The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on many businesses, especially in the real estate industry, is profound. Many realtors have to fundamentally change many aspects of their businesses and things are yet to return to the way they used to be.
For businesses, change is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it creates risk and uncertainty. Old strategies and methods tend to waver in the face of new challenges. But on the other hand, change also creates opportunities.
Real estate companies that can adapt to a post-pandemic world, readjusting their models to meet new demands while leveraging unrealized opportunities, will find themselves in the best possible position to not only survive during and after the pandemic but thrive.
In this guide, you’ll learn about 3 practical and simple steps that’ll help you ensure success with your real estate business during and after the pandemic.
HOW TO GROW YOUR REAL ESTATE BUSINESS DURING AND AFTER THE PANDEMIC
Following the steps outlined below won’t only help you improve your real estate business for efficiency but also help you increase your return on investment (ROI).
Please note that you don’t necessarily need to follow these steps in the order in which they are outlined. However, it is highly recommended you do.
Business and Brand Strategy Review
Your business and brand strategy are important parts of your business that shouldn’t be taken for granted.
For one, they help you reach your business goals by defining the methods and tactics you need to employ. They also guide many of your organizational decisions.
Although we can’t fully cover everything that can be done with your business and brand strategy, we’ve highlighted some important aspects you can work on that can help you acquire more clients and achieve a high return on investment (ROI).
1. Define or Review Your Business Goals: Goals provide a roadmap for you to follow and help determine the tasks that must be done or improved to meet those business goals.
Define “SMART” business goals for your company or review your existing ones.
SMART is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
So, make sure your business goals are specific, can be measured, are achievable, relevant to your company, and can be placed on a time limit.
An example of a SMART real estate business goal is the increment of revenue by referrals by 20% in 6 months.
The aforementioned business goal is specific and easily understandable for anyone on your team. It is measurable because your business revenue by referral can be calculated with your business data. 20% increment in the revenue by referral in 6 months is achievable. The business goal aims at increasing your company’s revenue, so it is relevant. And it’s a 6 months goal which makes it time-bound.
Some of the advantages of setting SMART business goals are that they inspire actions and help you identify what you need to work on to take your company to greater heights.
2. Define or Review Your Core Values: Organisational values describe the core ethics or principles that your company will abide by, no matter what. They inspire your best efforts and also constrain certain actions.
Strong, clearly articulated values should be a true reflection of your business aspirations for appropriate workplace behavior, and play an important role in building a positive culture at your organization.
One important value that we think every realtor should add to their repertoire is diligent customer service. More time, effort, and resources should be dedicated to helping clients meet their property needs with ease.
Doing this won’t only help you increase your brand’s equity but also rack up referrals for you, which are important for your real estate business. Referrals from past clients are the number one source of business for realtors according to contactually.
3. Do a SWOT analysis: The pandemic forced many realtors out of their comfort zones to discover new ways of doing business, not just to survive but also to lead the industry. Now is a great time for you to review your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, in a bid to capitalize on your advantages and work on reducing or eliminating your disadvantages.
Strengths are things that your company does particularly well, or in a way that distinguishes you from your competitors. Think about the advantages your organization has over other organizations. These might be a good brand image, a large loyal client base, access to a big marketing budget, etc.
Weaknesses are the things that stop you from performing at your optimum level, as an organization. They are areas where your business needs to improve to remain competitive. These might be a weak testimonial system, a reduced number of property inspections due to the pandemic, etc.
Opportunities refer to favorable factors that could give your organization a competitive advantage. For example, having a virtual tour system already in place, in the wake of restricted movement of people due to the pandemic. This will aid virtual property inspections significantly.
Threats include anything that can negatively affect your business from the outside, such as shifts in demand, shifts in market requirements, or a shortage of recruits. A major threat in the real estate industry is the shift in demand for commercial properties due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Identifying your core strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats leads to fact-based analysis, fresh perspectives, and new ideas for business growth.
4. Do a Target audience research: Many things have changed about customers’ behavior since the beginning of the pandemic.
Doing target audience research will give you insight into what’s currently driving your target audience, what challenges and pain points they have, and how you can help them meet their needs.
At the end of the day, what you want to do as a realtor is help your clients get their desired properties with the least effort possible. This is the ultimate value creation which won’t be possible if you don’t understand your clients enough in the first place.
This guide and its resources will help you easily do Target audience research and also help you build real estate buyer personas.
5. Competitive audit: One of the major aims of reviewing your brand strategy is to understand the key competitors that serve the same target audience as you, compare your points of difference, and develop a plan to lead them.
A competitive audit is an exercise that will help you achieve all of the aforementioned objectives. When reviewing your competitors, you should look at their positioning, unique value proposition, marketing strategies, strengths, and weaknesses.
Also, look at the ways they’ve evolved their business in the wake of the pandemic. These will give you insight on how to lead them.
This guide will help you conduct a full-blown real estate competitive audit in no time. It also includes all resources and workbooks you need to complete your competitive analysis easily.
Marketing Strategy Review
A Marketing Strategy Review is a thorough review of your marketing plan, objectives, strategies, and current activities being executed in your business. Its objective is to see what’s working and what isn’t so you can identify areas for improvement.
Marketing Strategy Review is especially important in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic, which has changed a lot of things such as consumers’ behavior and buying patterns.
A successful review will help you ascertain your marketing strengths and weaknesses, so you can make informed decisions about where to put your resources and to make sure you’re not wasting your precious marketing budget.
