The real estate industry is competitive. If you don’t get in front of high-quality prospects, your competitors will. To get more clients, you need to let the right people know about your services at the right time and in the right place—you need a marketing plan.
Sounds like a plan… but where to begin?
Here are the key steps for writing an effective real estate marketing plan:
1. Set Your Marketing Goals
Define your marketing goals, lay out how you’d achieve them, and identify the metrics for measuring success. For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, you may launch a Facebook ad campaign. Success may look like an X% increase in inbound inquiries from the audience segment you targeted in that campaign.
2. Create Buyer and Seller Personas
Your marketing message must resonate with your ideal clients. To gain an in-depth understanding of your audience, create buyer and seller personas to describe their preferences, pain points, desired outcomes, and more. Then, keep the profiles in mind when you write copy, design ads, and select your marketing channels.
3. Research Your Geographic Area
To make your listings attractive to your target audience, highlight aspects that are important to them. Besides features within a property, consider the neighborhood and community where it’s located. For example, if your target audience is young parents, you may emphasize that an area is a great school district.
4. Understand the Competitive Landscape
Research the most successful real estate agents in the area and see how they market their businesses. For example, how are they generating leads? What’s the messaging on their websites? How are they reaching their audiences? Find out what’s working for them and see how you can adapt the strategies for your business.
5. Define Your Unique Selling Proposition
With the foundation set, you can now answer the question: What unique value do you bring to the table that’s important to your target market? What gaps in the marketplace can you fill? How do you address the needs of your clients? Then, incorporate these talking points into your marketing materials and build your brand around them.
6. Set a Marketing Budget
Knowing how much you have at your disposal can help you strategically allocate your resources to achieve the maximum impact. List out not only each channel's spending but also the cost per lead, net profit, and return on investment (ROI). How much you spend will depend on your market. For example, luxury real estate marketing typically requires a higher budget.
7. Design Your Marketing Calendar
Now the rubber meets the road—you have to decide what touchpoints to use and when to deliver which campaign. Account for all the channels you have at your disposal and what role they play in helping you achieve your goals.
Pay-per-click (PPC) and Facebook ads are great for getting in front of a target audience segment that meets specific criteria (e.g., location, income, age.) Email marketing is ideal for nurturing leads and announcing open house events to your existing clients. Meanwhile, blogging can help you drive website traffic and demonstrate your expertise to build trust.
Bonus Tip: Achieving Ongoing Success
Creating a real estate marketing plan isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it exercise. Track your metrics, understand what works and what doesn’t, and adjust your plan continuously to improve results. Also, stay up to date with the latest trends and technologies to help you increase the cost-efficiency and ROI of your strategies and tactics.
