You likely don't have a team or even individual marketing plan, do you? You just keep doing the same marketing tasks year after year and kind of think that you have all the bases covered, right? Well, you are not alone. Few realty agents or brokers have a solid marketing plan and one big reason is that they don't know the steps in creating one. Here are the steps.

The steps are the same for General Electric and Google as they are for an individual Realtor® or realty team or office. Take note -- Consider saving this column and sending it to everyone in your company if you think your firm is bordering on marketing chaos. If it is, send this column to the owners and managers. They need to create, with your help, a marketing plan. Before it is too late.

Step One: Set Team or Company Mission, Scope and Goals

Top management or the broker in charge of a realty team establishes these, gaining input from within the company, from outside resources such as their ad agencies, media buyers, office managers, marketing consultants, city or county real estate sales statistics, etc.

Mission and Scope

Mission and Scope refer to the nature of the company's products and actions in relation to its markets and audiences.

For example, a horse-property specialist has a different mission and scope than would an agent who sold only beachfront mansions. Mission and scope answer the questions, "What business (or niche) are we in?" and "What markets should we address?"

They include estimates of future products, services and specialties and changes in technology. For example, designing a better website or launching a new active blogging program is a future activity that might affect marketing planning.

Goals

Goals are the results that the team's operating plan should achieve. Individual strategies and programs support the plan and by reaching its marketing objectives, the team achieves its marketing goals.

Goals should be expressed in a way so that the team's progress towards reaching them can be first benchmarked and then measured. They should be set high enough to challenge the eager beavers,, but not so high that they are unachievable. Goals are expressed in both dollar and non-dollar terms.

Dollar goals are expressed many ways. They can be directly related to profit or total sales, commissions, or to factors such as return on Investment (ROI) or simply, in big firms, how much the stock price has gone up.

For realty agents, year-to-year dollar and non-dollar goals often relate to number of transactions, commission amount earned, total sales volume, total rentals, etc. They can even relate to the success of community service programs undertaken and gain or loss of public recognition and approval. A goal might be "becoming established as the top realty agent in X and Y city neighborhoods through farming programs.

Step Two: Getting Organized for Planning

In big firms, many managers organize for marketing planning. In a team or small real estate firm, each person could be assigned a certain task. All departments should be included and each should receive a list of items that top management needs, based on the mission, scope and goals already established.

Some of the main tasks in organizing include assessing what is going on NOW. There should be an honest situation analysis, a market profile, both what the market is doing now and what it likely WILL be doing. You need to know the market's wants, needs and its attitudes toward what you are providing. What do you have that makes people buy from you instead of you're your competitors? What do you and your team do better than others? What do you fall down at doing?

Is your advertising really positioning you properly in your marketplace? Are your facilities adequate for now and the near future? Is your training program adequate?

Once everything is known, quantified and written down about the team, you can move to the next step, which is the situation analysis.

Stay tuned in the next few weeks for Part II of this series!