Some of the things you can do for review is to break down your marketing activities (and your overall strategies) into three different areas, then review the contribution of each area to the achievement of your overall business goals. These areas are your owned media, your earned media, and your paid media.
Owned media: These are some of your most precious marketing assets; things like your website, email list, and blog.
They are media sources that your brand has complete control over and no one can take your owned media away from you.
With your owned media it’s crucial to keep your eyes on the results you are achieving with your strategy.
A few metrics you’ll want to know about your website and blog are:
· Unique visitors
· Bounce rate
· Monthly Traffic
· Conversion rate
· Email list sign-ups – monthly or weekly
Usually, you’ll use your earned and paid media to drive traffic to your owned media. That’s because your marketing and growth are much more secure when you don’t have to rely solely on other company’s owned media such as social media platforms.
Earned Media: Earned media is favorable exposure that your company has not paid for or created. It can be a story idea that’s pitched to the media–newsworthy or entertaining enough to garner usage based on its merit. It can also be a creative campaign that goes viral across multiple social media sites.
Social media is the most used earned media channel and it is very important. With your earned media channels, you should keep a close eye on your engagement rate above everything else. Followers, likes, and hype are great (they provide social proof), but the key to converting leads to clients is keeping them interested in your brand and having them engage with your brand.
The higher the percentage of your engaged followers, the more likely it is that those people will turn into customers and refer their friends to you.
A few metrics you’ll want to review and keep your eyes on for your earned media are:
· Social share
· Post saves
· Comments
· Conversion from social media (You can use UTM codes to track this).
· Number and quality of reviews
· Revenue generated per social media channel.
Paid Media: Paid media is the purchase of ad inventory on a media channel or publisher site to broadcast your brand message and reach your target audiences.
Anytime you are paying to get in front of an audience whether it be online (Pay Per Click ads) or in a physical manner like in a magazine ad, these fall into the paid media space.
With this category, your focus should be on getting the lowest possible cost per result. In other words, the highest possible return on investment (ROI).
Once you’ve done your marketing strategy review and established what’s working and what’s not, it’s time to make some changes.
Update your strategy with the changes that you and other key decision-makers at your company have established. This could include setting new SMART goals, establishing new benchmarks to achieve your target ROI, changing the frequency of publishing content, establishing new marketing methods, increasing or decreasing the budget based on the actual results of specific campaigns, etc.
We have a full guide on how to run effective real estate digital marketing campaigns. Check it out for more info.
Employing Real Estate Marketing Technology (MarTech)
Real Estate Marketing technology will help your company be more efficient and effective. The automation of laborious marketing tasks can help reduce the number of man-hours required for the execution of your marketing strategy thus helping you to achieve more with less.
An example of this is the use of Real Estate Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) to track and manage customer data instead of the traditional method of using spreadsheets. The CRM can help you store, manage, and retrieve copious amounts of data easily.
Real estate marketing technology can also help your team(s) to be more effective in the acquisition and retention of customers. For example, by using Facebook ads to target specific demographics, you can tailor your marketing message to that specific personas; increasing your chances of engagement.
The main types of real estate marketing technology are:
· Advertising: Advertising technology provides a way for you to access audiences that would otherwise be out of reach. This could be through Google search ads, remarketing ads through Facebook, or targeting a specific job title within LinkedIn.
· Analytics: Analytics should be the cornerstone of your real estate marketing technology stack.
It helps in understanding the current state of your marketing activities and provides a solid foundation to predict future outcomes. That’s invaluable to the process of improving and optimizing your marketing campaigns.
Analytics can be a standalone product (e.g. Google Analytics) or an add-on of a different tool (e.g. Monster Insights for WordPress).
· Content Management: A content management system will help you easily manage the creation and modification of your digital content. They usually integrate document management, digital asset management, and record retention.
WordPress is regarded as the most widely used content management system in the world because of many things such as it’s free, easy to use and it is open source.
· Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Implementing an effective CRM system is a critical aspect of marketing efficiency. By using a CRM, you’ll be able to generate more value from your existing customer base, which in turn increases the return on investment (ROI) of your customer acquisition efforts. Hubspot, Bitrix24, Contactually are all examples of CRM software used by realtors.
Check our in-depth real estate CRM guide for more info.
· Social Media: There are several different ways that social media operations can be optimized using technology. For example, if you are responsible for scheduling posts and managing them on multiple platforms, Hootsuite can help do this with utmost ease. Chatbots are also a marketing technology that’s making waves in the real estate industry.
Creating a marketing tech roadmap will help you quickly visualize your marketing technology needs so you can prioritize them based on importance, cost of acquisition, return on investment (ROI), and other factors.
Your marketing technology needs will be informed by your marketing strategy.
CONCLUSION
COVID-19 has impacted not only the global economy but the entire business growth and operation as a whole.
Considering the uncertainty of the situation created by this pandemic, it is highly advisable that you, as a realtor, take a moment to analyze the business scene for challenges and opportunities so you can stand a chance of not just surviving but thriving.
What do you think of this guide? Have we left anything out? Please let us know in the comment section, we love to hear from you. Please also drop a like if you found value in the guide.
Reach out to us in case you find any step of this guide overwhelming or you’re short on time or resources. Our crack team of real estate brand strategists and digital marketing experts are ready to help you build the real estate business of your dreams.