As a real estate agent with a marketing strategy, it’s easy, and often natural (and also effective) to want to focus your marketing messaging on telling people all about you, your successes, and your decades of experience helping people buy and sell properties.
In short, it’s easy to focus on talking about yourself. And there’s no doubt that it works and people do respond to it.
And while it’s fine to focus on that as your overall marketing message, another (more increasingly popular) approach to take is to focus on the solution you’re providing, rather than you and the transactions you’ve done.
And that’s where a solutions-based marketing strategy comes in.
A solutions-based marketing strategy is where you focus on addressing how a person’s pain point is solved.
While it’s easy to outline what you do, how you do it, and how great you are at doing it, solutions-based marketing is different. It’s where your marketing message focuses on explaining the problems your business and your offering solves (sometimes, even if it means working with someone else).
Solutions-based marketing works because, naturally, people care about “what’s in it for them”, which solutions-based marketing puts front-and-center.
In this marketing approach, you focus on the person you’re marketing to, not yourself.
For example, let’s say someone’s pain point is, as a first-time homebuyer, they don’t have a strong knowledge of the real estate market or what happens as part of a typical real estate transaction. If you were to focus your business on working primarily with first-time buyers and helping educate them (and hold their hand) as part of the real estate transaction, to make things easier for them, then you’ll be solving the pain point of them being completely overwhelmed when they buy their first home.
Or, a person’s pain might be that they, for whatever reason, can’t afford to pay the typical percentage of commission that goes with the sale of their home. In this case, you can try to convince them as much as you want, with very logical points, as to why they should pay a higher commission and the better results they can get from doing so, but if they simply do not have the funds, then how good you are at what you do can’t make them work with you, so instead, solving their pain point could mean working with a discount agent (or them avoiding working with you if you don’t discount your commission).
In both of those cases, focusing on the solution that solves their potential or current problem can win (or push away) new business.
★ Want to learn more about building a marketing strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Building a Real Estate Marketing Discoverability Strategy
- Building Downloadable Resources Into Your Marketing Strategy
- How (and Why) to Build a Real Estate Marketing Segmentation Strategy
And as an agent, there’s no shortage of solutions that you can focus on in your marketing message (and not all of them need to be financially based). For example, you could:
- Provide staging services, and focus on solving the client’s problem of making sure their home looks its best, to maximize the sale price of the property.
- Provide moving services, and focus on solving the hassle that comes along with organizing, packing, and moving all of the contents of a home.
- Provide light renovation services, and focus on solving the client’s problem of finding a contractor and making renovation decisions on their own.
There are a lot of different solutions you could provide (and market) because there are a lot of pain points that people face as part of the typical real estate transaction; by focusing on the solutions you’re providing, people that are concerned about those issues might choose to work with you over someone else.
★ Want to learn more about building an inbound marketing strategy? Have a look at these posts and resources:
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
- Why You Should Drop Your Real Estate Marketing Funnel (And What to Do Instead)
- Download Our Inbound Marketing Guide for Real Estate Agents
People will always want to work with someone that is successful and great at what they do, especially when it comes to a transaction as big as buying and selling a home, so marketing yourself that way absolutely does work; but by focusing on the problems people face in a real estate transaction and marketing to them the solution you have in place to solve that problem for them, and focusing on what’s in it for them, you can get more leads, more business, and more deals, simply by changing your marketing message.
With up to date marketing trends relevant to today’s market, our report is a selection of curated content, information, and data that will give you an outline of what’s working right now in real estate marketing.
