If your search for the perfect real estate marketing plan on the internet has come up short, you’re not alone. Most online resources in this space often get convoluted and talk about esoteric things like analyzing competitors’ data and answering questions upon questions about your ideal audience without providing any actionable information on how to go about creating a plan that works for you.
That is why, in this article, we’re attempting to simplify the ordeal for you by giving you a 5-step-process for creating the perfect marketing plan for your real estate business along with a downloadable worksheet that you can use for your brand. This will not only help you get more clarity but also understand which marketing activities you need to pursue in order to get the maximum return on your investment.
Here’s what we'll cover:
- Why Is A Real Estate Marketing Plan Important
- Step 1: Define Your Marketing Objective And Set Goals
- Step 2: Work backward to figure out the steps to achieve your goal
- Step 3: Pick a platform for marketing your services
- Step 4: Create measurable tasks for each platform & get to work
- Step 5: Review your progress periodically
Let’s get started!
Why Is A Real Estate Marketing Plan Important
A real estate marketing plan helps your team determine the steps they must take and tools they must use to achieve your business goals. Here’s why it’s important in the real estate space:
Helps identify your target market: An effective real estate marketing plan will help you identify your target audience, their problems, needs and values. This helps you create relevant content and drive more leads to your business.
Defines your unique selling proposition: Crafting a marketing plan for your real estate business will help you identify competitors and come up with a unique offering that makes your target market choose you over your competitors.
Pro tip: Videos should definitely be a part of your real estate marketing plan because research shows that listings with videos get 403% more inquiries than listings that don’t. You can easily create stunning real estate videos using InVideo’s online video editor.
Now let’s take a look at how you can create your own real estate marketing plan:
Step 1: Specify the goal you want to achieve through your marketing plan for real estate business
Most realtors don’t get the best results from their marketing efforts because they’re often trying to target too many things at once. The multiplicity of goals often leads to confusion and lowering the impact of the marketing activities you undertake.
In order to have a solid marketing plan for real estate businesses, you need to first determine what business goal you want to achieve in a particular time frame and then pick the one highest ROI activity that will help you get there.
For instance, if your primary business objective for FY 2022 is to increase your revenue by 10% from 2021 where you sold 12 houses at an average price of $110,000 per unit, then you will need to sell around 15 units this year at an average price of $120,000 per unit to get there.
To achieve this, you will need a higher number of credible leads that have a better chance of converting to paid clients. Therefore, while your primary goal is to sell 15 houses in 2022, the goal you want to achieve through your marketing efforts here is to generate more credible leads because that is what is ultimately going to help with the sales.
Step 2: Work Backward To Figure Out The Steps To Achieve Your Goal
Now that you have your core marketing objective in place i.e. generate more credible leads, you will need to determine the best way to get to this. While there are certain measurable ways to do this, these will differ slightly from business to business.
Let’s say, you’ve seen good results from using email marketing in the past, then building an email list will be a good way to achieve your objectives. On the other hand, if you’ve found that posting regular updates on Facebook has helped you get the most qualified leads in the past, then that will be the route you take.
In short, you want to assess all your marketing efforts from previous years to see what has given you the best results. In addition to this, you also want to assess what is working for other realtors in your area. Talk to your fellow realtors and either ask them directly or observe their practices by participating with their marketing activities.
Once you’ve determined which activity will help you get the best results, it’s time to figure out the steps you need to take in order to get the best results. For instance, if you zero in on email marketing and building an email list to achieve your goal of getting 15 clients for 2022, how exactly will you go about it?
Here’s one way.
- Let’s say on an average, your emails have a 2.5% conversion rate for follow ups, you will then need at least 600 people to show an active interest in your real estate services in order to get 15 qualified clients.
- Now given that the clickthrough rate (the number of people who click on the link in your emails) is around 10%, you will need around 6000 people to click on the link in your email in order for you to get to 600 qualified leads.
- But in order to get 6,000 clicks, how many signups will you need? Let’s say your email open rates are 20%, you’ll need 30,000 sign-ups in a year and 2,500 sign-ups every month on an average to acquire 6,000 clicks.
