When searching for growth plans for real estate agents, you usually find lists of different marketing methods.
That’s fine, but the answer for the growth part is missing.
So, how to grow fast as a real estate agent?
Since the growth motor of your real estate business is marketing and sales, you first need to find a winning marketing campaign by doing continuous testing.
Once you know your cost per acquisition or transaction, you can apply different scaling methods to your winning campaign.
To do that, you also need to consider your marketing numbers and reduce your time frame to attain your profit goals.
If you want to know how to do that, I invite you to read the rest of this article.
What Do You Need First to Be Able to Grow as a Real Estate Agent?
Marketing and sales are usually the heart and growth motor for every business.
This is not only true for the real estate industry.
If you are starting your real estate business, you are confronted with many unknowns.
And one large piece of the unknown is that you don’t know what’s working.
You might have heard from different real estate influencers and gurus that this and that marketing method brings good results.
Still, you usually don’t know if this is also the case for your business or your individual situation.
So, if you don’t know what’s working for you, you can’t think of growing just yet.
I’m a gym junkie and can give you an analogy from there.
It took me several years to test different methods, read up on science-based training methods, modify the nutrition, etc., to find out what works for me to grow some muscle.
You read what different people are doing in different publications and books, and you can often wrongly assume that what’s working for these people will work for you.
But unfortunately, it’s not the case for the most part.
You can be lucky and get results with a particular method you are reading about because you have a similar genetic constitution.
But usually, we aren’t clones or some collective hive like the Borg from Star Trek, where one thing always works for everyone else.
So, before you can double down on what works to grow, you first need to find out what works.
The same is true for growing your real estate business.
How Do You Find Out What Works?
You first need to have a real estate marketing plan or a strategy.
I already discussed how to create a marketing plan in this article.
This is usually done by testing different marketing methods and channels you plan to use based on your marketing plan.
When developing a marketing plan, you will also know which metrics to track to determine if you get the desired results.
An Example of a Scalable Marketing Method
Let’s do an example with a scalable marketing method because scalability makes growth possible in the first place.
You always want to start with one to a maximum of three marketing channels or methods for your marketing tests.
This is because you don’t want to lose track and preserve your advertising spending.
Ideally, you start with a marketing channel that potentially has an extensive reach and, at the same time, is suitable for your individual financial and time situation.
Usually, if you have enough money, you do not necessarily have much time, and vice versa.
In this, and this article, I analyzed already some marketing channels in the context of scalability.
So, you can use pay-per-click advertising if you have little time but some money to spend on advertising to do tests.
The two largest ones, where you basically cover the whole Internet, are Facebook Ads and Google Ads.
If, based on your research, you know that your target customers can be best reached, for example, on Facebook, then you start with Facebook.
You start with the latter if Google Ads can better reach them.
Once you get successful results in one of the two, you can apply different scaling methods within the platform and then branch out to other marketing channels.
You can then use the market information and experience you have already collected with the one that worked and is working.
With market information and experience, I mean that you will then know which ad creatives, sales copy, and offer convert best.
This is the knowledge you can take with you and apply to variations to other additional marketing channels (print media, content marketing, etc.) without having to do the kind of testing you did in your first one.
And there are not that many marketing channels as good for carrying out quick tests with trackable variables as Facebook Ads and Google Ads.
Suppose you decide to use Google Ads.
With Google Ads, you can do several tests to develop a winning ad campaign step by step.
You could test in the following sequence:
- Your Ad Copy improving the CTR of your Ad steadily to find out which real estate offer likely has the highest demand, including several different keywords, by doing A/B tests with your different ad variations regularly
- A/B test different versions of your landing pages
This is just a superficial way of describing a test with Google AdWords, which would merit an article on its own.
A lot depends on your monthly budget.
It can take just several weeks, a month, or several months until you have done enough tests and created a winning campaign that starts to convert well.
Once you have developed a winner with hard testing, you can start to scale your AdWords campaign and branch out to further marketing channels.
You would now be at the stage where you know that for X amount of dollars, you would constantly get Y real estate leads.
What does scaling in the context of Google Ads mean?
You increase your daily budget, add new keywords, and/or branch out to other Google Ads distribution channels besides search ads.
