Real estate can be one of the most competitive markets. With over three million people in the United States working as real estate agents, it can be difficult to stand out–especially when your job only pays if you make sales. However, in recent years, digital marketing has become an increasingly effective tool for realtors looking to boost their business. Here are five ways that digital marketing can help real estate businesses and realtors grow their business and make more sales:
Personal Branding on Social Media
One of the best ways for realtors to generate engagement with their listings is to create a strong personal brand on social media. Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are great platforms for real estate agents to share photos and videos of their listings and helpful tips for homebuyers and sellers.
Another benefit of doing this is that you could generate another income stream for yourself. Many realtors who begin posting industry-related information, investment ideas, and other valuable content on social media have found that they can monetize their following by selling courses, e-books, and other digital products.
Generating Reviews and Testimonials
If you’re a registered agent, you’re likely familiar with the importance of generating reviews and testimonials. They boost your online visibility and help you close more deals. Positive reviews also play a role in your business’s off-page SEO.
To build trust with potential clients, it’s important to showcase reviews and testimonials from your past clients on your website and social media accounts. Digital marketing can help you increase the number of reviews and testimonials by making it easy for customers to leave them on your website or social media platforms.
You can also use email marketing to request feedback from past clients. For example, you could send a follow-up email asking the client to leave a review on your Google Business page or Zillow profile after closing.
Building an Email List
An email list is a valuable asset for any business, but it can be especially helpful for realtors. You can use your email list to send potential clients information about new listings, open houses, and other events. You can also use your email list to nurture leads by sending them helpful information about the home-buying and selling process. For example, you could send a series of emails with tips for first-time homebuyers or advice for sellers on how to prepare their homes for showings. To create an email list, here are a few strategies you can use:
- Use a pop-up or lead capture form on your website to collect email addresses from visitors.
- Run a social media contest or giveaway and require participants to sign up for your email list to enter.
- Add a call-to-action (CTA) in your email signature directing recipients to sign up for your email list.
- Create a Facebook or Instagram ad targeting people who live in your city or town and include a CTA to sign up for your email list.
Creating Helpful Content
Another way to stand out as a real estate agent is by creating helpful content that potential clients will find when searching for information online. You can do this by starting a blog and writing about topics like the local real estate market, tips for buying or selling a home, or advice for first-time homebuyers.
If you don’t have time to write blog posts yourself, you can hire a freelance writer to create content for you. This is a great way to generate leads and build trust with potential clients. To get started, here are a few ideas for blog posts you could write:
- The top five things to look for when buying a home
- The top three mistakes first-time homebuyers make
- Five tips for selling your home fast
- How to stage your home for showings
- The benefits of working with a real estate agent
Having a Strong SEO Strategy
The best way to tie your social media and online presence together is with a great SEO strategy. This means making sure your website is optimized for search engines and that your social media profiles are linked to your website.
One way to do this is by claiming your Google My Business listing and adding links to your website and social media profiles. You should also make sure your website is mobile-friendly and that it loads quickly.
Your website’s look and feel will also play a role in your SEO. Make sure your website is designed with your target audience in mind and that it’s easy to navigate. You’ll have to do some A/B testing and improve your web pages over time to see what works best for your business.
Another important part of your SEO strategy is keyword research. You’ll need to use the right keywords on your website and social media profiles so that potential clients can find you when they’re searching for a real estate agent online. To get started with keyword research, here are a few tools you can use:
Once you’ve identified a few keywords, make sure to use them in the following places:
- Your website’s title and meta tags
- Your website’s content (in blog posts or on webpages)
- Your social media profile descriptions
- Your social media posts
Endnote
Digital marketing is a valuable tool for any real estate agent or business. Using the strategies in this blog post can boost your sales and grow your business.
My personal experience tells me that more and more, people are accessing the real estate market via the internet. Having moved four times in a year, I have found all the properties I have rented online.
With more than 2 billion users, social media can be innovative and cost-effective marketing platforms for realtors and real estate companies. Following are a number of reasons as well as tips to use social media for your business effectively.
Connect
Social Media Marketing strategies should be implemented in your business plan for a number of reasons. First and foremost, social media are born to serve one main purpose: communication between like-minded users sharing content and information they are both interested in.
Social media will give your real estate business a space to find and hire freelance marketers, perspective buyers, potential clients and like-minded professionals. Networking is key: add your past and current clients on Facebook, establish a professional network on LinkedIn, make Twitter part of your customer service strategy.
By using the major social networks as part of your marketing plan you will be able to give customers a more intimate and realistic picture of your products and services. Moreover, your perspective clients and followers will feel integral part of your brand experience and personality.
Write Good Quality Content
Social Media can dramatically help you build your brand image and communicate it to potential buyers and clients. However, success on social media is entirely based on the quality of your content. Because of the range and variety of your audience, it is important to adjust the content to the customer demographic you are targeting.
It is fundamental to use your titles and descriptions well: they will appear in the organic search results and they should include all your key-words. Make them appealing and stimulate people to click on them. It is vital to make your content searchable: your online outreach will depend on the number of people clicking and navigating through your social media profiles.
Diversify Your Posts
With Twitter, the champion of ‘word-of-mouth’ and micro-blogging, you can engage with your audience through targeted and concise posts. As with Instagram, it is important to be visually captivating: add an image to your tweet and you are much more likely to be retweeted or favorited.
Twitter also gives you the chance to engage in one-to-one conversations with your audience. If a customer or a professional responds to your tweet, acknowledge them and keep the conversation going! Twitter can be a great way to demonstrate good customer service and to interact with industry experts. Last but not least, never forget your #hashtags and make sure you check which ones are trending in the real estate industry.
Picondo Homes, an Ottawa-based company, gets super interactive by tweeting beautiful images of their properties and advertising open house events for their followers to sign up to!
While Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are effective means for social media marketing, they still present a good amount of unrelated content. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is the place where you will find almost exclusively freelancers, perspective employees and industry experts. This professional networking platform will allow you to establish new and reinforce existing working connections.
It is important, therefore, to be extremely professional: Colonial Capital, for instance, promote their image as industry leaders by regularly posting authoritative updates about the real estate market.
Social Media Management Tools
There are a number of social media management tools which can help you define your social media marketing strategy. Crowdbooster, HootSuite or free ones such as Bitly (which also shortens your links for Twitter!) provide real-time analytics, they allow you to keep track of clicks and give you data such as number of likes, comments, shares, retweets, replies, reach and more. While most of them are not free, the investment can prove beneficial for your business: you’ll be able to manage all your social accounts at once and save plenty of time.