Selling in real estate is challenging, time-consuming, and exhausting. The fluctuating economy and buyers’ demands complicate it further. And we haven’t even got to the financial barriers holding millennials and generation Z back from buying properties.
This might be a solid damper on your mood, but fortunately, this guide covers how you can make the most of this bleak situation by improving your real estate marketing strategy.
Let’s take a positive turn towards a few trends that real estate agents and developers can expect in 2024:
- Residential sales have experienced a 51% surge since 2021.
- The rental market is slowing down, and real estate sales will remain a seller’s market with higher demands and even higher property rates.
- 9 out of 10 US companies are moving away from the remote model and towards a hybrid, work-from-office focussed model. The primary market in metropolitan cities will soon experience a boost.
- Over 44% of new homeowners search for properties online! There’s an upward trend in the demand for intelligent HomeTech and the option to buy properties online. It’s safe to say that rapid adoption of technology can be expected in the real estate sector.
- Property rent is expected to reach 8.4% by May 2023, so you can expect younger and first-time homebuyers to move toward the housing market.
To make the most of these upcoming opportunities, you must have a marketing game plan ready. Leads with a buying intent, captured through the proper marketing channels, ultimately lead to faster conversions. With just a few marketing strategies, you can increase your visibility, build trust with your audience, and ultimately, drive more leads and sales.
25 Real Estate Marketing Strategies
In this article, we’ll cover various strategies spread over offline and digital channels and share the tools and resources you need to implement them. Before you change any of your marketing strategies, here are a few basics you need to review:
1. Build a niche
A niche in real estate is defined both by where you’re selling and whom you sell to. A single real estate agent can’t cater to every demographic across the country, and focusing on a segment of your audience can prove to be an excellent marketing tool.
The chosen niche should lie at an intersection of your interests and the upcoming market trends. For example, your niche can be affordable apartments in New York for millennials. Real estate businesses can also focus on corporate spaces as their niche if most of their clients are businesses (which can be further segmented into the size of the company and the location they prefer).
2. Hire a professional photographer
Whether it’s for a listing website or your own, having a professional come in to shoot pictures or videos of the property is a significant upgrade. Since 97% of people use the internet to look for a home, you’re putting your best foot forward with these visuals.
Buyers are more prone to come and visit the property if they have an idea of what it looks like. The images and videos give buyers an idea of the size, location, and amenities. Drone shots and 3D renders of the living space are a bonus you can take advantage of.
You can take inspiration from our client, Acron Homes, who use videos to market their villas in Goa.
3. Register yourself as a business on Google
The easiest and most effective list you can be featured on is on Google and Google maps under local businesses. Listing here is an important aspect of local SEO as well. With reviews, directions, geo pins, and pictures—it doubles up as a website that generates plenty of leads. It also helps your buyers:
- Ask and answer questions
- Book appointments
- Check out prices for different listings
4. Improve your website
Your website may be the buyer’s first interaction with your business. A bad website can harm your business and drive your audience away. Improving your website involves publishing relevant blog posts, presenting your listings along with the pricing, showcasing client testimonials, and enabling easy navigation across pages.
Invest in a professionally designed website that
- Showcases your properties
- Includes a clear call-to-action
- Provides easy-to-use contact forms.
Tools: Platforms like WordPress and Squarespace offer customizable templates and features to create a professional website.
5. Understand your target buyers
Just as your niche needs to be well-defined, so does your list of target buyers. You can build an ICP for different property or property types based on the amenities they provide and the range of investment to find leads from your database accordingly.
Automating this stage with segmented lists or using filters to create lists is one of the most efficient ways to target buyers. For example, a villa with a school and hospital nearby may be the right fit for a family but not for a first-time homebuyer.
6. Create a strong brand identity
Your brand is the foundation of your marketing efforts, so it’s important to establish a clear and consistent brand identity. Building a brand identity includes creating a unique logo, choosing a color scheme, and developing a tone of voice for your messaging.
Tools: Adobe Illustrator and Canva can help you create a professional logo and design other branding materials.
