In real estate, there is an unspoken rule of thumb that 10 percent of your budget be allocated for marketing. Today’s real estate professional needs a plan and strategy around how to best put that money to work for your business. The myriad of traditional and digital marketing tools available can be perplexing to understand and strategically organize including high end websites, popular social media channels, local newspaper advertising, branded giveaways, partnerships and sponsorships, public relations campaigns, search engine optimization and more.
In choosing how to invest your marketing budget, you must plan a strategy that supports the objectives of your overall business plan. Here are three straightforward tips all real estate professionals should think about:
1) Make sure the business plan includes a well-defined mission statement. This should typically answer a few key questions:
• What kind of real estate do you sell or want to sell?
• Who are your customers? Residential buyers or sellers? Commercial buyers? Investors?
• Where is your business focused? Where do you want it to focus?
• What do you offer customers that they won’t find elsewhere?
2) Your mission statement can define the direction for your marketing plan. What, where and how you sell tells you plenty about whom you need to be targeting in which markets.
Marketing involves paid, earned, owned and shared media, like a television commercial, a newspaper article, a company website or a client’s photograph of a house posted on Facebook. Understanding the target audience of your geographic market will help determine how to use which mix of media in each market.
Read the last tip for incorporating your marketing strategy into the your business plans in our latest Clean Slate post, “It’s “Write a Business Plan” Month: How to Include Your Marketing Strategy.”
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