Frankly, as a writer who has respect for the English language, I can get pretty ticked off when someone promises “unique” marketing ideas, and the first thing on their list is “create a website.”

Really?

If you want marketing ideas that will help you stand out not just for the sake of being different but because you want to be remembered . . .

If you want marketing ideas that won’t strain your budget or break the bank . . .

And if you want marketing ideas that are relatively easy to implement . . .

Then you’re in the right place.

To bring you some truly unique and genuinely creative marketing ideas for real estate agents, I’ve scoured real estate marketing sites, read blogs, and listened to podcasts. The result is a collection of 6 marketing ideas that will reenergize your imagination and, more importantly, increase recognition of your brand and generate leads.

1. Use Google satellite imagery

I recently read an article that said the human brain is very bad at coming up with wholly original ideas but that it’s exceptionally good at making incremental changes to existing ones. This first creative marketing idea absolutely supports that claim.

The idea is the brainchild of Jimmy Burgess, the chief growth officer at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Beach Properties of Florida. He’s taken an old idea—offering home estimates—and turned it into a captivating, irresistible, insanely effective lead magnet by using Google satellite imagery and a strict follow-up strategy.

How effective is insanely effective?

In 90 days, using the idea I’m about to describe, Jimmy earned $11.2 million in listings. He converted that into $9.1 million in sales. And given the amount of time it took for him to implement his idea, he made $3,600 in GCI per hour!

You can listen to Jimmy explain the details of his process during his interview on the Stay Paid podcast, but at a high level, below are the steps he takes. All you need to do to get similar results is commit to the process. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with the steps below, it’ll only take you about 5 minutes to complete them.

Look through your database of contacts, and pull the names of everyone who is considering selling their house in the next 2 years. These could be open-house guests, past leads, past clients, friends, and family who gathered during the holidays and chatted about the crazy real estate market, FSBOs, and expired listings.

1. For your first contact, use your MLS to pull together a simple comparative market analysis (CMA) of active, pending, and sold homes.

2. Completed an estimated net seller’s sheet that includes the typical closing costs in your contact’s area.

3. On your computer, open tabs to Google Earth, your CMA, and the estimated seller’s sheet.

4. In Google Earth, search the home address of your first contact. Set your desktop to record your screen. Launch Google Earth, and record as Google Earth zooms in from outer space to the address you entered. Listen to Jimmy’s interview to hear what he says during this part of the video, and you can record yourself saying something similar.

5. Once this segment of the video is complete, continue recording as you switch to the tab with the MLS CMA you’ve already completed. Again, listen to his interview to hear Jimmy explain what to say.

6. Finally, switch to the tab that shows the seller’s sheet. Now, you can explain a seller’s sheet, but, once again, it’s what Jimmy says that makes this a stellar marketing idea, so take notes.

7. Close out the video following Jimmy’s lead, and don’t mention anything about whether your contact wants to sell their home.

8. Select a video email program to embed your recorded video. Jimmy uses BombBomb because it will report how many times someone opens his email, which is information essential to his follow-up process, but other programs do the same.

9. Send your email with the subject line [Address]: Valuation update. This subject line gives your email an extended shelf-life because an easy search by your contact for their address will bring up the video and CMA any time they want to revisit it.

Your follow-up is equally easy.

After a couple of days, consult your report. The people who have opened your email and viewed your video most often are the ones you should call first and, you guessed it, Jimmy explains what to say. He also tells you what to write when you resend your email to those who haven’t opened it yet.

This unique marketing idea will not only change your business . . . it will change your life.

2. Send a personally branded magazine

If you want to talk about unique marketing ideas, then let’s talk about mailing a professionally produced, personally branded magazine.

A high-quality publication that features your image, business, and contact information checks all the boxes of effective marketing:

• It supplies value because it offers entertaining and useful information.
• It keeps you top of mind because it consistently and regularly arrives in your recipients’ mailboxes.
• It nurtures relationships because sending a gift is something nice you can do for others. And when you do something nice for someone, they want to reciprocate (as in giving you referrals).
• It has significant staying power because rather than being tossed in the trash can like a piece of junk mail, people will keep it on their kitchen or coffee tables where, by the way, other people will also see it.