Once you have built the foundation of your marketing strategy in these five arenas, you can move towards optimizing each marketing channel. In the next section, we’ll tackle different lead sources and the potential they hold. These comparisons will help you choose the best one for your business.
Digital marketing strategies for real estate
Print media, including magazines and newspapers, are now a thing of the past. Less than 10% of people actually check listings on print mediums. And as everything has moved online, so has the property-buying experience.
1. Invest in content marketing
Content marketing is a powerful way to attract and engage your audience. Create blog posts, videos, and other types of content that provide value to your target audience and showcase your expertise in the real estate market.
61% of consumers say they feel better about a company that delivers custom content and are more likely to buy from it.
Tools to use: Ahrefs and Yoast are complete content toolkits to research keywords and maintain website hygiene. You can build and manage your content marketing plan on CoSchedule.
2. Improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO)
While improving your website, businesses also need to focus on publishing blogs that target relevant keywords and build relevant backlinks to boost SEO rankings. The trick here is to answer the frequently asked questions that homebuyers may have. Publishing SEO-friendly, high-quality content will surely drive traffic to your website in the long run.
Tools to improve SEO for your website: Google Keyword planner, Ahrefs, and Semrush help you manage SEO practices, find backlinks, and research keywords. You can use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to evaluate website traffic and understand your audience.
3. Zero down on Lead Magnets
Once you’ve nailed down your SEO efforts, it’s time to convert the traffic into actual leads. A lead magnet is a valuable resource that is gated by a landing page or a form. It helps you collect lead details such as contact information, requirements, buying intent, etc.
A few examples of lead magnets are
- Ebooks
- Buyer’s guide
- Checklists to choose a new home
- Real estate trend reports
- Tools that help buyers calculate mortgage and the future value of property
You don’t have to stick to text content while creating lead magnets. On-demand webinars, virtual walkthroughs, and informative videos are great options too.
Tools to create lead magnets:
- Text-based (checklists, whitepapers, eBooks): Canva, Attract.io, Pixabay, and Adobe document cloud with easy to edit templates and stock images help you create lead magnets even if you lack design expertise.
- Video-based: Zoom, Loom, Wistia, iMovie, and Adobe Premiere Pro are easy to use to record and edit videos.
4. Get yourself listed!
Zillow, one of the most popular real estate websites, is an obvious choice to sign up for and list your offerings. But that’s what everyone’s doing. Personalization is your secret weapon here. Sign up on as many local platforms as possible, in your country and region, after evaluating the amount of traffic they receive.
There’s a bit of the commission that you’ll sacrifice, but the leads generated from this source are highly qualified. But some of the listing websites are free too! We’ve simplified things for you. Here are the websites that you need to get yourself listed on: Real estate listing websites.
5. Initiate PPC and Paid Advertising campaigns
Paid advertising, such as Google Ads or social media ads, can effectively reach a targeted audience and drive traffic to your website. While listings are a great option, it’s also a place where you’re being compared to your competitors. Whereas PPC campaigns help you target and retarget leads to just your website. It’s an expensive initiative, but it proves to be effective in a short period of time.
On average, the cost per lead in the real estate sector is $15, with a closing rate of 1%. But with effective marketing techniques and targeting, you can bring the cost down to $5 and increase the closures to 3%.
Tools: Platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Facebook Ads offer ad creation and targeting tools to help you reach your audience.
Marketing strategies don’t end at just generating leads. You can move buyers down the funnel by engaging with them and reminding them of your other offerings that suit them better. Here are a few tips to get you started:
Real Estate marketing strategies to engage buyers
1. Engaging email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach potential clients. With an average ROI of 122%, it’s an amazing, personalized channel. Businesses can use targeted email campaigns based on demographics, location, price range, property type, and many other factors. Here’s a template you can use:
Subject: Now is the time for a fresh start.
Hello [Prospect],
Have you been considering moving to a new place? Here are a few points to consider before buying a new house.
• Housing prices in your locality will increase by [percent] over the next five years.
• The average home in [location] sells in [number] months.
• Houses in [city name] have now reached an average price of [value].
I have [number] of years of experience as a realtor and I am confident that I can help you buy the right home for your family, with all the necessary amenities. Let’s get in touch. Click here to schedule a meeting: [meeting link].
Regards,
[Name]
[Contact number]
[For more templates, check out: 20 Best Ready-to-use Email Templates for Real Estate]
A marketing automation tool with readily available templates and automatically scheduled campaigns make email marketing really easy for real estate marketers.
Tools to use: LeadSquared’s marketing automation has easily editable no-code templates that help you easily send out thousands of email campaigns.
2. Leverage WhatsApp marketing
WhatsApp might just be the most effective platform for engagement. You can send out campaigns just as you would for emails, and with over 2 billion users worldwide, there’s no running out of leads on this platform.
Use it to share updates about new listings, open houses, and other events. WhatsApp has a 98% open rate, making it an effective way to reach potential clients.
Our marketing activities are automated from start to end of the buyers’ journey. Whenever customers book a property visit, they get an email + WhatsApp message which helps increase our credibility as a brand. This way, our lead engagement has gone up by 50%, and so have property visits.
Jatin Piplani, Digital Marketing Manager, Cofynd
Tools: Gupshup and Verloop are a few conversational messaging platforms which can be integrated with LeadSquared’s Real Estate CRM to schedule and track your WhatsApp campaigns.
3. Post regularly on social media
Social media is a great way to connect with potential clients and promote your properties. Choose the platforms that make the most sense for your business, and then create engaging content, such as short videos and virtual tours, to regularly share it with your audience. 69% of adults in the United States use at least one social media platform, so it’s important to have a presence on every relevant space, such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, based on the demographic you cater to.
Tools: Hootsuite and Buffer are great to schedule and manage social media posts.
4. Host informative webinars
People buy from sellers they trust. And when the investment amount is huge, as in the case of real estate, building long-term relationships and trust is one of the most important tasks. 79% of webinar attendees are more likely to buy from the host after attending a webinar. Webinars allow you to create an engaging and informative space for your buyers.
Businesses can use webinars to educate potential clients about the real estate market, the buying and selling process, and how you can help them achieve their goals. A few interesting topics for such webinars are:
- How to assess the real estate market?
- Tips for new homeowners
- How to get a mortgage for your house?
- How to start investing in real estate?
Tools: Livestorm, Zoom, Loom, and Wistia can be used to organize and record your webinar.
5. Real estate chatbots to enable self-service
Real estate sales depends on engaging with the buyer whenever it’s convenient for them. While your real estate agents are busy with on-site visits and focussing on their deals, they might lose out on the chance to generate new leads.
A chatbot is a virtual real estate agent that makes up for every call or interaction missed at any time of the day. It can also assist buyers in scheduling visits and segmenting buyers based on their interests. Bottom line, by deploying a simple chatbot, you can generate leads and improve sales conversions by 67%!
Note: A rule-based or AI-automated chatbot isn’t a substitute for human interaction. It just steps in and helps your buyers when your real estate agents can’t, such as off business hours or while browsing the website.
Tools: RealtyChatbot, Tidio, Structurely, and Engati are a few easy to implement and affordable chatbots for the Real Estate sector.
6. Engage your customers, even after you’ve closed a deal
36% of real estate sellers found their real estate agents through a referral by friends or family, and 27% went with the agent they had previously worked with to buy or sell a home! Encourage satisfied clients to refer their friends and family to your business and consider offering a referral fee or other incentive for successful referrals. This can help build your client base and establish your business as a trusted and reputable source for real estate services.
A CRM is a handy tool that helps you fetch plenty of referrals. With all the buyer information stored in one place, the frequent reminders to reach out, and marketing automation to create digital touchpoints, your referral strategy sorts itself out. Don’t shy away from asking your happiest customers for a gleaming review on yelp and a testimonial for your website.
Tools: LeadSquared’s Real Estate CRM helps you manage all your referrals in one place, along with complete lead tracking and notifications. The other referral marketing tools you can use are Evabot and Woorise.
While we’ve established that real estate businesses should focus on digital marketing strategies in the future, it doesn’t imply that offline strategies should be completely disregarded. Offline marketing strategies are crucial to any real estate business’s marketing plan. These can be just as effective in attracting new clients and promoting your real estate business. Here are five offline marketing strategies for real estate businesses:
Offline marketing strategies for real estate businesses
1. Step out of your office and attend physical events
Attending industry events and networking with other professionals is a great way to meet potential clients and build relationships with other real estate professionals (for wonderful co-listing opportunities). This can include local chamber of commerce events, real estate association meetings, and trade shows.
You can even organize project launch meets for potential investors and buyers. It creates a relaxed environment for buyers to learn more about the project while getting the chance to experience the property.
These events provide an opportunity to share your expertise and showcase your brand. Don’t forget to keep your business cards and social media profiles handy so that the people you meet have a way to get back to you.
2. Invest in billboards
80% of Americans can be reached by outdoor advertising and have a high recall for it. Signs and billboards get your brand and listings in front of a large audience, even if they’re relatively untargeted.
This can include placing signs at properties you have listed for sale or rent and purchasing billboard advertising in high-traffic areas. It’s a chance for you to get creative and experiment with the wildest ideas for a higher recall.
3. Get yourself featured on the radio
Radio, like billboards, has a wide range but the added bonus is that you can also target your specific audience. This can be done by tweaking the messaging and experimenting across time slots. For example, the morning slot where people aged 25-60 head to work might be a prime time for your real estate business.
The right copy and a crisp CTA can send hundreds of inbound leads to your real estate call centers.
4. Attend housewarmings
You’re the matchmaker that brought the buyer to their dream home. So, you need to ensure that their friends and family know you and reach out to you to buy their own home. A couple of keychains, any merchandise, and even business cards can help you stay on the top of their mind. It’s a genius way to generate qualified offline leads for your business.
5. Advertise near railway stations and airports
If your budget does not allow for hosting such events or tours, you can reach out to city newcomers independently, without partnering with hotels. This can be done by advertising your services near airports or railway stations. Apart for the ideas mentioned previously, you can also strike a commission-based arrangement with the cab drivers near such spots, in which they personally recommend your service to each passenger.
6. Don’t give up on cold calling
There’s no such thing as a cold lead or a dead lead. Cold calling may be the best way to sell listings that aren’t going anywhere or engage leads that ghosted you long ago. But keep the basics in mind! Don’t forget to research the prospect and know everything about the property before you get on a call with them.
Cold calling can work to sell more properties to investors or previous buyers and re-evaluate the requirements of leads who couldn’t find the right home.
[We’ve got a few scripts for you real estate agents, too: 15 Super-effective Real Estate Cold Calling Scripts]
7. Advertise near beautiful homes
Have you ever seen a house so gorgeous you wished you lived there? This is a very common feeling and particularly heightened when you’re looking for a place of your own.
You can distribute flyers or put up posters near the best (or even famous) houses in your city. A simple line like ‘Want a house like that?’, provided with your phone number, can be a strong call to action for a prospect passing by a beautiful house and marvelling at it. Remember – guerrilla real estate marketing is popular because it pays off.
But there’s another challenge that we haven’t talked about yet. It’ll hold back your marketing team even if they implement the best strategies.
It’s the lack of a central platform that connects your lead sources, marketing team, and on-field agents.
The solution? A complete real estate sales and marketing automation platform. Or, LeadSquared’s Real Estate CRM in short.
Track your leads and marketing activities in one place
When you have multiple channels that generate offline and online leads, you also need to have your workforce ready to handle such a high volume of incoming leads. To do this, you can either hire a large workforce or just make your process smarter with a CRM.
Take a look at how a CRM can completely automate your real estate process, from lead collection to closing the deal.
A Real Estate CRM helps you:
- Set up automated email marketing campaigns
- Build landing pages for lead generation
- Manage real estate inventories
- Improve sales productivity
Adopting a marketing automation tool is probably one of the best moves for your real estate marketing teams. If you’d like to learn more about the features of LeadSquared’s CRM or try it out for your business, get in touch with our team today!
