How to write a marketing plan for a small estate agency

Your small estate agency relies on your ability to attract new customers, so marketing should be a priority for you. Without a plan, you could make it more difficult for yourself to get the word out. A marketing plan solves this issue by giving you everything you need to create a strategy for the campaign.

There are a few questions your marketing plan for a real estate business needs to answer:

• What position is your business in at the moment?
• Who would you like to target?
• What are your measurable goals?
• How are you going to reach them?
• What is your budget going to be?

Knowing your current situation will help you make the right moves in your marketing. A SWOT analysis encourages you to think about different aspects of your business, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Your strengths will be the reason that customers would want to come to you. So think about what is unique about your real estate agency and what you have to offer that is worth shouting about in your marketing.

Every business will have weaknesses, but knowing yours puts you in a perfect position to overcome them. Think about the areas of your business that are currently struggling. Your marketing may want to avoid highlighting them.

Thinking about your potential opportunities is especially important for marketing. What new things could you try to improve your business? For example, discover ways of showing off houses that your competitors haven’t considered, like virtual reality viewings.

Doing some market research on your competition may help you find threats to your business. An example could be that another agency is launching a contest to bring in more customers. Think about how you could plan to overcome those challenges if they happen.

There are two ways to give yourself a good understanding of who to target – market research and customer profiles.

There is over one way to carry out research, but having a purpose is critical. Your aim is to understand the groups of people your business is most likely to appeal to. 

Perhaps conduct first-hand research through interviews or surveys. Or try a second-hand approach by finding out who your competitors target. Your research should help you build a picture of who your ideal customer will be. 

After carrying out research, imagine your ideal customer so that you can tailor your marketing plan towards them. Creating a customer profile is a straightforward way to do this.

Put together a hypothetical person. You can give this person a name, age, gender, location, occupation and interests. Imagine what their lifestyle would be like. Knowing their priorities and what their lives would involve provides insight into how to market towards them.

Your marketing plan needs to have specific goals that are realistic and measurable. They should have a time frame so you can look back and see if they were achieved.

If you have a specific number of things to aim for, it lets you find the best way of reaching those targets. You might set goals around increasing the number of followers your business has on a social network or how many contacts you have in an email list, for example.

Knowing the strengths and opportunities, combined with an insight into your audience should mean you have set the right goals. Achieving them means coming up with ideas for what marketing tactics to use and what the message will be. Tactics can include the channels for your campaign.

Perhaps if you want to build your business online, you would like to put on a giveaway and share it over social media. If your plans are informed by your goals, you will be able to look back on them in future and decide if they provided you with a return on investment (ROI).

Return on investment means that your spending on marketing activities was financially beneficial for the business. An example would be the X amount spending on Facebook marketing led to X amount of new followers.

Every activity you decide to carry out is likely to have a cost. Knowing how much is expected to spend on each activity will require more research. For example, suppose you are looking for a social media campaign from a digital marketing agency. In that case, you can ask for a quote. 

Setting the budget should follow your strategy for what you want to do. Having both your planning and budgeting based around the potential return on investment is a wise decision to avoid any likelihood of unnecessary spending. By putting a timeline in the plan to follow for your budget, you can help you check how well you sticking to it. A campaign could last weeks, months or even years. Having a set frame means that you can change course if needed.

Before you start marketing your business, you want to make sure that you have a separate business account for the spending and monitor it in an accessible way. Thousands of small business owners use the Countingup app to make their financial admin easier. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, you can monitor your marketing spending throughout your campaigns. Cash flow insights also provide you with the ability to start planning your next ones. Through this one app, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

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