Digital Marketing for Real Estate is one of the most extensive and vast industries in the world. It offers incredible opportunities to its stakeholders and promises great success to those who work both hard and smart. However resilient, the needs of the buyers and investors have changed over the years. With digital technologies and easy access to the internet, homebuyers prefer doing some leg work online before actually visiting the site. And since there are umpteen ways to market properties online, the industry has become fiercely competitive.
That said, it has become important for you, as a real estate agent, to reach the right customers at the right time. The most reliable and effective way of doing this is to build a holistic real estate digital marketing plan. In this blog, we will shed light on why digital marketing has become an indispensable component of the real estate industry. Plus, to kickstart your marketing plans, we will share some tips that will turn leads into clients!
What is the Importance of Digital Marketing in the Real Estate Industry?
From Facebook and LinkedIn to Instagram and YouTube, there is a sizeable presence of the Indian population on various digital and social media platforms. This increasing online presence can be attributed to the new-age technologies, availability of affordable smartphones, and growing internet penetration. With the number of internet users increasing every minute, you can harness the potential of digital marketing to gain leads and increase sales. Enlisted are some of the advantages of implementing real estate digital marketing strategies:
- It helps in identifying a target audience and expands your overall reach.
- It aids in building a strong online presence and makes the brand more recognizable among homebuyers.
- You can offer virtual tours of your housing projects, neighbourhood, or amenities.
- In comparison to traditional marketing techniques, digital marketing is less expensive.
- It allows you to track your metrics and measure campaign results through various KPIs.
- From social media posts to paid ads, there is no cap on creativity.
Real Estate Digital Marketing: A Three-pronged Approach
In order to gain quality buyer leads, it is essential for you to follow a three-tier online lead generating strategy—Attract, Convert, Engage.
How to Gain Real Estate Leads?
- Develop a user-friendly website
- Create content in the form of blogs, infographics, white papers, research reports.
- Promote content on different social media platforms.
- Implement a mix of paid techniques like Facebook real estate ads, Google Adwords, influencer marketing, etc.
Lead Generation in Real Estate: Things You Should Know
Social networking platforms today are an inherent aspect of our lives, and real estate agents can therefore get a lot from this situation. Here’s how you can use social media to generate leads:
- Create compelling content: It is not a hidden secret that valuable and lively content is necessary for the development of a loyal social media following. Release your property listings, follow up with community updates, give advice on home buying, and come up with some design ideas on an inconsistent basis. Make use of those interesting visuals with renewable energy value-added information in the captions, and tag the post with renewable energy.
- Run Targeted Ads: The net possibility of social media-paid advertising and its capability to target people based on demographics, hobbies, and location has become more specific nowadays. It makes sure your ads reach not only a wider but more qualified pool of prospects searching for homes in your area.
- Host Live Q&A Sessions: Sessions had real interactions with potential customers at the very moment. Your customers expect you to respond to their inquiries about local markets, certain properties, or home buying concerns.
- Run Contests and Giveaways: Of course, you can organize contests and giveaways to help generate buzz and make the engagement rate on your social media pages go up. Provide rewards like a free appointment, a decorating supply voucher, or a discount coupon for participants in the competition.
- Partner with Local Businesses: Partnering with neighboring business owners such as mortgage agents, home advisers, or interior designers can highly increase brand image. Joint-marketing and offering services to a wider scale of customers is one of the major advantages, which increases your brand’s awareness.
- Respond to comments and inquiries, Promptly: Social media is a conversation between two parties. It is dynamic and interactive because the users participate in the discussion and share their views. Reply back to the comments, messages, and questions as soon as possible. It proves that you will respond to people in a timely manner, which in turn builds credibility for your existing and prospective customers.
How to Covert Leads to Clients?
By applying tons of real estate digital marketing tactics, you have generated leads. Now comes the critical part where you have to convert prospects to clients. Let’s see how you can do this.
- The first and foremost step is to segment your leads. Once you have bifurcated buyers, sellers, or leads that want to avail of other services, you will be able to offer solutions accordingly.
- Don’t wait for contacting the leads till the next day. With so many competitors in line, the leads may move to another agent.
- Whether it is through an email or by making a call, follow up with the leads. This step will take up a lot of your time, but it is the most important step in converting leads to clients.
How to Keep Clients Engaged?
Another important aspect that you need to consider while creating a real estate digital marketing strategy is customer engagement. Gaining new leads is fruitful but retaining the existing customer base is equally important. Chatbots for resolving queries, real estate posts for social media, publishing trends and news, sending newsletters, posting video testimonials, etc are excellent ways of keeping clients engaged.
List of Highly Effective Digital Marketing for Real Estate Strategies
Some of the real estate digital marketing plans that can help property builders and real estate agents gain leads have been given a rundown below:
Property Listings through Google Ads
Google ads are the most suitable route to reach property buyers who have shown genuine interest in your projects. In such ads, you bid on keywords related to the project or area concerned. Based on the quality score (relevance of your ad) and the bid you place, Google ranks your ads on search engine pages.
Video Marketing
According to Cisco’s report, 82% of internet traffic will be generated from online videos. Hence, adding promotional content in the form of videos should make an integral part of your real estate digital marketing plan.
While case studies can bring traction to your business, posting video testimonials of satisfied homebuyers is an excellent way of real estate branding. Not restricted to testimonials, you can also post property interior videos, upcoming projects, explainer videos, sold out-properties, and other relevant categories.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you want to reach a target audience, you need to understand their queries, the words they are typing, and the content they want to read. Being a Realtor, you must be familiar with the common queries or topics which real estate investors are interested in. Perhaps, you also have excellent listings or content on the same.
But how would you bring that content and property listings in front of your target audience? Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the answer to this. SEO is the method of improving or optimizing your website for increasing visibility on search engines. The better your web page ranks on search engines like Google, the better visibility your brand will get.
Unlike paid advertising, you don’t have to worry about budgets or funds for SEO. Well-articulated content that answers a user’s query effectively will rank your page higher and you will start receiving free or organic leads.
Blog Writing
The most cost-effective and efficient real estate marketing strategy to keep readers engaged is blogging. Considering how broad the real estate industry is, you can post blogs on an array of topics like location-based listicles, how-to-guides, real estate laws, and other relevant topics. However, this method is efficient only when the content reaches the target home buyers. For this, optimizing content based on SEO practices and sharing the same on digital platforms, consistently, is required.
Drip Email Marketing
If you want to reach a larger audience in one go, drip email marketing is the right way. Simply put, drip emails are automated emails that are sent at a specific time to those who have shown interest in the real estate projects. Newsletter sign-ups, blog subscriptions, intriguing CTAs, downloadable guides are some of the ways to identify leads. So if a buyer subscribed to your blogs while skimming through your landing page, automated emails can then be sent to the reader.
Interactive Ads
While the conventional lead generating ads can run across multiple platforms, interactive ads encourage the customers to “act” rather than skim through the ad. Such ads allow real estate agents to interact directly with the audience in an immersive way and garner more information. Youtube surveys, banner ads, playable ads, etc are some of the examples of using interactive advertisements in the real estate digital marketing strategy.
An efficient real estate digital marketing strategy can boost your property sales and yield profits. However, growing your real estate business in today’s dynamic and ever-evolving atmosphere requires a creative approach. As important as paid marketing tools are, an equal emphasis has to be laid on free or organic channels to boost brand visibility. Additionally, you can also take assistance from leading full-stack real estate marketing agencies to fine-tune your strategies and take your business to new heights!
