How to Sell More with 8 Simple Steps
It’s no secret that the real estate market has had its few ups and downs over the years. In fact, if you’re reading this, it’s may even have given you a few gray hairs!
Like most businesses, you have to have a solid marketing plan in order to encourage customer traffic and sales. The real estate market is no different. Real estate marketing is actually key to making your properties sell.
Think about it, a huge component of marketing is revolved around attracting the right consumer and converting them to customers, right? That’s exactly what a real estate agent wants to do! Your job is to find the right person for the property and sealing the deal! Do you see how they interlink?
Having a cohesive real estate marketing plan will set your agency and listings apart from your competitors and help you stand out from the clutter. It will get your listings out there to reach the RIGHT buyer.
In our opinion, most real estate agencies do tend to rely more on traditional marketing methods. Is your agency still solely relying on listing sites, newspapers, and faces printed on local bus stops? It may be time to consider some of these top inbound marketing strategies.
1. Utilize Real Estate Social Media
Social media is possibly the most powerful and risk-free marketing tactic out there. What’s great about real estate social media is that all it takes is a little dedication, effort and a $0 budget to boost your client base!
By focusing on your social media profiles, not only are you generating more awareness for your listings but you are engaging with potential customers. These are people who might not be subscribed to your newspaper listings, who might not live in your property areas, or who might have not even heard of your agency.
For optimal real estate marketing results, we suggest that your agency focuses on visual platforms. Why visual? Well, the brain processes non-verbal content in 0.25 seconds (EyeQInsights). In 0.25 seconds, that user would have already formed an attraction to your post that will make them want to read more.
Here are some platforms that we suggest using:
- YouTube
Each platform has different strengths that can be used to your advantage. The common theme amongst the platforms is that they all allow you to interact with your audience, post attractive content, and promote your business in a positive light that you control.
Social media allows you to engage with your audience in a more relaxed way. Instead of formally calling around for leads, they are now coming to you. That’s why we LOVE platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
Instagram and Facebook have been modified to help brands target their ideal audience. Tools like Facebook Ads are optimized to increase your reach and convert an audience member to a customer. To read more about the wonders of Facebook Ads, click here.
2. Make Your Listings Shareable
Now that we’ve touched on social media, it makes for the perfect segway into shareability. Adding social shares to your property listings open your listing’s reach and post it onto platforms that you haven’t yet.
What we love about this tactic is that most home shoppers are eager to share their “dream home”, right? They’re often keen to add it to their Pinterest board or share it with their friends and families. So, instead of downloading the listing and then emailing it to their groups, they can simply share it at just an instant!
This instant share makes it easy for home buyers to add it to their feed and get the necessary feedback from their peers. It also broadens your reach – who knows, perhaps one of their friends will make an offer first!
3. Go Virtual with Your Tours
At Dawning Digital, we’re ALL about the rise of video content marketing and the real estate market is no different! You know the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words”? Well, a video is worth 1.8 million and that’s just in 1 minute!
While having property photographs is a necessity and a key marketing tactic, try opting for video content too. Take your potential buyer on a virtual tour of the house. Help them create the picture of what it would be like to live in that home, how it would feel to have their feet up by the fire after a long day’s work.
The more that people can get a sense of how it would feel to live in the house, the more intrigued they will become.
4. Create Instant Connections
Look, the real estate game is a competitive market. From the buyer’s side, when they see the house that they love and can afford, the immediately want to make contact, right? Right!
They want the information at an instant! They want to know how and when they can finally come and see their dream home, and they want to know now.
However, the problem lies in the fact that instant communication means that you will need to be on hyper-alert 24/7. That doesn’t sound too appealing, correct? Lucky for you, there’s a simple solution to your problem and they’re called Chat Bots.
Chatbots have been created to harness those instant connections when you are unavailable. Instead of letting that initial infatuation decrease, chatbots create a valuable customer experience that leaves them feeling satisfied and acknowledged.
Live chats allow your website visitors to ask their questions and answer their questions in real-time. Instead of waiting for your response and trolling the internet for different properties, they are getting what they need immediately and they stay focused on your property.
5.Optimize Your Website
While we’re on the topic of website add-ons, let’s talk about website optimization to help you sell more. There are a few things to take into consideration when planning your website but we’ll keep it simple with the 3 main elements: the design, the user-friendly ability, and the SEO strength.
- Design
Your website is most often than not the first point of contact a person makes with your business. Is it engaging your audience to make them want to stick around?
Your website should show off your best assets and encapsulate everything that you’d want them to know about your services. Try incorporating professional imagery that’s warm and inviting and mix it up with encouraging, call-to-action text.
Just remember the 3 main rules of inbound marketing: engage, attract, and delight!
- User-Friendly
After you’ve considered your design, you may want to look at how user-friendly your website is. Not only should your site be easy to navigate, but it should also be optimized for mobile usage.
These days, consumers are highly tech-savvy and spend the majority of their time on mobile devices. So much so that a recent study demonstrated that 80% of internet users prefer to use their mobile devices for online activity.
If you had to think about it, how many times have you scrolled through your phone looking for certain listings just out of convenience? It’s paramount that your website caters to your tech-savvy clients by being mobile friendly.
You could even take it a step further by creating an app. An app provides consumers with instant access to your services without getting distracted by other online clutter.
This way you are continuously keeping them engaged and becoming their first choice for property listings.
- SEO
If you’re reading this and thinking, “SE-who?”, don’t worry! We’ve all been there. To help you get a better grasp on this real estate marketing strategy, you can read our article here.
In a nutshell, SEO, or search engine optimization, focuses on highlighting your webpage on Google based on the selection of keywords you’re targeting. For real estate agents, your website may want to target keywords like “property for sale” or “houses to rent in California”. When someone searches these keywords, your website will then list on Google as an answer.
This sounds great, right?! You are directly being put into contact with people who are actively searching for your services.
6. Start an Email Campaign
Email marketing is one of the best ways to nurture your customer relations. You can keep your client base informed with your latest property listings and services while opening the door for potential buyers.
Here are a few reasons why you should opt for an email campaign strategy:
You can collect email address from your website, local outreach or even encouraging subscriptions through your social media platforms.
7. Create Valuable Content
As we’ve mentioned, your marketing strategy should be revolved around the big 3: attracting, engaging, and delighting. One of the best ways to follow this rule is by providing your audience with valuable content that they want and need.
As a real estate agency, you already have one of the biggest advantages! For most, buying a house is a HUGE deal that isn’t taking lightly. You are able to tap into that aspect by answering all the questions that your potential buyer may have.
This content can be displayed on a number of platforms. You can consider creating a blog platform on your website, or create lengthy posts on LinkedIn or Facebook. By doing so, you are becoming a trusted pillar of support that looks like they know what they’re doing.
Who wouldn’t want to trust someone knowledgable with the prospect of finding their dream home?!
8. Trust the Professionals
When you’re stacking up the costs, it can get tempting to go for the DIY route. As a real estate agent, this might even become more so with the fact that each sale determines new costs and new budgets.
However, there is extreme value in hiring a professional to take care of your marketing needs. Selling a property is all about appearance and demonstrating the very best it has to offer. Your marketing efforts may be fruitless if you don’t have good content to work with in the first place.
That’s exactly why we’d recommend utilizing a professional photographer. It may cost a few pennies to hire someone to capture your property but it will have an enormous effect on how the property will be received. Bad photos can heavily dimish the interest in even the best properties on the market.
This strategy doesn’t just have to be limited to how you display your properties but it can also extend to how you present your agency to the world. Consider hiring a professional marketing agency to look after your website and social media. They will know exactly how to highlight your brand across to your ideal target market and help you become number 1 in the real estate game.
We hope that these super simple real estate marketing ideas have left you feeling inspired! If you have any questions or would like to discuss any of the above strategies, please contact us at hello@dawningdigital.com or schedule a call. We’d love to chat with you!