A free subscription to your magazine, complete with your branding, is guaranteed to leave a lasting impression.ReminderMedia specialize in creating personally branded magazines for real estate agents. These magazines offer everything listed above, plus they’re automated, so you don’t ever need to worry about forgetting a touchpoint.

To see our most recent issue, request a free PDF sample and enjoy the beautiful images and engaging articles about travel, art, food, design, home and garden, wellness, and more.

3. Provide a free, branded moving truck

This one means shelling out a few bucks, but it’s a creative marketing idea you’re going to get a lot of mileage out of it—literally and figuratively. And it’s a business expense, so you can claim it when tax time rolls around.

First, you’ll need to buy the truck. One that’s about 15 feet long is large enough to move the contents of most 2 bedroom homes (especially those items you don’t want to trust with a moving company), yet small enough for your clients to maneuver without worrying about ripping the top off while driving through an underpass.

Then there’s the fun part—designing the graphics.

Work with an experienced designer to develop eye-catching images that you can either restrict to the sides or use to wrap the truck from bumper to bumper. You may want to consider approaching a business partner, such as a painter or plumber you trust and regularly recommend, and offering them the back door for their advertising as a way to help offset some of the cost.

The not-so-fun part is covering your butt.

You’ll need to buy the necessary liability, comprehensive, and collision insurance. This is not where you want to save a few bucks—purchase at least $5 million of coverage. You also need to have the proper legal papers prepared. And you should probably consider having GPS tracking software installed.

Despite the expense, offering a moving truck is a fantastic idea:

• Your ROI includes 24/7 exposure of your brand and nonstop marketing of your business and services. Essentially, clients using the truck will be volunteer advertisers. You can drive it to listing presentations, closing, and other events. You can also park it where others are going to see it.
• You can generate tons of goodwill by donating the use of your truck to local charities, your chamber of commerce, senior centers, and similar organizations.
• You can post photos of your truck in action on social media, and ask those to whom you lend it to do the same and tag you.

One company that offers moving-truck services for real estate agents is On the Move. You can get the truck, the graphics, and the insurance all in one place.

4. Set up a private Facebook group

Will Penney was another Stay Paid guest who’s using a powerful and creative real estate marketing idea.

At the end of his episode, “How to Beat the Big Agencies in Real Estate Without Spending Millions,” he describes a social media marketing strategy using a private Facebook group that has worked so well for him, he’s turned it into a second business called Social Orchard. While you can implement his idea yourself (as you can see below, it isn’t difficult), it does take time to keep it going. For that reason, you may want to consider using his service.

To create a private Facebook group:

1. Log in to your Facebook page.

2. Go to your Home Page and click Groups in the left-side menu.

3. Click Create New Group.

4. Give your group an appealing name.

5. Choose Private from the drop-down menu. When you do this, a second drop-down menu appears.

6. Choose Visible from this second drop-down menu so that your group can be found.

7. Click Create, and start to invite everyone in your sphere to join your group.

A visible group can be found by anyone who is searching. However, because you’ve also set your group to be private, they will not be able to see or comment on what’s posted unless they are a member. Still, they can request to join.

This combination of private and visible settings is perfect for your purpose because, by definition, a private group is exclusive, and everyone wants to be a part of the “in-crowd.” So when members start sharing your content, many of those recipients will want to join.

Once you’ve created your group and invited your sphere to join, you need to post content that your group will enjoy and find valuable.

You can post memes, articles, photos, videos, recipes, DIY projects, recommendations, quizzes, trivia, reviews, and anything else you can think of that will engage your members. But don’t post anything about real estate. (As Will says in his interview, “that’s like pooping in the pool.” People will leave your group in a hurry.)

Instead, select content that offers value—it’s educational, entertaining, or endearing—and do it routinely and often. Will posts to his private group once a day, 4 days a week.

