With so many options to market your business both on and offline, many agents and agencies are confused about which channels to focus their marketing budget on.
If you are looking to grow your profile and not sure where to concentrate your efforts here are some ideas to help you build a winning online presence:
Maximize your use of social media
Property professionals that use social media as a marketing tool not only allow themselves to reach a larger audience, they also allow themselves to communicate listings and other information at any time of the day.
Setting up your social media channels requires little to no investment, unlike some other forms of marketing such as a website or print material which require some budget to build and create designs.
So, what is the key to nailing social media as a real estate business?
Most case studies show that the key advantages of social media for real estate agents are:
- The ability to show your brand’s personality and the human side of your business;
- To remain top of mind with clientele; and
- Build trust with both past and future vendors and buyers.
Although there are plenty of other advantages too, these three elements are difficult to achieve with other forms of marketing.
Social media has a unique ability to achieve these objectives without feeling too invasive to the client.
Consistent and quality content, as well as offering genuine value to your audience are imperative to success on social media.
Using social for hard selling purposes will only alienate your audience, so ensure you consider what value your content is bringing to the table before you hit that ‘post’ button.
Update your website and create blogs
In the shift to online marketing, the need for a website and blog presence in the property industry has become vital.
Customers are more informed than ever with endless information at their fingertips, so you can be assured that they will do their research and critique your online presence.
Having a great website is especially important if you have been called into an appraisal as the ‘second’ or ‘third’ agent.
In this situation the first choice of agent might have an existing relationship with the vendor, however, the vendor may still call in other agents to appraise the property for reassurance and to satisfy themselves that they have considered all the best candidates.
This is where your digital marketing can really help you stand out and give you a fighting chance at the listing.
Equally, it is as advantageous if you are constantly competing against more experienced agents.
You need to be able to wow potential vendors with your professionalism and presentation and your website is a great way to do this.
On top of a winning website, blogs are a great way to keep your audience engaged and informed and position yourself as an expert in your field.
Long-form content allows you to share more detailed information with your clients, showcasing your expertise and building rapport with them.
Plus, you have the added benefit of owning your marketing asset and not being at the mercy of third-party sites, as you are with social media channels.
Get found on Google
Once you have a website up and running, it is essential that you can be found by search engines, and that’s where SEO comes in.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is often overlooked by businesses when developing a marketing strategy.
Currently, in our ever-growing digital world, 89 percent of consumers use search engines to research a product or service before purchasing it, and few people go past the first page of Google.
Ranking on page one of Google is not an easy task and it will take time if your website is new.
Keyword research is imperative to understand the best keywords to rank for to attract the right people to your website, and how competitive it will be to do so.
There are over 200 factors that influence your ranking on search engines, but the following three items will have the greatest impact: the technical build of your website, keyword optimization of your content, and building backlinks to your website.
Hiring an SEO expert would be your best bet if you want to have a strong presence on Google.
Tackle email marketing
As we have already seen, there are many elements to creating a strong digital presence.
Despite the buzz around newer strategies such as social media marketing and SEO, email remains one of the most effective ways to communicate and generate leads from customers, and I believe it is one of the most underutilized marketing channels in real estate industry.
Many agencies and agents have such messy databases that they go into email paralysis and just never send out any emails to their database, afraid the wrong thing will go to the wrong person.
On the other end of the spectrum, agencies can get too excited with email marketing and spam their database with untargeted ‘just listed’ and ‘just sold’ emails in the hope of generating a new lead.
According to Mailchimp the average open rate percentage for email marketing in the real estate industry is around 20.84 percent with a ‘click through’ rate of about 1.91 percent.
Consider the frequency of your emails carefully and test what yields the best result.
Once a week could be the perfect number for you, but equally a meatier monthly update might work best for your database.
The important thing is to make sure the content has substance and the design is engaging.
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At Ubertor, we specialize in crafting websites that will draw in traffic, make searching easier, and turn website viewers into clients. Don’t waste time reinventing the wheel – let us do it for you! Contact us today for more information and get a FREE consultation on what needs to be done with your website presence!
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