Realtor Success Blog

A good real estate marketing plan is just like a roadmap. It tells you where you are now and where you want to go — and the different routes to get there. Your final destination? A place where you generate lots of leads and sales and grow your business exponentially. Here's how to create a real estate marketing plan that really works.

1. Set Your Goals

Before you spend cash on marketing, you need to define your goals. Ask yourself what you want to achieve from your marketing plan. A bigger market share? More customers, perhaps? You might want to base your goals on the core values of your organization: trust, price, quality, and so on. Whatever objectives you choose, write them down and then plan your marketing accordingly.

2. Decide on the Best Social Media Site for Your Marketing

Social media dominates real estate marketing nowadays and has overtaken older methods like direct mail and newspaper advertising. Eighty-four percent of Realtors now use social media to some extent, with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn being the most popular sites.

It won't take long to create a social profile of your own, and you can use it to talk to buyers and sellers, advertise hot properties, and keep the social sphere updated with the latest market-related insights.

As part of your social content strategy, also post content that is genuine, fun, and shares your personality. This can be done through photos and information you find extremely valuable. Don’t inundate your feed with heavy articles or too much sales and marketing content. People want to work with people that they can relate with, so keep that in mind every time you post to social media.

3. Identify Your Competitors

Knowing what your competitors are doing helps you carve out a marketing niche, where you can target a specific group of home buyers. Marketers call this competitor analysis — a process that lets you analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your rivals' marketing strategies in relation to your own. There are many online tools that let you size up your local competition, and you can use this information to plan future marketing campaigns.

4. Make SEO an Important Step of Your Plan

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing solution that targets search engine users. It's an important junction on your digital roadmap: Google alone has 1.17 billion unique monthly users, making it a powerful marketing opportunity that you can no longer ignore.

If you want your real estate agency to get noticed on the search engine results page, make some small, but significant, changes to your website. Keyword optimization, backlinks, content creation and meta descriptions improve your search rankings and encourage more people to visit your property listings.

5. Know How to Monitor Your Marketing Results

Analytics tools provide you with an easy way to monitor your marketing results. These programs provide you with insights into your campaigns and help you with decision-making. Discover how many people view each of your property listings, for example, or which channels (social media, search engines or business directories) generate the most traffic. These tools deliver powerful metrics that help you identify market prices and investment trends, too.

A marketing plan lets you plan ahead so you don't waste cash on marketing techniques that hinder business growth. You can identify mistakes before they happen and choose the best ways to promote your real estate agency online. Follow the five steps above to create a marketing plan that provides you with a great return on your investment.