Digital Marketing for Real Estate Agents

Impactful Assets in Digital Marketing for Real Estate Agents

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Building Your Book of Business for the Future

As we move away from older marketing practices typically used in the real estate industry, the impact of digital marketing for real estate agents can’t be understated. 

If you’re new in the business or are already established but looking to grow, you’ve more than likely used or have considered using the traditional marketing & sales tools such as:

  • Advertising on displays, magazines, publications
  • Cold calling
  • Cooperating agent relationships 
  • Mortgage company relationships 

These are all still effective channels to grow relationships and ultimately pipeline, but the future of demand generation will reside in digital marketing rather than the traditional items listed above. This post will talk about building your online presence via:

  • Website
  • SEO 
  • Email marketing/automation
  • Digital Advertising

These practices are meant to complement your existing efforts and provide a greater stream of leads for your business. 

Let’s dive in. 

Website

Your website is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy and will ultimately become a primary source of leads when deployed correctly. If you’re a solo agent, you’re probably not paying much attention to getting a website built yet since it can be expensive; It is afterall, an asset. As you start to grow and build a team around you, it’ll become one of the most critical assets that you can invest in to generate long-term ROI. 

As Dirk Zeller notes in his book “Your First Year in Real Estate”, 85% of consumers start their search for properties on the internet. 

Some things to consider:

  • The website should best represent your skillset and how you address your target audiences’ pain points. 
  • It should list properties that you’re driving demand for. Most websites embed the IDX listings to their site, but that doesn’t allow you to realize the SEO value of the properties. 
  • Include reviews from clients about how you’ve made their lives easier throughout the process
  • Your organization will more than likely have their own CRM with great advertising tools within the platform, which is great, but doesn’t allow you to take that system elsewhere should you choose to leave. 
  • Enable you to build a contact list through form submissions on your site  
  • LOAD QUICKLY – your audience won’t stick around for a slow website

Real Estate SEO

Again quoting Dirk Zeller, “The company you select (and later on build) must have a robust website that is highly ranked in key search terms.” This section focuses on search engine optimization (SEO) and ensuring that you’re being found for the terms that users’ are searching for. 

So whether you’re choosing a company to join, or building your own team, ensure that all of these tactics are being deployed to give you the best chance of success.

SEO is critical in digital marketing for real estate agents because it ensures that your target audience can find you online. As you optimize your website, you’ll need to:

When all of the steps above are done effectively, you’ll begin to see traffic increase on your website, and ultimately better track if users are converting to become a source of leads. 

We’ll even argue that after sticking with this strategy for a long period of time, you’ll be able to replace prospecting with SEO as it becomes a main driver of leads; This will save you a significant amount of time each week as you no longer have to spend your precious time hitting the phones and cold calling.

The chart above gives you a bit of an idea of what your ultimate goal will be when building out your main sources of lead generation. 

Email Marketing & Automation

The next crucial asset in digital marketing for real estate agents is your email marketing software. Whether you’re leveraging the platform provided by your company or a third party tool like Mailchimp, these are your goals:

  • Reach out to prospective clients

Building your email list and sending out creative copy to capture potential customers is an art; Deploying this strategy can become an additional source of leads for your business. 

  • Drive traffic to your website and landing pages

We’ve already discussed how crucial your website is. After it’s fully optimized, use email marketing to drive more traffic to your landing pages; A homebuyer seminar sign-up page, a neighborhood/community page that you think they might be interested in, or even your homepage since it should clearly outline your value. 

  • Communication after closing (follow-ups, Holiday emails, etc.)

One of the most significant reasons that a client may not work with you again after you’ve helped them buy or sell their home is a lack of follow-up. They’ve simply forgotten about you. This part of your digital marketing strategy seeks to mitigate the risk of being forgotten by clients without the manual work involved in follow-up.

By deploying automated email marketing, you’ll take the manual work out of having to continuously stay in front of past customers. Here’s how you can accomplish that goal:

  • Import them into a specific list after closing 
  • Set workflow rules that automate the follow-ups
  • Include specified timeframes where you send out emails to
  1. Thank them for their business
  2. Ask how they’re getting settled in
  3. Ask for a review that you can share with future prospective customers
  4. Scheduled Holiday emails 
  5. Check-in to see how they’re doing emails
  6. Ask for referrals as it’s a main driver of your leads

Assuming you’ve provided value, setting these automated emails ensures that you’re growing relationships with your clients, remaining visible, & aren’t forgotten when it comes time to help them tackle their next real estate goal. 

Digital Advertising

One of the first questions an agent will ask their new employer is whether they’ll help them cover advertising costs for signs and other physical advertising means; Not to say that’s not effective, but we’re in a new era now.

Digital advertising for real estate agents is more important now than ever as we’re living in an economy that lives and thrives on the internet. 

Signs are great, but they unfortunately limit your reach. Here’s what we mean.

Digital advertising allows you to be granular in your targeting efforts and ensure that your target audience sees what you’re putting out there, not just the cars driving by a sign. 

Platforms to run Digital Advertising on:

Setting Granular Search Criteria

Traditional practices like an advertising sign sitting outside or in a store limit your reach to whoever is passing by it. Digital advertising allows you to determine exactly who you’d like to see your ad including:

  • Search terms/retargeting

For those searching for a specific key term online, you’ll be able to bid on keywords so that your specified ads are visible to that user. 

  • Demographic targeting

Setting filters that allow you to reach your target audience based on their demographics is a major benefit of digital ads. 

  • Company Targeting

You can even target users based on the company that they work for. For example, if you live in an area where X company employs higher income individuals that are more likely to buy homes, you can directly target those employees. 

  • Job Experience and Title

Sticking with the theme of income brackets, you’ll be able to target your audience based on the experience level and title that they have. This should correlate directly with the bracket you have the most experience selling to. 

  • Interest and Traits

This is more of a LinkedIn specific feature but you can actually run ads that are only shown to users that have certain interests and traits. For example, if a member follows a home buying page that is common among buyers, ensure that your ads are shown to them. 

Concluding this portion, digital advertising for real estate agents provides significantly more control over getting your message out to your target audience when compared to traditional tactics among real estate professionals. 

The Future of Digital Marketing For Real Estate Agents and Growing Business

This post isn’t to say that you should abandon all of the traditional practices used by real estate professionals as you look to gain visibility and generate leads, but rather that digital marketing should complement those efforts and be expanded upon as you become better at these tactics.

When looking for brokerages to join, one of your probing questions should be around if they offer marketing dollars to help you develop your business. If they do, it will enable you to leverage digital marketing professionals and digital advertising dollars to start implementing these practices. Deploying them effectively will generate a long-term ROI for your book of business.

The aspects discussed in this post should be the foundation of your overall marketing strategy, but you’re not done once they’re implemented. Continuously monitoring, optimizing, and investing in them is equivalent to investing in assets that are going to generate returns of your team. 

Reach out and let us know how this is working for you, or if you’re looking for help on getting started with these digital marketing practices.