5 Steps to a Marketing Plan

Have clear and concise goals that you’re excited about achieving

The first step to any marketing plan requires setting measurable goals and objectives. Ask yourself - where are you now, and where do you want to be in a year? In 5 years?

Now that you have a vision of the gap between where you are and where you want to be, ask yourself what has been preventing you from accomplishing those goals. Are you closer to achieving them than when you first started or do you feel that you have a mental block - perhaps they seem too overwhelming or impossible? Do you believe they are possible to achieve? Honestly ask yourself if you are strongly committed to making those goals a reality.

What’s most important for any goal or objective is that you strongly feel that it is possible for you to accomplish it. If you don’t feel you can achieve it, you will find that you fight yourself instead of believing in yourself and you will make it all the more difficult for you. On the other hand, if you believe in your ability to achieve your goals, you will be enthusiastic and passionate, and this attitude will resonate throughout your work. Yes, the power of positive thinking does wonders!

What do you do well & what could you improve?

Take out a piece of paper and a pen and jot down the activities you are currently doing in your career that have been successful for you. Elaborate on them as if you were describing your process to a newcomer in the field. Now, of these activities, are there any that you can improve upon? If so, what specifically can you do to make them better? In addition, now write down all the activities you do or have done that don’t work well for you. Elaborate on what you think went wrong and why. Be honest with yourself.

Look at what competitors and top producers are doing

You probably have a routine that you follow to find prospects, convert them to clients and service them. This may be something you formulated in your first 1-3 years as an agent, or you might have adapted it greatly to fit your current situation. Now that you’ve looked at what you do, look at what some of your competitors do. Do they seem to be doing everything you are? Are they better or worse off than you? Now look to a top agent that you admire. Top producers often work the same amount of time or even less than agents that do ‘ok’ but they focus on what is most crucial to their business. What do they do and what do they delegate? Where do they focus their time and efforts?

Most top producers have a very efficient system in place - one that focuses on meeting their clients’ wants and needs and striving for 100% client satisfaction. The top producers have learned how to leverage what they’ve learned about their clients to speed up their prospect to client conversion and they spend more time making their client’s life easier. Think about how this top producer spends his or her day. How does this differ from yours?

Prioritize & Incorporate

Now that you’ve brainstormed about what you do and what a top producer probably does, how can you incorporate some of the best practices the top producer does into your own routine? Pick 2-3 activities you believe would increase your income most if you were to incorporate them into your own business practices. Now, how can you schedule them into your routine while still keeping the activities you do best? The key to marketing is to improve upon what you already do well. And replace the things that haven’t been working along the way. By making these tradeoffs, in a few months, you’ll start to see results. Keep making these kinds of baby steps, and soon, you’ll be well on your way to achieving your goals.

Writing The Marketing Plan

Don’t forget to document all the changes you want to make! You should schedule when you’re going to do what task so you don’t forget or go off track. This scheduling should be the foundation for your marketing plan. Marketing plans start with goals and objectives and detail out how exactly you will accomplish each. This involves changing the way you currently market to make the process more efficient. You want to make sure you are focusing on productive activities and spend less time on less effective activities. Outsource the less effective activities if you can. Eventually you will have to if you expect your business to grow, but initially, put them off to the side and focus on what will make you money. This ultimately will revolve around how you can make your current clients happy and how you can more effectively streamline your prospect to client conversion so you have more time to spend with clients.

Effective marketing plans require that you set measurable goals. Even if you are taking baby steps, you can still set mini-goals that by a certain date, you will have worked out the details of this aspect of your plan. 3 months out, you should have X new clients. 6 months out, you should see a decrease in prospect to conversion time of X%. And so on. If you can’t measure it, you won’t be able to evaluate how well you’ve stayed on track.

Your marketing plan should cover each and every activity you plan to do for the next month to get you to your goal 12 months out. If you want to earn $200,000 in commission, how many new listings will you need each month? What types of marketing materials will you need? How many escrows will you need to close each month? After you’ve broken it down by month, break it down even further by week. How many postcards or emails do you need to send out each week? How many networking lunches should you schedule? Where should you take out classified ads?

As you can see, we started at an extremely high level and broke it down it extreme detail. At first your goals may seem daunting, but if you plan everything out and take baby steps to reach mini-goals, soon you’ll find yourself well on your way to reaching that salary you always dreamed about.