Highlights From My Marketer’s Toolkit: Key Customers and How I Reach Them

Published by Ashton Elder

Ashton has an M.S. in Marketing from Florida International University and has been working as a marketer for over five years. She is currently serving on the University of North Florida’s Department of Communications Professional Committee Board. Ashton has been a guest on several media and marketing panels throughout her career. She also holds a degree from the University of North Florida where she studied political science, journalism, and mass communications. Prior to working in marketing, she worked as a journalist for several news outlets and publications, including an internship at NPR where she produced several radio features. This site features a collection of her articles and radio features from her career in journalism. This site also features some of her insights and projects from her career in marketing. Ashton’s background in journalism has provided her with a solid foundation on which to build enhanced media and social media strategies to provide creative, innovative marketing solutions. Ashton also has first-hand experience with brand design and brand building. Ashton also works on an array of marketing projects from social media to email marketing and everything in between. View all posts by Ashton Elder

ab test, branding, content marketing, customer journey, digital marketing, email, email marketing, Marketing, omni channel marketing, SEO

I have been a marketer in the real estate industry for five years. As the head of marketing at a Florida real estate brokerage, I provide marketing aimed at reaching a wide variety of customer segments. First, I obviously tailor marketing messages to those looking to buy or sell real estate. However, our brokerage also wants to increase brand awareness in the Northeast Florida area and in the greater real estate community. In addition to these audiences, our company always desires new ways to recruit new and experienced agents into our office as we have continued to grow over the years.

However arguably our company’s most important customer base is made up of the real estate agents who currently hang their license with the company. Therefore, there are several aspects for me to consider when crafting marketing messages for this key customer segment.

Laying out all of the extra services we provide to our agents is one of the most important ways we position our company as the best choice to our customers, the agents. The real estate brokerage not only offers the services of a full-time marketing director but also unique in-house classes, events, and extra services. These exclusive offerings make up our unique selling proposition to our agents and set us apart from other brokerages in the area.

However, we always need to stay top of mind with our active agents as our industry is competitive and several brokerages try to recruit our agents on a regular basis. There are countless examples of marketing communications I send to our agents. One of my favorites that I will highlight here is a weekly email newsletter. I love email marketing and I find that it’s one of my most successful ways to reach key customers. My weekly e-newsletter for our current agents is packed with essential information, upcoming events, items of value, and extras such as humor and the latest in real estate industry offerings. The entire email is branded to our company with a few creative inserts such as GIFs, pictures, and buttons embedded. I use the relatively new email marketing Platform Flodesk, and I would highly recommend it. It allows for full customization, elevated design options, and a fantastic system for segmentation. I have found a dynamic weekly email to current customers to be an excellent way to communicate with them and to stay top of mind.

Being the head of marketing for a real estate brokerage requires me to connect with a diverse group of customer segments. That being said, our agents are essentially our company’s most important customer base and therefore require custom marketing campaigns. I believe creativity, dynamic content, and personalization are key components to optimize these types of campaigns.