In 2018, one out of every eight real estate professionals spent more than $20,000 in real estate marketing.
This is, of course, a necessary expense as you need to market yourself, your services, and your listings to generate new leads.
But here’s some good news: there are ways to offset your real estate marketing budget and instantly increase your profit margins!
Check out these genius tricks for offsetting your real estate marketing budget.
Sell Ad Space on Your Own Marketing Materials
Today’s top brokers are taking advantage of digital catalogs to stay top of mind with clients, land more listings, and generate new buyer leads. Unfortunately, smaller brokers sometimes see the quality of the digital publications and assume the cost would blow their real estate marketing budget. After all, with the catalogs customized to feature your brokerage on the cover and throughout the catalog, as well as featuring your listings and articles of interest to your local residents, these should cost a fortune!
But there’s good news on all fronts! First, these digital catalogs are not as expensive as you might expect given their professional quality and ability to generate leads. And secondly, you can completely offset your cost by selling ad space in your digital catalogs to just a handful of local businesses.
Other real estate service providers like lenders, inspectors, and appraisers will be interested in reaching your client base, full of potential buyers and sellers! Why not sell advertising space in your digital catalog to these providers to completely cover your digital catalog costs?
Partner with Other Local Businesses for Your Events
If part of your real estate marketing budget is going toward hosting events like mega open houses, seminars, or client appreciation events, consider partnering with local businesses to offset the cost of these events.
Local companies like title agencies, mortgage lenders, and escrow companies may be willing to pitch in to help cover the cost of the event if it means they’ll be able to network with your clients and prospects and promote their own businesses.
Take real estate investing seminars for example. Local lenders would likely be interested to meet potential borrowers, and they may be happy to pay half the venue and catering costs for the opportunity to speak about investment financing options their company offers.
Or how about Renter-to-Homebuyer seminars? You could partner with a high-end apartment community to provide the venue. After all, most of these communities offer meeting spaces, and you’ll be collecting contact information for lots of renters who might not be ready to buy quite yet.
Automate Your Marketing
Automating your marketing is a brilliant way to offset some of your real estate marketing budget.
Let’s face it, marketing doesn’t only require a monetary investment; it also requires a substantial time investment. Offsetting the cost of your time allows your real estate marketing budget to stretch further by freeing you up to take on more clients.
There are lots of ways to automate your marketing in the 2020s! Here are a few of the best ways:
Digital catalogs. Those digital catalogs we already covered are a great example of automated marketing. The catalogs are automatically sent to your client base every month, requiring little-to-no ongoing time investment on your end!
Social media solutions. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to schedule social media posts in advance and post across multiple platforms so you only have to spend a little time at the beginning of each month to automate your social posts for the rest of the month.
Email drip campaigns. With tools like Constant Contact, MailChimp, and MailerLite, you can create a chain of automated emails to stay in touch with your client base regularly.
Automating these regular touches allows you to spend more time on the contacts that need more one-on-one nurturing.
Offer Sponsored Blog Posts
If you’re not already blogging on your real estate website as part of your real estate marketing, you should probably start this week. Did you know that blogging (also called content marketing) costs 62% less than traditional marketing, but generates three times as many leads?
See, blogging gives search engines content to index on a regular basis. This regular indexing shows the search engines that the content on your website is continuously updated and relevant, which makes search engines more likely to list your website in their search results. If someone searches online to learn more about the home buying process in your local area, will your website show up in the results? If you have a blog post about that specific topic, people are much more likely to find you online!
And while blogging is one of the most cost-effective marketing methods available to real estate brokerages, it isn’t exactly free. You’re still investing in the time it takes to write, format, and publish each post. And it takes a few minutes to promote your posts across social media once they’re live. You may even be using a professional real estate blog writer and social media manager to handle the process for you, in which case, this is an obvious out-of-pocket expense.
You can offset the blogging side of your real estate marketing budget with sponsored posts. As the name implies, these blog posts are sponsored by other businesses. These businesses pay you a fee to mention them in a given post and link to their websites. Depending on your monthly views, you can charge anywhere between $25 and several hundred dollars per post.
Sponsored Post Ideas
Simply reach out to local companies you like and trust (because you don’t want to promote companies you don’t personally believe in!), and ask if they would be interested in sponsoring a post to gain exposure to your buyers, sellers, and homeowners.
Here are a few potential sponsors to consider:
Escrow companies
Movers
Plumbers
Electricians
HVAC specialists
Roofers
Title companies
With a large enough viewership, you may even get companies contacting you with ready-to-publish posts they’re written for you. You earn a fee simply by publishing their post on your site!
Focus Your Marketing Budget on Activities with the Best ROI
Perhaps the best way to offset your real estate marketing budget is to save your money for the marketing activities that yield the best results.
Too many agents fail to track the return on investment (ROI) for their marketing activities, so they regularly overspend on activities that don’t provide solid returns.
Here’s a simple exercise to check your marketing ROI:
List all the marketing activities you currently invest time and/or money in.
Review your expenses from the past year to determine how much you spent in each category. Bonus points if you can determine how much time you spend on each activity and assign a cost value to that time investment.
Review your records from the past year to determine how many leads each activity generated. Then jot down how many closings each activity generated, and the total dollar value of those closings per activity.
Last step: divide the amount earned by the amount of your investment in each activity to determine the ROI of each activity. The higher the ROI, the better!
WIth your ROI by activity calculated, you’ll be able to see where your real estate marketing budget is well spent and where it’s wasted. By moving your wasted marketing budget dollars into marketing activities with a better ROI, you’ll instantly offset more of your real estate marketing budget!