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Why Do I Need a Real Estate Investors Marketing Plan?
When you make your livelihood in the real estate market, there is one thing you depend on above all others—finding great deals. It doesn’t matter whether you are a wholesaler, flipper, or buy and hold investor; you need a solid real estate investors marketing plan to keep your business up and running. Not just any marketing plan either, but a yearly marketing plan for real estate investors.
To generate consistent, motivated seller leads, you will need a solid annual marketing plan for real estate investors. Generating high-quality leads is easier said than done, though. So if you want to find those leads, or better yet, have those leads start finding you, you will need to master the marketing segment of your business with a yearly marketing plan for real estate investors.
The best marketing plan for real estate investors will increase your lead generation and also help automate your marketing processes. This helps to ensure that your pipeline of motivated seller leads is always flowing.
Perhaps you already have an annual marketing plan for real estate investors. Maybe your current yearly marketing plan for real estate investors isn’t generating enough leads? Perhaps the problem is that you’re not converting enough leads? Maybe you do generate leads but the process of obtaining them is inefficient? Regardless of your current system, let’s explore what a top marketing plan for real estate investors looks like.
What Is A Real Estate Investors Marketing Plan?
To take your yearly marketing plan for real estate investors to the next level, the first thing you will need to do is dial in your strategy. Do you already employ an annual marketing plan for real estate investors? Studies show that over half of all real estate investment businesses don’t utilize any sort of yearly marketing plan.
It is a fact that not all yearly marketing plans for real estate investors are created equal. For example, you could take a successful 12-months marketing plan for real estate investors for one business and apply it to a different one and have completely different results.
As a real estate investor, your marketing plan must be tailored to your specific business/industry. That is why the best marketing plan for real estate investors is a marketing plan written by and developed for real estate investors.
You may find yourself saying, “But I already have a 12-months marketing plan for real estate investors!” after reading the first section of this article. If you do, that’s great! Ask yourself if your current plan outlines these things that other top marketing plans for real estate investors have:
- Does my marketing plan account for the entire year?
- What is the vision for my business?
- Who is my target customer?
- What is my value proposition?
- Does my marketing plan have multiple streams for lead generation?
- Does my marketing plan make my processes more efficient?
If you answered yes to all of these questions, then congratulations! You must already be a pro when it comes to marketing. However, if you answered no to any of the questions, then keep reading to see what you need to do to lock-in your marketing plan for good.
Developing an Annual Marketing Plan for Real Estate Investors
If you don’t have a marketing plan in place already, you may find yourself asking, “What are the components of a 12-months marketing plan for real estate investors?”. Never fear! We’ve put together a guide of some of the most important marketing practices every real estate investor should know.
Below are some of the key ingredients to a strong 12-months marketing plan for real estate investors.
Defining your Vision
What are your short and long-term goals for your business? Developing a vision statement is important to clearly identify the goals you’d like to reach and how. Laying out your vision statement will help you set your sights on the targets you want to hit.
Defining your Target Customer
After you have defined your business goals, the next most important thing is to identify who you will be offering your products and services to. For example, will you be marketing to sellers, renters, first-time home buyers, etc.? Identifying the market segments you’re selling helps paint a clearer picture of who to target with your 12-months marketing plan for real estate investors.
Defining your Value Proposition
One of the biggest obstacles in business is standing out from your competition. Ask yourself what sets your business apart and makes your offerings unique. Here are some questions you can ask yourself when defining your value proposition:
- What can I offer that other businesses can’t?
- How does my product or service provide value to the customer?
- What are the latest pricing, selling, and buying trends in your market?
Ways to Start Generating High-Quality Seller Leads
Once you have set your goals, identified your target customer, and defined the value of your offerings, then you can begin to hunt for potential prospects. There are multiple options for gathering these leads. Below is a list of common lead generation techniques that any great annual marketing plan for real estate investors has:
Direct Mail
Physical mail delivery has been a cornerstone of every real estate business for decades for a reason. The majority of Americans still prefer to receive physical mail, and studies have shown that individuals are more likely to be open-minded about an advertisement sent through the mail than when online.
Build a Website
Most consumers nowadays use the internet to research products and services before buying. Creating a website for your real estate business will help show your prospective clients what products and services you have to offer. Make sure to include your listings on your site and update them regularly so that potential prospects will be encouraged to visit your site regularly as they search for properties.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Once you have built a website, the next step is to optimize it for web searches. Search Engine Optimization refers to the process where you leverage keywords to raise your ranking on search engines like google. The better your ranking, the higher you appear on the list when the key terms are searched. This is a low-cost way to bring in additional leads, but it does require strong SEO knowledge and consistent effort. Don’t know where to start? Check out Motivated Leads.
