Real Estate Agent Marketing on a Budget—Affordable Ideas From $0 to $50 per Month

You’ve probably heard the old cliche that you have to spend money to make money. But you’ve probably also heard the one about money doesn’t grow on trees.

When you’re a real estate agent, both of those can be true at the same time. In order to make money, you should be spending money on marketing. But in order to have money to spend on marketing, it would be super helpful to have some commissions rolling in to be able to spend a portion on marketing.

There’s no magic number in terms of how much you should spend on marketing, but a lot of the advice you might hear is given as a percentage of your commissions. But it’s like, OK, you say I should spend 30% of what I earn in commissions on marketing, but 30% on nothing is a big fat zero!

Or, even if you’ve had some closings, but the grand total boils down to $20,000 in commissions, it’s kind of hard to part with $6,000 of it for marketing when you need to pay taxes on that money, your bills, and possibly enjoy life a teensy bit.

But, if you want to survive as an agent, let alone grow your business, you do need to do some marketing. The good news is, you don’t have to spend big bucks on marketing—there are plenty of things you can do on a small budget!

Rather than wishing you had a bigger budget, perhaps focusing on a straight-up dollar amount to spend per month is easier to wrap your head around and commit to.

So let’s break it down in increments of $10, starting at zero, to give you a marketing idea you can do for each price range per month.

Free Real Estate Marketing Ideas You Can Do Each Month

Even if you can’t spend a dime on marketing, you can work with tools you already have at your disposal: email, texting, phone calls, and posting on social media are all “free”. Sure, you pay to access those tools in the sense that you need a cell phone and a computer, but you don’t have to spend any more money than you’re already spending on the use of them. The only thing it’ll truly cost you is the time it takes to come up with and write whatever you send or post!

Send or share useful, interesting, or funny articles. Share real estate tips. Share your thoughts on the current local market.

It might not sound sexy or exciting (or even sound like “marketing”), but you can get a lot of business and referrals simply by staying in touch with friends, family, past clients, and your sphere of influence.

A Real Estate Marketing Idea You Can Do With $10 Each Month

You can’t stretch $10 too far, but it’ll still get you a couple of cups of coffee!

Take someone who is strategic to your business out for coffee once a month. Pick one person to do this with once a month, or a new person each month. Think along the lines of a local business person who often comes into contact with people who need to buy or sell a house. Or just someone who’s well connected and would be a good source of leads.

Springing for the coffee alone isn’t necessarily going to buy someone’s loyalty, business, or referrals, so make sure you make it a useful meeting for them. Bring them useful information, or leads that’ll help them in their life or business.

A Real Estate Marketing Idea You Can Do With $20 Each Month

You probably already have a box of business cards, but are they ones you’re proud of and actually look forward to handing out?!

Spring for a box of creative business cards that’ll get you excited and pumped up to put them in people’s hands, and make a concerted effort to hand every single one of them out each month. Yes, you read that right: Every. Single. One.

For example, you can go to Vistaprint and get 100 business cards for around $20. Break it down by making it your goal to hand out 25 per week, or 5 per day Monday through Friday. That’s 100 times you’ll need to hand out your business card to someone in a month.

Then, do it again the month after. After 12 months, you’ll have made a concerted effort to give 1,200 people your business card. And, if the cards are creative enough to stand out, you’re sure to at least make a memorable impression, if not get some immediate leads with a ton of people.

Besides just being super economical, this will compel you to do what many agents fail to do: get out and meet new people face-to-face on a regular basis.

(***We have no affiliation and make no money off of that Vistaprint link. We just know agents in our private real estate marketing group speak highly of them, and often let everyone know when Vistaprint is running a deal so they can stock up on products.)

A Real Estate Marketing Idea You Can Do With $30 Each Month

A great way to get your name and message out there is to run some ads on Facebook. It’s hard to run a campaign with a budget of less than a dollar a day, but you can make $30 stretch pretty far when you hone your audience and message on their platform.

Finding the right targeting and type of ads will take some trial and error, so factor that into your learning curve and cost, and don’t expect tons of immediate results. But with a little time and tweaking, you can have a well-oiled audience and ads running at very low costs per click, views, or conversions, depending on the type of campaign you choose.

A Real Estate Marketing Idea You Can Do With $40 Each Month

Using the Every Door Direct program through the United States Postal Service, you can mail out 200 postcards per month for right around $40.

This doesn’t include the cost of postcards, but if you keep your eye out for the deals at Vistaprint (mentioned above) you should be able to score some at a decent price, and you might be able to find even better deals on other sites if you shop around.

The trick with postcards is to keep it consistent. You typically need to send postcards to an area frequently and for a long time in order to see results. Choose an area where you want to farm long-term, and/or has a lot of sales per year on average. You should also try to send postcards that stand out from the typical ones other agents send, so you have a better chance of making an impression on the person before they just chuck it in the recycling bin.

A Real Estate Marketing Idea You Can Do With $50 Each Month

Last, but not least, you can do a ton of different types of marketing with a budget of just $50 per month.

Check out our Inner Circle membership where you get access to:

• Articles ranging from humorous, to informative and resourceful.
• Memes that are cleverly promotional and funny.
• Email and letter templates people will actually enjoy reading! (None of that dry boring stuff…)
• Witty postcards people will certainly remember.
• 20 “Branded Booklets” that will make you look and sound like you wrote them yourself, and each one comes with landing pages, and a corresponding follow-up series of emails. (These booklets are great to offer as lead magnets using Facebook ads, and can be delivered digitally, or you can print them out and offer physical copies.)
• Access to thousands of the coolest, most helpful real estate agents around in our private Facebook marketing group. The agents are constantly sharing how they personally use our marketing materials with each other, and other cool, inexpensive marketing ideas they come up with to stay top of mind and generate business.

You get all of that and more, for just shy of $50 per month. What’s even better is that pretty much all of the marketing you get access to as an Inner Circle member can be used and implemented for free by using your email, phone, social media, or in person. (But click here to see if we’re running a promotion. We run them from time to time…)

So, even if you’re on the tightest of budgets, now you have a bunch of marketing ideas you can implement. But remember, no matter which ones you decide to use, consistency is key and you can’t do any type of marketing once (or once in a while) and expect business to pour in. So no matter which ones you try, give it twelve months of deliberate attempt and you should see a nice return on a pretty low investment!