Congratulations on passing the state licensing exam and getting placed with an agency! Now it’s time to find your clients – and to have them find you. Some agencies will provide assistance for marketing, but they might not give you all the tips you need. Read on to learn more about tips to market yourself as a real estate agent.

Your new agency may give you some leads to get started with. But those are not going to expand your business very well. You can also start with marketing to your so-called warm market – your friends and family. It’s the least expensive type of marketing, and you know that your audience will be receptive, or at least polite and hear your message. They can also give people they know a referral to you, and that kind of marketing is both free and invaluable. Your warm market paired with your agency’s leads will be a solid place to start.

Adding on to that, there are traditional types of marketing like newspaper ads and local city magazines. But in today’s digital age, these marketing formats don’t yield very strong results. Here is where you can let your creative talents shine. Think of ways to make digital videos that not only make your clients’ home look dazzling, but get you noticed.

Viral videos can take off and get people watching them for reasons other than their original purpose. Even if 90% of people viewing your clip are doing so for reasons other than buying a home, your name is getting out in front of all of them. One clever agent in Northern California did a parody of “YMCA” and garnered so much business, he was named by the Wall Street Journal as the top real estate agent in the country.

You should also have a robust website that invites people to click and contact you. Use those clicks to collect e-mails for your newsletter that you can also use when you get a new property to sell. Having good topics like ways to get stubborn grease off of your range hood or quick fixes for a leaky toilet will keep people coming back for what you have to say and build loyalty to you.

Keep up with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, too. These are the two most popular social media sites. If you have the time, you should maintain Google+ and Instagram accounts as well to broaden your horizons.

Lastly, know your market and use that knowledge to your greatest ability. There are all kinds of things people from out of the area need to know about schools, traffic patterns, and shopping, just to name a few things. Your local market guide will be a great asset to them – and lead to you getting more business. People want an agent who knows his or her stuff about the area. Your market guide shows potential clients that you are that expert.

Remember, a comprehensive marketing plan is not inexpensive. You will have already paid for your license and your testing fees, so be sure to factor marketing into your starting budget. While your agency might give you some tools like a set of personalized postcards or business cards, you will still need to have your own personal marketing set of tools as well.

Your customers are talking about everything from sex, politics and religion, to the latest shade of eye shadow. Every responsible social media interaction from your company carries with it a set of “musts,” those things you have to do in order to remain ethical, above-board, believable, interesting and relevant. Your media marketing strategy needs to include a set of guidelines by which anyone who writes for your company operates, a code of ethics that will leave your reputation intact at all times, and make you invulnerable to unwarranted criticism or attack. Even small business marketing strategies need to include maintenance of a viable “corporate” image. With the right strategies even the smallest Atlanta based companies can be active on the world stage.

Your media and public relations policies should include the following:

Authenticity
Be original in thought, deed and word, at all times. If you are ever found out to be a mimic, a plagiarizer, or an overt over-the-top pusher of your brand, you will not only lose customers, but you will incur the wrath of the Internet in the form of unflattering reviews and comments from which you will find it difficult to recover.

Transparency
Being open with your public should become second nature, to a certain extent. While transparency means admitting mistakes publicly and responding to critics or negativity, it does not mean revealing trade secrets or divulging personnel matters, ever. Legally speaking, if you are going to quote someone, always obtain permission and attribute the source; treat every quote you make as if it were copyrighted information. And, with every entry on a social media site, include digital marketing information including your name, email address and web address.

Play to your audience
Remember who is reading you: Past clients, current customers, potential buyers, and even past, current and future employees. Before you publish anything, read your content with all of those people in mind, and edit accordingly. This is your public face; don’t embarrass yourself.

Common sense
Exercise good judgment about language, unflattering commentary, inflammatory remarks, or any other interactions that might be slanderous or hurtful. Businesses based in Atlanta for instance, have long used their social media strategy to build product support and moderate negative comments in their social marketing network. Your company image and media marketing strategy can have no room in it for below-the-belt social networking interactions. Let your employees know that your policies mandate that any and all interactions undertaken by them in the course of business, or even after hours, if they use your name, will be monitored. Stress the need for an ethical approach to social networking that keeps your code of conduct in media public relations intact.

Be value-added
Bring something to the table that is not only interesting and relevant to your company or product, but make it so people want to engage and learn more. It’s a balancing act, but you want to promote your company and ideas without seeming to do so. No one wants to waste time reading blatant advertising when they are casually surfing, or feel duped into buying something when they are browsing the web.

A big mistake that businesses make is to simply put their current company literature onto a website and expect this to be sufficient to have a maximum impact online. A business does not want a web visitor to have the same experience that they could have from offline literature. The business website must utilise the potential of the internet and form a website that is engaging and communicates to the web visitor on many levels. A successful online business utilises the creativity and communication techniques that can be sought online to give the customer an interactive experience on the website.

Having an interactive ecommerce solution is now an obligation for businesses to sell online. Many businesses fail to add certain elements to their website which engage with the customer, here are the top elements that need to be included in an ecommerce software solution:

• Social Bookmarking: The recent Google algorithm update has meant the need for an ecommerce solution to have a social presence is now a necessity. There is now huge traffic and potential customers on social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The ecommerce software must have the ability to link into these sites and interact with their customers. Having sharing buttons on the ecommerce solution so that customers can spread the word on your behalf to their friends and colleagues is a priceless marketing tool and is so simple to incorporate.
• The businesses social presence is now benefitting the businesses search results more than ever with the algorithm update. This means that increasing the social brand will benefit the traffic and potential sales. By adding these ‘share’ buttons and ‘like’ buttons will increase your social presence and now that the search engines are using a websites social status as an element when ranking the website they are essential tools that need to be incorporated.
• Email Newsletter: Collecting web visitors’ information and statistics is fundamental to the success of an online business, knowing their web habits and behaviours will give the business an advantage over competition. By adding a ‘subscribe to newsletter’ option, the business is then able to gain an email address of the web visitor and interact via email. When the email list starts to grow, it can be become one of your most valuable marketing tools as information can sent directly to the web visitors’ inbox. By engaging with the customer, with their consent, the ecommerce solution is more likely to make a sale, as the customer has expressed an interest in the website already.

Incorporating these elements into a business website will gain the website an exposure to your customers and interact with them to create sales. By utilising the social market will give the business an exposure to a market that is growing all the time and will be the future of how a customer finds your product or service.