Tools for Effective Real Estate Marketing

One of the things that we did at our company and this is something that’s very common with some of the bigger Fortune 500 companies, is actually, a lot of people thought that this is a fun exercise for the whole team. So, whether you’re one person at the company or you have four or five team members. You need to actually think, and look back and say okay, “what am I as a company? What is my personal brand? What do we stand for?” I think if you don’t really know that then it’s really hard to actually do all of the marketing elements and figure out, “okay, well what does my website, what should it look like?” You first have to figure out, you know, what is your goal, what is your vision for the company and what do you stand for? For us for example is we wanted to separate ourselves from all the other financial institutions, where a lot of times people think of financial institutions as a little bit very proper, suit and tie and kind of stuffy. We wanted to be approachable and kind of light hearted and fun but at the same time, we know we’re still making money for people. That was something that was really important to us. So we try to focus our branding more on that. Then the other thing you want to do is like you’re positioning statement and your target consumer. You have to think about okay, who are your consumers? Are they the younger generation, are we talking millennials, are we talking someone that’s older? So you want to make sure that when you're developing all of your marketing materials, you’re speaking to that customer. The other thing with the target consumer is you want to make sure that you're not targeting everybody, that sounds like a great idea, I don’t want to miss out on targeting everybody, but what will happen is they’ll start to send mixed messages to folks. People will respond to things very differently and you’ll start to see that your efforts aren’t really working. So, it’s always good to have like a target bull’s eye audience and then you can always have a secondary audience where you know that it will start to spread to those folks. But it’s very important to have something that’s very precise and you know exactly who you're targeting and what your messaging is going to be. I promise you; it will go a long way and then it will just kind of have that ripple effect. Just kind of just laying the groundwork of things and that’s really how we started to develop the website. And we figured out okay, we know who our audience is, we know what we stand for, colors and all of that stuff is very important. If you go to our website, you’ll notice that it’s very approachable, it’s very clean, very modern and that is just something that how we wanted to represent ourselves.

Listen to full episode:https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/09/ws342-tools-for-effective-marketing-with-puja-talati/

On the website, some of the things that you absolutely have to have and I think people know this, but I’m just going to reiterate it because maybe you haven’t thought about it. It’s always good to have an about you section and a story. People want to know the story about the company. I get this question all the time. “How did you form, tell us how did you start, how did you grow?” Have that on there, people can really relate to that. Think of some of your favorite brands outside of real estate and really people buy those products because they have some sort of connection and the connection is key when you're talking about investors in the real estate business. It’s always good to have your property list on there if you're just starting out, you know, that will be sparse, but just remember, it will continue to grow but that is your credibility people want to see what you're doing. It will show, what markets you’re focused in, giving information or FAQ’s, having industry related news. All of that stuff will build a footprint, people can search for you, have contact information. I would suggest looking at other people’s websites and seeing what they have on there and then you can put together your own website.

What we found is you know, at first we used to send a lot of emails and I think you know, nowadays, there’s so much email that you're getting, I get hundreds of emails a day so you want to make sure that you're not getting lost in that. So, what we found to be a really good cadence is with our investors or perspective investors, we do a monthly newsletter that just tells people about you know, what’s going on in the market, what or what areas do we really like. We talk about the financial industry etc. Just give them some nuggets of information and I mean, you can probably read that newsletter in under two minutes and what we like about that is you know, people have their phones out when they’re waiting in line for something or they have a quick minute or two, so having something short and sweet, you're most likely going to get someone to open that newsletter and to actually read it and that’s really important because you want to make sure you’re spending time creating these newsletters. You want people to actually read them, you don’t want them to just delete it. So, that way you’re top of mind. If they expect it on a monthly basis so you have a little bit of that cadence set forth with them and you know, we’ve received a lot of feedback that seems to work really well. I would just be careful of bombarding people with newsletters or emails or things like that because at some point, you know, they’ll just start deleting them.

Listen to full episode: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/09/ws342-tools-for-effective-marketing-with-puja-talati/