Real Estate Marketing Plan: Simple 90 Day Strategy To Your First Leads Online

Are you looking for a real estate marketing plan for your real estate brokerage or investment business to get great buyer, seller, and tenant leads? Are you ready to do your online marketing, but you’re not sure what you should do in your first 90 days?

Well, that’s a pretty common problem to have.

We all had it at one point, and you’ll probably have it if you don’t have it right now. I will walk through this Carrot whiteboard strategy, a suggested path in your first 90 days with your online marketing strategy in the real estate industry.

Real Estate Marketing Plan: Our Simple 90-Day Lead Generation Strategy For Sellers and Buyers

If you have not set up your website yet, the first thing you’re going to be doing is, of course, getting a website set up. If you need a website, check us out at carrot.com. Or, check out biggerpockets.com or Facebook forums to see how our clients perform if you’re not a Carrot member, great! We’ll roll with whatever you have going on now.

The first 90 days are the foundation. So, many people have unreal expectations in their first 90 days of any marketing, but primarily online.

Online marketing takes some time to build, so if you’re looking at search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, or anything like that, your first 30 days, especially, is just getting things going and refining things.

Even if you’re doing PPC, your campaign won’t be optimized in that first month. So have realistic expectations about your first 90 days. This is your foundation setup, and you will scale up after that.

One of the biggest things is you need to have patience in these first 90 days because if we expect the world to change in 90 days, you expect a flood of leads to start coming in, but you’re not putting a flood of marketing out there; then you’re probably not going to get the results that you expect.

Now, not saying that you can’t get a flood of leads coming in in the first 90 days, you totally can, but you have to put a flood of marketing out there to capture that, and we’re going to show you how to do that.

So, one thing I want to ensure that we all do in our marketing and our businesses is to keep your marketing simple initially. You see many different marketing methods and must explore them all at once.

But that isn’t the path you need to follow. We’ll often look at companies and go, “Man, that company is exactly where I want to be,” but they didn’t start there. They slowly stacked things onto their business, and over time as they found out something worked, they made it good; they made a process. They systemized it and said, “Let’s stack something else on there.”

That’s how a real estate investor goes from doing their first deal to 2,000 deals. It doesn’t happen overnight. It happens by stacking marketing methods and systems, one by one, as they perfect each of them. So have patience and stack your efforts.

What Should Be The First Thing You Do In Your Online Marketing?

The first thing I would suggest people do in their first 90 days is you’ve got to get a high-performing website set up.

We’re talking about a website that converts well, looks great on mobile, is not just mobile friendly but looks great on a mobile device, and performs well on a mobile device. It converts a visitor into a lead at a higher rate on a mobile device, which is one thing we focus on a ton here at Carrot, which is why our clients get such great results.

Launch a website; that’s day one!

Personalizing Your Website To Cut Through The Clutter

Within the first 48 hours or so, you will want to be doing some basic stuff. Get your site launched, go in and tweak your content up, personalize your content a little bit, get your story on there, and get your “about” page filled out so people can make that connection with you.

You want visitors to see a real face or person behind the brand. Not a nameless, baseless entity because, as we’ve talked about in other Carrot strategy sketches, in our CarrotCast podcasts, and in our coaching calls for our customers, it’s a cluttered market. Hence, the way you stand out is by telling your stories by connecting at a personal level.

So, ensure you personalize your content within the first few days of launching your website. You have to reinvent the wheel. If you’re a Carrot customer, take our content and look at one paragraph, read it, see what’s in it, write it in your own words, and then delete ours. So adjust 20, 30, and 40% of that content.

If you’re creating a website from scratch, write excellent, engaging content, and work real credibility and real testimonials into it.

Add Lead Tracking So You Know What’s Working And What’s Not

The next thing you must do is put tracking in place as soon as possible. If you’re a Carrot customer, you already have tracking in place, but if you want to get more advanced, and you want to use your own Google Analytics account, or you want to put your Facebook pixel, I would do that the first couple weeks of getting your website. Or, we can do it for you if you’re a Carrot member.

You’re going to need to start tracking that traffic right away. That way, you can begin to retarget people.

Hone Your Unique Selling Proposition

Next, you must ensure your unique selling proposition is nailed within those first few weeks of your online marketing.

