Real Estate Marketing Plan
To receive the highest possible price when selling your house, you’ll need a solid real estate marketing plan primarily consisting of posting and advertising on the internet. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling the home on your own, or your agent is selling it for you, without an effective and targeted marketing plan, you will be missing out!
Back in the day when it was time to sell a house, marketing on the internet wasn’t really a factor. Some were still placing ads in newspapers and local real estate magazines. Today, things are much different.
Before getting started you should know, to properly market your home takes a good deal of time and effort! It’s hard work, even for a marketing expert who does this everyday! We can assure you, when it’s all said and done, it really is worth it.
First make sure your house is in good repair and looks appealing. For the sake of this article, we’re going to assume you already have an accurate approximation of your home’s value. We’ll also assume the home is ready to sell and you are ready to initiate your real estate marketing plan. Then, if you’re going to the trouble and expense to making your home marketable, you’ll want your real estate listing to be presented to qualified buyers truly interested in buying a home in your area or neighborhood. This can be a bit tricky because when doing paid marketing you want to avoid wasting money on unqualified buyers or those not interested in your geographic area.
Create and Gather Assets for Your Real Estate Marketing Plan
First thing you’ll need to do is start gathering marketing assets. Of course, if you have a realtor, he or she will handle all this for you. In fact, if you have NOT selected your local realtor yet, we’d love to speak with you. If not, you could also use the following as a list of questions to ask any realtors you are considering using. Be sure to ask what assets they would plan to include in your real estate marketing plan.
PRO TIP: We know it’s difficult, but we suggest treating the process of selling your house as if it were a business. Your primary mission is selling your home, fast and for the highest possible price. Try to set your mind to detach yourself from your emotions and depersonalize as much as possible.
The assets for your real estate marketing plan should include, text description, photos, video and such. You’ll use these assets for your property website, social networks, YouTube, uploading to the MLS and other major real estate sites. You will also use the assets for emailing everyone you know.
Suggested List of Assets
- Listing Price – This is not really an asset, but you’ll want to get this right the first time. If you get it wrong, it can hurt because you lose all the FRESH NEW LISTING momentum. Take whatever measures necessary to depersonalize this process and establish a realistic listing price. Do NOT rely on an automatic online home evaluation. If we are representing you, we will handle all of this.
- Property Description – Your real estate marketing plan must include an accurate description of your home, focusing on the most marketable features. This same description will appear everywhere!
- Professional Photography – Do NOT use your cell phone for your property photos and DO NOT skimp. Hire a professional photographer to take photos displaying your real estate listing in the best possible light. We promise, taking high quality photos will attract more buyers to your home. Add the gallery of photos to the web page.
- Video Tour – Create an actual video tour of your home. This is best because the tour contains video clips as opposed to still photos. This is not one of those 360 presentations. We like the video tour best because it provides viewers with a more accurate representation of what it would be like if they were actually walking through the home.
- Include Aerial Footage – If possible, use a drone to shoot aerial footage and include a few clips in the video tour. We include drone footage in every listing, even condos. We promise, it will be worth it!
- 360 Tour – Those 360 presentations are kind of nice but often times don’t work so well. We’ve tried a few but have never been totally satisfied with the technology. It’s very important to avoid anything that might frustrate potential buyers.
- Drone Video – Drones are great and nowadays we’re using them for all our listings, even condos. We promise, it will be worth it! See one of our drone videos below.
- Fliers & Signs – All good real estate marketing plans include fliers and signs. You’ll need digital and hard copies of fliers and signs. The fliers should be used as handouts for visitors, neighbors, etc.
- 800 Number and Recording – Some agents use an 800 number strategy. If you want to include this into your real estate marketing plan, the 800 number is the only phone number displayed and it should be placed EVERYWHERE. The potential buyer calls the number, hears the recording and you are automatically sent the phone number and message.
If you are planning to choose a realtor, you can easily include the list above as questions to ask during your initial interview. Just do a little tweaking, and they will work fine to use during your interview.
Publish Your Property Website or Webpage
Your real estate marketing plan MUST include a property website or landing page! Don’t skip this because having your own web page enables you full control of your listing. Remember, you’ll be competing with other sellers and most home searchers have a very short attention span. If you think just using Zillow or the MLS as your landing page, think again! Potential buyers are easily distracted and change directions on a dime! Do you really want your leads to easily click or tap a button and leave your listing in favor of a similar property?
The MLS and Zillow don’t care about your listing or your marketing goals and do little to help sell your home other than including it on their site. Of course you will want your home to appear in the MLS and on major real estate websites. The thing is, if you find an interested buyer on your social networks or by other means, you want to direct buyers OFF those other websites and send them to your own property web page so you keep their FULL attention.
