Did you know that nearly 90% of people are now turning to the internet for real estate related inquiries? Therefore, if you haven’t implemented an effective online real estate marketing plan that generates high volumes of qualified leads on a consistent basis, then we need your full attention.
The next 3-5 minutes could change the future of your real estate business for the better, but there is a huge catch. In order for you to succeed, you must have a teachable mind and a willingness to learn.
Every day, more and more professionals are learning the principles necessary to create a marketing plan for real estate that helps them to build a stronger online presence. Consequently, you must discover how to stand above the crowd if you ever want to obtain worthwhile results.
Based on our own experience of working with thousands of other real estate professionals across the nation, we have discovered several key components that a sample real estate marketing plan must include to truly succeed.
Should you choose to learn and follow each piece properly, this can certainly place you in the top 3-5% of real estate online marketers. These elements are outlined below:
Real Estate Marketing Plan 4 Step Process
- Identify a Niche Focus
- Build a Lead Capture Point That Offers & Delivers “Something of Value.”
- Drive Traffic to Capture Points
- Incubate With Content
Real Estate Marketing Plans – Step 1: Identifying A Niche
Be sure you take your time to fully evaluate what your first chosen niche will be, because this is the cornerstone to your Realtor marketing plan. There are various pieces that need to be considered as you are researching which market to focus on.
First of all, we must emphasize the importance of choosing a niche that you are truly interested in. Too many times we have seen agents, brokers, and other internet marketing professionals choose a topic that they know very little about. Or even if they are knowledgeable, they could give a rip less about the content.
When create a marketing plan for real estate, instead of trying to find the area that will provide the most traffic and best exposure first, your primary goal should be to pick 2 or 3 niche markets that you absolutely love and could talk about for hours.
More important than anything else is to provide user driven content. Therefore, serve your audience with quality and useful information, and they will love you for it. This builds trust long term, and you won’t have to play any games trying to fool the search engines.
Once you’ve highlighted what your passions and skill sets are, now it’s time to start focusing on the numbers. Of course, you may love working with first time home buyers or 50+ retirement communities. However, unless you actually have the online audience to market to, it may not be worth your efforts.
That is why it’s important to choose a few niches that you enjoy first, so that you can weigh which type of real estate marketing plans will offer the best ROI. To discover monthly searches on specific keywords related to your niche, we will go to Google’s keyword tool for more inspiration.
Sample Real Estate Marketing Plan – Step 2: Build a Lead Capture Point That Offers & Delivers “Something of Value.”
Now that you have your chosen area of focus, we will transition into building a lead capture page that will provide your visitors with high quality content, which will entice them to provide you with their contact information. Each real estate marketing plan template must be within plain view for your visitors, such as the top right hand corner and the bottom of most pages.
Remember, we’re not trying to trick people into giving you their email or phone number. From the time that they visit your page to the point that they leave, you want to always exceed their expectations. This should be your ongoing trend throughout the entire cycle. Build a relationship by proving that you are worthy of their trust.
The options are nearly endless for the types of offers that you can provide for your prospects. Some of these Realtor marketing plan ideas may include:
- The foreclosure deal of the week
- Free reports pertaining to your market
- One hour webinar on how to stage your home for sale
- Property tours and helpful information on the local market
And this sample real estate marketing plan goes on and on. Use your imagination and put together your “something of value” that can make you stand above your competitors. See what everyone else is trying and do the opposite. To research this just “Google” other local offices and find out what they are providing for their audience (if anything at all).
Real Estate Marketing Plan Template – Step 3: Drive Traffic to Capture Points
Great, so you have your niche and offer ready, but how exactly are you going to get traffic to those pages? Although we could spend hours writing a post on this alone, we’re going to provide a list of the top 3 sources we have used for our own marketing plan for real estate with a quick synopsis of each:
- Craigslist—This is by far one of the best and cheapest ways to get traffic to your sites. However, you need to know how to stand above the crowd to make this work. It is important that you create postings that will draw your audience to your capture page by providing a picture or video link to that site. This can be accomplished using some html code. Simply type in “html picture link” into Google and this will walk you through the process. Also use killer titles and ad copy and post a couple listings throughout the day to make yourself stand far above the crowd.
- Facebook Ads—Though this is a paid resource, our clients have attracted a huge amount of leads just by adding this piece to their real estate marketing plans. These are typically cheaper than Google ads, and there are some pretty powerful ways to tailor your messages to a specific audience. We simply love the response we get from Facebook!
- Social Media & Web 2.0—This encompasses everything from networking on Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn to creating content for Youtube, article directories and web 2.0 blogs. There are countless ways to submit free information that can be built around your chosen keywords. Over time you will build a strong online presence and each little drip will add up to a huge amount of traffic for your Realtor marketing plan.
Real Estate Marketing Plans – Step 4: Incubate With Content
As referenced in Step 1, this is what will separate novices from serious marketers. As you begin to build up your list of prospects following the first 3 steps, you will want to continue to offer high quality content in order to achieve “top of mind status.” In fact, this may be the most important piece to this sample real estate marketing plan.
Based on the constant barrage of information on the internet today, this can only be achieved by blogging or posting new content every other day or so that is relevant to your chosen niche. This will show prospects that you are human and will draw them back to your site every time you email updates to your list.
That way, when your leads are ready to buy or sell, you will be the first person they contact. So create a Realtor marketing plan of action by jotting down ideas that you can blog about on a consistent basis. This can be anything from posts, to videos or even property search results.
Be sure to also include information from other sources and authority sites so that you offer quality content and not just self serving links. This will pay off big in the long run. If you choose to follow this step along, you will easily be separating yourself into the top 5% of real estate marketers.
