Recently, Brandon and I were elected to chair the marketing committee at Keller Williams. The company model doesn’t include a marketing “budget” for the office. Marketing is the sole responsibility of the agents within the office to orchestrate and execute.
Despite that, agents all agree when they sign on to have $50 taken out of every closing to pay for office marketing. A decent model when listings are selling. However… when the market comes to a screeching halt and sales dip, the marketing budget dips too! We were running an ad that cost nearly $5000/month largely paid for by individual agents that wanted their listings showcased in color in the Sunday classified section once/month.So… here’s what happened! We got “elected” to the committee at the end of January. The first meeting we were able to pull together was the first week of March. In the interim, prior to having our first meeting and even recruiting our committee, we immediately slashed the ad! The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results! This is absolutely true when it comes to marketing!
Next, we got our committee together to brainstorm! It was time to figure something out – FAST!
We talked about the past ad (costs, effectiveness, budget, etc.). Then we all brought up ideas that we’d seen, tested, or heard about. This went on for about an hour and some great real estate marketing ideas came up; things that you might not ordinarily think of and some things that we had to kind of wrap our minds around and figure out HOW to make them work!
Some of the ideas that came about (and how you can use them in your real estate marketing for your investing business) were:
Long story short… we brainstormed for about an hour and came up with dozens of ideas AND deliverables for each person on the committee. You can do the same with your own “real estate marketing committee”. Set one up by finding other investors and splitting the marketing costs.
Next… we got together with local print media reps and priced out different options in the publications. We spent a good amount of time determing “where” our market was coming FROM. We concluded that in West Palm Beach, the majority of people moving into the median price homes wer coming from Ft. Lauderdale and Miami. So, it made logical sense to price those publications…
We had another brainstorm session with the marketing rep from the Ft. Lauderdale newspaper.
When the dust settled, my mind went to work. There are some fundamental questions you must ask yourself – and find the answers to – when developing and evaluating your marketing strategy and determining the best tactics.
- What is the desired result?
Are you looking to capture buyer leads? Are you looking to find motivate sellers? Are you trying to build your private investor pool? etc… If you don’t know where you are going, how do ever expect to get there?
- How much will it cost?
Once you know what you want your real estate marketing to accomplish, you need to set a budget. It will cost you time and money. How much of either is dependent on the strategy and how creative you are at leveraging yourself and others!
- How can I do this for little/none of my own money?
This is the single most important question you always need to ask yourself in real estate marketing; any marketing for that matter… This will force you to get creative, think outside of the box and ultimately come up with the very best options! You can expand this question to how can I do this for little/none of my own time? Ideally, you can generate the idea and someone else will do the legwork to make it happen for free! But unfortunately this is probably idealistic and you’ll have to invest some of your own money or some of your own time; at least early on in your real estate marketing.
So I started trying to figure out how we could be different from the other real estate ads (keep in mind, our primary competition is other Realtors and other real estate brokerages). Our goal is to capture leads and showcase listings for our sellers. The cost for a 2 page spread in the real estate section (tabloid size) was $1280 BEFORE negotiations – we’ve not gotten there yet! So… how can we be different and not pay for it?
So the concept is this… the ad will include “6 Steps to Buying A Home…” Each step will be a vendor that will pay between $200 and $225 per 2.5″ X 2.5″ spot. Keller Williams will be free. Then, agents that want to upgrade their listings will pay $20-$25 for a photo and personal contact information. This accomplishes the goal of lead generation for the office, lead generation for the agents, and something unique that every other ad DOESN’T have – the process.
Then… part of the strategy will include articles and press releases on the off weeks. By submitting 1-2 articles/press releases every week, we should have a presence in the publication at least 2-3 times/month. What’s more is that since we are marketing in the county just south of ours (where buyers are coming from!), there are only about 20 companies advertising per month in that paper competing with us. If they each run an ad once/week, that’s 5 Palm Beach major advertisers each week. If we are in the publication 2-3 times/month, then we have 10%-20% on a monthly basis consistently if you calculate in the PR component.
This came out of 2 strategy sessions with a little bit of thought and creativity. Imagine what you can come up with if you just dedicate a small portion of your day to creative thinking/real estate marketing.
In real estate sales, the model is to spend 3 hours/day lead generating. What if we modeled that in the real estate investing world? Think about how much money you could make if you spent 3 hours/day marketing for real estate leads… This could be in the form of brainstorming marketing campaigns, writing direct mail campaigns – and sending them :-), posting bandit signs, etc. That’s 15 hours/week and I can gaurantee that if you TRULY spent 15 hours/week doing only tasks that are directly related to generating leads, you’d have more deals coming through the pipeline than you’d know what to do with. Surely, you’d have a deal a week!
The trick here is actually doing tasks that generate leads! Replying to email… listening to real estate teleseminars… surfing the net… all of these things may seem productive, but they are NOT generating any real estate business. If someone came up to you while you were on task for your real estate lead generation time and asked you, “what is the direct link between what you are doing at this moment and getting an actual real estate lead”. If you’re more than 3 steps away, you’re not lead generating! You’re only fooling yourself!
With that… it’s time for you to stop reading this post and get back to finding real estate deals.