We work with a lot of real estate agents & brokers, and are always on the hunt for a competitive edge in every aspect of their business, including real estate marketing.
Like what you read? Check out our Real Estate Marketing Playbooks (pre-designed tasks with staff to help if needed, or you can bring your own staff for all or parts).
Trevor Tynes, SEO Consultant
Create a list of Question-Based Topics (QBT). These can come from common questions clients and people have that have anything to do with buying, selling, homes, properties, locations, etc. Answer these questions as comprehensively as possible to begin ranking in search engines like Google just as people are searching for answers that will help them with their buying or selling journey and decisions. This will get you and your brand in front of people who wouldn’t otherwise know you, create goodwill and get them into your pipeline.
Carlos Obregon, Bloom Digital Marketing
Real Estate agents share a very unique challenge when promoting their services. Whether we are talking about an agent who is starting our or a very experienced agent, they will both charge the same commission in percentage. So pricing is not the ideal differentiation here. Instead, I would focus on highlighting what ancillary services set you apart from other RE agents.
Some of these services can be professional photography of your property, virtual tours (especially now!). TV, radio, print and of course extensive digital advertising.
Also very important is to highlight your past track record as an agent, your awards, recognitions and achievements. And last but not least make sure you give back to the community and make this known, this can be in the form of being a member of charities, being involved in fundraising, donations and any other programs that give back to the less fortunate in your local community.
Amanda Thomas, Konstruct Digital
Real Estate is an intensely competitive online niche.
It’s easy to want to be everything to everyone, but my #1 tip is to pick a hyper-niche within real estate. Examples might include: specific neighbourhood, specific situations (e.g. divorce, first time home buyers, etc), specific types.
Your brand name should then reflect that niche. Choosing a brand name with keywords users are searching for can help you get a leg-up with your SEO.
Once you’ve selected your hyper-niche, your marketing becomes much simpler:
- Who to network with in complementary businesses becomes more obvious.
- Where to do physical advertising may become more obvious.
- Your Content and Social media strategy will become more focused.
You’ll become the go-to expert for that niche which lends itself well to: referrals for specific situations, speaking opportunities, and news source opportunities.
Experts are more valued than generalists.
Gabby Miele, From the Future
Aside from the normal social media interaction, building a blog with your ideas and partnering with local agents is a great way to build your credibility. Your blog should cater to your customer – make the first interaction count. Make it about the value you provide and really show how much you know about your industry.
Your personal branding should focus on your mind. And while those cheesy real estate agents with their photos plastered on their blogs are probably doing the same thing, there’s a threat of it not focusing on who’s paying you at the end of the day.
Most importantly (and something people don’t really talk about) is investing time into SEO practices. Whether it be utilizing the top search terms of your industry on your blog or doing some local link building, your blog will surely move up the ranks by making yourself a thought leader.
Fraser McCulloch, Platonik
Advertise. When you get your hands on a property to sell you need to make potential buyers aware it exists.
A property developer friend recently built 6 premium flats in the West Coast of Scotland. There’s 2 audiences for me, those just married or those retiring and downsizing.
Within Facebook Ads Manager I can select people living within 25 miles of the property location. I can choose people aged 25 to 49 and I can choose people who signalled to Facebook that they are getting married, just married or we got married.
Facebook proposed an audience size that reaches 1200 to 3500 people per day and 9-27 website clicks per day. The daily budget is £30 per day.
Compare that with the cost of radio, local newspapers, signage and you’ll find that’s a very competitive budget. This advertising will make the right audience aware of your property and with the right advert and call to action prompt people to view the property listing.
Whilst you may not be an expert with Facebook Advertising there are plenty of marketing experts who can set this up for you.
In addition to local Facebook Advertising I would also recommend you use the Posts feature within Google My Business. Posts enable you to share images, videos, updates, offers and news that Google will display next to your website when people are searching for you or your company. This way you can catch those house hunting who may be unaware of your latest properties.
Chris Labbate, SEOBANK
I would focus on promoting your success stories! The more social proof in the form of testimonials, reviews, comments, and shares will help to build your brand online. It’s not just about the authority and higher ranking either, if you have a personal touch, and share each homeowners journey people will resonate with their stories. I think we all remember the Real Estate agent who did the “Fortnite Floss” that became a viral video. All it takes is being a little bit different, sharing your success stories and tapping into some other trending topics.
Potential buyers and sellers won’t be interested in your listings or branding unless you have strong social proof. Even those who are referred to you by word of mouth will check your online reviews for confirmation about your trustworthiness.
With that in mind, experiment with as many digital platforms as you can handle. Focus on the numbers and find the best platforms with your ideal clients for the fastest results!
Clinton Wu, TFS Properties
If you are interested in being a marketer in real estate it is vital that either you yourself are a practicing agent or you work closely with someone that is. Our company, TFS Properties, focuses on selling commercial property and most of our customers are financially sophisticated, as such, our marketing material must reflect that.
Along with that, marketing and advertising in real estate comes with its own set of regulations, and being an agent or working closely with one, you can avoid making mistakes such as forgetting to include your DRE number in your advertising material.
