How Helping Other Companies Can Make Your Real Estate Business More Money

In the last weeks, I wrote part 2 of my short series on 7 different internet marketing strategies for driving a lot of traffic to a real estate website without relying on search engines. Dozens of people re-tweeted that post and several commented on it. I wanted to thank you for your support here — I really appreciate it.

In today’s post, I want to expand on one of those strategies and tell you how you can make some extra profit using a marketing strategy called “integration marketing.” In short, integration marketing takes places when 2 different people/businesses work together to help each other by placing the first person’s business’ offer at a specific point during a transactional process between a customer and the second business. You may be saying, “What does that mean” — don’t worry, I’ll explain.

I bet you have been exposed to this type of marketing before. Online stores do it all the time and even some offline stores do it as well. Let’s say you buy a computer . . . if the integration marketing process is in place, you are immediately presented with an offer that will make your computer purchase even better. For instance, you can get a discount on technical support, insurance, software, a printer, a digital camera and/or a video camera. Why? Because if you are buying a computer, there is a big chance that you would be interested in complementary services or products.

Applying Integration Marketing to Real Estate

How could you do this in real estate? Let’s look at an example:

You sell your investment property to a retail buyer. That retail buyer might be either living in an apartment or in a house. What is the first thing they need to do? They need to move, right? What you can do is create a partnership with a local moving company, where for every person you send them, they give you something in return.

Once the buyers move in, they need to get home insurance, maybe landscaping or snow removal services. What if you ended up partnering with all of those different types of companies? Your buyer wouldn’t have to waste time looking for all of those different services.

But why would that retail buyer want to buy through you?

They will want to buy those services through you because you offer them one heck of a deal. You can negotiate in your agreement with the company lower rates for their services for your buyers along with a referral fee for you. In today’s economy, there will be many companies who will do that for you. Why? Because a new customer is better than no customer.

How would they track the sale to make sure that you get credited for it?

If you are doing it online, it’s very easy to track it. There are many software companies that specialize in creating special links just for you. Or the company could build a web page just for you and anyone who buys their service through that page would end up being credited to you.

However, if you are dealing in an offline market, the company can create coupons with a special code just for you. Now, when the customer contacts the company, they will need to either show them the coupon or give them the special code in order to get the special rate. It is that easy!

As I already mentioned, there are plenty of local companies who need extra business. Think about what business in your area could offer their service to help your customers. Tell them what you want to do, what you have to offer, and what they would need to do to make it work. Be friendly and compromise. In the end, all three parties — you, the buyer/seller and the company — need to win. Remember, it needs to be a win-win-win situation.

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have any comments or questions, let me know below.

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.