How To Overcome Marketing challenges For The Real Estate Agent And Investor

Becoming successful marketer is not an easy job, specially if you are new to the game. You will face many challenges until you find the right marketing formula that works best for you.

In marketing, you will face many hurdles and you will run campaigns that pull disappointing response if any at all. When that happens, and it will, you should evaluate the three cornerstones of marketing and adjust your next campaign accordingly.

Let us look at some common challenges Agents and Investors face.

"I do not know where to start" This is probably the most common challenge Real Estate Investors and Real Estate Realtors face. It is not isolated to the Real Estate Industry, every business in every industry has the same challenge.

You should start by deciding who are you going to target. This is the most important piece of information you need, without it the campaign will fail.

It is obvious that we are looking for either buyers or sellers. Lets take the sellers as an example. You will minimize your marketing costs if you know who wants to sell and you only market to them.

Here are some lists you can target:

Expired Listings: The challenge with expired listings is to find out what was the problem and why it did not sell, then solve that problem.

For Sale By Owner (FSBO): Majority of FSBOs end up getting listed. You need to establish yourself with them early in the game and stay in contact with them till the house sells, or they list it.

For Rent By Owner (FRBO): There are many who think they can make money by renting their house, or because their listing expired and they are trying to avoid making second mortgage payment. If the house does not rent, they might be motivated to sell.

Notice of Default (NOD): Also known as Preforeclosure. It is a list of people who have received a notice of pending foreclosure and they need to bring the balance current, give the house back to the bank, or sell.

Another form of marketing is by doing a campaign based on georaphic location. This is known as the shotgun approach where you pick a geographic location and market to it. To maximize your marketing, you need to set specific parameters. House Size, House Price Range, Location, Years Living In The House.

Pick one or more of the above, and market to them. But you have to be patient and consistent to see the results.

"I do not know what to say in my sales letter" Once you decide on one or more marketing lists, you need to design a marketing message specific to each list. If you are not used to writing sales letters, it might be a little intimidating at first, but it is not difficult to overcome.

One quick way to write a good sales letter, is to start by writing down what a prospect from each of this list is looking for service wise, what might they be concerned about, and why should they do business with you.Then for each item you list, write your answer to each of these points.

Make sure to highlight the benefits of working with you. They should feel that you are the solution they are looking for so compelled to contact you immediately.

Revise it over and over until you have a sales letter. Then move to the second and third and so on.

"I am afraid to spend all my money and not get a deal" The only way to overcome monetary concerns is to budget and work within this budget. Do controlled tests and watch the response. Once you have a monthly budget, work backward to establish how many mailing pieces you can mail a month.

The key is to test a message or marketing campaign though. The more targeted you get, and the better the sales letter gets, the higher the response will be. And it goes without saying, the more you mail, the higher the chances of a response.

There is no guarantee that you will get a return on every mail you send. It is numbers game. As you get more experienced and start noticing patterns in response, you will feel much better about mailing and will know how to do very successful campaigns and predict the response.

A general rule of thumb, and this highly depends on who you target, how convincing you are, and how you target them, you should estimate between 0.5% to 3% response rate. If your responses are not within this range, then you need to tweak your campaign.

"I do not know what to send them" What you send them will highly depend on your marketing budget and how organized you are.

The quickest upfront setup would be to send out letters and use mail merge to personalize the letters. You can do it on demand from home. The challenge with using letters is the time it takes to stuff envelopes and address them.

You could do it yourself, or if you are too busy making deals, hire someone to do it. If you hire someone, pay them per envelope and not per hour. However, you should start by doing it yourself to know what is involved and to save money.

Another effective alternative is to use post cards. You should design a good post card that adheres to the same concepts you use in your sales letters. Dont just make the post card and over sized business card with nifty graphics of a house& Prospects are not interested in pretty pictures, they want to sell!

If you have some graphics experience, you can design your own or hire someone to design them for you. I like to design my own post cards because I can constantly tweak them. I use photoshop to do so, but that is a personal preference.

Usually companies online are cheaper than local print shops. They also have templates you can use. If you go this route, order a small amount. Do not go with the large quantity for the discount per postcard before you test the response.

Fadi Zeidan is an active Real Estate Agent and Investor. Besides providing monthly training to new Investors and Realtor, he maintains a successful Marketing blog on his website www.fadizeidan.com. Fadi Zeidan brings in his Marketing knowledge from various industries to the Real Estate arena to help Agents and Investors formulate successful campaigns.