Real Estate Marketing Mastery: The 2021 Definitive Guide
Placester has published a new guide for Real Estate Marketing in 2021 - download it here.
In this new guide, you’ll learn exactly how to use marketing to promote your real estate business, including:
Real estate branding
Offline marketing
Website optimization
SEO
Email marketing
Social media
Listing promotion
Online reputation signals
Blogging, video, and lots more
Who is this for:
You are:
A real estate agent, office manager, managing broker, admin, tech lead, or anyone who is interested in improving the way you market and promote real estate for your business.
Knowledgeable about the process of buying and selling real estate. You’ve worked in real estate, in a brokerage, with other agents, brokers, admins, and assistants, and you are looking for new methods to deepen your marketing skills.
Interested in marketing tactics, tools, and strategies to be more effective generating new business, getting referrals, and staying top-of-mind with the business you have. You are eager to learn more, while recognizing that there are no silver bullets.
You want:
A greater sense of impact and control over your buyer and seller pipeline.
A more focused, less reactive way to promote your business.
To create a system for marketing your business that is less reliant on advertising.
To be super effective supporting others with their marketing.
More options to respond to unpredictable business challenges, while ensuring your efforts are continually building on a strong foundation.
To be strategically driven instead of letting the next shiny object drive you in circles
A shared language and common understanding about marketing goals, strategy, and tactics.
By the end of this guide, you will:
Understand the purpose of a good marketing strategy.
Understand the elements of consistent brand building.
Be able to define and prioritize marketing tactics (and related
activites) to promote your business.
Be able to identify and address common marketing traps.
Be able to collaborate with others on marketing.
Be able to effectively communicate your marketing needs when hiring help
Understand how to consistently improve your marketing
Understand how to measure your marketing success.
Be able to adapt and improve your marketing as circumstances change.
Let’s get started.
Real Estate Marketing Fundamentals
Picture this: In 2018, there were 5.34 million existing homes sold, plus 667,000 newly constructed homes, according to the National Association of Realtors and the US Census Bureau. That’s about 6 million homes sold to new buyers — and there are about 2 million real estate licensees in the country.
When you do the math, even generously including new construction sales, it’s clear that real estate is a cutthroat business, and only the best agents will capture enough clients to survive long-term.
Real estate agents might not immediately understand why marketing is critical to their success — but it is. Marketing is simply the act of sharing goods and services with an audience who might be interested in buying those goods and services; the better you can promote your goods and services to a receptive audience (as opposed to one that’s not interested in what you have to sell), the more successful your business will be.
When done well, marketing highlights the unique value that you bring to the table, showing specific buyers and sellers exactly why you’re the best choice for them. This means you probably won’t be the ideal choice for everyone — marketing means making some tough decisions about who your audience is and how you want to reach them.
Marketing is especially complex for real estate agents because you're selling both services (your ability to help a buyer or seller close a home transaction) and goods (actual homes for sale). As a business-owner, you’re marketing in order to find clients who you can represent in a home sale, and to find qualified buyers who are interested in making an offer on your listings.
This guide will walk you through everything you need to create a marketing strategy for your real estate business, step-by-step.
Here are the first 10 Steps:
Step 1. Develop a value proposition
If you want to be a successful agent, you should not only have unique characteristics that set you apart from the competition, but you should be able to define what those unique features mean to your clients, leads, and community. A short value proposition should exhibit your value and strengths as an agent. This statement will be reused in your marketing materials again and again.
Ask yourself what makes you unique. What do you bring to the table that other agents don’t? Is it your experience? Your personality? Your knowledge of the area? Or something else?
It’s possible that you bring skills from a past career that are invaluable to you as a real estate agent, or that attributes others might label as flaws are actually secret superpowers in your arsenal. For example, maybe working in health care gave you the ability to handle even the most outsized emotions calmly, which might make you an ideal agent for high-stress sales involving divorce or contentious estates. Or maybe your introversion makes you a good listener, which you can emphasize in your value proposition.
Step 2: Identify your target customer
Marketing always works best when its messaging is focused on a specific segment of your overall market. For example, your marketing will need to speak one way to investors and an entirely different way if your target customers are first-time home buyers.
