French author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, once said that “a goal without a plan is just a wish”. If you have been thinking about creating or updating your real estate marketing plan, you may want to consider the writer’s words. Too often today, businesses embark on marketing programs without a solid plan in place. Lured by the ease of access to social channels and the scads of free marketing tools, business owners and marketing managers regularly find themselves dropping media into the marketplace without rhyme or reason.

Four Key Consideration for a Real Estate Marketing Plan
A good commercial real estate marketing plan will guide the advertising, promotion and communications for your business.  It is vital to successfully running your operation and failing to develop a plan can result in budget problems, low customer volume and, in a worst-case scenario, the closure of a business.

In general, marketing plans are relatively tame in comparison to business plans which contain company financials, mission statements, and everything else required by a would-be financier,  but they can still feel overwhelming. To simplify the real estate marketing plan, we’ve boiled it out to four key areas for consideration – Plan, Plot, Prioritize and Progress.

Planning means developing a strategy and usually consists of broader based ideas like real estate lead generation, advancing ahead of competitors, or creating greater brand awareness.  A strategy tells how you are going to realize your goals. You’ll likely look for some statistics in this portion of the plan so that you can understand your market and where you stand relative to your competitors.

Once a marketing strategy has been created, you’ll need to plot your steps to accomplish this strategy.  These steps will be the methods of marketing which will work best to achieve the strategy set in place.  In general, these methods will be broken into two broad categories, core and on-going.  Core represents all of those tools that are basically table stakes for real estate marketing like brochures, flyers and offering memorandums.  On-going activities are just as they sound – marketing activities that require attention daily, weekly monthly, etc. These include activities like your commercial real estate website, blog, real estate branding, real estate SEO and so on.

Our tendencies as humans is to do it all.  If this was physically possible, chances are it would be fiscally prohibitive.  It’s important, therefore, to prioritize the activities of your real estate marketing plan. Think about how you might flight activities, so that it makes sense with your growth targets, seasonality and customer interest.

Finally, don’t forget to inspect what you expect.  Check the progress of your real estate marketing plan against the goals you’ve set out for your firm. If the leads from your website aren’t flowing in as expected, then make a change to the content you’re creating or up the frequency of your social media. Remember, this is your marketing plan, it doesn’t have to be set in stone.