5 Important Things to Include in a Real Estate Marketing Budget
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The Value of a Diversified Marketing Budget
Once upon a time, most of the average real estate marketing budget went to print and radio advertising. Times have changed, and that’s no longer the case. While print and radio advertising may still play a role in real estate marketing in certain markets, they’re no longer the mainstays.
Today, most people seek information online or in their inbox. That’s particularly true in the real estate sector, whether the goal is to buy or sell a property or find the right apartment or tenant to fill a rental vacancy. Today, internet-based marketing of one sort or another is essential to the long-term growth and success of any real estate business. The five most powerful marketing strategies, and the ones that should be included in every real estate marketing budget, are an effective website, digital advertising, social media advertising, content marketing, and email marketing.
A Company Website
Having a high-quality website is essential to establishing a strong online presence. This is how potential clients will find your business. It’s the primary source of information about your business and a key way for you to acquire contact information from prospects. When site visitors leave their contact information, any future interactions you have with them will be “warmer” than the typical cold calling situation. Investing in a high-conversion website—one that turns visitors into prospects and ultimately into clients—is critical for any real estate business.
From a budgeting standpoint, think in terms of the initial cost of website design and development and the ongoing costs of maintaining and operating it. Updating it regularly with new content will make your website more visible to search engines. That’s why it’s smart to include a blog where new, relevant articles are posted frequently. Hiring a professional web designer is a worthwhile investment. If you’re not a great writer or lack SEO experience, there are plenty of content developers you can hire to write attention-getting blog posts for your website.
PPC/Digital Ads
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a good way to drive traffic to your company’s website. It’s typically going to bring more visitors to your site than organic searches will.
In PPC advertising, you pay a fee every time someone clicks on one of your ads, which takes the user directly to your website. But the fee is very small compared to what you can make on a deal if that person becomes a client. PPC ads can appear on websites, social media platforms, search engines, and so on.
SEO skills are important to understanding and using PPC advertising. It takes some research to determine which keywords people will likely use in searching for your business’s real estate services. To use those keywords to trigger your PPC ads, you’ll have to bid on them. Most companies that employ PPC advertising do so through a platform like Google Ads.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing uses social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) to build a company’s brand and sell its products or services. The company establishes a social media presence, provides content of interest to potential clients, and attracts followers. With the right messaging and content, some of those followers will visit your website for more information and eventually become clients.
Content Marketing
Allocate some of your marketing budgets to content creation—blogs, newsletters, short videos, guides, and so on—to share on your website or through social media marketing. The idea is to provide helpful and interesting content without being blatantly “salesy.” Content marketing builds your profile and boosts your credibility, which sooner or later translates into sales.
Email Marketing
Email marketing entails setting up automated email campaigns that nurture leads and cultivate potential clients. Sending newsletters, timely announcements of new real estate services, helpful hints, and other information of interest to your contact list reminds potential clients of what you can offer them. Email marketing builds relationships and can lead potential clients to your website or social media pages. You may want to allocate money to the purchase or use of a cloud-based email marketing program to support your efforts.
Get Help with a Property Management Company
Marketing takes time and expertise, two things that not all property owners have access to. But with the right marketing tools and help you can increase your income and gain reliable tenants who love to live in your community and homes. If you don’t have the tools and experience to market your property alone you can reach out to a property management
Here are Palmetto State Properties, we are a full-service real estate brokerage and property management company who post our listings on over 40 platforms, both paid and unpaid, at no additional cost to our owners. Also, we advertise our homes on the MLS, which is available to all 7000 area Realtors and their brokerages.
A third or so of our tenants come from other agencies whose customers are moving to the area and using a real estate agent’s services. We also use popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. We make sure your properties are advertised in more than 40 online real estate directories, such as Zillow, Trulia, Homes.com, Realtor.com, Apartments.com, Zumper.com, etc., and we know how to create appealing listings. Some of our marketing services are displayed here.
Final Thoughts on Your Real Estate Marketing Budget
How much you devote to marketing your business will depend on your annual revenue and goals for growing the company. Anything between 1% and 2% of annual revenue should provide a steady, calculated, and predictable growth rate. But for fledgling businesses with smaller portfolios (and lower yearly revenues) and those who want to grow quickly, 2% to 5% of revenue should be your target range. We find most marketers choose 3%–7% of revenue to keep their existing levels of visibility and recognition. However, over the many years in this industry, we have discovered the property management sector is anything but typical. This could be due to the fact that our margins are less, but our tenant or investor retention rates surpass those of most other industries.
To get the most out of that budget, you may want to hire professionals to execute the marketing tasks you’re not willing or able to handle in-house. One way to do this is by working with Palmetto State Properties, we post our listings on over 40 platforms, both paid and unpaid, at no additional cost to our owners and offer a wide range of support for you to enjoy such as, all necessary maintenance, repairs, inspections, and enhancements every day of the week.
Get in touch today to find out how we can help.
