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Establishing a Marketing Plan for Your Real Estate Business

Before you can really take advantage of all the great (and often free) real estate marketing options available to you, you need to set a few goals and ground rules. Establishing a marketing plan for your real estate business is the first step toward achieving your marketing goals, attracting new clients and finding more leads.

Read on for 8 steps you can take to establish your real estate marketing plan.

1. Name your business objective. Think of this like a mission statement. In one to two sentences, what are you, as a real estate professional, trying to achieve, and why?

2. Name your goals. Your business objective or mission statement covers your entire business and will likely remain stable for years. But you should have individual objectives and goals on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. To achieve them, you’ll need many action plans. Stay true to your wider business objective and maintain branding consistency. But don’t be scared to set big goals

3. Name your target market. Be specific here – who are the ideal home buyers and sellers for you? What areas and locations do you serve? Commercial or residential? You don’t have to focus on only one type or area, but the better you know your individual client types, the better you’ll be able to target your marketing strategies.

4. Name your USP. USP = Unique Selling Proposition. This can be difficult to pinpoint, but it’s crucial. What can do you offer or provide that others don’t? What sets you apart from the rest? If you can answer that question succinctly, you are light years ahead of the majority of your competitors.

5. Name your competition. Speaking of competitors, knowing who they are, how they operate and their USPs is a major piece of marketing strategy puzzle. There are A LOT of real estate agents out there. Why should a home seller choose you to list their property? Be sure you understand what you’re up against, and go back to your USP. Sometimes, it’s as simple as attitude and attentiveness.

6. Set your budget. How much money do you have to spend on marketing? This figure will help you to choose the best avenues for promotion and lead generation. Many online marketing tools are inexpensive or free. Investing in a quality agent website and individual property websites are costs that are no brainers – so much of your strategy will come back to having these things in place.

7. Write your To Do list. Now that you have established some markers, you’re ready to get started. Begin with a detailed action plan, step-by-step, and start ticking things off as you go. This is a great way to make a big job feel more manageable, and to make sure you don’t forget anything important. Include short- and long-term objectives. Refer back to your mission statement and your individual goals.

8. Ask and answer this question: “Did it work?” You need to be able to measure the success of each of your marketing attempts. If you set clear objectives and KPIs, this is easy to do. Familiarize yourself with conversion rates where applicable, website analytics, social media metrics, leads, etc. When things work, do them again. When they don’t, consider it a great learning experience. Either do it better or differently or try something else entirely.

Measuring the Success of Your Social Media Efforts

Before you can accurately and effectively track the success or failure of your social media efforts, you have to start by knowing your objectives. What is it you hope to achieve by putting your real estate brand on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, a blog, YouTube and the like? To measure success, you need a goal. Measuring the success of your social media efforts is crucial. After all, free isn’t free if you’re wasting your valuable time.

Are you looking to increase traffic or something more specific? It’s a good idea to establish what a conversion is – is it a phone call, an email, a referral? Is it a new client? A home sale? Measuring your results takes understanding what it is you’re trying to measure.

Quantifying online connections is the easy part, but it’s only the first step. How that engagement affects your ability to generate leads is what ultimately matters. Internet driven marketing provides real opportunities for understanding, tweaking and perfecting your real estate brand marketing strategy. Social media provides the platform – for marketing and advertising, as well as customer service and retention.

Two of Your Best Friends are Free

When it comes to tracking and measuring the impact social media has on your bottom line, two of the best tools in your belt are free – Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.

Google is constantly tweaking and perfecting its social tracking tools, and you will find increasingly great ways of measuring your social media KPIs through Google Analytics. The Social Traffic Report will expose how traffic coming in from different social media sites are converting along the lines of average time on site, page views, and goal or ecommerce conversions.

Google’s URL Builder can help you identify which social media interactions generate the most traffic. You can also measure the impact of social media on your site’s SEO by correlating social media referral traffic with changes in the volume and quality of organic search traffic. This valuable insight can help you make significant adjustments to you content and strategy.

The internal suite of analytics tools offered by Facebook will help you better understand who “Likes” your brand and how they engage with it. You can access a breakdown of user and geographic demographics to see, at a glance, if you’re reaching your target market.

Returning to Google for a moment, setting up Google Alerts can be a great way to see if anyone else picked up your post or promotion. It can also introduce you to competition you weren’t aware of, which is always useful.