Most real estate investors and more importantly, the aspiring real estate investors, spend a major of their time focusing on the wrong details of their businesses. Too much emphasis and time is spent on the areas of business that do not lead to growth, revenue or longevity in business! Instead the emphasis is placed on the areas of business that drag down revenues and end up costing valuable time. If you want to be successful in your real estate business there is one area that must absolutely be given a major of your attention if you want to grow and build a sustainable business model.
MARKETING
Most real estate investors dabble in advertising. Usually placing ads with the focus on building inventories by seeking potential property sellers and hopping that the haphazard form of placing ads everywhere at once, without measuring success and results, will somehow lead to profitable deals. The rest either shun advertising all to together or, and this unfortunately only applies to an extremely small percentage of real estate investors, have a detailed specific plan in place to use advertising as a tool for growth.
Having a plan for marketing a real estate investment business is an easy process and something that only has to be done once. After the plan is set in place, daily, weekly and monthly routines can be built around that plan for implementation, testing, re-testing, adjusting as you get results and then continuing the same process over and over. It is a highly repeatable and duplicatable process. Again, it is highly unjustified that only a small percentage of real estate investors actually are disciplined enough to put the time and thought into developing and maintaining a marketing plan. Even though a marketing plan can be simple and easy to implement, many simply do not bother.
Here are some simple steps that can be taken today to get a quality marketing plan in place and get more real estate investors operating in that small minimum and headed towards success!
DEVELOPING A SIMPLE MARKETING PLAN
1. Develop specific goals / results that you want to achieve.
Some examples of specific goals might be that you want to create 100 property leads per month. Another might be that you want to create 100 buyer / investor leads per month. Whatever the goals are, they must be specific and obtainable and more importantly, they must be measurable. Simply wanting to create leads without a specific number and within a time frame will not work.
2. Map out which activities must be endeaken to achieve your goals / results.
Do you need to place ads in local papers, penny savers, nickel pages? Do you need to place bandit signs? Do you need to keep a blog, write articles or place online ads? Whatever the tasks are, make sure that you again create a detailed number of tasks and time frame for those tasks.
3. Are there activities that others on your team can handle?
Investing in real estate should never be a solo sport! Even if you are using virtual assistants, there are tasks such as placing online ads, that need to be handled by others. There simply is not enough time for a serious real estate investor to spend on tasks that could be handled by an $ 8 an hour assistant. Decide which tasks can be delegated to others on the team and get them assigned with the same specific goal.
4. Track your results.
The largest mistake made by real estate investors who actually deploy a marketing plan is that they fail to track their results. Every minute and every dollar spread advertising comes with an actual and true cost to your business. You track the costs and calculate at the end of each month how much money was spent. If you are serious, you have a budget as well and can track if you are on or off budget with your advertising / marketing expenses. So if that is the case, would it not make sense to track if you are actually bringing revenue back in to offset that expense?
Tracking results is easy if done correctly. First you can send leads to different locations based on the advertising. You may advertise a phone number for newspaper leads. You may advertise an email address for online leads. You may advertise an actual web site for bandit sign leads. You could use an 800 Number with calling service for certain areas you are looking for seller leads. Each of these different advertising sources is attached to a different communication method. When leads come in, you are able to track which source developed that lead and if that lead turns into a deal, you are able to track income to expense. Now you are able to determine which advertising sources are the most profitable and where to spend your time and money!
Failure comes too easy in investment real estate for those who do not take the time to plan, track and adjust. A marketing plan does not have to be overly complicated or even overly detailed. It can grow and get more detailed as your business grows. What is does have to have is specific goals / results and the specific actions and time frames for the results to be tracked. If an investor simply puts these steps in place, they will be well ahead of the major of real estate investors and wannabe investors and be on track for success.