Is it just me, or is there an abnormally high demand for real estate online marketers nowadays?
I mean, I have always known that there is a strong demand for them
since at one point, the total real estate ad spending reached about $27
billion.
Just lately though, I’ve been getting quite a lot of inquiries from
prospective clients in that field, to the point where the number of
inquiries I was getting became quite overwhelming.
Some were looking to hire me, while others were just asking for
marketing tips that they could use for their real estate business.
Either way, it was getting exceedingly challenging for me to keep up
with all the inquiries, especially when they were asking for marketing
tips.
It’s because of this dilemma that I thought of writing this online
marketing guide for real estate agents. Instead of answering all the
inquiries one at a time, everyone can just read this guide.
If you’re looking for real estate Internet marketing strategies that
you can use for your business, or for your clients, then this guide will
surely be of help to you.
Let’s hop right in.
1. Run a Referral Program Through Your Email List
Referrals are such a powerful tool for real estate agents, that it
can often times spell the difference between them succeeding in this
career, or them looking for another.
In fact, after having spoken with countless real estate agents, one
of the things I’ve learned is how they get the majority of their
business through referrals.
So here’s what you can do.
You can run an email marketing campaign where your clients will reach
out to their existing or previous clients, then ask them for referrals.
By the way, remind your clients to offer an incentive of some sort.
Remind them that their network might also be busy so they need to
make it worth their network’s time to refer them to their connections.
*Note: as you can probably imagine, you can only use this strategy if
you’ve been keeping track of your connection’s contact details,
especially their email address. That is why it is a must for you to
capture/store their email addresses.
2. Amass Reviews on Websites Where Your Prospects Hangout
According to an article published at Searchengineland, “88 percent of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations (vs. 79 percent in 2013).”
At this point, you should have already realized how effective a
marketing tool online reviews are for your real estate clients. Through
reviews, you can convey to your audience how credible your client is,
and how his expertise in the industry is top notch.
The thing with online reviews is that they somewhat work as a
referral of some sort by the people whom your clients have transacted
with to those who have yet to do business with them. It can help cement
your client’s status as a trustworthy person to deal with.
This of course, is a critical element that can help influence your
client’s prospective customers to pull the trigger, and reach for their
wallets.
3. Use Video Marketing
What makes videos such a powerful tool for real estate agents is it
allows their viewers, their prospective buyers, to really capture the
experience.
A professionally crafted video can paint a mental picture in their
audience’s minds as to just how amazing it would be if they were the
ones living the property being featured.
Giving their audience even just a hint of that experience can easily
rouse their audience to call and inquire about the property.
4. Have a Professionally Crafted Website. One That’s Easy to Navigate
If your client doesn’t have a professionally crafted website for
their business, they’ll be missing out on a lot of leads or referrals.
Not only are websites effective in bolstering your client’s image as
someone that’s authoritative in the industry, but it can also be of good
use to them when it comes to marketing, and building strategic
relationships with other like-minded individuals, among others.
To help you create an amazing website for your client, one that can
truly help in advancing their business, you can consider these points:
- It needs to be intuitive, and user friendly.
- The property’s details (like address, price, features, etc…) should be easily available.
- Your client’s contact details should be highly visible.
- The website needs to have high quality images of the properties.
- It needs to have a blog.
While there are certainly other things that you can include in your
client’s website like certifications and a professionally crafted “About
Us” page among others, the points that I shared above should be a good
starting point for you.
The way this real estate company created their website is
a good example. Not only does their website have the basic (yet
critical) points that we discussed, they have a powerful search engine
that allows their prospective customers to get highly targeted search
results.
*Important note: Remember that there is more to a website than just
making sure that it looks good. More than its aesthetics, it needs to be
highly optimized for conversion.
Sprinkling your call-to-action buttons on the different areas of your
website where you’ve provided much value to your audience is without a
doubt one of the best conversion optimization tips that you can
implement on your client’s website.
5. Blog About Your Audience’s Problems/Frustrations/Questions
Countless surveys and statistics show
how effective a marketing tool blogging is. If you blog about the right
topics, then you’ll surely get the traction that you need.
I’d like to emphasize the phrase, “about the right topics”, however.
The thing is, some business owners tend to write about the things that
they like, even though the topic isn’t necessarily something that their
audience would find interesting.
That’s a big mistake.
You need to consider your audience first when thinking about the
topics that you will blog about. If you’re blogging mainly for your self
satisfaction, then you might be better off doing that in a personal
blog, or your diary.
However, if your reason for blogging is to get more leads and customers, then you need to think about your audience first.
One of the best ways to make sure that your topic is something that
your audience will find interesting, is to write about the struggles and
the problems that they are facing.
You can probably put two and two together as to why blogging about
your audience's problems will almost ascertain that they will love
reading about your blog post.
Since they are struggling with the same problem themselves, they will
surely want to read your blog to figure out what the solution is.
What’s Next?
Have you been helping real estate agents with marketing their
businesses? If you answered, yes, then please take the time to share the
marketing tips that you implemented that brought you real results.
I look forward to reading your ideas.
