Media plan template for Real estate

The media plan with five columns an agency or developer needs: which listing or development the row sells, the market it sits in, where the campaign has got to, what price bracket it is in, and which kind of enquiry the row is bought to produce.

Everything else is the general plan, unchanged. One row per line of spend, budgets as integers in minor units, one currency named per row, and a target column that ships blank because the number is yours.

Use it when the campaign has a fixed end date it cannot move — an auction, a launch weekend, a settlement — which is the normal condition of property. A plan organised by month will spread the budget evenly across a period whose last ten days decide the result.

Write it when the listing is signed and before the photography is booked, and re-read it the week the first open inspection lands. That week is where a property campaign is actually decided, and a monthly rhythm walks straight past it.

Most media plans start today and run forwards. A property campaign runs to a date that cannot move — an auction, the close of a launch period, a settlement — and the only sensible way to write one is backwards from that date.

That single difference changes the shape of everything. The last ten days are usually the ones that decide the result, so the weight belongs there and the earlier weeks exist to build the audience the last ten days will convert. A plan organised by month spreads the budget evenly across a period whose end is doing all the work, and then reports an average that describes neither half.

Write the fixed date first, put it in every row's flight end, and then fill the weeks in reverse. Where the photography or the copy is not ready, that is a start date constraint and it belongs in the notes, because a campaign that starts late against a fixed end has less room than the plan says it does.

The listing or development column is what makes the plan reportable. Property spend is frequently paid for, in whole or in part, by the vendor, and the question that follows every campaign is what was spent on this property. A plan that blends two listings into one row cannot answer it without somebody rebuilding the sheet by hand.

So one listing per row, the reference in the cell, and the same reference inside the campaign name in the ad account. That last habit costs nothing at build time and turns the reconciliation from a project into a filter. Write the vendor-paid portion in the notes while the row is being written, not when the question arrives.

A property campaign moves through stages, and each one asks for something different. Pre-launch is building an audience with no address to send them to yet. The launch weekend is the concentration. Open inspections are the period where attendance is the number that matters. Pre-auction is the last push at people who have already engaged. Post-auction, where it happens, is a different campaign with a different message.

Give each stage its own rows. A campaign that runs unchanged from pre-launch to auction spends its heaviest days showing the same creative to the same audience it reached in week one, which is the most common and most expensive mistake in this category. Stages in rows make the weight visible at planning time, and make the result readable afterwards.

In most categories the audience is the interesting part of the plan. In property the audience is mostly geography, and the interesting part is the price bracket.

The bracket decides how many buyers exist at all. A property in a narrow band at the top of a market has a small pool, and a row pointed at it will exhaust that pool quickly however well it is built; the answer is usually reach into adjacent markets rather than more frequency in the same one. A property in a broad mid band has a large pool, and a row that is not producing enquiries there has a creative or a price problem rather than a reach problem.

Writing the bracket into the row is what lets you tell those two situations apart four weeks later, when the only thing anybody remembers is that the cost per enquiry went up.

The enquiry type column exists because the five events a property campaign can count — an enquiry, an inspection booking, an inspection attended, a registered buyer, an offer — are wildly different in both volume and value.

A plan that counts enquiries will buy enquiries, and enquiries are the cheapest and least predictive of the five. If the agency's system records inspection attendance or buyer registration, count that, and use the same words in the row that the system uses so the plan and the report can sit beside each other.

This is also why the target ships blank. The rate at which an enquiry becomes an attendance depends on the market, the bracket, how fast the agent replies and what the price guide says. All four are yours. Read them, then write the target in.

There is a second reader in every property campaign and most plans forget them: the vendor's neighbours, and the owners who have not listed yet.

A listing campaign is also the agency's own advertising, seen by everyone in the market who is watching what sells and who sold it. That does not justify spending a vendor's money on the agency's brand, and the honest way to handle it is to keep the two in separate rows with separate budgets and separate owners, so that nobody has to argue later about which one paid for what.

Where an agency runs a standing market-presence row alongside its listing rows, give it its own stage value and its own target, and judge it on appraisal requests rather than on enquiries for a property it was never selling. Blended into the listing rows it will flatter them, and the listings will be credited with interest they did not create.

Six checks. Every row names a listing reference and a market. Every row names its stage, and the stages run in order to a fixed end date that appears in every flight end cell. Every row states which enquiry type it counts. Every budget is an integer in minor units with its currency named. Every target traces to your own rates in this market and this bracket, or is blank. And the vendor-paid portion of every row is written down before anybody asks for it.