If you have goals for your real estate business, whether you’re just starting or an experienced agent looking to grow in the next year, you first need to create a marketing plan for your business.
Your marketing plan should include some short-range objectives with long-term thinking about your business growth. How will the marketing you do right now get you a deal, and more importantly, how will your efforts now help you get more deals down the road?
We all know agents that coast by year-to-year, doing the minimum and getting the minimum in return. But if you are an agent or a member of a team looking to grow your brand over the next couple of years, you need to start with a marketing plan.
What Is A Marketing Plan?
A real estate agent’s marketing plan is a roadmap to help you get more exposure and leads for your business. While you may think that you have a plan, it may seem a little chaotic if you’re not being intentional about every step involved in your marketing.
For example, you know that social media is a great way to reach people. But how can you and your business stand out to others if you're posting less regularly? You need to schedule time every day and every week to create and post content on social media to stay relevant on your pages and with your contacts.
Over time you want your marketing plan to highlight your brand and bring you new leads. To achieve your dream, you must be intentional about your marketing efforts. First, you need to analyze who your ideal client is and where they may be reached so that you can produce and publish content that helps them.
When designing your marketing strategy, you’ll want to strategize about each of the following:
- Identify your ideal client
- Refine your message
- Check out the competition
- Define what sets you apart
- Decide the type of content you want to create
- Set a budget
- Create a timeline for creating and publishing
A mentor or coach can help you identify and refine your marketing plan, but the initial work starts with you.
Only you know what you’re most comfortable with, what message you want to send, and your personal philosophies that are important for you and your business. A mentor and coach will help you strategize and help you build the systems you need to reach your targets effectively.
Once you’ve established who you are targeting, what makes you different from the other agents out there, and established a budget, you’re now free to create your content.
As you begin to create your content, a few things work better than others for generating leads.
Your marketing plan should be a task you have that is daily, weekly, monthly, and every 6-months to a year as you plan out content. First, you need to create a calendar and strategize the type of content you want to send out, when, and how often.
For example, if you’re planning to ramp up your marketing when the market is hotter, think about some fun topics and things you can incorporate into your marketing.
As agents, we know that the market cycles upward in late spring, so having some exciting and creative content for those months planned out, especially when it’s slower, will get you ready to jump into action as the market swings upward.
The best way to do all your marketing is by using a time management technique known as time blocking. You simply can’t get everything done in a single day. That’s why it is essential to prioritize what needs to be done and schedule time each work day for those tasks.
Time blocking simply sets aside a period of time, like a couple of hours a day, for specific tasks like appointment setting, follow-ups with clients, and marketing efforts.
Video
When I talk about video, people think, “oh, I could never stand up there and be on video.” Well, let me tell you, if you’re unsure or are worried that you won’t be confident in your video, I’ve written a video just for that on my YouTube channel.
Video marketing has propelled my business, and I show you tons of tricks and tips on how to be more confident on video.
Or maybe you think it’s going to be expensive to get the right equipment and film it all.
But there are all types of videos you can do to incorporate into your marketing. Video is the top way to reach as many people as possible in real estate. There’s simply no way around it.
One of the more effective ways that I’ve found to use video in my marketing is video texts.
Video texts are simple little videos you shoot on your phone and send out to people in your sphere. Simple little videos checking in with them, especially on significant days like their birthdays, or a simple little hello video is all it takes. I recommend sending out 10 of these little video texts daily to people in your sphere to touch base with them.
Best of all, this type of video marketing doesn’t cost much, won’t take up too much of your time, and is easy and fun to do.
Social Media
Social media is king for marketing. You can post on social media a couple of times a day. If you have other content, you can create your content ahead of time. More than 75% of people are on Facebook, so using that platform can get you a ton of exposure and expand your sphere if you post regularly and strategically.
Community Involvement
Being a part of your community is a win-win for you and your business. Think about various community organizations you can join, like Rotary or some other service-oriented organization around town.
Doing things around town like sponsoring a youth sports team, helping create a food drive for families around the holidays, or organizing a park clean-up activity are great ways to be involved in the community and get your brand out without spending a ton of money.
Email Campaigns
I’ve talked about this before, but email campaigns are great ways to stay in front of your clients and expand your audience. Better yet, you can batch your content, create a sign-up newsletter, and have different content and social media links to the opt-in page. Of course, you can set and forget your email campaigns, but best of all, your message and marketing will get to your audience on a regularly scheduled posting.
Remember, time blocking is a way to schedule your day, and part of your marketing efforts should be time blocked into your calendar.
In order to be even more productive and see better results, there’s another time management strategy known as the Pomodoro Technique. This technique will help you break down tasks into smaller portions allowing you to accomplish more without running into a wall of fatigue.
It works like this; set a timer for 20 minutes. During those 20 minutes, only work on a single task. When the timer goes off, take a quick 5-minute break doing anything but the work you were just on, then set another timer for 20 minutes and repeat.
If you use the Pomodoro Technique for your tasks, another time management hack to consider is time blocking. With time blocking, you’re scheduling chunks of time in your workday to focus on a particular task.
So if you have marketing, appointments, and follow-ups, you’d block a couple of hours in your day for each. Then using the Pomodoro Technique, you’d focus on tasks within those blocks to increase your productivity without being scattered on too many different things.
Using time management strategies, you can focus your attention 100% on your marketing plan. You will want to dive deep into the type of client you want to represent, how you and only you can help them, and how you want your different content to reach them.
Revisit And Revise Your Marketing Plan
Ok, so you have a strategy and marketing plan. First, you block time off daily to work on your marketing, break those tasks into 20-minute segments, and send out and post your marketing.
What’s next?
The final part of your marketing plan should include reviewing and revising it regularly. Astronauts check their coordinates and adjust their trajectory all the time, and so should you.
When you revisit your marketing, you may find that some types of content perform better than others. For example, your video texts are doing great, and your social media is lacking.
In that case, switch up your social media to include more videos or use a video-based platform like TikTok. Increase the number of video texts you send out every week to people.
Whatever you decide is up to you, but you need to examine your marketing results, throw yourself into those that are working for you, and back off the marketing that isn’t pulling its weight for you.
I recommend revisiting your marketing every few months and scheduling time in your calendar to rethink and reimagine your marketing plan for the next couple of months or the following year.
