Marketing Plan in Real Estate - Grow Your Business Today

The Ultimate Marketing Plan in Real Estate

This marketing plan in real estate is a guide to creating long-term sales growth in your business. The most successful real estate agents all create a marketing plan that guides them through the ups and downs of the housing market. This template will help build a foundation, develop a customer base, find your value proposition, and scale for years to come. Ultimately, this marketing plan for real estate agents will navigate you for years to come.

Real Estate SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis represents the perceived strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in your local marketplace. Typically, a SWOT is conducted for emerging businesses that want to better understand the business environment prior to setting up shop. In this case, you will create a local real estate SWOT so you have awareness of your business prior to launching. With this said, a SWOT analysis can easily be conducted by a real estate agent or brokerage that is already active in the marketplace. Typically, it is good practice to refresh your analysis every few years as new competitors come into town, regulation increases, and your marketing campaigns become outdated.

Strengths: When developing the strengths in your Real Estate SWOT analysis, it is important to think about what makes you different from competitors. This can be internal motivations, brand assets, experience, etc. A great example of strength can be a strong social media brand, a decade of real estate experience, or access to exclusive leads that your competition does not have access to. The goal of this section is to gain a better understanding of the tangibles, or intangibles, that can be leveraged for future success.

Weakness: For the weakness section, it is important that you take an unbiased look at the stress points in your business. This can be resource limitations, strong competition, lack of experience in the field, or a small marketing budget. This portion of your SWOT is a pulse check on the areas that need work in your business. If you do not have a healthy understanding of your weaknesses, your business could be set to fail before you even launch. If you are having a hard time developing weaknesses for your analysis, talk to an experienced real estate agent that can help outline your needs.

Opportunities: This section is where you can find the immediate business opportunities in your market. This can be an underserved neighborhood or lack of adequate competition. Find the low-hanging fruit and prioritize it in your marketing plan in real estate.

Threats: The last section in your SWOT outlines the external factors that could harm your real estate practice. Think about increased regulation, a down real estate market, or lack of adequate housing inventory in your market. All of these factors should be considered before you develop a marketing plan in real estate.

Altogether, your SWOT analysis is a snapshot of internal and external factors that will impact your long-term success. Take time to develop an accurate assessment of your business and the local marketplace.

Target Audience

Once you have developed a SWOT for your business, the next step in the marketing plan in real estate is to outline your target audience. A target audience in real estate is a group of people with similar demographics, behaviors, and core motivations that are in-market for a home. By defining your target audience, you can coordinate a marketing plan that is effective and efficient. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone (and failing at that), a target audience allows you to focus your energy on filling the needs of niche groups and seeing higher conversion rates altogether.

If you are having trouble identifying a target audience to focus your business on, think about the communities you are active in. This can be a church, yoga studio, support groups, the list goes on. Think about what bonds your community together and be the ‘realtor,’ in that community. If your target audience is made up of first-time homebuyers, create content that helps demystify homeownership. Additionally, if your community is made up of veterans, create content about the benefits that the military has access to when trying to buy a home. Whatever target audience or community you decide to market to, ensure your content is creating value for their lifestyles. Specifically, it is vital that your marketing plan for real estate creates a value proposition that helps close the deal.

Value Proposition

When developing a marketing plan in real estate, it is vital that you do not skip over your value proposition. While it is a relatively small concept, the value you bring will be the final deciding factor for a prospect. A value proposition is the unique value your real estate services bring the consumer that cannot be easily replicated by competition. This means your business is special. Do not lose what makes you special. This could be fast closing, quality customer service, lower fees, etc. Ensure your value proposition is unique and not a duplicate of your competition. If the value you bring consumers seems generic, you will lose business to other agents that actually bring real value to the homebuyer.

Every real estate agent has heard prospective buyers brag about negotiating their own contract or selling their home without an agent. For this reason alone, it is important that your market plan in real estate addresses the tangible values that realtors bring to the closing table. Additionally, take it a step further and show your target audience the unmatched value you bring to every homebuyer. It is imperative that you take time to develop a service that cannot be replicated and helps solve real problems in the industry. If you take time to develop a rock-solid value proposition, your service will sell itself.

Brand Identity in Marketing Plan

Now that you know who your audience is and why they should choose you over other realtors, it is time to tie this all together in concise brand identity. Your brand is the face of your marketing plan so that consumers can easily identify who you are and what you do. Furthermore, a brand identity will serve as a map for marketing campaigns, creative endeavors, and future business development. If crafted well, over time, your brand will give you instant credibility and authenticity. Conversely, if you rush to market without considering your brand cornerstones, your business could be shrouded in doubt, poor performance, and lack of experience in the local marketplace.

So the question still remains, how do we create a brand? Thankfully, we have done the heavy lifting. At this point, you know who your target audiences are and what value you bring to them. Now we need to develop brand assets that fit this narrative. For example, develop a business name, purchase a domain, create a brand color scheme, and craft a few headlines. These brand assets will follow you across websites, social media accounts, and on every marketing campaign you create. It is important that you build brand assets that have a timeless appeal. For example, as your audience becomes more familiar with your brand identity, they will associate certain colors, people, and values to your brand. This will create subconscious credibility over time that cannot be replicated. If you are changing around your colors, name, logo, etc., your audience will never have enough consistency to value your brand.

The top layer of brand assets like colors, domain name, logos, etc. are going to be the face of your brand. However, developing a brand goes so much deeper than a color palette. Mission, Vision, & Goals, are three topics that you need to grasp before you ever launch your real estate business. A great way to develop these concepts is to ask a few standard questions;

What problems do I solve for future homeowners?
What is special about my real estate services?
What positive impact do I want to have on the community?
Where do I see my business in 10 years?

Once you have answers to these fundamental questions, it is time to define your goals, create a mission, and consider the long-term vision of your business.

Craft a Mission Statement for Your Marketing Plan

As a business owner, it is important that you understand the value of a mission statement. A mission statement is a concise description of the overall purpose that you hope to achieve with your business. Why is a mission statement important in your Marketing Plan in Real Estate? It’s simple – this statement will act as a compass as you navigate business ups and downs. When difficult questions appear, it is important to understand what your purpose is, so you know what direction to move towards.

Here is an example of a mission statement from the Benkinney Company:

” Delivering the dream of homeownership everywhere. All branches of the Ben Kinney Companies have this same goal because owning real estate provides security, safety, and opportunity for individuals. The technology we build helps real estate agents become more efficient at their job and find more customers to deliver on that mission. Our training prepares agents to be even better by utilizing exceptional techniques and systems, and the Ben Kinney Teams constantly help families find and sell homes.”

The mission clearly defines what Benkinney Company’s core purpose is and how they plan to achieve it. Try to model other realtors you look up to define your mission statement. Ultimately, your mission =allows you to take a step back from the nuts and bolts of your marketing plan in real estate and ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” This is the singular most important question in the business.

Once your mission statement is crafted, it is time to plan out marketing tactics that will showcase your brand to your target audience.

Realtor Marketing Tactics

Now that we have discussed the strategy portion of the marketing plan in real estate, it is time to invest in marketing tactics that find your target audience and showcase your value in the marketplace. As you begin to develop a marketing plan, it is important to consult the sales funnel:

A sales funnel is one of the most important concepts in digital marketing. This concept outlines the stages that a consumer will go through before using a product or service. Often, this process is completely subconscious. However, the biggest brands in the world have mastered the sales funnel to constantly generate loyal customers.

Awareness: In the awareness stage, you will spend time showing your audience who you are. Often, content marketing is a great marketing tactic for awareness. For realtors, I recommend creating videos, blogs, and graphics for your social media pages. This is a way to start the awareness process without overspending on an elaborate paid media campaign.

Interest: The interest stage is where the consumer is aware of your business and becomes intrigued with your products, services or offers. Generally, consumers reach this stage as they become closer to the purchase. Often, prospective homebuyers increase their interest level as they conduct research on local realtors. For this reason alone, it is important to have awareness-type content on your social pages or website. Furthermore, interest-type content is less focused on who you are and more focused on what you do. Specifically, create content that shows the value of your service to the consumer.

Decision & Action: The decision and action stages are hand-in-hand. When someone is in the decisions stage, they are highly informed and very close to signing a contract with a realtor. The best marketing tactic for the decision and action stage is search engine marketing or pay-per-click campaigns. By displaying your service at the top of Google, high-intent users are likely to sign up with your services. What a lot of realtors do wrong is forgo the awareness and interest stage and just bid on Google Ads. Without proper awareness and interest funnel, users are likely to bounce to a brand they recognize. Brand recognition is vital to success in the decision and action stages.

Now that you have a good understanding of realtor marketing tactics and the basics behind the sales funnel, your marketing plan in real estate is almost complete. From top to bottom, this plan will generate business. However, over time your initial assumptions may change, adapt, or be wrong. That is normal. Thankfully, the final stage of our plan is to audit, optimize, and scale our marketing efforts for years to come.

Audit & Optimize Your Real Estate Marketing Plan

Auditing your marketing plan in real estate is essential to discovering holes in your strategy and seeing what worked well. From there, you can cut out the fat and invest in your most profitable campaigns.

The best way to quickly audit your marketing is to compare what is going in versus what is going out for every campaign. For example, if you are trying to generate engaged users on your social media pages, simply track the hours you are spending creating content versus the numbers of shares, likes, comments, etc. If you are seeing an increase in engagement over time, you are doing something right. However, if you are struggling to get any engagement, there is a clear issue in your content plan. Either do research or find a consultant to help fix your content plan.

While this is less of a quantitative audit, you can clearly measure success versus failure. This can be easily replicated for other types of marketing campaigns that have a clear monetary value. For example, if you are running a PPC lead gen campaign, you can easily track how much you are spending versus how much you are making from PPC leads. If you see negative ROI, there is clearly a problem with your paid search campaigns. Ultimately, if you audit your marketing campaigns on a weekly basis, you will see growth.

At the end of the day, there is no perfect marketing plan in real estate. However, if you follow our guide to marketing growth and brand development, you will see results. Just follow the plan, and stay consistent!

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Henry

Henry has spent the bulk of his career working for mortgage companies and marketing agencies. He uses his experience in the martech industry to guide his strategies and insights in the mortgage and real estate world. He firmly believes that marketing success in every industry boils down to a technology-centered strategy.

Real Estate Marketing