Real estate marketing plan

A real estate marketing plan that gets used fits on one page: a budget derived from your income, a channel split with dollar figures beside it, a calendar that says what ships each month, and four review dates. Everything longer is a document that gets admired in January and ignored by April. This page builds the one-pager for an individual Canadian agent — the channel details live in the national marketing pillar, and office-level planning is a different animal covered in the brokerage marketing plan.

Start with the budget, not the ideas

Ideas expand to fill any budget, so fix the number first. The common industry convention is roughly ten percent of gross commission income — treat that as a starting posture, not a law, and adjust for stage: building years justify more, harvest years less. Take last year’s GCI (or a sober first-year projection), set the annual figure, and divide it into twelve so every monthly decision is spending a known allowance rather than reacting to a salesperson’s call. One rule attached: any channel you fund gets enough to be fairly tested or nothing at all. A hundred dollars of ads is not a test; it is a donation.

The one-page structure

Four sections, each a few lines.

Positioning. Who you serve, where, and the one sentence a past client would use to describe you. This filters every idea downstream — a condo-first downtown practice and a rural acreage practice should veto opposite things.

Channels, in three bands. Owned assets that compound (your website, your email list, your content); the sphere (past clients and the people who already know you); rented reach (ads, placements). A serviceable starting split for an established agent weights the first two bands with the majority of the budget and holds rented reach for specific goals — a launch, a farm push, a pipeline gap. Write actual dollars beside each line.

Calendar. What ships, monthly, per channel. Not themes — deliverables.

Measurement. Where each contact came from, tracked in one system, reviewed on four dates you book now.

The annual calendar, by quarter

Q1 is infrastructure season: the website audit, the database cleaned and consent status verified, the year’s content backlog listed, budget split committed to paper. Q2 rides the spring market — listing-led marketing, open houses feeding capture, ad spend if any concentrated where inventory is. Q3 is the farming and relationship stretch: the sphere touchpoints, community presence, the mid-year budget review where one underperforming line dies. Q4 closes the loop — a year-in-review market piece (clients genuinely read these), client appreciation, and next year’s plan drafted while this year’s numbers are fresh. A monthly constant runs underneath all four quarters: the market update, in whatever format you can sustain, because it is the one deliverable that serves every channel at once.

The measurement page

A plan without attribution becomes astrology at review time. Every contact that enters your pipeline gets a source recorded the day it arrives — website, sign call, referral, ad, open house — and the quarterly review reads three numbers per channel: contacts, appointments, and closed dollars traced back. Cost-per-lead context for the paid lines lives in what leads cost in Canada, and the lead ROI calculator turns your own conversion assumptions into a break-even check before you renew any spend. The review’s output is always the same decision: each line gets more, gets fixed, or gets cut. Plans fail less from bad ideas than from nobody holding the funeral for a dead line.

Keep the compliance column

Two Canadian layers belong on the page itself so they never surprise you mid-campaign: every electronic message to a contact needs a consent basis you can point to (CASL is a budget line’s silent killer — a bought list you cannot legally email is worth nothing), and every piece of advertising carries your registered name and brokerage under provincial rules. Both are template problems: set them up once in your systems and the plan runs clean all year.