Creating a Marketing Plan for Your Real Estate Business

[Omar Johnson]

As a quick turn real estate entrepreneur one of your highest priorities for growing your business should be marketing. Obviously there is more to the business than just marketing, like negotiating and closing deals, but your marketing efforts are what drive the whole process by providing a steady stream of leads for you to negotiate and turn into deals.

All other things being equal, the strength of your bottom line is proportional to the strength of your marketing, period. Many educators even say that you should consider yourself to be in the marketing business rather than the real estate business, and there is considerable wisdom to this advice.

Getting lots of business is no accident. An effective marketing campaign cannot be begun or sustained without a detailed and goal-oriented plan. There are at least four elements that are crucial to designing a marketing plan with wings that will take your business to new heights of success. They are the target audience, or who you want your marketing to speak to, the marketing message, or what you want your marketing to say, the method of delivery, or how you will say it to them, and your marketing budget.

Without having a clear idea in your mind of who you are marketing to, all of your marketing efforts will be a shot in the dark. Who are your customers or clients? What do they do and what are they like? In quick turn real estate there are two main classifications of customers that are important for your business: sellers and buyers.

Buyers can be further classified into wholesale buyers, who buy professionally, and retail buyers, who buy to have a place to live. Your plan should include a detailed description of the types of individuals you are marketing to, including what their habits are and how to reach them.

Your marketing message should not only get the attention of your target audience, but should also inspire them to take action. Figure out who your customers are, what they are in need of, and how you can provide it. Then let your marketing message tell them how doing business with you can solve their problem, and command them to contact you by phone, fax, email, website, singing telegram, in person, or whatever works best for your business.

Once you know what you want to say and who you want to say it to, you need to know how you are going to say it to them. How will you get in front of your prospects and get their attention? There are many ways of doing this including through email, postal mail, bandit signs, outdoor advertising, business cards, and classified ads, to name just a few of the more common ones. Your plan should include as many methods of delivery as you can consistently handle and track the results of.

Finally your plan should also include a budget that details how much you will spend to implement it over the coming months, preferably all the way out to a year. This could be conceived of as a dollar amount or as a percentage of gross business revenues. However you plan it, you should plan to consistently reinvest profits into marketing and growing your business if you don't want to keep working as hard as you are right now for the rest of your life.

Once you have designed and begun to implement your plan, stick to it until you see results. Use common sense of course, but realize that it takes time for the full effect of a marketing plan to be felt and don't expect results overnight. Allow your advertising time to saturate the market and build up the momentum that will keep your business rolling for a good long time.