There are few industries where powerful marketing techniques can make such a big difference as in real estate. It doesn’t matter how good you are at selling houses, unless you know how to use marketing effectively your real estate business will lose out to the competition.
Choosing a realtor is big decision with a lot at stake, so people need to feel sure about your abilities before hiring you. This is where marketing comes in—effective marketing lets your potential customer know why they should hire you, why they need to hire you.
By implementing these 17 marketing ideas you’ll no longer have to cold call clients, they’ll be coming to you directly and in bigger numbers than ever before.
1) Create a Strong Personal Brand
When choosing a realtor, people are looking for someone experienced, knowledgeable and trustworthy. Personal branding is the key to setting yourself apart from other realtors and emphasizing your strengths and qualifications.
Write a short bio that highlights your experience and knowledge of the local area, trying to stress your values and commitment to helping clients. You should also hire a professional to take a good photo of yourself, and create strong profiles on social media and professional networking sites.
2) Establish your Value Proposition
In order to get potential clients interested, you need to be clear about what value you are offering them. Establishing your value proposition means clearly explaining how you will solve your clients’ problems and improve their situation. The more specific you can be the better. Techniques such as using case studies about how you helped a client achieve their goals can be very effective.
3) Ask Former Clients for Testimonials
Testimonials help give credibility to your value proposition and describe the sort of positive outcome you can create in the same language as your clients use themselves. You should ask former clients if they’d be happy to offer a testimonial, and incorporate this into the selling process in the future. Written testimonials are good, but video testimonials are much more convincing.
4) Use Lead Capture Pages on your Site
You can’t always expect visitors to just arrive at your website and decide to email or call you. The number of leads your website generates can be greatly increased by using lead capture pages that encourage prospects to give you their email address or contact info by offering something in return. You could offer a free report or phone consultation for visitors who fill out a short form on your site. Here are a few more lead generation techniques.
5) Write a Regularly Updated Blog
Blogs are great at generating search traffic and establishing your credibility as an expert. In general, the more frequently and regularly you publish articles on your blog, the greater the boost to your website’s traffic figures. The quality of your articles is very important too, however. A few in-depth, shareable articles could generate regular and substantial search engine and social traffic to your site.
6) Create Videos Showcasing your Expertise
A lot of people dislike reading long articles and are much easier to reach through video. Recording videos where you reveal some of your expertise will help to attract more clients and develop trust, and give clients the feeling that they know already know you personally. Sharing videos on sites such as YouTube can also have SEO benefits and help give you exposure to more potential clients.
7) Use Calls to Action
On every page of your website you should make it clear what the visitor should do next, whether this means filling out a form, clicking through to another page or emailing or calling you directly. The way to do this is to use strong calls to action such as “find out what your home is worth” or “get your free report now”.
8) A/B Test Pages
Modern online marketing is all about measuring results and tweaking different variables to improve performance. A/B testing means creating two different versions of a page and seeing which is most effective. Some of your visitors will see page A, and others will see page B. You can then measure how changing the two versions affects things like sign-up rates, to gradually improve the effectiveness of the page.
9) Use High-Quality Images
The cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words” is certainly true when it comes to real estate marketing. High-quality images of the homes you are selling are essential to creating interest among buyers. Your homepage also needs high-quality images that tell the story of what you can do for your clients.
10) Develop a Strategy for Each Type of Client
As a realtor, you will likely have clients from various different age groups and economic backgrounds, with different goals, fears and aspirations. For this reason it is important to identify the different types of client you have, and develop a detailed customer profile of each type. You can then develop a specific strategy to effectively target each group.
11) Focus on One Target Market at a Time
If you have identified several different types of client to target, you may feel overwhelmed when you start to think about your marketing strategy. The best thing to do is to focus on one target market at a time, creating and executing a strong marketing strategy for each before moving on to the next. This helps you stay focused, which will result in higher quality marketing campaigns.
12) Understand your Clients’ Fears and Desires
People are motivated to move towards things they believe will make their desires a reality and prevent their fears coming true. Therefore it’s very important to understand what drives your potential clients in order to tailor your marketing copy. You should aim to align your message with your clients’ hopes and ambitions, and explain how you can prevent their fears from being realized.
13) Learn How to Use Social Media Effectively
Social media sites such as Facebook are great for promoting not just your business in general, but also individual listings of houses. Try to grow a large following on Facebook and post each new listing with an eye-catching picture and an appealing headline.
14) Improve your Listing Copy
Copywriting is often one of the biggest factors in marketing success. There are very few realtors who couldn’t improve their results by learning new copywriting techniques, testing different headlines or hiring a professional copywriter.
15) Experiment
Testing different headlines and landing pages are both ways of using experimentation in your marketing. A good marketer realizes that they can’t know for sure what potential customers will respond to before launching a new marketing campaign. Rather than simply trusting their intuition, effective marketers look at the data and adjust their campaigns continually, always experimenting to find out what works.
16) Send Professional Emails
Appearing professional is very important in establishing trust with new clients. One of the easiest ways to do this is to send professional-looking emails using templates that include a footer containing your company logo and contact details. A professional-looking email assures your clients they are dealing with a professional, and including a link to your website in the footer will encourage prospects to visit your site again.
17) Use Google and Facebook Ads
Regularly blogging, creating different pages for different customer types and posting videos on YouTube will all improve your rankings in search engines. However, getting the all-important number 1 spot is not easy, and takes a lot of time and effort. A quicker way to get visitors to your website is through Google and Facebook ads. This marketing technique offers great returns on investment when done right.
These 17 techniques are just some of the ways you can improve your real estate marketing campaigns. When used as part of a coherent overall marketing strategy, these ideas can take your real estate business to the next level, greatly increasing the number and quality of leads you generate and homes you sell.