You already know that the vast majority of home buyers today start their quest for a new house by going online. Given that simple fact, shouldn’t online marketing form a key part of your strategy for promoting your real estate business? When done properly, online marketing can help you find more buyers and make more sales.
Provide Useful Content
As an experienced agent, you already know that collecting leads, networking, and hunting referrals are just the first steps to finding buyers. These practices only serve to get your foot in the door. To make sales, you will have to impress prospective buyers with your expertise and talent. This holds true when you are marketing yourself online just as much as when you are selling in person.
Great content is the key to demonstrating your strengths. Don’t be afraid to give away useful information for free. There’s no better way to show that you will be a good guide to buyers who are interested in your local market. There are a host of different ways to publish your content online and you should make use of many different platforms, but it all comes down to sharing information that prospective buyers genuinely want and need.
Go To Where The Buyers Are
In the past few years, social media networks have really come of age as marketing tools. Today you can get tremendous bang for your buck by advertising on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The sheer volume of information these services collect about their users allows you to target likely buyers with incredible specificity. This makes your marketing investments go further and ensures that you concentrate on only the most promising leads.
Take the time to study your past and current buyers to learn all you can about their online habits. You will want to focus your marketing efforts on the sites and networks where they spend the most time. You will also need to make sure that your own online presence (your websites, blogs, etc.) are responsive and easy to access with mobile devices, as well as, desktop computers. You don’t want to lose a potential sale because a buyer got tired of zooming in and out over and over to read an online listing that wasn’t optimized for his or her phone!
Invest In A Wide Net
Real estate is in a rather unusual position in the world of online marketing because the key decision-making point that convinces a buyer to work with you may happen months or even years before he or she is in the market for a house. If you make yourself into a prominent authority on your area, you will spread a positive reputation far and wide. This can bear fruit far down the road, so it’s worth creating a persistent and helpful online presence.
Many of the best real estate agents working today are closely partnered with sites that focus on spreading useful information about the communities and neighborhoods they serve. You can never know when writing a blog post, sharing a photo, or answering a question about your area might win you a new client, so spread yourself as wide as you can.
Build A Strong Funnel
Once a potential buyer does express an interest in working with you, you need to have a strong sales apparatus in place to take them from “prospective client” to “happy homeowner.” Online marketers (like others) call this a sales funnel. Your funnel needs to be flexible so that you can capture both “I need to buy a house this month” clients and “I may move to town in a few years” clients.
Once a client is in your funnel, you will be communicating with them directly via email or social media. Provide them with helpful information and always include reasonable calls to action encouraging them to move further into the funnel and closer to working with you. This is not the place for high-pressure sales tactics. Just make it as easy as possible for your prospective buyers to take the next step. They will make it when they are ready.
Picking out specific marketing strategies will depend on your needs and the type of buyer you are looking to attract. Stick with the general principles detailed here, though, and you shouldn’t have too many problems attracting more business. Taking your marketing online is positively essential if you want to succeed in today’s real estate market.