Ideally, there will be something about your target customer that ties into your value proposition. Why does this particular group of customers need your services? What is it about you that makes you a perfect choice for them?
Resist the temptation to make your target customer overly broad. You can’t be everything to everybody, and you’ll be limiting your own voice if you try. You also don’t want to get too specific if that won’t serve you well; there’s no sense in specializing in condo sales if there’s only one condo unit in your town!
Step 3: Develop a strong real estate agent bio and add it to your “about” page.
Now you know who you are, what you do, and for whom you do it — so put it together in a bio that’s clear, easy to read, professionally written, and can be used across all of your professional platforms. When buyers and sellers find your brand online, they should be able to get a strong sense of your professional qualifications and personality.
Step 4: Get a professional headshot.
Your bio isn’t the only thing that can provide consistency and coherence to your brand; you’ll also need to come up with a personal photograph that exudes a friendly demeanor and elevates your brand with a professional look. Hire a professional photographer who can provide tips on positioning and who can make sure the final product is crisp and presentable in a variety of formats.
If you’re low on funds early in your career, you can also opt to take one on your own that looks professional. Here are the basics:
Polish yourself up: Put on makeup and nice, tailored clothing so that you look your best for the picture.
Find your scene: You want a solid-colored background with good light that’s not too harsh.
Use a self-timer or get a friend to take the photo.
Test out different facial expressions and poses.
Cheat: Use a photo of someone or something you love to generate a warm smile if you feel self-conscious.
Step 5: Decide which marketing channels to use.
We’re going to cover a lot in this guide, but not every channel will make sense for every agent or every audience. Traditional marketing might not be the best opportunity if you’re trying to target entry-level buyers in a big city with a large tech scene; in that case, you probably want to think about digital market and social media to really capture that younger, tech-savvy demographic.
It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to find the time to use every platform and optimize every channel effectively, so choose where your time will be used best.
Will you use a website? Will you blog often? Will you use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or another social media option?
Select the marketing channels that make the most sense based on your personality and other skillsets. Start with what will make you feel most comfortable and what you’ll actually do — you can always venture out of your comfort zone later.
Step 6: Prepare your elevator pitch
An elevator pitch is a 30-second pitch to use when talking to new leads — essentially, something you can tell them about who you are and what you do in the time it takes to travel together in an elevator.
If you created a value proposition (above), you can think of a pitch as something very similar. But how things are read on paper doesn’t necessarily translate well to personal interactions.
In your initial conversations with leads, you should be able to make a brief but powerful statement that conveys you’re a knowledgeable agent who knows the market better than anyone. Once you’ve created your pitch, practice it out loud.
Step 7: Infuse your brand with a personal touch
Now that you have an idea of who you want to reach, what you want to say, and how you want to reach them, think about some interesting or quirky ways you can add a personal touch to your business cards, email signatures, social media accounts, website, and other marketing channels that will help identify you and differentiate you.
People like working with other people. If you can give them a glimpse of who you are as a person (include your pet in your branding? share your music obsession in your videos? consistently refer to your favorite sports team in your blog posts?), they’ll be more likely to want to work with you.
Step 8: Have a unique signature item or look.
By the same token, many agents have a distinctive look, whether it’s a color they wear often, a style of dress, a hat, or hairstyle. Develop a positive, distinctive factor for your personal brand that is recognizable and memorable.
Step 9: Get some swag printed with your branding
Brand exposure in your area can help grow your business. Get items like calendars, pens, keychains, and notepads, and have your name, logo, and contact information printed on them to pass out to clients or at local events.
Traditional marketing
By “traditional marketing,” we simply mean marketing pre-internet. For many agents, this is still a quite lucrative and important part of their business, so if it makes sense for your niche and target audience, you may want to consider some or all of the following traditional marketing tactics.
Step 10: Establish partnerships with local area businesses.
Develop relationships with local businesses and request to put your real estate cards or listing information at their desk or bulletin board. Maybe you can keep real estate fliers and brochures at the local pizza place in exchange for always delivering pizza to your buyers on move-in night?
