Real Estate Marketing on a Budget: Cost-Effective Strategies for Success
Maximizing marketing impact while minimizing costs is essential, especially in a tight market. No matter what’s happening externally, consumers still need to see your brand front and center, and you need to emphasize, position, and reinforce it through your marketing efforts. As a broker or real estate team leader, you also need to protect your bottom line. But how can you do this without sacrificing quality while still ensuring solid marketing reach? We’re breaking down practical, budget-friendly marketing strategies you can start implementing.
How to Actually Minimize Marketing Costs as a Real Estate Leader
We get it: crunching numbers and balancing your line items can be stressful. To mitigate the stress and get down to brass tacks, let’s take a look at real, cost-effective marketing strategies you can leverage with your team or brokerage to minimize your spend — no matter how tight the squeeze of the market.
Tap Into Free and Low-Cost Tools
What free and affordable tools for marketing and client engagement do you have at your disposal? If you take a little time and a whole lot of creativity, you might be surprised to find you have a substantial variety to choose from. Some free marketing tactics can include social posts on a regular schedule, email marketing blasts, or even sending out handwritten letters or postcards to clients. You can even sign up your team or brokerage to participate in volunteer events to get your business out there and build brand trust through philanthropy.
Another great low-cost, free tactic? Comarketing campaigns. Find a real estate vendor or local business you have strong rapport in and offer to go in on a marketing campaign that’s low-cost or free. Promote one another’s businesses on your social media profiles, through email blasts, and even attend local or volunteer events together.
Use Your Daily Life as an Agent to Enhance Your Content Marketing
You don’t need lights, camera, action, or a big budget to have impactful content marketing. You and your agents can easily create valuable content without a hefty budget. Start by creating a list of common real estate topics impacting your market directly. Then, work with your agents to start jotting down ideas of content you all can create to address these topics with proven real estate expertise. This can look like:
- The state of the market this quarter
- What does [real estate term] mean for you?
- A day in the life of a [your brokerage or team] agent
- A sneak peek into new listings
You don’t need to get fancy: simply have your agents prop up their phone on the desk in a part of the office with good lighting, or take their phone on the go, and start filming or snapping. Use Canva to get an easy, free or low-cost graphic design treatment for all your content.
Use Social Media Wisely
Are you and your team using social media to its fullest? Ensuring effective use of social media platforms is a must in order to reach and engage potential clients. Make sure you’re all posting on a regular basis with consistent branding and tone. Help your team stay on track by following a content calendar to take the guesswork out of what to post, when, and how.
It’s also crucial to always engage with online users who are interacting with your profiles. Replying to comments, direct messages, and resharing real estate posts can go a long way in giving your algorithm a boost. This makes it more likely for more consumers to find you, without having to shell out extra marketing dollars for paid advertising campaigns.
Send Out Email Campaigns
Email campaigns are a sleeper hit in your marketing toolkit, and it continues to be an impactful channel with little cost. Use your CRM to set up behavior-based drip campaigns, and set up nurture campaigns to keep leads warm and engaged. Segment your audience by characteristics, interests, and other key details and create and send email content that addresses their needs directly. Maximize your email channel with relevant, information-packed newsletter blasts you can send to leads, current clients, and past clientele. The possibilities are endless and costs stay low.
Get a Helping Hand from BoldTrail Solutions
BoldTrail is here to help you make the most of your marketing and help you protect your costs. The BoldTrail platform has cost-effective marketing automation tools designed to help brokerages and real estate teams execute impactful campaigns on a budget. Stop hovering over your ad spend; BoldTrail takes care of it for you with dynamic, multi-channel campaigns that automatically adjust based on user behavior.
Another great way to save as a broker or team lead? By consolidating your technology. Do away with the costs associated with a variety of systems, subscriptions, and solutions, and the endless battle to get them to seamlessly “talk” to one another. After all, the average brokerage saves 35% on technology costs by switching to BoldTrail. Don’t miss out on saving big while still winning big, use our handy calculator below to see how much you could save: