real estate marketing plan to life. If you’re a newbie realtor, you can commit about $1,000 to marketing materials critical to your business’s visibility. As time progresses and you acquire experience, you can increase this value accordingly.
Whether you’re a new or experienced real estate agent, your marketing budget shouldn’t exceed 10% — 12% of your net income. That way, you don’t overspend in your quest to make a rock-solid real estate marketing plan.
#6 Uncover a Select Marketing Strategy
You can’t wave a magic wand and expect patrons to flock toward your business. You’d need to uncover mediums that’ll get your target audience inundated with your services.
When uncovering a unique marketing strategy, consider these channels:
- TV ads
- Radio ads
- Google ads
- Newspaper ads
- Social media posts
Your marketing strategy should suit your target audience. Consider creating a real estate website to showcase your business’s services to numerous home buyers and sellers simultaneously. You can also hire a top-tier real estate marketing company to improve your firm’s website traffic and rankings on Google search results.
#7 Monitor Your Marketing Metrics and Make Tweaks as Needed
Once you implement real estate marketing strategies for your business, monitor them regularly. That way, you can tell whether they’re yielding the desired results.
For instance, let’s say your radio jingles didn’t attract the clients you wanted. Here, you might want to switch tactics and opt for something more relatable in this era — the internet. You can weed out ineffective strategies and adopt beneficial variations by towing this route.
No marketing strategy is perfect. As time passes, you might need to tweak one or two things. Doing this ensures you always put your best foot forward in your real estate marketing plan. Check the best real estate investor websites here.
Team of real estate agents analyzing distinct marketing strategies alongside their outcomes
Notable Ideas You Can Implement to Solidify Your Real Estate Marketing Plan
We’ve listed the steps vital to creating a real estate marketing plan that converts. Adopting the following real estate marketing ideas is crucial to maintain this structure’s sturdiness:
- Build a Google My Business (GMB) profile
- Create a newsletter
- Offer incentives after closing a deal
- Work alongside local businesses
- Create a Zillow profile to attract more prospects
- Seek referrals from satisfied clients
- Display client testimonials on your website to gain credibility
Parting Shot
To make headway in the saturated real estate industry, creating a marketing plan is non-negotiable. However, don’t let your desire for instant results spur you to develop unrealistic variations. Before setting sail with specific marketing efforts, research to ensure they meet the client’s needs.
Have you inserted the “learn how to create a real estate marketing plan here” phrase on Google countlessly but still find it challenging to create one? If yes, listen to the Icons of Real Estate Podcast. Here, you’ll encounter Teresa Cowart and other revered real estate agents delivering tips on how they excelled in the competitive real estate industry.
Conclusion
A stellar marketing plan is required to succeed as a real estate agent. To build a format that stands the test of time, listen to real estate agents like Teresa Cowart deliver tips on creating a great marketing plan on the “Teresa Cowart’s Real Estate Lifestyle” episode of the Icons of Real Estate Podcast.