Real Estate Marketing Plans

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by Brandon Cornett

A real estate marketing plan should be one of the first things a new agent develops when starting out in the real estate business. Thus, the marketing plan is on the minds of many new agents, as well as veterans who are venturing out on their own for the first time.

But this is where the confusion often sets in. How does one create a real estate marketing plan from scratch? What items should be included to ensure success? In this tutorial, we will examine the five primary parts of a real estate marketing plan. We will talk about:

• The cost / marketing budget
• The immediacy factor
• The audience
• The marketing mix
• Testing and tracking

But before we talk about the five elements listed above, I need to caution you about something. Some agents will spend a lot of time and effort looking for the perfect real estate marketing plan — as if such a thing (A) existed, (B) could be purchased, and (C) would apply equally to every agent in every marketing situation.

The thing to keep in mind is that there's no such thing as a "one size fits all" marketing plan. Your business goals will be slightly different from those of your competitors. Your budget will certainly be different, and so will your level and type of expertise. So you real estate marketing plan must also be different to account for these variables.

Because of all these differences, you probably won't be able to purchase the ideal real estate marketing plan for your particular situation. You can certainly save yourself time by starting with a template for a small business marketing plan (like the one provided below), but you'll have to customize it based on the key factors presented below.

5 Key Parts of a Real Estate Marketing Plan

Agents have different audiences, different goals, different skills and backgrounds, and a lot of other differences. So a particular plan might well for one agent while being insufficient for another. This is why customization is so important.

But despite these differences, there are certain things that all real estate marketing plans should have in common. I call them the five factors of planning success. Let's talk about these five important ingredients for agent marketing success.

1. Cost & Budgeting

How much do you have to spend on your promotional efforts in the first year? What about the second year? Before you worry about the other key factors on this list, you should establish your marketing budget — at least for the first year.

I know you're excited to get started. There's no doubt that real estate marketing can be an exciting venture, especially when it starts producing results. But before you begin you need to have a good idea how much you can afford to spend (factoring in all of your other business expenses). Everything else we talk about will tie back to this key part of your marketing plan.

2. The Immediacy Factor

How quickly do you need your marketing program to generate business in order to stay afloat? Or in other words, how heavily will you depend on your marketing program from day one?

This is an important consideration for all agents. But there are different things to consider based on how long you've been in the business. Long-time veterans, for example, will get business from non-marketing sources such as referrals. But new agents who don't yet have any referrals coming in will have to rely more heavily on proactive marketing techniques.

Where you fall on this spectrum will often dictate the types of marketing you should use. SEO versus PPC is a good example of this, from an online marketing perspective. Natural search engine optimization (SEO) will slowly but steadily increase your website traffic over time. So a new agent should only "earmark" a portion of the marketing budget on SEO. On the other hand, a pay-per-click (PPC), or sponsored search, campaign can start driving web traffic within a day's time — literally as soon as the campaign starts running.

So an agent just starting out (with not referrals coming in yet) might want to pursue SEO and PPC simultaneously — SEO for the long-term, lasting benefits, and PPC for the short-term benefits.

This is a prime example of how immediacy can influence your real estate marketing plan from day one.

3. The Audience Factor

Up to this point, we have talked about the budget and immediacy factors (how much you can spend on marketing, and how quickly you need results). Now it's time to talk about another key component of the real estate marketing plan — your audience.

Regardless of what form of marketing you plan to use, you must always consider your audience. With direct mail, you would obviously want to target financial and geographical demographics that match your ideal audience. With search engine marketing, you would want to target the kinds of phrases being searched by your ideal audience.

The more research you do about your audience, the better prepared you'll be to create a real estate marketing plan that delivers good results.

4. The Marketing Mix

We have touched on this concept already, so I won't belabor the point too much. Suffice it to say that marketing is like financial investing in one regard — the more diversified, the better.

By spreading your marketing efforts over multiple channels, you will avoid placing too much burden on any one channel. In other words, don't put all your eggs into one basket when creating your real estate marketing plan.

We preach this elsewhere on the website, as well. We offer a variety of services to help agents expand their web presence, thereby broadening their marketing mix online. We provide services for blogging, web marketing, search engine optimization, online PR and more. This is a prime example of a good marketing mix.

Which marketing channels should you use? Well, this will call for some experimentation on your part. You have to try different marketing techniques to see what works best for you. And that brings us to the final component of your marketing plan...

5. Testing and Tracking

If you don't keep track of your marketing results, you won't know what's working and what's not. When this is the case, you could be spending too much money on techniques generating a low ROI (return on investment), and not enough on techniques producing a higher ROI.

In fact, without a testing and tracking process, you won't even know your ROI to begin with.

It's beyond the scope of this article to explain tracking and analysis for every type of lawyer marketing. But if you keep the following two principles in mind, you can't go far wrong.

• Common sense is the first principle of a testing and tracking program. Even the most basic testing program will provide insight into your marketing effectiveness, and common sense will guide you in creating such a program.
• Proper expectations are another important principle of testing and tracking. If you expect a particular marketing medium to do more than it's capable of, you will be disappointed with the results — even if the results are reasonable and realistic for that particular medium.

For instance, many people pursue search engine optimization (SEO) as a way to generate website leads. But this is an unrealistic expectation for SEO. Search engine optimization is a traffic generator, not a lead generator. SEO can drive traffic to your website, but you still need to capitalize on that traffic in some way. So the proper measurement or testing SEO success would be search engine ranking and website traffic, not web leads.

Conclusion
This is not an all-inclusive examination of the real estate marketing plan. Obviously, there are more factors at work, and more decisions to be made, than what we have covered here. But the five factors listed above form the framework of a good plan. So if you start with these things when creating your marketing plan — cost, immediacy, audience, mix and testing — then you'll be off to a great start.

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