Cross Marketing in Real Estate can be another beneficial marketing method.
It takes advantage of synergy effects when various partners work together for a joint marketing goal, reducing your overall marketing and advertising costs.
But how can you do cross-marketing in real estate?
You can do external cross-marketing with partners operating in a non-competing real estate niche and internal cross-marketing by applying marketing data from winning campaigns to other marketing channels.
So, in this article, I will first discuss what cross-marketing is, give you five examples of external cross-marketing in real estate, the challenges involved, and how to do internal cross-marketing in real estate.
What is Cross-Marketing?
In a sense, cross-marketing or cross-promotion is a joint endeavor and sometimes even a joint venture.
It happens when two or more businesses in the same or similar industries or niches work together to achieve a joint marketing or promotional goal.
In these cases, you share your audience, leads, or clients with another business and vice versa, and promote another business’s products and services to your audience and vice versa.
5 Examples of External Cross Marketing in Real Estate
1) Cross Marketing with Contractors
Whether you are a real estate agent, a real estate investor, or another type of real estate professional, working with contractors can benefit cross-marketing.
Why?
Because contractors usually know earlier than others when a home gets on the market.
They are the first ones called to upgrade it so it can hit the market.
So, what happens when you build a good relationship with contractors?
They can provide you with information about homes getting on the market soon.
In turn, you could give them potential clients for further contractor work.
2) Cross Marketing with Home Insurance Agents
A counterpart to cross-marketing with contractors is cross-marketing with an insurance agent.
I call it counterpart because, this time, it’s not about potential home sellers but potential first-time homebuyers.
If you put yourself in the shoes of first-time homebuyers, one of the first things they will do is research and look for different home insurance.
This means that insurance agents will know about potential homebuyers entering the real estate market.
A situation like this can benefit you if you want access to more homebuyer leads.
What could you offer in exchange for the insurance agent?
You could also provide them with leads from your database.
You might have current homeowners who would like to switch their home insurance, or you have other potential homebuyers who require new home insurance.
3) Cross Marketing with Mortgage Lenders
Cross-marketing with mortgage lenders has similar benefits to home insurance agents.
You will be able to target potential homebuyers but also potential home sellers.
Another first thing potential homebuyers do before going on a shopping tour is to meet and consult with a mortgage lender.
On the other hand, mortgage lenders also speak with potential home sellers because they need to find their home’s value.
So, they can become a valuable source of potential homebuyers and home seller leads for you as a real estate professional.
The mortgage lender could even promote your business on his website.
Vice versa, you could, in turn, refer customers and leads in your database to mortgage lenders and promote their business on your real estate website.
Other methods could include having the business cards of the respective mortgage lender in your office and vice versa and doing digital marketing campaigns together, which leads me to the next example.
4) Joint Advertising Campaigns
You could reduce your ad spend significantly by doing joint advertising campaigns with other compatible and non-competing real estate businesses and professionals.
Another option is also doing and promoting different events together, such as “open houses.”
A method not in paid traffic but within content marketing could be writing a guest post on your partner’s website and vice versa and sharing content on social media.
5) Cross Marketing with Realtors
This cross-marketing type can be interesting for wholesale real estate investors and realtors.
For wholesale real estate investors, it can be beneficial to work with realtors that are more focused on homes in the lower price ranges to access potentially distressed property owners.
Suppose the deal is structured the right way. In that case, the investor gets a source for sellers.
The realtor can still make money on a deal, even if the property is already an expired listing.
The other cross-marketing approach is the classic co-brokering between real estate agencies and brokerages in the same or different states.
Here, seller and buyer clients can be referred to each other, and a potential commission is shared.
If the relationship is good between the two, even joint marketing campaigns could be carried out.
To summarize the tactics in a list, these are the types of cross-marketing you may want to consider:
- Co-op advertising (paid advertising and content marketing)
- Joint promotions
- Joint events
- Collaboratively produced marketing material
- Sharing email lists
- Sharing business cards
- Classic customer referrals
- Bundled Offerings
Challenges of External Cross Marketing
While all the above sounds great, there are also some challenges.
It can be a long and difficult process to find the right partners.
Why?
First, the partner needs to target a similar audience or demographic, and second, at the same time, it shouldn’t be your direct competitor.
The next challenge is to make sure that it’s a trustworthy business.
This will be much easier if you already have businesses in your contacts with whom you have built a reliable relationship and don’t need to start from scratch.
Questions you might want to ask yourself before progressing with external cross-marketing:
- In the case of joint advertising campaigns, how to determine the advertising costs, and how will the billing be handled?
- In the case of joint advertising campaigns, how long will the respective campaign last?
- Who receives what share of the profits?
- Who is the main contact person for each business?
- Will you have a follow-up system in place, and if yes, how will it be handled? (also, read my article on follow-ups here)
- In the case of promoting your partner’s business on your website, how will leads coming from you be tracked (e.g., affiliate link tracking software)?
- What is your exit plan should things go south?
- What are your guidelines regarding content, what to do and not to do with your audience, and vice versa?
There Is Also Another Type of Cross Marketing
Up to now, I have only discussed cross-marketing between different real estate businesses of complementary real estate niches, hence external cross-marketing in real estate.
But there is also the possibility of doing cross-marketing internally, and I will call it “internal cross-marketing.”
Here “cross” refers to advertising your product, service, or brand across several marketing channels.
It is a concept I have already mentioned in this article and in this one, more or less as a side note.
Here, you focus on the marketing data you gain from your advertising campaigns. You then use this data and apply it to other marketing channels.
In other words, you first create a winning advertising campaign.
Once you have a winner, you will have valuable data about your target audience, including email addresses and/or phone numbers.
You will also know what ad copy, landing page copy, and offers work with your audience segments.
With this knowledge, you can branch out and optimize campaigns on other marketing channels faster to get up to speed faster and improve your conversion rates.
One classic example of using contact information from one campaign in another on a different marketing channel is using a list of email addresses and using these emails to create a remarketing or custom audience campaign in Facebook Ads.
These email addresses you may have generated through a successful Google Ads campaign or another campaign.
See, how you can go about internal cross-marketing is endless because you can combine a lot.
Another example would be to use the phone numbers you collected during a prospecting campaign and use them in another Facebook Ads Campaign to market to a custom audience.
Critical Success Factors for Both External and Internal Cross Marketing in Real Estate
1) Tracking and Analyzing Marketing Data
The whole effort for internal and external cross-marketing in real estate and other industries could be for nothing.
How so?
If you can’t track and analyze the data generated by your campaigns.
Therefore, you might want to use at least some analytics software, such as Google Analytics (read about Google Analytics for Real Estate in this article).
2) Recording Data & Lead Information
The next important thing to do is record the data you generate, which is leads most of the time.
This can be done with customer relationship management software that can sometimes be directly connected to analytics software, such as Google Analytics.
Using a CRM, you can track which lead or potential customer came from which campaign.
This will help you to find out what works and what doesn’t.
By the way, this will also help you to know if a lead came from a partner with whom you do external cross-marketing.
In this context, you may want to also read my article about customer relationship management software in real estate.
3) Testing, Testing, and Testing
Also often mentioned in my blog articles is the importance of constant testing and optimizing advertising campaigns.
Only with enough testing will it be possible to create a winning advertising campaign in time.
Sure, you can get lucky in the beginning and have a winner from the get-go, but most of the time, you will start with a loser campaign and need to optimize from there.
This can be discouraging at times, especially in the beginning, but unfortunately, it’s necessary and needs patience and perseverance.
But suppose you have the first two success factors implemented. In that case, this process will be much easier, and your chances of success will increase.
This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.
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