Real estate is a tricky business. Of course, if you become a realtor, it is with the expectation of success. Success is not guaranteed, though. It would be best to have motivation and talent like any other field, but sometimes this is not enough. It would be best if you had a plan. This is where realtors may fail. A real estate marketing plan is often neglected but always needed.
A real estate marketing plan is a document that defines what you will be achieving in terms of sales in the following year, how you will finance your marketing efforts, who you will be targeting, and how. Marketing is all about proposing a unique value to your audience. What is the exact feature you offer that the competition doesn’t? Defining this is a fundamental principle of successful marketing.
In this article, we will tell you how to plan for your real estate marketing process to get the best out of the time and effort you invest in your business. You will learn how to set goals and what to expect in the following year.
What is a Real Estate Marketing Plan?
A real estate marketing plan will differentiate you by highlighting your unique value proposition. It allows you to find what works best for you and where to make changes and improve. A real estate marketing plan enables realtors to assess marketing strategies and develop KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to picture and plan for the future.
A real estate marketing plan will outline the following:
- Sales goals and where you want to be in business
- How you will get there (Real Estate Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, etc.)
- The message you will convey to your audience (unique value proposition)
- The tools by which you will deliver the message
- How to measure the performance of your efforts
- Where, when, and how you will need to make changes to get the best out of your marketing efforts
Your real estate marketing plan needs to be well thought out.
It only will work if it is SMART:
- Specific: Defining a general and broad target and plan will not be helpful. Use specific wording. Getting better at your job is not a specific goal.
- Measurable: You need to be able to measure your goals. Becoming a popular realtor is not measurable.
- Attainable: Be realistic. Going for impossible things will only disappoint you. To make a 1000% improvement in sales is just a pie in the sky.
- Relevant: What you plan should be relevant. Thinking of being the best real estate investor is not causally related to being a realtor.
- Timely: Reaching a goal is only valuable when done at a desirable time. Having no deadlines will relieve everyone from pushing and trying harder.
Why Do Agents Need a Marketing Plan?
Why have you chosen to be a realtor? Passion? A desire to help others? It could be an array of different motives. However, one common goal for all who decide to become a realtor is to make money. But to do so, you will need real estate marketing ideas. Ideas that turn into money. Without unique ideas, you are just another figure in the crowd.
Nowadays, it is naïve to assume one can prosper as a realtor using only old methods such as mailouts and cold calls.
The problem is to have a unique value proposition; you need ideas that work. Sadly, ideas that fit the description are generally not free. Unless you are exceptionally gifted. Having no plan (ideas) risks your hard-earned cash. You want the money to go into real estate digital marketing to work towards something.
When to Start a Real Estate Marketing Plan
The answer to the above question is yesterday or even before. However, as you are reading this article, you may not have done it yet. Still, the second-best answer is today. A real estate marketing plan is the foundation of your real estate efforts.
Remember that to enjoy the positive outcomes of such plans, you need to put in time and energy. This needs to be taken seriously and committed to.
11 Steps to Creating a Real Estate Marketing Plan
Define a Mission Statement for Your Business
A mission statement briefly defines:
- Your unique value propositions
- Your clearly defined and specified target population
- The outcome and the difference you will make in their lives
A mission statement is one of the most essential concepts realtors must have defined, as they will base all their marketing efforts on it. It tells them:
- What falls within their mission and what does not (in other words, the things they should and should not do)
- Who is a part of their target audience and who is not (who they should be focusing on and spending their resources on)?
- What difference do their services make in their customers’ lives (what is in it for their customers?)
A mission statement is so important that it should be known by heart. It would be best if you stuck to it and committed. It is your guide.
Vision
Your vision is where you imagine and want yourself to be in a specific timeframe in the future. For instance, to be ranked #1 realtor by sales in a particular area or higher in transactions from realtor X. However, you had better tread carefully here. The vision you picture for yourself should not be too ambitious. Be realistic and think of something you can achieve.
Develop Buyer and Seller Personas
Do you know who your current customers are? Who are your potential customers? Maybe you would like to think the answer is everyone, but that would be wrong. For your specific services, you will have a precisely defined audience. Understanding your real estate marketing funnel is one of the most important things you must do.
You can’t treat all your customers the same way. After all, you would not be marketing to a newlywed and a single mom the same way. The buyer persona is broken down into two sections:
Demographics
Demographics consist of statistical data about a market’s population, providing insight into the number of people in the area, their ages, marital status, education, income, housing types, average age, and the value of the property. Knowing what demographic you are marketing to is essential.
Demographics determine “who” your prospects are.
Psychographics
Psychographics defines your audience’s personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. It provides a tool to help determine how your prospects act and feel according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria.
