4 ways to supercharge your real estate marketing

As a business owner, it’s important to keep customers coming in the door – new and recurring. Marketing can help you to stay top-of-mind and relevant even when your customers don’t need you right that minute. Here are 4 steps you can take to market yourself better.

1. Consistency is key

Your goal should be to create a consistent experience with your marketing. Customers should know what they can expect from you and be able to recognize your branding in a crowd. This helps you come across as more professional and more reliable. There are two separate factors here:

a. Tone of voice and aesthetic

Everything that goes out under your business name should have the same tone of voice and aesthetic. Since your clients are working directly with you, your brand voice should be similar to your personal voice — not exactly the same, of course, but if you’re a fun, witty person, that should come across in your branding.

For visual help, ColourLovers is a great place to browse palettes, and MOO’s online design tools make it super easy to have consistent branding, even if you’re doing it all yourself at the moment. Getting professional help with your branding is a great goal, but there’s no need to look unprofessional until you hit that point.

Also, make sure that your tone of voice and your aesthetic also match each other. If your brand voice is light and fun, your visual branding should have bright colors and fun accents, not Times New Roman and dark colors.

b. Marketing schedule

The other side of consistency is how often you’re sending or posting updates. Sticking to a regular schedule tells your clients that you’re reliable and also keeps you top of mind for potential customers.

On the other hand, if you post three times in one month and then once in the following two months, that doesn’t necessarily reassure would-be clients who are checking out your social presence before they give you a call.

2. Find your niche

There are plenty of other realtors out there that your clients could go with, so you need to find your niche — that special thing that makes you stand out — and stick with it. Your niche could be:

• The way you do business (fun and down to earth, instead of stodgy and professional)
• The kinds of clients you target (young clients without any children, or empty nesters looking to downsize)
• The types of property you specialize in (condos instead of houses, or focusing on properties in a specific part of town)

Whatever it is that you choose as your niche, you want to highlight your experience in that specific area. For more about getting real estate customers by showcasing your expertise, head to our post about the best way to get real estate customers.

3. Offline vs. online

Offline and online marketing both have their strengths — and their weaknesses. You should aim to balance them both, so that you’re getting the best blend of those strengths and weaknesses in your business.

As someone who is working largely with local clients, offline marketing should play a strong part in your business. Examples of offline marketing would be networking events, direct mail, or putting flyers up locally. It’s great for making a personal connection very quickly, especially if you’re actually out meeting potential clients, but it doesn’t scale as well as online marketing does.

Kickstart your offline marketing with Flyers. Partner up with local service providers or mortgage companies and ask them to hand out flyers, or ask previous clients to share them in the community for you. You could also make custom flyers for each neighborhood you work in and place them in local coffee shops.

On the other hand, online marketing is becoming more and more important as Google becomes the first place people look to find anything. This kind of marketing scales very well and often gets more returns over time.

For example, blogging is one of the more common forms of online marketing. You can post something on your blog once, work on the SEO for your site, and have that blog post rank on the front page of Google for years to come, getting you more clients over time.

Online marketing’s great for reach, but when it comes to making a personal, one-to-one connection, you can’t beat a real, offline encounter.

4. Be helpful first

It’s a common mistake to always focus on getting the sale — that’s what marketing is all about, right? But especially over the last decade or so, marketing in all industries has taken more of a customer-service focus. Rather than doing a hard-sell, it’s often better to be as helpful as possible to new customers (and your average person, who might refer customers to you).

This is also a great thing to keep in mind if you start blogging or when you’re writing social media updates: is this helpful content? If someone can get a useful take-away from it, whether they’re your client or not, then it passes the test and it’s great marketing.

Scale up your offline marketing with flyers