Now that we’ve determined that we need 2,500 new sign-ups every month, you need to determine how to acquire these sign-ups. Again, here there are multiple ways to go about it and you want to pick the method that will give you the best ROI.
Note: The figures we’ve given above are only to help you get an idea of how you can work backwards to achieve your business goals.
For more accurate and realistic figures, look at the conversion, click-through, and open rates from your previous years. And if you’re just starting out or need a benchmark, check out Mailchimp’s article and prospecting conversion rates here.
Step 3: Determine platforms & methods for real estate marketing plan
Now that you understand what steps you need to achieve your goals, you need to determine what is the best possible way to go about it. This is where your choice of platform and your preferred method comes into play.
Continuing with the email list example from above, there are several ways to achieve your goal of getting 2,500 sign ups per month. Let’s take a look:
- Let’s say you want to acquire these 2,500 sign-ups only through your website. If your average website conversion rates are 1%, you need 25,000 visitors a month and 833 visitors a day.
This will mean you will need to focus on improving your SEO to a point that you are able to organically get over 800 visitors a day or you’ll have to run ads to drive a similar conversion to your website.
- On the other hand if you want to acquire 50% of prospects through social media channels and the remaining through your website, you’ll need half of your prospects to come through social media channels. Let’s say your social media click through rate is 10%, this means you’ll need around 4160 social media views to get around 416 visitors to your website this way.
This will mean you will need to create a social media posting schedule as well as run social media ads in order to achieve these numbers.
But how do you exactly determine which route you should take? In addition to looking at your own past numbers, you will also need to look at the following factors in order to determine the best course of action:
1. Identify the platform your target audience is on
Create audience segments based on factors like age, income, etc. Then, use the audience insights on your social media platforms to help you identify which segment uses a specific platform. For instance, if you’re targeting millennials, you’re more likely to find them on Instagram than any other platform. This means that you will need to create content for Instagram in order to target them.
2. Research competitors
While creating a marketing plan for real estate business, check out which platforms your competitors are using, the type of content they’re posting, and the overall engagement they’re receiving to see what works for them. If you find that a competitor is finding a lot of success by using social media videos, then you will want to explore that option.
Pro tip: you can create stunning social media videos for your real estate business using InVideo’s real estate video maker.
3. Consider available resources
Growing on any platform takes time and you need to put in consistent efforts to reap the benefits. So before you put your fingers in multiple pies, determine if you have the financial resources and the time to do so.
If you’ve got a dedicated team working on your social media and SEO round the clock, you can devote yourself to multiple channels. But if you’ve got only limited resources, take a look at previous years’ reports and choose 2-3 channels that gave you the highest returns.
If you want a complete digital marketing strategy for your real estate business, check out this article here.
4. Organic vs paid methods
Both organic and paid channels have their own pros and cons. Organic marketing helps you build trust and authority so more people can sign up to your email list. However, it takes a long time to show results. On the other hand, paid advertising can definitely help you get results quicker, but it means increasing your spending.
Ideally, you want to have a mix of both paid and organic methods to achieve your goal.
Step 4: Create Measurable Tasks For Each Platform & Get To Work
So, you’ve defined your marketing goals and decided which platform to focus your effort on. Now, you need to break down your real estate marketing plan into daily activities to meet your goals.
For instance, if you want to grow your email list by driving your Instagram audience to sign up for your newsletter, here’s a potential list of tasks you will need to undertake:
1. Decide the frequency of posts based on the number of views you get every week. For example, if each of your posts get 4,200 views a day, you must increase the frequency of posting to twice a day to get approximately 8,400 views on your post and hit the daily target of getting 833 signups every day.
But if you’re already using other channels and need social media to achieve only 50% of the goal, you must post once a day to get 416 signups, according to the above calculation.
2. Determine the best format of posts and start creating content around that: Let’s say Instagram videos get you the maximum engagement and conversion, then you need to focus on videos as your primary format while also creating and posting content occasionally in other formats such as images and carousels.