Chris Porteous, My SEO Sucks
One of the more underrated marketing tips that real estate agents should take heed is also a bit of an old-school technique: Maintaining an active blog about real estate. Sure, the latest trends in digital marketing lean towards strategies like social media campaigns and posting listings in real estate search engines. Blogging may be more of a slow cook approach, but it does wonders in boosting the authenticity of your brand (i.e. what you offer as a real estate agent), while laying a solid groundwork for your SEO efforts.
In terms of authenticity, running a blog helps strengthen your brand by providing information (via tips and informative articles on real estate deals) that customers and prospects can trust and even keep as reference later on. Your blog can also serve as a venue for answering real estate-related questions from interested parties, who could later on convert to satisfied customers.
Lastly, a blog gives you a really cool SEO-ready recipe for brewing your long tail content that should attract traffic organically, for building quality links that should help boost your real estate website, and for offering always-updated new content that your followers can look forward to.
David Bell, Diving Bell Creative
We’ve seen a lot of success for Real Estate clients who are willing to create high quality gated content. For instance, if you’re focusing on a specific neighborhood, creating a 2-3 page pdf that includes knowledge that only a local would have. Things like neighborhood history, information on schools, tips on the best places to shop or eat, and other hidden gems. It’s even better if you can somehow weave your past client testimonials into the mix like “[agent name] helped us find the perfect house within a new school district that’s the perfect fit for our 1st grader.” The goal is to create something that anyone who lives or is interested in living in that neighborhood would enjoy looking through.
Once you have this in your toolbox, shout it from the mountain tops. Run Facebook ads, send it in your newsletter, post it wherever your potential prospects are. You can get extra reach if you let the businesses listed in your gated content know about it and ask them to share too.
Callum Sherwood, First Page Digital Singapore
Use location/city specific pages to target generic city based keywords. This is where the money is at in terms of generic keyword/SEO opportunity. Many Real Estate portals will use parameterized URLs to generate their city pages (ex: /location=?id939) instead of /singapore/east-singapore/.
By doing so, you will be able to rank for generic keywords & generate leads quickly! This is something we see very frequently over here in SEA, real estate portals with huge amounts of branded search & no search engine friendly URL structure, i’d consider this one of the lowest hanging fruits possible for real estate portals – get on it!
The other thing is image SEO, when you add listings to your portal, put some effort into how you name your listing imagery, as Google images is still a big driver of organic traffic. Naming images to be search engine friendly isn’t time consuming at all & will yield you good dividends.
Skyler Reeves, Ardent Growth
Every real estate agent needs to build up their brand if they want to be successful without spending a ton on ad
vertising. Word-of-mouth referrals and name recognition are two of the most powerful forces in marketing for your niche. If you want to build a name for yourself you need to be creating video content and distributing it across as many social channels as possible — and it makes sense.
LinkedIn is one of the best channels out there right now for organic reach but your content for LinkedIn will need to be different than what you’d post on a platform like Facebook. If you’re making content on LinkedIn, it should be highly-informative financial education for a more sophisticated audience. Don’t fret about having the most polished and professional-looking videos either. People don’t go on social platforms to be advertised to, so the more “natural” you can make your posts look, the better. Be consistent and try it and you’ll see the results come rolling in.
Freddie Chatt, Freddie Chatt
In 2020, real estate agents need to be focusing on SEO. Ranking high in Google will lead to a consistent stream of new clients looking for your services.
Find keywords that your potential clients are searching for using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush and optimize your site to rank for these searches. Partner with local businesses and suppliers to build links to your site, and make sure you are getting as many reviews from your existing clients, these will all compound to driving more organic traffic to your website.
To boost your chances of ranking, start a blog and write posts answering common questions that your clients ask you when you first speak to them. The chances are they will be looking for these answers via Google too if you are answering those questions with your content, they’ll see your authority on the topic and you’ll be more likely to close them.
Jeremy Moser, uSERP
Marketing for real estate agents requires a big local presence, but also a focus on non-local traffic too. I think the biggest wins here are creating a strategy that tackles both groups: (1) residents in your area looking for a new home and (2) people looking to move to your region.
To effectively market to both, start with local marketing. Build links and mentions on real estate agent directories, local newspapers, magazines, and websites. Connect with local journalists to publish stories. Take advantage of Google my Business to list your real estate business on Google products. Next, focus more broadly on ranking for keywords in the real estate space. Starting with long-tail versions like “property taxes in [state]”. Longer-tail variations will be easier to rank for due to less competition, allowing you to build authority and search traffic. Once established, start creating big-ticket organic pages for high volume keywords to expand beyond your local district.
Matt Diggity, Diggity Marketing
Know Your Numbers and Buy Leads.
I’ve helped many real estate agents with their lead generation efforts, and although I love search engine optimization, this is not the way to go.
Paid advertisement is. The first page of Google search results is clogged up with high authority websites like Yelp, Realtor, Expertise, and Zillow.
You are going to have a near impossible time ranking your single listing above these massage properties.
Instead run targeted Facebook ads to your local area. How much to spend depends on how much you made from each lead. To determine this, figure out how many leads you had on average over the last 6 months. Then figure out how much profit you made in your business in the last 6 months. Divide them and you have your profit/lead number.
Don’t spend more than this in your Facebook campaign and you’ve got a profitable lead generation flow on your hands!
Written by:
Shaurya Jain is a marketing enthusiast from India. He runs www.attentionalways.com. He loves playing badminton but cant seem to get good at it for some reason.