Real Estate Marketing | Real Estate Marketing Tips

There are literally dozens of ways of marketing your real estate investing business. Some are time intensive, while others require you to open your wallet and spend a few bucks. In order for you to see maximum impact from your marketing efforts, you need to sit down and develop a comprehensive marketing plan for your fledgling business. It's not hard, but it does require some thought and the ability to get the best return possible from your investment of time and money.

If you master your marketing efforts, real estate investing will always provide you with more than enough money for your needs, wants, and desires.

Initially, you may have more time on your hands than cash in the bank, so I'll start with a number of techniques that will cost you next to nothing. Keep in mind, though, that your best results will come from cluster bombing your chosen investment area with a combination of marketing techniques. Classic money advice has always held that you should never put all your eggs in one basket; the same advice holds true for your marketing efforts.

I advocate a marketing technique I call Real-Time Investing. Your investment here will primarily be time and gasoline, but what is involved is simply driving around areas in which you would like to invest looking for signs of distress. The signs of distress that I'm referring to here are things like overgrown lawns, newspapers piled up on front porches, and deferred maintenance on houses. By combining Real-Time Investing with certain guerrilla marketing techniques, you can get really good results without breaking the bank.

Some of the different techniques you can utilize that don't cost much money are things like bandits sign, flyers, and canvassing the area looking for motivated sellers. Marketing efforts that require a little bit more money can generally be broken down into two basic categories: shotgun marketing and target marketing. Shotgun marketing is considerably less expensive than target marketing, but the results you get won't be nearly as good. However, it's still a good idea to utilize both techniques because you will get some results from shotgun marketing at very low cost.

Shotgun marketing is a general technique that is the marketing equivalent of carpet bombing. Instead of honing in on specific targets, you shoot at everything that moves. For example, in a direct mail campaign you could send a postcard out to every home in a particular ZIP code looking for motivated buyers or sellers. However, you can improve your results by targeting only specific properties or addresses. Instead, you might consider sending a postcard to people who are 30, 60 or 90 days past due on their home loans. In addition, if you're looking for people that might be interested in buying properties that you have available, you might send postcards to apartment dwellers or people who have recently been turned down on home loan applications.

Remember, there a dozens of ways to market yourself and your real estate investing business. You may not have the resources to spend much money on highly targeted radio or television ads, but the results you get can very quickly pay for the cost of the ad. The key here is to target the right demographic groups with the correct media. Talk radio stations and certain cable television channel will yield you tremendous results. Do your due diligence and research your options before spending your hard-earned money and you'll get astonishing results.