If you have selected the Gregory Real Estate Group to represent you and your home sale, we handle all of this for you. If you are selling on your own, you’ll need to find a way to create a single page web page or site.
Local Realtors Matt & Meray Gregory
[email protected]
We provide video tours with drone footage and professional photography for every listing. Should you have questions or need help to buy or sell your home, please contact us.
Your Local REALTORS®
DRE# 01463326
DRE# 01831112
Real Estate Listing – Video Examples
See below examples of two video tours from our past listings. Each video includes drone footage and interior video clips, enabling viewers to get a feel for the home, property AND neighborhood.
Tip for Displaying Listing Assets on Property Website
All good real estate marketing plans include the display of photos, videos and a clear call to action directly in the upper fold of your property web page. Prospective buyers prefer visual displays over the text. Keep your description brief, but make the photos and Call to Action the centerpiece.
There are two schools of thought with regard to how many photos, length of videos and how much of a description to include with your listing on your web page.
- Some agents and sellers prefer to provide less photos, shorter videos and no price. The goal here is to encourage the visitors to contact them so they can have a real conversation.
- Others, prefer to provide the price of the real estate listing, lots of photos and longer videos. It’s up to you to determine what you want to accomplish. If you don’t want to be bothered with lots of unnecessary phone calls you’ll want to provide as much information as possible, including the price.
Our own real estate advertising plans always include the price in our listings because if we don’t, our website visitors will go elsewhere and find it.
To sum it up, develop your real estate marketing plan, create your assets and publish them on your own webpage before publishing elsewhere.
If We are Listing Your Home
We create a property web page for all our client listings on our own site. The benefit is, our site is already highly ranked in the search engines for our local area, so that’s automatically a huge benefit for our clients. For local neighborhoods and communities, we outrank everyone, including the big nationwide sites like Zillow!
If Selling on Your Own
If you’re selling your home on your own you’ll need to create a one page website to use specifically as a property web page to market your real estate listing on the internet. This will be your primary HUB to the internet. All ads and social media posts should link to this site!
Another option, though not advised, you could set up a separate Facebook page which you could delete once you sell the home. We really don’t recommend this for a couple of reasons. First, not everyone is on Facebook. Second, people on Facebook are easily distracted and you want to hold their attention. Using only social media will limit your audience.
You could also go to one of those automatic web site builders such as SquareSpace. This is not ideal because no matter what they advertise about anyone being able to create their own website, it’s still time consuming.
Pro Tip: Before moving forward with adding your home to the MLS or any large national real estate website, first publish your listing on your own property website. It’s important the search engines find your page before it goes into syndication to the world.
Upload Your Listing to the MLS and Major Real Estate Websites
If you are NOT a realtor and you are selling your home on your own, you will not have access to the MLS. There are still ways to include your real estate listing in the MLS but no matter what, it’s going to be costly. Post your home on Zillow, Trulia and anywhere else they will let you add your listing for free.
When posting, only use a portion of your assets, but not all. Your goal is to get interested buyers off the MLS or large sites and on to your webpage. You can do this by only providing enough teaser information do gather interest and get your buyers to click the link or call you directly. It’s very important, when uploading all your real estate listing information to include the link back to your site.
Market Your Real Estate Listing on the Internet VIA Social Media
If you have a real estate agent, they will do all the social media posting for you. If so, be sure to go to all their social media pages and re-share their posts on your pages. If you have no agent you’ll need to post your listing on ALL social networks. Anywhere you can do a post, do it! Include one of your videos and a photo or two at each location. It’s CRITICAL to always include a link back to your property webpage when posting your listing on the internet.
Last, don’t forget to email all your friends and be sure to ask them to share your social media posts with their friends. They will do it for you, but be sure to ask.
One more thing! Remember we made mention about having some fliers on hand. Well, go copy off about 100 copies and deliver them to each home in your neighborhood.
Real Estate Marketing Plan Recap
If you want to get the most money from your sale a solid real estate marketing plan is a must. Remember, invest your marketing money on the visual assets. Then publish your listing on your own website and share everywhere! When sharing, only provide enough teaser information to entice your visitors to click or tap to your property webpage, or call you directly. Unless you fouled up on the listing price, you’ll get your home showings and the offers will come rolling in. That’s it, you’re done!
We offer this post as a service to our friends, clients and those living in the communities we serve. Should you have any questions please contact us.
Matt & Meray Gregory with the Gregory Real Estate Group.