Optimize your Website for Mobile Formats
This point is pertinent for any business people that maintain websites — and real estate agents are no exception. You want your web experience to be as seamless as possible. Prospects shouldn’t have to deal with a clunky, “desktop condensed onto a phone screen” mobile site when they want to learn more about your business.
Develop an Email Marketing Campaign
Once you have your website dialed in, you can begin to craft an email marketing campaign. These campaigns can be generic for your entire lead database or tailored for specific demographics. For example, you can send a monthly newsletter going over what deals you have closed, new listings for the month, and other content generated for your blog. Make sure to link everything in your email back to your website as well to help drive traffic. You can also send out email blasts anytime a new listing becomes available. When crafting an email campaign, you must craft an appropriate subject line for each email. The subject line is often what determines whether a recipient will open an email or not. Make sure to keep the subject exciting but brief. Subject lines that are long or confusing to read will guarantee your email goes straight into the trash folder.
Get Active on Social Media
Maintaining an active, engaging social media presence is one of the better ways to frame yourself as a trusted advisor for potential prospects, generate interest, and connect with potential clients. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are all platforms where you can share helpful content with your followers.
Digital Advertisements
Social media and other digital advertisements are excellent ways to source high-quality leads. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads are all excellent options to drive your marketing efforts. These platforms allow you to target specific data categories and locations to carve out the specific demographics you are looking for in a potential lead. However, these options do come with a fairly high monthly cost, so it is important to consider your overall marketing budget before placing a big ad buy.
Skip Tracing
The process of skip tracing requires a bit of effort, but is an extremely useful marketing technique. Skip tracing is the practice of digging up key data about a property or lead you have little information on. This includes things like digging up phone numbers, current addresses, names, etc. This method allows you to be very specific with your target market and build a strong lead database.
Ask for referrals
Did you know nearly half of the sellers using a real estate agent found that agent through a referral from friends or family? If you’re not asking for referrals, you should be. The best way to ask for a referral is to follow up with customers a few months after you’ve closed the deal to ask how they’re doing, and include a referral request in your call or email.
Cold Calling
This is by far the most classic technique on this list, and there is a reason it is still around after all these years. Cold calling is a tried and true sales and marketing method. While cold calling is a difficult process requiring a large call volume to generate, it is still a highly successful method.
Managing Data to Convert Leads
Congratulations! You’re now successfully drawing in more leads than you ever have before, thanks to your new multi-channel marketing plan that you’ve implemented. The second phase of any top marketing plan for real estate investors is to manage the leads and close the deals.
Data Management
Collecting mountains of data can be a fantastic thing for a business. However, a company with no way to manage all that data can often find itself drowning in it. The best real estate investment marketers utilize CRM systems (Customer Retention Management). These systems help you sort, classify, and search the data you’ve collected on your leads so you can further tailor your marketing campaigns or craft customer-specific sales strategies.
Failure to manage your data properly can result in two major problems. The first problem is that leads get left behind. When dealing with mountains of data, it is easy for potential prospects to slip through the cracks unless you have a system to manage all of the inflow of data. The second problem is that without an efficient CRM system, you are highly likely to waste time and money trying to handle this data by other methods.
Some real estate investors may not like to discuss data management, but strong data management practices will ultimately yield more deals from the same marketing plan and budget.
Good, clean, well-managed data will allow you to follow up with each lead when it makes the most sense. It will allow you to contact people rather than trusts or LLCs, never waste marketing dollars on incorrect information, and also avoid skip tracing the same list twice.
To determine if your customer leads are being managed properly, ask yourself these questions:
- Do you know which accounts have been contacted?
- Do you know which leads are interested or not interested?
- Do you know when leads entered your marketing lifecycle or how long you’ve been in contact with them?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then your data is broken. You must keep your data clean on the frontend (detailed customer relationship management) as well as on the backend (mailing and cold calling lists). Doing this will help your business efficiency and will ultimately lead to a higher conversion rate among your leads.
Improve Your Marketing As A Real Estate Investor Today
Sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin. To have one without the other is to have an incomplete set. You can be excellent at sales, but without a strong marketing plan, you will struggle to find opportunities to sell. This is why having a real estate investors marketing plan is so important.
When you have a top marketing plan for real estate investors, you will dramatically optimize your business operations. A real estate investors marketing plan will allow you to: generate more leads, identify high-quality prospects, manage information about potential customers, and ultimately close more deals.
