Real Estate Marketing Plan to Gain Your Competitive Edge

You wouldn’t start a business without a business plan, therefore why would you enter a digital market without a marketing plan? For real estate, preparing for the future and gaining competitive advantage begins with having a solid marketing plan to identify your strategies, budget forecasts, target audience needs & profiles and overall business marketing goals.

A real estate marketing plan is your road map to success through the digital era. It allows you to foresee strengths and weaknesses that may come up in the current climate and plan accordingly – for example a cold winter season may not be the best time to market open houses. It also keeps your team focused on objectives as well as keeping ourselves accountable.

In this blog we discuss the 5 key elements of creating a simple but effective real estate marketing plan, that will help drive the growth of your business!

1. Who are you and where do you want to be?

Defining your business vision is the key component when starting a real estate marketing plan. By identifying who you are, what your business is and its main principles, makes it easier for teams to collectively work together for one goal – to drive sales through the roof. Not only does it cement your objectives as a company but it helps future clients know who you are, aligning themselves with your brand.

When creating goals in your business vision, make sure they are clear and precise.

For example:

1. Market our business on social media channels to attract more foot traffic to our website.
2. Market our business on new social media platforms including Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube to increase foot traffic to our website by 40% – gaining 1000 website clicks extra per month.

This may be a lot of detail but it’s a clear goal that can be measured, both for the success of the marketing objective itself – and for the teams that create it.

2. Responsibility and accountability

Once you’ve identified your marketing goals, create a strategy of who is responsible and accountable for actioning them. You’d be surprised how many people leave a 3-hour meeting with no idea what they’re supposed to do next.

By holding people accountable you actually empower them to make decisions and take control of their department. Not only does it make things clear, but it decreases workload by keeping people on track and focused.

For example, if you are hiring a digital marketing agency like Geonet, we can provide you with a clear marketing strategy based upon competitive analysis and data reporting. We provide our clients with up-to-the-minute ad spend tracking, leads reporting, and conversions. We are constantly testing, tweaking, and improving campaigns and target audiences.

3. Who is your target audience?

Once you’ve defined who you are, define who your target audience is. This is where a lot of real estate companies go wrong, they try to market to everyone – thinking the masses will bring in more sales, rather than focusing on a niche. Although it’s good to appeal to everyone, knowing exactly who your target audience shows your expertise and knowledge in the field.

For example, if you’ve focused on a real estate area 1.5 hours away from Sydney down the south coast, it’s likely most of your target audience is going to be families that wanted a more calming environment to raise their children, but whose parents/parent still works in the city as house prices are expensive.

Once you know who you’re marketing to, you can create cost-effective strategies that target them and their needs specifically without wasting time or resources.

Important information to know is:

• What type of buyer are they? First home buyers, property sellers, families, or work relocation?
• How old are they? This is very important as different generations have different needs and are marketed to in different ways.
• What is their income and budget?
• How did they find out about you? – Feedback is a great way to see what marketing tools are working, was it a referral, online ads, or social media?
• What are their needs and specific requirements with a real estate property – don’t waste time! If someone needs 3 bedrooms, don’t show them a 2 bedroom property.

After you’ve found your target audience, interact with them. This can be done by collecting information, sharing feedback, and creating a survey. The more you know about their challenges with real estate, the more you can do to attract them with a compelling solution.

4. Competitor and SWOT analysis

If you don’t know what your biggest competition is doing, then you’re going in blind. Trends are important as well as knowing what is and isn’t working for both your competitors and your own company.

For example, if you’re a furniture store and your products are being delayed in delivery and manufacturing, looking at your competitor’s reviews allows you to identify whether the error is a country-wide problem – or your direct supplier problem.

It’s not a case of copying your competition, it’s about being inspired and learning how to do it better. When you know the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your own business, as well as competitors – you have the opportunity to correct systems that aren’t working, save money and propel your business forward as an expert.

5. The best marketing strategies

Internal strategies for marketing include creating a marketing calendar, having specific milestones, reporting data such as effective marketing campaigns which lead to sales generation, retargeting past leads, and creating feedback through testimonials and reviews.

External strategies include social media ads, keyword analysis for PPC and SEO, a strong social media presence, creative content with video and virtual graphics, email marketing campaigns, newsletters, and blogs.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the work that has to be done you may want to think about hiring a trusted digital marketing agency that specialises in real estate. If you had a $3 million property to sell, you would invest in the right photographer that could create amazing photos – rather than doing it yourself on an old iPhone 5. This is the same concept when hiring a digital marketing agency, it allows you to focus on what you do best – making sales happen, and leave the digital marketing to the trained professionals.

Geonet is a full-service digital marketing agency that can help you create the best real estate marketing plan and can turn and see business goals into real generated profit. We have been proven to increase listing by up to 400% in 3 months, as well as creating a whole new marketing strategy that focuses on longitude and latitude marketing called Geo-targeting.

For more information on how to create winning plans that generate results, contact us today!