Real estate companies and teams who are vying for business in a highly competitive — and often highly personal — industry know the best way to attract customers is through high-impact marketing that showcases the global brand and messaging while speaking directly to local audiences on every channel.

It’s a tall order, and because real estate companies are so widely distributed — with teams of realtors essentially operating their own businesses in distinct markets — the burden of localized marketing feels especially heavy, easily dropped in favor of more urgent initiatives (like helping clients buy and sell property).

However, letting localized marketing slide is a shortsighted solution, as communicating directly with buyers in the areas your teams serve is a key way to differentiate yourself from competitors and build credibility by highlighting expertise in the area where they’re looking to invest or sell. By offering a truly tailored outreach experience, you’ll attract more customers — and more referrals — who choose you for your personal feel, local knowledge, and custom experience.

5 Keys to High-Impact Localized Real Estate Marketing

Personalize in Print

Despite its reputation as an old-school tactic, print marketing — and in particular direct mail — remains a powerful tool for real estate marketing, from open house invitations to roundups of comparable properties in the area and more. The key to making direct mail and print marketing effective in today’s digital age is personalization. So as you plan out direct mail campaigns, it’s important to think through how to incorporate materials tailored to specific neighborhoods and demographics, utilizing variable printing to include personalized details to both capture attention and establish a more personal connection with potential clients.

When creating print materials, what specific elements should you be looking to tailor to recipients?

• Visuals: Rather than stock images of any old city, make your collateral memorable by using imagery that will resonate with the local community, including meaningful landmarks, scenes, or events.
• Samples: If you want to build credibility by highlighting properties you’ve sold, don’t just choose any property — choose one that recipients will recognize. This might mean printing different versions of your flyer for different cities (or even more granular — different neighborhoods), but it will go a long way in creating that “local business” feel so many consumers are looking for.
• Logistics: Be sure you’re printing times in the right time zone for recipients, regardless of where your corporate office is located; be sure the addresses and phone numbers for contact will direct potential customers to the right agents; and check for regional terms that might resonate better with some audiences more than others.

Go Deeper with Digital

Print outreach alone is not a solid marketing strategy. Today, having a strong online presence is nonnegotiable. This includes localized landing pages, unique social media accounts for each team to communicate with their specific audiences, highly customized email outreach, and even geotargeting to help your campaigns reach specific areas.

Meeting your audience online helps them build familiarity with your brand and lets them know you’re available and eager to meet them. Use all the same localization tactics you use in print, and let your “old-school” and digital outreach work together to make your organization — and your specific team — a household name so that, when it’s time to make a move, your ideal customers know exactly who to call.

Event Marketing: Location, Location, Location

From open houses to sales offices, a lot of real estate marketing happens on site, and these events are powerful marketing opportunities, too. “Open house” signs in the front yard and around the neighborhood are critical of course, but those are table stakes.

Once you’ve invited people in with your print and digital outreach, welcome them with signage and materials designed to show off your unique process or skillsets, provide special promotions (Discounted staging? A free inspection?), and be sure nobody leaves without a swag-filled favor. When you put as much marketing energy into your local events as you do for the rest of your outreach, your audience experiences the best you have to offer, and you establish your team as the one to call when they need a realtor.

Lead with Your Purpose

Research from SurveyMonkey found that 78 percent of consumers had made purchasing decisions based on brand values in the last year, and 55 percent said they would be more likely to purchase from a company that shares their values. Half of survey respondents said they cared much more about social values than they had just a year prior. Long story short, consumers want to work with providers that prioritize purpose and not just profit — and for local audiences, purposes related to their own backyards is even better.

So, as you’re creating your local marketing strategies, it’s to your benefit to prominently feature all the ways your team is involved in the community. Do your brokers and realtors donate a percentage of each commission to a local charity? Highlight that. Do your individual team members spend their time off volunteering? Show that off. When potential customers are looking for someone with expertise in the area to help them buy or sell a property, your in-depth community involvement will be a critical competitive advantage.

To Protect Your Brand, Empower Your People

For real estate companies with teams targeting clients across various cities, regions, or even countries, it can be challenging to ensure every local realtor is producing and distributing consistent brand materials. Corporate could do it all themselves, but who has time for that? They could ask every local realtor to create their own collateral and messaging, but this would require a seriously time- and resource-consuming review process—or almost guarantee brand dilution, muddied messaging, and loss of quality control.

Instead, consider leveraging a through-channel marketing automation platform to give your distributed teams access to everything they need to create and customize collateral while maintaining airtight brand integrity. This makes it easy for every realtor to create and execute localized, multichannel marketing campaigns, alleviating the corporate marketing team’s oversight burden and empowering users to build strong relationships with their unique, local audiences.

The Right Marketing Partner Makes All the Difference

While localized marketing is critical in the competitive real estate landscape, it’s not without its challenges. At OneTouchPoint, we are experts at overcoming those challenges. With an expert team and a powerful marketing management platform, we excel at empowering clients with distributed marketing presences to create and execute localized, multichannel marketing campaigns with all of the impact and none of the headache.

To learn more about how OneTouchPoint powers brand engagement for our clients, we invite you to request a live demo. Our experts will be happy to walk you through our platform and process.