Any real estate agent will tell you that the behavior of home buyers has changed. Due to the advancement in technology, home buyers are now doing most of the house-hunting tasks online. They seem to have a clear picture of what they want and thus spend their time researching to check whether they can find their dream home in areas they prefer.
As a real estate agent, you have no choice but to incorporate digital techniques into your marketing efforts. This is the only way to boost your sales.
In this article, we shall look at 8 digital marketing tactics that real estate agents can use to boost sales.
1. Create a Real Estate Website
Today’s home buyers are digital and prefer to do most of the home-seeking work at the comfort of their houses. They spend time moving from one website to another, just to check the best houses and offers. To tap into this digital generation, having a website is mandatory. With a real estate website that is well-optimized, you can be sure to reach them and showcase what you have.
However, not just any website will bring you clients. Have you ever visited a website that took too long to load? Such are the websites that can only help keep away potential clients. Your website needs to be user-friendly, well decorated with photos, links, and call-to-action messages. A good website should be mobile friendly and responsive, given that most of your target audience use smartphones to browse. To ensure that the website provides the best experience to the user, it should have the following:
- High-quality and relevant content
- New listings
- Links to other relevant players like movers, home inspectors, etc.
- Contacts
Check out our step-by-step guide on website creation and leads generation!
Written specifically for property agents, learn to create a wordpress business website and generate leads from it with close to zero budget! Click here to read now!
2. Post Quality Real Estate Content
Most online users never go beyond the first page on SERP when looking for some relevant homes to buy. Studies show that those websites that are found on the first page tend to be more trusted than those found on other pages.
But indexing does not just come; you have to work for it. Ensuring that your website meets all the SEO requirements will put you in the eyes of many potential clients online.
When it comes to online marketing, content is king. You cannot say you have a great SEO strategy when your website has some low quality and irrelevant content. Ensure that you regularly post high-quality blogs that provide users with great tips and advice on buying or selling a home.
3. Create Profiles on Social Media Platforms
Owning accounts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others can be a great way to compliment your website achieves. We know that real estate is a social industry. With active profiles on social media platforms, you can share your website content with thousands of users on such platforms. You can ask your friends and followers on these platforms to share the content on their profiles, thus reach more people.
Remember that social media signals play a significant role when it comes to the ranking of your website and content by the search engine bots!
4. Have an Email Campaign
Email campaign is an effective way of reaching new leads and keeping up with past clients. coming up with a quality and efficient email campaign strategy is vital, given that it will help you speak directly to potential clients as well as past clients based on your experience with them.
Even though email campaigns can be very effective, the content of the emails determines whether or not it shall be opened. Ensuring that you send quality and relevant emails to potential clients can lead to higher conversion rates.
5. Host a Webinar
To succeed in the real estate industry, you need to share your profile as a professional. Let people know that you are an expert when it comes to real estate and that you can provide solutions to the problems they are facing.
With the help of online workshops and webinars, you can reach thousands of people who are interested to learn one or two things in this industry. And unlike other forms of marketing, people who subscribe to online workshops and webinars are directly interested, thus easy to convert them into customers.
6. Focus on all SEO Aspects
Digital marketing is highly competitive. As a startup without a good budget, SEO is your only savior. As we have already seen, quality content is the backbone of any SEO strategy. But there is more to that.
SEO is a free way of getting relevant and targeted traffic to your site. This is because those people that will be visiting your site might have used relevant search terms in your scope. It is thus easy to convert such visitors, and thus increase your sales. The following are some of the important aspects of a great SEO strategy, other than quality content:
- Backlinks – other websites linking back to your website are a vote of confidence in your content, and thus search engine bots will rank it higher.
- Meta titles and descriptions – makes it easier for Google bots to crawl your website and identify the relevancy of your content.
- Social media pages – likes, comments, and other forms of engagements from social media are important signals when it comes to ranking. You can also use social media to channel users to your website.
- Online directories – having your website listed in online directories helps people know more about your business. In the directories, ensure your list contacts, address, and location, and working hours.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. By applying SEO tactics on your website, you can push it to the first page of Google search results!
Start by learning the basics of SEO today with our free SEO Beginner Guide.
7. Host Virtual Tours
Virtual tours are vital for any successful digital marketing strategy. As a real estate agent, you can use virtual tours to showcase what the homes you want to sell have to offer to potential clients.
The videos you post on virtual tours will play a significant role in convincing potential buyers, allowing you to boost your sales without having to do a lot of convincing. For this method to work, however, several things have to be observed. Ensure that you use real footages of the homes you are selling, the videos you post need to be interactive and responsive both on desktop computers and mobile phones.
8. Advertise
Many would have expected this to come first, but we don’t think it should be number one. Why? Because all the above strategies are the cheapest any real estate agent can use. Advertising is an effective way of reaching new clients and generating new leads.
For effective advertising, a real estate agent should go for Pay-Per-Click (PPC), which means that you only pay when your ad is clicked. You can use this method to get targeted individuals who use particular keywords to reach your ads.
SEO vs PPC, which marketing strategy to go for?
Learn the differences and tips you need here!
Final Thought
Just like any other business, creating a successful real estate business needs dedication. You will have to spend a lot of time and put in more effort to succeed. And in most cases, you will also have to spend money to get clients. The strategies we have discussed in this article are easy to follow, cheap to implement, but effective if implemented correctly.
