Real Estate Marketing: Three Pillars of Success - Customer Acquisition

by Harper Thorpe | 0 comments | Posted Tue, 2011-08-23 09:44

This is the first article in a three part series that explores the three legs of successful service companies.

Real Estate is part of the largest segment of our economy, the service industry. The service industry views three distinct pillars of success: customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer margin. The most successful Real Estate brokers and office managers also focus on these three components.

Customer Acquisition

When you think of Customer Acquisition strategies, you immediately think of real estate marketing and advertising. There are significant style differences in the way that a brokerage supports customer acquisition with marketing. In general, there has been a slow movement away from traditional broker advertising. In many broker business models, the bulk of advertising is selected and purchased by the agent. But, marketing is still being performed by the broker though it’s done differently.

Today’s broker provides marketing services to the agent in the form of broker technology services, powered by real estate data, delivered with a consistent brand identity.

Broker marketing is the practice of supporting agents with the tools they need for customer acquisition. It includes the delivery of marketing and advertising materials that help the agent reach new customers. In many instances, the broker is like an advertising agency—providing templates that are nicely designed and include suggested communications. The templates include Listing Presentations, CMAs, flyers, and dozens of other materials an agent needs to attract customers every day. The key challenge for brokers is driving agent adoption of these materials. Here are a few of tips to drive adoption.

• Put marketing tools in one place such as the Real Estate broker Intranet, so the agent can access them from anywhere, anytime. The easier they are to access, the more likely they are to be used.
• Make the agent branding dynamic—this is where data connections play a role. Automatically add in their images, contact information, property information, real estate market trends and other relevant information that is displayed in the marketing materials. If the production process to generate materials is fast and easy, adoption will increase.
• Support publishing. If you can’t afford to offer printing to your agents at no charge, engage a service on behalf of your agents that guarantees competitively-priced, custom print deliverables that supports your strategy and brand. We have such a partner whose service can be accessed by agents from within AgentAchieve—accessible, fast, and easy.

We have observed a not-so-remarkable coincidence in real estate. Successful brokerages always supply this marketing support to agents for customer acquisition. The more the marketing is adopted by the agents, the more successful the brokerage is at customer acquisition. As you would expect, this also plays a role in agent retention.

The marketing center in AgentAchieve was built purposefully to support brokerages in offering this service to agents, and it works. Besides the intuitive way the application produces results, our secret sauce is real estate data. We make customer information, agent information, and property information available so that it may be quickly and easily incorporated into any marketing material.

When you look at your customer acquisition strategy in your business, consider your marketing processes and how effectively they serve your agents. If you haven’t already done so, go through the process an agent would use to create marketing plans and deliverables. Interestingly, some brokers who provide these tools have never ever used them. Make sure your office managers have tested (and can support agents in the use of) your customer acquisition marketing tools.

The baseline capabilities of each member of your team should include accessing the marketing toolset, producing a flyer, and creating a CMA or listing presentation. Get copies of the materials produced so you can read it yourself. Is it good? Take it to a couple of your friends or neighbors and ask them to look at it and give you feedback. Be sure to go through this process every three months so you can evolve the quality of the materials.

In the next article in this series we will look at best practices and strategies for Customer Retention. To read it, please follow this link.

To read the article on Customer Margins, please follow this link.

Learn how to lower costs and boost profits