Psychographics determine “why” your prospects might buy or sell properties
If you have your own website and social media channels, you can use Google Analytics and the Social Media Insights section to study your audience in detail. Other than that, depending on the location of your farming area you can use some online tools and websites to get data on your audience.
Evaluate Previous Year’s Marketing Performance
When planning for the coming year, looking at how you have done so far is vital, especially in the previous year. It would be best to see what worked for you and what did not. This way, you will better understand what works and what doesn’t. After all, nobody knows your business more than you, and even the best business professionals do not have the knowledge and experience for your business.
Analyze Marketing Channels
As your marketing plan includes promoting your services across different channels, it is a good idea to have a look at what you did last:
- How many potential leads did you generate?
- Of these, how many of them turned into leads?
- Where did you get these leads?
- What was the number of leads generated from your website?
- From your social media and ads?
- How much money did you spend to generate leads?
- What is the average cost per lead?
Considering all this information, which platform provides the most benefit for the money you spend? That is where you should put more money and effort. What channels did not do well? There, it would be best if you made modifications.
Analyze Branding
Take a look at your brand’s overall look across multiple online and offline channels. Do your online channels, logos, print ads, etc., follow a coherent and consistent theme? Where have you gone awry?
Are they all targeting a single buyer persona? Go through all these areas carefully, write down where you need to make improvements and take note of your strengths to repeat the constructive patterns.
SWOT Analysis
Another critical stage in creating your real estate marketing plan is to do a SWOT analysis that determines your
- Strengths: The advantage you have in the business over the competition
- Weaknesses: Where you are weaker than the competition
- Opportunities: What can be used to your advantage
- Threats: Where there might be a threat against you.
Analyze the Competition
Like what you did in SWOT analysis, you need to study your competition, define their strengths and weaknesses, and find ways to improve upon their solid points and leverage their weakness. This will allow you to keep up with their progress and outperform them.
To get some insights into the competition’s customers, you need data. Some of this data is private and not open to the public. But with some research, you can find valuable and practical information on the competition’s clients.
Pay attention to what they are doing and how they are doing it:
- How significant is their online presence? Do they have a website? How well-built is it? What about their social media channels? Are they regularly active? Please pay attention to the posts they share and how many followers they have.
- How do they present and promote listings and properties? Are they using professional photography services? Do they take advantage of high-quality videos and virtual open houses?
- What about their offline marketing? Are they using print ads and local advertising? Do they contribute to knowledge by writing in local newspapers and attending radio shows on local stations?
- Are they using paid advertising on Google AdWords and social media Ads? How much are they spending on ads? What keywords are they targeting? What are their keyword gaps?
After you have thoroughly analyzed your competition, you can incorporate actions in your real estate marketing plan to take advantage of their weaknesses and fill in the gaps in their plan.
For example, if they are not providing enough updates during their business with the clients, you can leverage and provide what they do not. If they have a weak social media presence on social media platforms, you can develop a robust online marketing social media strategy and stand out.
Pay Attention to The Best Practices
There are many things you can do to market and promote your business. However, there are some which have been proven to be more effective. New real estate marketing trends emerge every day, and you need to keep up and use the best-emerging methods in real estate marketing. Long-established and proven methods also must be a solid part of your marketing efforts. Websites, referrals, social media, SEM, etc., are a few of the best areas to focus on to promote your brand and grow your business.
Define Goals for Your Real Estate Marketing Plan
Every business needs goals to shape its efforts and have a clear objective to strive for. Now that you have analyzed the market and your own performance in the previous year, it is time to set new goals for the coming year.
In real estate, there are three types of goals:
Business Goals
How do you define success in your career? Hitting a specific sales target? Reaching a certain number of clients? Getting X number of referrals? As mentioned earlier, having no goals means going nowhere, as you do not know where you are going and if you have arrived there. Try to make it realistic, tangible, and specific. Set SMART goals. What is your goal? Close $X in sales?
Strategic Goals
Defining ways and strategies to achieve your business goals would be best. The strategies you choose directly impact the probability of success in achieving business goals and are just as important as the goals themselves. If your business goal is to close $X in sales, how do you plan to achieve it? By becoming the number 1 realtor in your farming area?
Tactical Goals
Tactical goals are the actions you will take to achieve your strategic goals. If you plan to be the number 1 realtor in the area, how are you planning to do that? By establishing a solid online presence and presenting yourself as the real estate go-to?
| Business Goals | Close X$ in sales |
| Strategic Goals | Becoming the #1 agent in your farming area |
| Tactical Goals | Strong online and social media presence |
Develop a Marketing Budget
There are hundreds of ways to spend money on marketing. However, it is not recommended to start spending where needed. Your money is precious, and you want to know how and where you will be putting it in the future. There should be a budget that you stick to it no matter what. This way, you know where and when to spend money. What you spend should be defined by considering your audience.
