Real estate marketing is simply a matter of communicating a message about what you have to an audience that may or may not want what you are offering. The choices that you face as an agent are practically without limit, and you have to compete with every other company that market to consumers on a daily basis. Each consumer is hit by thousands of advertisements throughout the day through the print, online or electronic media. The solution is to focus on what you want to accomplish and what you want to communicate and who you want to reach with your message.
Agents get on the wrong route, when they try to take communication short cuts by blitzing the market with their ad messages. This route is a dead end since they don’t have the budgets of fortune 500 companies, so they can’t compete well in the mass media environment. Also, the end customer is being bombarded by so many ads throughout the day. Sending another ad his way is hardly the way to target the person you’re trying to reach.
As an agent just beginning to ascend the ladder of real estate success, you need to be highly targeted with messages about specific offerings that align perfectly with their interests and needs.
- You must have a plan before you embark on marketing communications
- Who is your target audience?
- What are you offering to your target audience?
- Why is the product you are offering a good fit for the wants, needs and purchase abilities of your target audience?
In today’s cluttered marketing environment, consumers are trained to tune out messages that don’t seem to address their real and unfulfilled wants and needs. In other words, if your message doesn’t clearly deliver a solution to your prospect’s exact problem — if it doesn’t position itself into an open slot in your prospect’s mind — then your efforts, dollars, and time will go down the marketing drain.
Positioning is the marketing art of knowing what available space or position you and your offering fill in the market and then getting that message to exactly the people who want what you’re offering.
In real estate, price is the cornerstone of positioning.
Knowing your product position and the nature of your likely buyer puts you in a better position to select the right media vehicles to carry your message to your market. Consider the following generalities in your planning:
If you’re marketing a lower-end home in your marketplace, many of your prospects may not be technologically savvy. With limited resources, they probably haven’t invested in computers or included Internet connections to their monthly budgets. Therefore, you probably won’t want to weight your marketing efforts toward online ads that your prospects may never encounter. You’d be better off placing ads in a cheaper local language publication that has a wider circulation.
One segment of these buyers that is tech savvy is the first-time homebuyer category. Young professionals can also fit into this category. You may often find them stretching out of this bracket into the next or at least to the upper end of the bracket.
If you’re marketing a home in the mid-price range, you can be fairly confident that your prospects are searching for properties online. To reach this audience, an effective Internet marketing strategy is essential.
If you’re marketing a high-priced home, one-to-one communications may be the most effective tactic. Especially with one-of-a-kind, top-priced properties, you may find that mailing a high-quality brochure to care-fully selected prospects nets the greatest success. Likely buyers for a property in this market position are likely too busy to spend hours on the Internet or poring through print ads.
Product positioning only works if the home you’re selling is priced appropriately. If you give in to a seller’s desire to set an unreasonably high listing price, your marketing task will be vastly more difficult because
- You’ll be forced to market to the wrong audience. In order to reach buyers who can afford the price the seller is asking, you’ll be talking to people seeking a higher-level home than the property you’re offering.
- Your product will lose in competitive comparisons. It won’t take long for buyers to realize that the home you’re offering is inferior to others they can buy with the same amount of money.
When you list an overpriced property, you have only two hopes for success
- That the marketplace will heat up dramatically and lead to escalating prices, which brings your listing price in line with others, or
- Your seller will agree to a rapid price reduction.
