A Marketing Strategy for Your Real Estate Agency

The property market is changing again. There are many more younger clients, and for them the image and size of a company matter less than the people behind it.

More and more agents and agency owners see that they need marketing to win clients.

How do you win clients today? Cold calls plus waiting for referrals? On our blog you'll learn how to use more modern and more predictable methods.

But before you do anything, you need a marketing strategy.

Planning and running your marketing isn't only a way to sell more. It also builds lasting relationships with clients and gives you an edge over the competition.

In this article I'll show you how to plan the growth of your agency using marketing.

What is a marketing strategy?

First, a short introduction to what a marketing strategy actually is.

A strategy is simply a concrete plan of action. It covers the most important elements, such as the goal of your marketing, a clearly defined audience and the way you communicate with it. We'll go through each of them below.

Most agencies I meet already do some marketing. They run ads or post on a company Facebook page, but very few have planned their next steps. They haven't defined their audience either, and they don't know where to find it.

For marketing to work, you have to do more. It's like selling a home: you can put the listing on one portal and wait for something to happen. Or you can use several portals, social media, the MLS and your own database of clients.

Let's get straight to building the strategy for your agency.

How to build a marketing strategy, step by step

Set your goal

To market effectively, you first need a clear goal. Before you start, take the time to set the direction that will guide all your communication. Without a clear goal it's much harder to stick to the plan. You'll lose motivation quickly and start looking for new tricks.

Your goal depends on how your agency works. A local office that handles only commercial property in one city will have a very different goal from a franchise that operates across a whole country.

At this stage you should have a vision of where you want your business to go.

Example goals you could set:

• win 100 new clients in the next 6 months,
• gain 2,000 relevant followers in 6 months,
• increase enquiries from social media by 60% in 3 months.

These are only examples to make the idea easier to picture. Make sure your goals are clear and, above all, measurable, so you can check your progress regularly. Break six-month or yearly goals into quarterly or monthly ones, so you can correct your course much faster.

Define your target audience

The next step is to define your target audience: the people who will be the main buyers of your services. You can't write one message that speaks to both 20-year-olds and 70-year-olds.

Start by describing the person who has most often been your client. Write down their age, gender, family situation, job, and their goals and needs around property.

If one group clearly dominates among the people who contact your agency, that's a sign you already communicate well with them. There's no need to change a winning team.

This is also where you look for the channels that reach your audience. Once you know their age and interests, choosing the right medium gets much easier. If your sellers are mostly over 60, you can be fairly sure you won't find many of them on TikTok.

If you work with premium clients, look for them mainly on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube. Younger clients aged 25 to 35 buying their first home are often on Instagram.

As you can see, describing your audience in detail shapes all your communication. Some audiences prefer to read, others prefer video.

It's slow work, but you can't skip it.

Define your unique value proposition

You know where you're going. You know who you want to sell your services to. Now let's create the value that sets you apart from the competition.

The number of agencies grows every year, and they all say much the same thing about themselves: an individual approach, high-quality service and so on.

If you want to be better and become the first choice, you have to stand out.

To do that, look at what your competitors offer and find out what your clients expect. You can simply ask them after a deal: "What made you decide to work with our agency?" Their answer is your starting point for a unique value proposition.

For example, your value proposition could sound like this:

• We help owners get a better price for their home by preparing it properly for sale and marketing it widely on the portals and on social media.

Can you see the difference?

Plan your communication

Now we get ready to talk to potential clients.

If until now your communication has mostly been cold calls, it's time to change that.

Social media is the perfect tool for building and keeping relationships with your audience. Not everyone has to become a client right now, but being active on Instagram, Facebook or YouTube is the first step to bringing them closer. Don't focus only on selling. Share your experience, show what you know and take people behind the scenes of your work. Everything you'd do in a listing appointment.

People work with people. This kind of content shortens the distance between someone who doesn't know you and someone who'd happily meet you for coffee.

Social media is one place. A newsletter is another. I know what you're thinking: "We're supposed to write emails? Nobody does that."

That's exactly why you can do it and stand out easily. It's one more way for people to remember you.

Make sure everything you share brings value to the client and isn't just a boast like "sold in 14 days". The rule is simple: if someone doesn't want to be your client, they won't be. But people who are undecided will make up their minds faster once they see what you know.

Set your budget

We're nearly at the end, so let's talk about money.

Your budget has to fit both your goal and the size of your agency. I'd suggest setting it as a share of revenue rather than a fixed amount, for example 10% of last month's revenue.

You'll see the best results after a few months, once your brand is more visible. That doesn't mean the money you spend early on won't come back.

Paid ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google can bring you a steady flow of enquiries from people who want to work with you. How many of them will sign with you? Often you need only one or two deals for the spend to pay for itself.

Advertising will certainly be the most expensive option, but it will also bring the fastest results. And that's what you're after, isn't it?

Plan how you'll measure results

The last step is a plan for monitoring and analysing the results of your marketing. That means checking regularly how your marketing affects sales and client relationships, drawing conclusions and adjusting the strategy when needed. Sales reports, client satisfaction surveys and similar tools all help here.

Remember that marketing needs time. Don't change your strategy every few days.

Summary

To sum up, a marketing strategy is a plan of action that helps you reach your business goals. A good strategy helps you sell more, build relationships with clients and stand out in your market. Go through it step by step and don't skip anything, even if some of it seems obvious.

If you'd like to know more about building a marketing strategy for your agency, book a free strategy call.

I'll show you how we can make you more visible online and bring you more enquiries from clients who want to work with you.

See you there.