Starting the Marketing Plan

My wife and I sat down late last week to start putting together a Marketing Plan for our business (Lish Properties). We spent several hours brainstorming, and then I took our long list of brainstorm ideas and organized them into logical marketing components. For the most part, the bulk of our marketing efforts will likely fall into the following three areas:

1. Branding/PR: While generating income is certainly a primary goal of the business right now, we are lucky to be in a position where we have enough financial and employee resources that we can focus some attention on longer-term business growth. For us, this means creating not just a business entity, but a business brand. Using both traditional and innovative campaigns, we’re hoping to define a full-service real estate investing brand that ultimately allows us to capitalize on our current business model as well as create new business models and revenue streams. Put another way, we are working on strategies that will allow us to create a recognizable name and brand that will help us generate more money down the road.
2. Building a Buyer Base: Due to current RE market conditions, finding buyers is the key to our ability to flip houses and generate income. A couple years ago, when anyone could get a loan, acquiring property at rock-bottom prices was the focus of most investors; today, great deals are aplenty and finding qualified buyers is the challenge. Many of the marketing ideas we are in the process of developing are geared towards building a base of buyers for our properties; while some of those buyers may be qualified short-term (in other words, they’re ready to buy today), we also are focused on taking unqualified buyers and getting them qualified, so that they can buy our properties 1-, 6- or even 12-months from now. While building a buyer base is by-far the least “sexy” part of our marketing efforts, it’s probably the most important in terms of positioning us to succeed.
3. Professional Relationships: Much of our success and failure will determined by our ability to build relationships with other real estate professionals. This means building a network of agents who can bring us property deals, agents who can bring us buyers, financiers who can help us get our potential buyers qualified, and legal professionals who can help us get the deals done. We will focus a good part of our marketing efforts around building strong relationships with those who will ultimately mean the difference between success and failure in our business.

Over the next several weeks, my wife and I plan to add some meat to our Marketing Plan, put together a list of marketing goals for next year, and hopefully by the beginning of the year, we will start rolling out some programs and marketing efforts.