Real Estate Marketing Tips: How to Grow Your Following- Part 1
As a real estate professional, you want to move properties quickly, but standing out online in the real estate market isn't easy. Plus, with digital marketing changing with the speed of light, it's hard to know what will work best. These tried-and-true online real estate marketing tips are the best place to start…
Try These Real Estate Marketing Tips for Online Success
1) Use the Latest Technology
Matterport 3D scans are a highly effective—not to mention fun—real estate marketing tactic that utilizes 3D and virtual reality to provide a three-dimensional depiction of a property. Buyers are able to fly through a home or property to get a much more accurate idea of what it looks like and how it is laid out before even visiting it in person.
These high-tech virtual tours are a fully immersive experience that will wow your audience, and it’s quickly becoming an expectation for many consumers. Adding this feature will help you stay ahead of the market and provide the solutions your ideal customers want and expect. You can use software such as Matterport to bring these virtual tours to life.
2) Offer Video Walkthroughs of Your Properties
While this technology isn't as engaging as 3D Matterport scans, video walkthroughs are just as important because they provide buyers with a good sense of what a space looks like in real life. You can hire a videographer, but you don’t have to because there are many tools available to make this process a snap.
For example, the Zillow Real Estate App provides an easy way to create video walkthroughs with your smartphone. You also might consider buying a drone to film large properties from the outside.
3) Let a Professional Take Your Photos
Yes, it is true, we do judge a book by its cover. There is no way around that. No one is attracted to grainy, blurry, or poorly composed photos; in fact, it's a turnoff. That's why you need to be including professionally shot photos of your properties on your website.
Photos are what grab your buyers' attention; therefore, they should be taken with a wide-angle lens and proper lighting. Minimal Photoshop editing can also go a long way. If hiring a professional isn't in the budget, though, here are some great tips for taking professional-looking photos with a smart phone.
4) Ensure Your Website Is Professional & Makes People Want to Revisit
Forbes quotes that there is a big difference between a regular website and a professional one, and consumers are very aware of the difference. Especially now, it is essential that agents ensure their websites are functional and aesthetically pleasing at the same time.
Your site needs to be fast, easy to navigate, and contain both quality content and sharp photos. At the same time, your site shouldn't contain too many ads or distracting elements. Above all, make sure it is a site that people want to check back on for fresh content on a continual basis.
5) Use ReadyChat
One of the biggest marketing tactics today is chatbots, and they can be highly beneficial for real estate agents. You've probably experienced these yourself when a live chat box pops up at the bottom of a website asking if you need help. When you ask questions in the chat box, it is artificial intelligence that is answering, but it feels very human since humor and personality are typically infused in the answers.
With this technology, your website visitors can get their simple questions answered right away, or they can be directed elsewhere for more in-depth solutions. This improves customer service and helps increase conversions. ReadyChat is the perfect chatbot solution for real estate agents since it was built specifically for the real estate industry.
6) Be a Real Estate Blogger
If you don't currently have a blog on your website, you've already fallen behind. Blogs have become one of the best tools marketers have for building an audience, especially if you deliver tons of value and develop a unique voice. Provide a consistent stream of content that is highly useful, and if you really want to make this strategy effective, add infographics and videos.
It's important to note that people are only interested in seeing your listings when they are in the market to buy or sell real estate, so if that is all you post, you aren't going to gain a loyal following. That's why it's also important to post lifestyle-type information that appeals to everyone. That way, even the people who aren’t ready to buy or sell will still gain value from you and they'll think of you when they need to buy or sell a property.
Here are some great content marketing tips for real estate agents. And these topics will give you some ideas for your blog as well:
- Backyard Makeovers You Can Do This Weekend
- How the Real Estate Market Impacts You Even if You're Not Buying or Selling
- 5 Ways to Easily Increase Your Home's Value
- Simple Changes That Can Turn Your Home Into Your Dream Home
- Best Times of Year to Sell a Home
- Inexpensive Ways to Copy Million Dollar Home Details
7) Draw People to Your Blog
Having a blog is one thing, but you also need to make sure people find your content. That's why you need to be active on external sites that provide links to the articles on your blog. For example, you might write guest posts on other websites or provide content on Medium, Quora, or LinkedIn's publishing platform.
Provide useful and relevant content on those sites and then link back to more content on the topic on your own website. By doing this, you gain more visibility and improve your rankings in Google at the same time.
8) Be the Go-To Realtor
If you do all of the above right, you'll build a strong reputation and you'll be poised as the go-to real estate expert. This is something that takes time to establish, but if you provide the right information to the right people at the right times, you'll nab that expert status.
Think about the experts you follow. They are most likely providing tons of value and sharing content and tips that help you solve a certain problem. You probably look forward to receiving their content and you talk about them with others. That's exactly what you need to be doing yourself if you want to be perceived as an expert. When that happens, your notoriety and expertise will gain you a lot of exposure and referrals.
9) Invest in PPC Advertising
Probably the best way to bring in immediate traffic to your website is with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This also happens to be one of the most expensive real estate marketing ideas, but if you know what your website visitors are worth, you can come up with a budget that allows you to bring in a steady stream of traffic at a price you can be prepared for. This method is only expensive if you don't know your cost per transaction (how much you have to spend on ads to get a customer).
10) Collect Data & Analyze It
If you haven't installed Google Analytics on your website, that's an easy thing you can do right now that will help you effectively deploy your real estate marketing tactics. By doing so, you'll know when your marketing efforts are working, when they aren't, and why.
You'll be able to look at metrics that tell you which posts and pages are ranking well, how many people are viewing them, stats and demographics about your viewers, where your traffic is coming from, and more.
Once you have that information, you can make adjustments to your current real estate marketing tactics to improve their effectiveness. For example, you can write more posts that are similar to the ones that are getting the most views, or you might realize you should be marketing to a different demographic.
Your Takeaway
When you use these real estate marketing tips in your business, you’ll stand out in a crowded market and develop a network of followers that will stay with you. The biggest takeaway we can give you is to offer tons of value to your audience. They will love you for it!
Stay tuned for additional real estate marketing tips to help you stand out from the competition.