Offer a Unique Value Proposition
If you were to choose one factor for a successful marketing plan, it would be USP (Unique Selling Proposition). The real estate market is not a new field of business; it is overwhelmed by all the other realtors. That is why you need to have something unique to offer.
Now, what is your unique selling value? Or why should people choose you over other realtors? The values you offer should focus on the needs of your audience. You need to focus on their problems and offer a solution that produces a desirable result for them. This way, you can stand out in the crowd. Other realtors and agents will have their own value propositions, so you need to have your own UNIQUE proposition.
| Niche | Newlyweds |
| What they need | Looking to buy their first home |
| Your unique solution | Detailed and guided consultation |
| The outcome | Buying the best home for their money easily |
Develop Milestones
It is not advisable to wait until the end of the year to see how well you have done. Instead, agents should develop monthly, quarterly, or yearly milestones for their goals. This will break down the goal into smaller steps and make tracking how you do it easier. If you are not doing well, you can find out what is not working and try fixing it.
Create a Marketing Calendar
Marketing is about delivering a unique value consistently and staying on top of your audience’s mind. Go quiet for a while; you will likely be forgotten while your competition keeps a consistent presence.
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Therefore, you must have a detailed calendar for all your marketing efforts that lays out when and how you will act according to your defined plan.
Whether you are relying on content marketing, SEM, social media marketing, offline marketing, etc., you need to have thought of a regular and consistent schedule to act on them. The ultimate goal is to establish a pattern that is recognized by your audience. Irregular patterns of acting in marketing will confuse your audience or, even worse, disappoint them.
Develop a Website and Social Media Channels with a Real Estate Marketing Plan
A part of your marketing efforts will be online. It would be best to have a website and social media channels to promote your brand.
A website is a realtor’s central online marketing source; all other avenues lead back to it.
Your website should:
- Be simple and easy to navigate
- Include all your listings
- Be visually appealing
- Include listing pages to capture leads
- Offer valuable and compelling content tailored to the needs of your audience
- Include your contact information alongside simple options to contact you right on the website
- Not be confusing or send visitors through complex menus
Designing a website with all the essential features realtors need is complex and costly. However, instead of designing a website from scratch and wasting money, you can use roomvu’s agent profiles: a branded profile including all the features you need. It is efficient and easy to make.
Social media was initially designed to help connect people. However, platforms like Facebook and Instagram are used for business at large. They provide business insight tools that help people analyze how they are doing and how they can improve.
Promoting business on social media is free unless you decide to incorporate ads into your marketing efforts. Even without ads, once done the right way:
- They increase awareness of your brand
- Provide an effective and practical to connect to the customers and convey messages directly.
- Customers can directly voice their problems and issues
- They can promote the content you produce on your website and lead the audience back to them.
Measure the Success of Your Real Estate Marketing Plan
Many real estate agents forget the value of measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of their real estate marketing plan. They start motivated, design and develop a great marketing plan only to leave it mid-way or forget to evaluate how they have done.
Evaluation of the marketing plan is a vital step. It has a substantial role in the business’s future success because it tells realtors what they’ve done right and what went wrong so that they can repeat fruitful patterns and modify bad ones.
Monitor results
Track all the leads you have got and see where they come from. Monitor your website’s performance. See how well your social media did in terms of followers and engagement. Which part worked according to your expectations and which did not?
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See, learn, improve
You need to evaluate the whole marketing plan according to the results you have gained. Try to find your strengths and weaknesses. Learn from mistakes and try to make changes in the plan accordingly for the future. Highlight the areas you did well and achieved excellent results and try to focus on them.
Real Estate Marketing Plan Tips
A real estate marketing plan will help you a lot in how you run your business and give you insights into how you are doing and where you need to improve. However, some small tips can help you even further in developing and running a successful real estate marketing plan:
Be Agile
The world is moving at a breakneck pace, and many new trends are showing up every day. Realtors need to keep an eye out and be ready for the new developments to keep up with them. Agility is an invaluable trait needed to succeed in this highly competitive market. If you wait too long to adapt to the new trends and developments, you have already lost.
Revisit Your Plan
The marketing plan you develop is not set in stone. It should be a living document that continues to be modified and adjusted over time. If something is not working after a while, be agile enough to make modifications and focus on what works. Make sure you evaluate your progress every six months and see if you can make modifications to increase your ROI.
Ask for Feedback
What your audience and clients think of your marketing plan is essential as it will help you look at things from their point of view. After all, they are receiving the end of your marketing messages, and the more you tailor messaging to their needs and preferences, the better results you will get.
Takeaways
A great real estate marketing plan starts with discovering and knowing what you want to accomplish. It’s highly focused on targets and the target audience. Without a marketing plan for real estate, realtors and agents will have difficulty finding leads. Long and short of it is that without a plan, you will be lost.