Many of the requests for real estate marketing and lead programs come to us from brokers and teams along with individual agents. In this post, we'll hit on a few key points of successful real estate marketing strategies for Brokerages or Real Estate teams - especially those that are growing in numbers of people or numbers of deals.Many of the requests from brokers and teams for our services come at a time when the group is trying to increase the number of deals at a faster rate than costs (you might be growing the size of the team, or just wanting to make everyone more efficient). This is absolutely the right mindset, and the first tip for team growth:

Team Real Estate Marketing Tips

Real Estate Marketing Tip #1 - Marketing First

When growing team, production or just productivity, the first thing you want to get dialed is the marketing part of your strategy. You want to not only have the strategy thought through, but started and running BEFORE you go and grow the size of the team or commit other costs. If you think about your efforts as a Factory, your real estate marketing efforts are the first machine in line. You don't want to have all of the machines and people running while you are still trying to get machine #1 working right.

Real Estate Marketing Tip #2 - Conversion is the Goldmine of Leads

As you have certainly discovered, real estate tools and lead programs can be plentiful, depending on what you are looking for. The trick is finding ways to drive some guarantees on your lead efforts and generation together with high quality. Whether you currently are at a marketing budget of $0 and going to step 1, or you are spending thousands and dialing into better results - one major key is conversion rate.Keep in mind that your conversion rates on leads will typically have to do with a number of factors, including:

• Where did the lead come from? Did they become a lead on your site?
• What brought them in? Was it content, ppc, word of mouth, outside marketing?
• What was the response time?
• What followup campaign are you running? (are you really following one or are you just 'pretty good at sending them a quick email and calling them that day' - because then you probably aren't as good as you think).
• What is your long-term follow-up plan
• How many systems do you have to use to track your leads and transactions?

As you can see, these questions are aimed at understanding exactly the process that your leads are going through - and that tells us a lot about your marketing efforts and results.

Real Estate Marketing Tip #3 - Multiple Logins Suck

If you haven't already experienced this, you know that trying to have multiple systems with lots of crossover is a painful and slow death to productivity (sometimes productivity just dies pretty quick). We won't claim to have reached the Nirvana of perfection in systems yet, but what you will find us providing to our clients and promoting as an idea, is to think about what HAS to be there, what REALLY NEEDS to be there, and what COULD be there in your systems, and make sure that is tied to your marketing and lead-gen system. We build ours that way and have learned that if you try to piece-meal your productivity together, you'll probably never get there.

Real Estate Marketing Tip #4 - Don't be too cheap

This sounds like something a marketing company would try to sell you as a "tip" :).The reason we include this in our tips, despite the obvious bias built into the tip, is that a common issue we run into is someone asking about our top packages and how productive they can be, then trying to talk us into a lower package price... We try to be flexible with options, but have learned that the ol' 80/20 rule (or 90/10) rules continue to apply as always, and if you aren't careful in the way you mentally approach your own marketing, you can get yourself into that 80% very quickly.Now, we are not promoting the idea of spending too much on your marketing, because that is typically a short-term game anyway, since you run out of funds with the first hiccup. The goal is that you get serious about what you are spending where, and you invest in marketing and lead-generation that really works, and that drives immediate results and builds long-term real estate marketing equity. You will hear as talk a lot about the inbalance of having only PPC, or the problem with spending $60/mo on a website, then nothing else on marketing. You really do end up spending money to make money, but you can spend it smart and turn it into an investment in yourself and your results.

Real Estate Marketing Tip #5 - Don't Skip Content, But Don't be Naive

If you follow our blog posts or have talked with our team much, you know that we focus on Content Marketing strategies in a lot of what we do. Blogging, Social Media, Email Response, etc are all very important - more important than ever, in fact. So, in short, you have to include this in your strategy and marketing plans. You probably have found, though, that very few people can (or even should) walk the line of trying to generate all of their own content. It is a tough proposition, and frankly, most of your time ought to be with clients.Keep in mind, that with the right marketing team (ie. Inside Real Estate :) you can define some goals, targets and even content topics, but leave the legwork of writing and distribution to the marketing pros. In addition, if you are short on content, or not staying on top of some fo the content ideas, no problem - the team has you covered.So, yeah, Content is King, but a system to actually get it written and regular is Queen - and we all know who really wears the pants.We always hope that you gain some insights and understanding about how you can do better real estate marketing from our posts - and we'd love your input. If you are interested in talking to one of our professional marketing specialists, give us a call (800) 656-1646.