Target Your Real Estate Photography Marketing

I’ve talked to several people recently that are building their real estate photography business, and have talked about doing general, non-targeted type marketing. I think it’s worth raising the fact again that as a real estate photographer building your business targeted marketing should be your top priority. Here’s why:

• Your potential clients (listing agents in a specific geographic area) are easy to find because they are all advertising to their potential clients.
• You don’t want to waste your marketing time and resources marketing to buyers agents who just want to work with buyers and never have a need for a professional real estate photographer.
• Your marketing is cheaper, faster and more effective if you know exactly who you potential clients are.

Thanks to Google search and real estate agent broker websites, I can sit here at my desk in my underwear in Podunkville, OR and in a few hours (takes longer for more populous zip codes) make a list of all the listing agents in any given geographic area on the planet. The list will include each agent’s name, e-mail address, phone number, number of listings and price range of the listings. I can even judge whether Josephine Realtor’s specific listing in St. Louis, MO has professional photography. If I can do all this so can you, and if you are a real estate photographer building your business you need to do this no matter how you chose to market yourself.

This technique of building your potential client list will help you of you visit real estate offices, call listing agents, send post cards or do e-mail marketing. I have a chapter on how to build your potential client list in my business e-book, The Business of Real Estate Photography, but most people will be able to do it just from the description in the paragraph above.