Pro tip: If you’re planning to create Instagram videos for your real estate business, InVideo offers hundreds of customizable templates that will make this task a breeze.
3. Create a content calendar and schedule your posts: Once you have an idea of what posts you want to create, put your ideas on a content calendar so you can stay consistent with creating and posting. You can use a software like Buffer to schedule your posts so that they continue to get uploaded while you focus on the rest of your work.
Source: Building Better Agents
Step 5: Review Your Progress Periodically
Marketing isn't a one-off activity that'll consistently give you the same results as trends and competition continue to evolve. So, you must review your plan periodically and make necessary changes if you want to stay ahead of the curve and achieve consistent growth.
When you’re creating, let’s say, a marketing plan for a real estate company, you’re working on the basis of estimates and these might not always be 100% accurate. Therefore, you need to analyze results periodically to see which activity is giving you returns and which one needs tweaking.
For instance, let’s say you started pushing out content on Instagram and also doubled down on SEO for your real estate website to drive signups. After a 3 month period when you review, you realize that Instagram content is not driving as much traffic and conversions as you had previously estimated. This will mean you either need to tweak your content on Instagram or you need to focus your efforts on another platform that might give you higher returns.
Here are 3 steps you can follow to review your real estate marketing plan
1. Check your Return On Investment (ROI)
ROI is the amount of money and time spent on an activity vs the results it helps you achieve. For instance, if you spend 4 hours a day and several thousand dollars a year on email marketing but it doesn’t end up converting into enough paying clients, it doesn’t offer a good ROI.
Now, while ROI is a monetary term, your investments aren’t always simply in terms of money but also in terms of the time, effort and resources you put into something. So you need to consider those too while making a decision.
2. Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Key Performance Indicators are metrics that gauge the effectiveness of your marketing plan over a period. For instance, the number of sign ups you get for your email list from your Instagram story is a KPI.
These are more easily trackable and together help you determine your ROI. In short, KPIs are incredibly useful in gauging short-term performance, while ROI tells you how well you did in the long term.
Although this sounds simple, most realtors track the wrong KPI in a rush to prove that their marketing dollars are having an impact. And the best way to avoid such rookie mistakes and define the right KPI is to determine the desired outcomes, why it will matter, and how you’ll influence it.
In our case, the desired outcome is to get 6,000 clicks from the emails we send out to our potential real estate clients. So in order to understand which type of emails are getting us more clicks, we will need to understand KPIs such as open rates, conversion rates and click-through rates to know what’s working and what’s not.
In our case, the desired outcome is to get 6,000 clicks from the emails we send out to our potential real estate clients. So in order to understand which type of emails are getting us more clicks, we will need to understand KPIs such as open rates, conversion rates and click-through rates to know what’s working and what’s not.
Note: If you want to learn more about the right KPIs for real estate, check out this guide.
3. Update Your Real Estate Marketing Plan
Tracking KPIs and ROI will give you a clear idea of what’s working and what isn’t. So, make changes to your marketing activities, milestones, budgets, metrics, etc., in this phase and start implementing them.
For example, if you’re getting more signups and revenue from Facebook ads when compared to Google Ads, you might want to invest more on FB ads to see better results.
To summarize this entire article, here’s a template we’ve created that you can download and use while charting out your own real estate marketing plan:
To summarize this entire article, here’s a template we’ve created that you can download and use while charting out your own real estate marketing plan:
Summing Up
Now that you know the importance of a good real estate marketing plan and the steps you must follow to create one, all you’ve got to do is implement them and start seeing results!
You can also read our definitive guide on Evergreen Real Estate Marketing Ideas if you want to learn further how you can execute your real estate marketing plan successfully.
If you’re serious about marketing for real estate agents - you can’t ignore video ads. You can sign up for a free account on InVideo where you can create stunning video ads in less than 10 minutes by leveraging 5000+ ready-to-use templates.
And if you want to excel at video marketing, you definitely should check out our YouTube channel, where we share daily video creation tips and tricks, the latest video trends and ideas that help you get more leads via video.
This post was written by Mrignayni and edited by Adete from Team InVideo