These channels are the display network, YouTube Ads (as part of the display network), Gmail Ads, and now just recently, Google Discovery Ads and more.
Once you have exhausted these distribution channels, you can branch out to other marketing channels outside Google Ads.
This is not only because of growth reasons but also because of risk mitigation reasons.
You don’t want your business to depend solely on one marketing channel.
How to Grow Your Winning Campaign and Yourself as a Real Estate Agent Fast
To grow your real estate business fast using the marketing channel chosen in the above example, you would have to spend more advertising money in a shorter time.
But it also depends on what the term ‘fast’ means to you.
Let’s say you had a monthly $1,000 ad spend budget to test your campaign with Google Ads.
After one month of disciplined testing, you created a winner and now know that you can spend $50 and reliably generate one quality lead.
You also know that you need to spend $500 for one real estate transaction.
In one transaction, you earn a profit of $8,000 on average.
Now, we have some numbers to work with to plan even for fast growth. It all depends on what the terms ‘normal’ and ‘fast growth’ mean to you.
Let’s say you made $60,000 the past year, and normal growth would mean you make a profit of $100,000 in the following year.
On the other hand, fast growth could mean making this $100,000 profit not within the following year but within the following three months.
Let’s use the assumed numbers from above for this sporty goal.
You would have needed to make 12.5 transactions within 12 months in the normal growth year to reach that goal.
Expressed in advertising spend, that would have meant spending $6,250 (12.5 transactions x $500 ad spend per transaction) within a year to generate these transactions.
The monthly ad spend would have been roughly $521.
But since you want to grow fast and do this within three months, you would have to spend this same amount of $6,250 not within a year but within three months.
Which would mean a monthly ad spend of $2,083.
Maybe you can now realize how important it is to first create a winning marketing campaign before you start to scale aggressively and thus can grow fast.
In paid digital advertising, it comes down to whether you can also aggressively increase your marketing budget to reach your yearly goals within three months.
But that’s not all.
By just crunching the marketing numbers, we now completely ignore the operational aspect of a (real estate) business.
You would also have to be prepared to handle more transactions in less time.
This would usually mean delegating more or hiring more staff.
This would likely reduce your profit per transaction, which in turn would also mean having to increase the number of transactions not in a linear way as we did in the example above.
How to Grow as a Real Estate Agent On a Budget
A different can of worms would be if you didn’t have the above budget for ad spending and would need to do it on a small or almost empty wallet (e.g., a $100 budget per month).
If you would still want to use the paid advertising method, testing could not take just one month but between 6-12 months or even longer.
Since you probably have more time in this situation, the content marketing method with an intelligent search analysis approach to produce the right content could be a viable route.
Why?
Because it can also take between 8-12 months until articles reach about 80% of their ranking potential.
So, if you produce many articles and other types of content right at the beginning within 1-2 months, this content could reach its ranking potential within 8-12 after publishing.
Nevertheless, you will also need patience until you know which content gets the most traffic and which one converts best into transactions.
To grow your real estate business with the content marketing approach, you will definitely need to delegate content production at some point.
Here comes again a numbers game.
After a certain amount of time, you may know that once ranked, you get, on average, 800 page views per article. And for every five articles with this number of page views, you generate a real estate transaction of $8000 profit.
Knowing this, you can determine how many articles you need monthly to reach your profit goal in the desired amount of time.
But the scalability will not be as fast as paid advertising because Google takes time to rank your content, and the traffic you generate isn’t as controllable as paid traffic methods.
To end this article, I will give you an example of the calculation for this method:
- 4000 page views per month convert into one real estate transaction of $8,000 profit
- You get, on average, 800 page views per month per article.
- The number of articles ranked at 80% of rank potential to reach the yearly profit goal of $100,000 (normal growth): 50,000 monthly page views or 62.5 articles ranked at 80% of ranking potential.
- The number of articles ranked at 80% of rank potential to reach the yearly profit goal of $1,200,000 (fast growth): 600,000 page views or 750 articles ranked at 80% of ranking potential.
This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.
- Why Real Estate Conversion Rates Are 6-Times Below Average - March 21, 2024
- How to Manage Your Apartment Advertising Campaign - February 23, 2024
- Finding Marketing Channels for Apartment Advertising - February 12, 2024