What about you and your company standing out, giving people a reason to work with you?

Find Leads With Craigslist Marketing – First 30 Days

So we launched the website, got our tracking in place, personalized some content, had our “about” page up there, put a picture of you on there, and swapped out pictures. Hence, they’re local to your area, swapped out some content, so it’s unique to you and your area, and built-in that credibility, testimonials, things like that, and then we start Craigslist marketing.

Start Craigslist marketing in probably week two or three after launching your website.

Craigslist marketing is fast, quick, and free; if you do it correctly, you can have the leads and traffic coming in that day. We have some great resources on our blog and a Craigslist course. If you are a Carrot member, you can learn about Craigslist marketing.

Start by doing two ads in the morning and two in the evening, then scale it up over four to six weeks to where you’re doing about four to five ads in the morning and four to five in the evening.

Check out our other Carrot strategy sketch on your content and marketing timing because we discuss why those times are important. Or, go check it out on our YouTube channel.

Launch And Build Up Your Pay-Per-Click – First 30-60 Days

Next, once some Craigslist ads are going, your website is optimized with great content, you’ve personalized it, you’ve built in credibility, and built a great “about” page, then you start to do some Google PPC if you have a budget. If you have $200 to $400 a month and are in specific markets, you can start some small-scale PPC marketing and ramp it up.

Sprinkle Credibility Into Your Real Estate Marketing Plan

In month two, you have some momentum going. You’ve got your website; you can always tweak your website later. You can always add more credibility. You can always add your Better Business Bureau logo later. We always look for progress, not perfection, so get that site out the door the first two weeks, build some basic credibility on there, and then you can continually refine it from there.

If you’re unsure what to do on your website to build credibility, hit us up or check out our credibility-building whiteboard strategy sketches and coaching calls on that topic.

Time To Work In SEO – 30-90 Days

Shift your focus to SEO. Pick two to three keywords to focus on for your market that are high-leverage keywords. We discuss it in some of our resources and start setting that foundation.

Then, if you have a tool to track your rankings, maybe start to put those keywords in there to track how your rankings are going. We have that built into Carrot, but other tools can track your rankings if you’re not a Carrot user.

One of the biggest contributors to SEO is content. Make sure you have a good blog post strategy and plenty of real estate blog post ideas to work from!

Begin To Adjust Your Pay-Per-Clicks

Now it’s time to adjust your PPC because you can’t set it up and forget it and not adjust it. So in month two, you will be adjusting and refining your PPC campaign. In month two, you will also turn on your retargeting if you have enough traffic.

You’ve put your Facebook retargeting pixel on, which we teach you how to do in a blog post on our website. Then, in month two or three, we’re going to start turning on retargeting ads on Facebook, and the same thing, we teach you how to do those in those other resources, so check them out. Also, keep your Craigslist marketing going.

Finally, to wrap out your foundational first 90 days, you’re going to be tracking and refining your SEO. You’re going to a coach or someone you can go to to ask them for advice on improving your SEO, building some backlinks, and social media signals, and in this time, you’re probably going to get some citations.

So, get your website listed on Yelp, Yellow Pages, and all those citations. We suggest between 20 and 40 starts in the first 90 days. We can do it if you’re a Carrot member; check out our marketplace. If you’re not a member, check out our how-to build citations for real estate blog post.

After you refine your PPC and only at this time, start thinking about a CRM. Way too many people started thinking about a CRM for tracking your leads in month one. If you don’t have any leads coming in, you have no leads to manage in a CRM. It’s like having gas with no car to put it into.

So make sure you’re focusing on getting leads first, and then you get your CRM to manage your leads once you start getting enough lead flow that you can’t manage. If you do it correctly, you scale up.

Wrapping Up Your Real Estate Marketing Plan: First 90 Days

Once again, contact us for those resources if you are a Carrot member. It’s just a quick run-through. We have many other resources, coaching, and guidance to help you crush it, just like we are with thousands of customers. If you’re not a Carrot member, keep returning to our whiteboard videos, CarrotCasts, or free resources to help you grow or join the fold. Join the Carrot community. We love to help investors and agents, too!

We will be learning new, amazing things every week with great experts, great marketers, and our Carrot team to teach you how we do what we do and how you can make a bigger difference!

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