As a quick turn real estate entrepreneur one of your highest priorities for growing your business should be marketing. Obviously there is more to the business than just marketing, like negotiating and closing deals, but your marketing efforts are what drive the whole process by providing a steady stream of leads for you to negotiate and turn into deals.
All other things being equal, the strength of your bottom line is proportional to the strength of your marketing, period. Many educators even say that you should consider yourself to be in the marketing business rather than the real estate business, and there is considerable wisdom to this advice.
Getting lots of business is no accident. An effective marketing campaign cannot be begun or sustained without a detailed and goal-oriented plan. There are at least four elements that are crucial to designing a marketing plan with wings that will take your business to new heights of success. They are the target audience, or who you want your marketing to speak to, the marketing message, or what you want your marketing to say, the method of delivery, or how you will say it to them, and your marketing budget.
Without having a clear idea in your mind of who you are marketing to, all of your marketing efforts will be a shot in the dark. Who are your customers or clients? What do they do and what are they like? In quick turn real estate there are two main classifications of customers that are important for your business: sellers and buyers.
Buyers can be further classified into wholesale buyers, who buy professionally, and retail buyers, who buy to have a place to live. Your plan should include a detailed description of the types of individuals you are marketing to, including what their habits are and how to reach them.
Your marketing message should not only get the attention of your target audience, but should also inspire them to take action. Figure out who your customers are, what they are in need of, and how you can provide it. Then let your marketing message tell them how doing business with you can solve their problem, and command them to contact you by phone, fax, email, website, singing telegram, in person, or whatever works best for your business.
Once you know what you want to say and who you want to say it to, you need to know how you are going to say it to them. How will you get in front of your prospects and get their attention? There are many ways of doing this including through email, postal mail, bandit signs, outdoor advertising, business cards, and classified ads, to name just a few of the more common ones. Your plan should include as many methods of delivery as you can consistently handle and track the results of.
Finally your plan should also include a budget that details how much you will spend to implement it over the coming months, preferably all the way out to a year. This could be conceived of as a dollar amount or as a percentage of gross business revenues. However you plan it, you should plan to consistently reinvest profits into marketing and growing your business if you don't want to keep working as hard as you are right now for the rest of your life.
Once you have designed and begun to implement your plan, stick to it until you see results. Use common sense of course, but realize that it takes time for the full effect of a marketing plan to be felt and don't expect results overnight. Allow your advertising time to saturate the market and build up the momentum that will keep your business rolling for a good long time.
Hotel Marketing Plan Sample
The network is becoming a real physical location: many people spend more time exploring, having fun, meeting and buying on the network that in real geographical location.
Let's take the case of a normal Leisure travel - like mine in Barcelona last week:
I booked the hotel - on-line
I bought the flight - on-line (now airlines like Ryan Air offer fast check-in for customers buying tickets on-line)
I found the major Barcelona attractions - on-line
I kept in touch with my family - on-line
In a clothes shop, they gave me a ticket card to visit their on-line store ? on-line :)
If I had my laptop, I don't want to imagine how many other on-line could have been?
The need to start a community-oriented Hotel marketing
As John correctly point out, so many people are beginning to identify more with on-line location and network relationship than with the off-line ones; when Internet becomes a community more than a market, who sells in a community-oriented way has clear competitive advantages on competition.
No one is claiming that these concepts are easy to understand, neither that a hotelier has to see them as something concrete to put into practice with a single click. The question that we hear more often from other hotel marketing agencies is ?yes, it's all true, but how can I tell hoteliers??.
These trends are the current reality of Internet and they'll develop more and more in the upcoming years: integrating in on-line relationship circuits will make the real difference between success and failure in hotel marketing.
We must use the strength of these communities to carry traffic, create a brand, sell rooms, and this can be done in a GENUINE, HONEST and PASSIONATE way. To make it clear, it's probably essential to start just to communicate the shape of the on-line medium in the next few years.
Which elements will affect travel decisions on Web 2.0?
Let's return to Barcelona (unfortunately, only with our minds?): which elements have been more influential on my hotel booking decisions?
LOCATION/PRICE: they will always be, joined together, the most important element for the 90% of travellers.
SUGGESTIONS: from "Friends" that I have never seen in person, in a on-line Community that not even talk about travels. In less than half a day I could have 3 opinions about hotels on the Ramblas with the best value for money, packed in a communicative form that resembles a really dispassionate ?dear friend's suggestion?: who's so rational to be not influenced -in a substantial way- by a similar informal exchange of information?
From isolated and scared users to protected and savvy travellers
Thanks to entertainment multi-media favoured by broadband connections, more and more people spend more and more time in Internet and become ?expert? in this particular "Location", and also an integral part of a tacit community: community that helps them to become savvy and well-informed consumers.
Up to a short time ago, the Internet was the ideal medium for the good advertising of a bad product: in an immature market, the user was convinced more by the quality of the website than by the quality of the product or service that the website was proposing.
Now the value is returned off-line: Internet has become a very powerful communication and sale channel, but the good Hotels are one again made of stone?
Both Omar Johnson & Alessio De Luca are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Omar Johnson has sinced written about articles on various topics from tax, Real Estate and How to Sell on Ebay. Omar Johnson is a successful real estate investor and author of the home study courses "The Real Estate Investors's Guide To Finding Motivated Sellers" and What To Say & How To Talk To Sellers" For more info visit. Omar Johnson's top article generates over 12100 views. to your Favourites.
Alessio De Luca has sinced written about articles on various topics from Real Estate. Source: Booking Blog, an Italian blog about .. Alessio De Luca's top article generates over 720 views. to your Favourites.
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