As the real estate market slows down during the colder months, now is the time to look ahead by planning your marketing budget for the new year.

Your expenses will vary based on your business size, market, competition, and other factors. Most real estate agents allocate around 10% of their gross commission income to marketing and advertising.

Here’s what to consider when planning your budget:

 

 

Three Categories In a Real Estate Marketing Budget

There are two types of marketing costs: One-off and ongoing monthly expenses. They generally fall into three main categories:

•   Marketing tools: Your budget should cover an email service, a customer relationships management (CRM) system, website maintenance and hosting, marketing automation software, and analytics tools. Some are one-off expenses, but most software is offered as a monthly subscription plan.

•   Advertising: Break down your budget by advertising channels, such as real estate listing sites, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media marketing, and print advertising. While these are ongoing expenses, they may fluctuate monthly, so you should consider how demand and seasonality impact your ad spend.

•   Labor: Account for the time you and your team spend implementing the marketing and promotional campaigns. You may need to set aside a budget for hiring contractors, such as copywriters, designers, and photographers if you don’t have these resources in-house.

 

 

Marketing Channels To Cover In Your Budget

Digital marketing will take up a significant portion of your budget. Here are the various channels you should account for:

Online Advertising

Most real estate agents spend half their budgets on digital ads, which include advertising fees and professional services. PPC ads are one of the best ways to reach prospects who are actively searching for real estate agents and, therefore, most likely to engage your services.

Advertising fees can fluctuate from week to week, and even by the minute if you use automatic bidding features. You must know how much you want to spend and allocate the money strategically to cost-effectively get in front of the right people at the right time.

Pro tip: LeadHax can help you maximize your Facebook and display ad budget by automatically posting ads based on your listing inventory, so you don’t have to spend time and resources managing the ads manually.

Website Maintenance

You need an appealing website to keep visitors engaged after investing in online ads to drive traffic. Even if you already have a site, you must create fresh content (e.g., blog posts and videos,) update the functionalities, and ensure that it delivers a glitch-free experience.

If you haven’t already, implement a lead capture mechanism on your website to collect visitors’ contact information. You can add it to your email list and keep building the relationships via email marketing after they leave the site.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to build trust, nurture relationships, and stay top of mind. The good news is that email marketing software is very affordable — many vendors even have a free tier, so you can try them out before committing to a paid plan.

Consistency is key to email marketing success. You should budget time and resources to send out communications regularly to optimize your ROI (e.g., new listing and open home announcements, newsletters with valuable content.)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Content Marketing

SEO is more than adding keywords to your website copy. It’s an ongoing effort to create fresh and relevant content while ensuring that the website experience, such as load time, navigation, and mobile optimization, meets consumer expectations.

SEO and content marketing go hand-in-hand. Posting timely and relevant content on our website helps boost your Google ranking while building trust and credibility with your audience, which is key to attracting clients.

 

 

Final Thoughts

Setting a budget can help you establish clear expectations and align your team’s efforts. You can limit unpleasant surprises while ensuring that you have the resources to invest in promotional campaigns year-round to stay top of mind.

 

Using the right tools can help you maximize your marketing spend — Get in touch to see how LeadHax can help.