If you’re looking to increase your sales, you’ve probably considered trying online marketing. But what exactly is online marketing, and how can you use it to attract buyers to your real estate properties? Here’s a detailed guide to help you succeed with online marketing for real estate agents.
The Basics Of Online Marketing For Real Estate Agents
To begin with, let’s set the table for discussion. The basics of online marketing for real estate agents include the following:
- Creating quality content to attract potential customers to your website.
- Engaging with your target audience through social media.
- Gathering demographic information about your ideal buyers.
- Monitoring the performance of your marketing strategy.
- Optimizing the conversion of site visitors into paying customers.
- Measuring the performance of your marketing strategies.
Let’s take a look at each of these items in more detail.
Creating Quality Content To Attract Buyers To Your Website
If you’re new to real estate web marketing, one of the first things you’ll want to do is create high-quality content for your site. Why? It’s a good place to start. With high-quality content, you’ll be able to engage with your visitors and encourage them to subscribe to your email list. You’ll also be able to attract prospective buyers to your website by demonstrating that you’re a reliable and knowledgeable source of information on the subject matter.
To get started, you’ll need to determine what type of content you’ll need to create. That is, you’ll need to decide what exactly you’ll write about. There are three basic types of content you’ll need to create:
- Product-centric content – This type of content will consist mostly of information about the products you sell, like real estate property listings. You’ll also write about the features, benefits, and quality of your products. For example, you might write about the various styles of homes your clients can choose from or the steps they can take to increase the value of their property.
- Service-centric content – This type of content will consist mostly of information about the services you provide, like brokerage services or mortgage loans. You’ll also write about the steps your clients can take to get the best service from you. For example, you might write about how to properly negotiate the terms of their mortgage loan or what questions to ask the brokerage when selecting a real estate agent to help them buy a property.
- Case-centric content – This type of content will consist mostly of information your clients can use to solve a problem. You’ll also write about your interactions with the client and the steps you took to solve their problem. For example, you might write about a problem your client was having with their current real estate agent. You might then suggest something they can do to solve that problem – like subscribing to your newsletter.
With high-quality content in hand, you can now move on to the next step – engaging with your target audience. You do this through social media.
Social Media For Real Estate Agents
Once you’ve got content to engage with your potential customers, you can use social media to further promote your website and grow your business. There are plenty of platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook where you can engage with your audience. And did you know that many real estate agencies have their own social media accounts where they can post helpful tips and tricks for clients?
These social media accounts are a great way to expand your reach with the right audience and increase the odds of a click-through to your website.
YouTube, in particular, is a great place for real estate agents to be found. If you’ve got a real estate agent channel on YouTube with lots of helpful videos, potential customers will be able to find you there.
It’s also a good idea to set up social media accounts for your blog articles as well. When someone finds a germane post on one of your blogs, they’ll usually click through to your social media accounts to learn more about you and your products. The more engagement you have on social media, the more people will want to learn about your business.
Gathering Demographic Information About Your Ideal Buyers
Now that you’ve got content and social media accounts set up, it’s time to gather demographic information about your ideal buyer. This will help you choose the right advertising platforms and tailor your content to appeal to the type of person you’re looking for.
First, you’ll want to establish what your target audience is. Generally, your target audience is anyone who is interested in buying real estate property. But you’ll also want to take into consideration other variables, like the type of property they’re looking for or how long they’ll be interested in staying there. You can use Google Analytics to establish these variables and create buyer personas – which are basically fictional characters that represent your ideal buyer.
Once you’ve got your buyer persona in mind, you can look at the areas of their life where you can find interest. For example, if they’re a millennial who is looking for a smaller, more flexible home, you might want to write about trendy living space arrangements, or the benefits of renting versus buying a home.
Knowing their interests will help you choose the right content to attract them. And what’s more, this information will guide the way you engage with them on social media. You can use tools like Google AdWords to find the audience that is most interested in your products. With these tools, you can choose the right ad and placement for the best results.
Determining The Marketing Mix For Your Business
To really stand out from the competition, you’ll need to find the right marketing mix to fit your situation. That is, you’ll need to decide what is the best combination of online marketing strategies to use for your business.
The basics of determining the right marketing mix for your business include the following:
- Search engine optimization – This is the process of getting traffic from the major search engines like Google using key words and phrases throughout your content.
- Pay-per-click advertising – This type of advertising costs you money for each click-through, but it can get you thousands of views on your videos, articles, and social media accounts.
- E-mail marketing – This is a method of promoting your products and services via email. It’s a very cost-effective way to reach a large audience and is a good place to promote special offers and discounts.
- Landing pages – These are web pages designed to convert website visitors into paying customers. Typically, a landing page will consist of a combination of the following:
- An engaging title
- An image
- A few persuasive headlines
- A few good-quality paragraphs
- Some footer text
- A call to action
The combination of these elements will engage the visitor and make them want to choose your product or service. That is, it will make them believe that this is a good place for them to learn more about it.
Create Awareness About Your Business
Once you’ve got the basics of online marketing for real estate agents under your belt, you can start to create awareness about your business. This is simply putting the word out there that you’re a real estate agent, what you do, and how you can help people find success in their real estate search. This can be as simple as sharing helpful tips and tricks on social media or as complex as getting on radio shows and podcasts to talk about your industry and what you do to help your clients succeed.
Even something as simple as creating a blog article explaining the basics of real estate agency and how to find the best agent for your needs can go a long way to raising your profile in your industry and gaining credibility with potential customers.
Promoting Your Business On The Internet
Now that you’ve got the basics of online marketing for real estate agents down, it’s time to get creative. In the next section, we’ll discuss a variety of tactics you can use to attract potential customers to your website. These are the basics of online marketing for real estate agents.
Product-centric Content
If your product is residential real estate, the ideal content for your website will be about the following: