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$500 Marketing Budget – What Would You Do?

July 5, 2012

ActiveRain is challenging agents to present their dream marketing plan – and get paid for it.

ActiveRain, the popular online real estate network, has an intriguing question for agents – what would you buy if you were on a marketing budget of $500 per month?

That question is at the heart of a new competition ActiveRain has launched called “The Price is Right,” where agents submit a blog post detailing their prospective marketing efforts for the chance to receive $500 toward their first month of that marketing plan.

The competition is an offshoot from a wide-ranging study ActiveRain conducted of agent spending habits, which it collected in a fascinating infographic also called “The Price is Right.” Among the study’s many findings, ActiveRain reported that cars are the largest expense for agents (on average, cars make up 39 percent of an agent’s total budget at a cost of $1,770 a year), and that agents who earn more than $100,000 a year invest 79 percent more funds into their websites than agents who make less than $35,000 a year.

The contest guidelines are fairly simple. According to ActiveRain, agents must:

1. Write a blog post describing what their $500 per month would go towards, with elaborations on what they would buy, what company would provide it, and what they love about that product or service.
2. Link back to the “Price is Right” infographic somewhere in the post.
3. Include the following statement at the bottom of the post: “This post is an entry for the $500 Real Estate Marketing and Tech Challenge.  Learn more about this ActiveRain contest at www.activerain.com/marketing-challenge.”
4. And finally, leave a comment on the competition’s home page page with a link to the contest entry blog post.

The deadline for entering the contest is today (the winner will be announced tomorrow), and every agent who submits an entry will receive 1,000 points on Active Rain.

So, what would you do with a $500 marketing budget? Would you focus on traditional media, like newspapers, or focus more on Google and online advertisements? Would you focus more on online leads? Subscribe to new training/coaching programs? Are there certain technologies, like IDX, that you would definitely need? Let ActiveRain know!