Creating a marketing plan to sell a one-of-a-kind property involves expertise, time, and money while preparing the property for the marketplace. It starts with research and developing a unique value proposition that differentiates the property. This proposition then acts as a guide that helps to develop a marketing, advertising, and sales strategy.
When developing a marketing and sales strategy, one has to be aware of the property’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
“A good marketing plan dictates how someone promotes their property. A sales strategy includes how to get a particular buyer to buy the property,” says Michael DeRosa, a luxury real estate expert and the founder of Michael DeRosa Exchange, a real estate brokerage known for selling unique, one-of-a-kind, and special quality properties.
The person selling the property should first know who their target market is. The target market is the people who will be the most likely to buy the property.
“You must understand who your potential buyers are and what they might want to gain from your property and its location,” says Michael DeRosa. “If you understand how your buyers think and behave, you can define your property as one that will suit their lifestyle and develop benefits that will speak to them.
Marketing is an investment in your property and its potential future use. It involves spending money to make the property more valuable to the market. Style, colors, furniture, and other design elements must align with the preferences of your target audience. Market research supplies the necessary information to make one’s marketing efforts effective and worthwhile. It dictates the best way to place advertising and the best format for that advertising, and it helps find and secure your buyer.
“For an advertising campaign to succeed, it needs to be backed by good market research. It’s market research that helps identify your target audience and increases the likelihood of successfully acquiring new buyers,” Michael DeRosa continues. “Through market research, you can determine not only the demand for your property and its location, but also gauge potential competition and sales trends.”
Luxury real estate companies like Michael DeRosa Exchange focus on sales strategies, monitoring buyer behavior through a number of avenues like surveys and questionnaires, monitoring online behavior, and even face-to-face interaction with buyers.
Marketing can be broken down into essential phases, or what is often referred to as the seven P’s: product, place, pricing, promotion, people, process, and presentation.
- Product: In real estate, the product is the property. Make sure to point out what makes the property unique or special. Highlight the relevant features and amenities that will attract potential buyers.
- Place: Place is where the property is located. Explain all the perks and benefits of purchasing a property in a specific location.
- Pricing: Setting the right price is important to succeed. Many factors come into deciding on a price, including return on investment, perceived value, lifestyle benefits, and opportunity costs of not buying.
- Promotion: The promotion relates to how you will market, advertise, and expose your property. Find the most suitable tactic that will help you communicate a property’s value in order to attract buyers.
- People: It’s important that everyone who represents the property and deals with buyers are fully trained sales professionals with intimate knowledge of your property and how it will potentially improve a buyer’s life.
- Process: The process of delivering your property to the buyer should be designed for maximum effectiveness. Michael DeRosa Exchange utilizes a competitive bidding strategy when selling incomparable properties, which motivates buyers to perform. Buyers get caught up in the competitiveness of the bidding and this drives the price of the property to the highest price the market is willing to offer. This sale approach is designed to deliver a final value that will satisfy sellers, the market, and buyers.
- Presentation: The presentation is the physical evidence of how the property appears in the market. Buyers’ opinions of how a property is presented can impact their buying decisions.
Distinguishing Marketing From Advertising
Marketing refers to preparing your property for the marketplace. Marketing is how you convince potential buyers that your property is the right one for them. Advertising is making your property known to people within that marketplace and influencing buying behavior. To do this, advertising must be timely and strategic, and it should focus on creative positioning and media. You should not advertise the property until your marketing presentation is complete.
When a buyer is preparing to make a purchase, their behavior falls into six broad stages. These are awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction, and purchase. Your advertising strategy will help you explain and promote your offerings to the right audience throughout these stages.
- Awareness and knowledge: Buyers are processing the information they’ve gathered from the advertising. Advertising should present information on the property’s benefits to create interest.
- Liking and preference: At this point, a buyer wants to know how a property relates to them. For advertising to be effective, it needs to reach them on an emotional level.
- Conviction and purchase: In this stage, buyers are either showing intent to buy, or they are actually purchasing. At this stage, the main role of advertising is speeding that process along.
“Once you do all of the above, selling the world’s most unique property is a piece of cake!” says Michael DeRosa.