5. Offer your expertise to HARO

HARO, or Help a Reporter Out, is a service that connects journalists, bloggers, and other writers who need expertise and insights with experts from a wide variety of fields and industries. You sign up with the service and create a profile, and writers who need your particular industry-specific knowledge reach out for a quote. It’s that easy.

Of the creative marketing ideas offered here, this one not only increases your brand awareness but also amplifies your SEO. The more often you are quoted in an article, the better the odds of you showing up higher in internet search results.

But you don’t need to get a ton of responses to your pitches for this strategy to work. Emile L’Eplattener, the managing editor of The Close, noted, “you only need a few good ones to add an ‘In the Press’ section to your website and listing pitches.”

6. Try guerilla marketing

If you’re bored simply copying the ideas of others and there seems to be nothing new under the sun, or you need something to give your brand exposure a boost, then you might want to consider guerilla marketing.

Guerilla marketing is a term first coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book Guerilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Ideas for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business (#ad). The term describes unconventional, innovative, and low-cost marketing tactics that aim to produce maximum exposure for a product or service. It’s an agile marketing strategy that allows your creativity to run wild, and the internet is full of examples.

Here are 2 easy guerilla-marketing ideas that might inspire your creativity:

1. If it’s a thirsty horse, it’ll drink.

On a hot summer day, infiltrate community yard sales and flea markets and offer wandering shoppers cold bottles of water customized with your branded label. (Some companies will print these labels for pennies.) Place them on the bottles of a few dozen cases of water, and pass them around as you do some quick meet and greets.

As an alternative, you can order reusable water bottle customized with your branding. You’ll probably still want to offer a cold bottle of water since that’s the immediate value.

Either plan will create an impression and earn you some thanks that may just be reciprocated with a few leads.

2. Come clean.

Get together with your team, and recruit your family members and friends who owe you favors. Put everyone in shirts branded with your business and, using bottles of glass cleaner and squeegees, approach cars waiting at stoplights and clean their front windows. When you’re done, hand drivers a business card or quickly slide one under their windshield wipers, and wave them on with a smile.

The trick here is to have a card with a tag line that will encourage drivers to recall the event. Something like, “See your way clear to owning a new home” with your name and business contact information would work just fine.

Last thought

Whatever unique or creative marketing ideas you decide to implement—whether it’s one or more of the ideas I’ve discussed here, you find some entirely different alternatives, or you come up with something yourself—do yourself a big favor.

BE. CONSISTENT.

No matter how amazing it may be, marketing takes time to grab hold. One social media post isn’t a social media presence. One postcard mailing isn’t a farming strategy. One email isn’t a campaign. And one newsletter isn’t much of anything except maybe a liner for a birdcage.

No one is going to trust you to manage the most significant financial transaction of their lives based on a single anything. Would you? Of course not, so why would you expect anyone else to? It takes time to have someone come to know, like, and trust you.

Be patient and persistent. Track your results. But don’t form any conclusions for at least 6 months—preferably 12. Give up too soon, and you’ve just wasted a lot of time and money.

And, finally, I want to extend a sincere offer to let us help you with your marketing.

Everything we produce, including our personally branded magazines, is of the highest quality and designed to make you look like the consummate professional that you are.

Your magazine is automated, so you don’t have to waste your time, and shipping to your exclusive list of recipients is included at no extra charge.

Everything is done in-house, which means issues are resolved immediately and special requests are no problem.

Our customer service team is top-notch—after nearly 20 years, we have a 4.8/5 customer rating—with live support in all US time zones.

We have our finger on the pulse of everything that goes on with our clients’ orders and accounts.

And you can believe that each ReminderMedia associate is committed to helping you live a life of freedom by closing more deals and retaining more business.

We will keep you top of mind with your clients.

Click here and you can request a no-obligation estimate. Yes, we’ll follow up to ask about your business to see if we’re a good fit for one another, but you’d expect that.

And don’t forget to request your free sample PDF of the most recent issue. We’ll promptly send it to your inbox, and, at the very least, you’ll enjoy a good read!

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