Lead generation is the lifeblood to growing a real estate brokerage. There are lots of different ways to generate real estate leads. With technology and consumer behavior constantly changing and evolving, it's important to keep a pulse on what's working now. Below are 5 hacks to improve lead generation for real estate brokerages.
Content Marketing
I often hear rumblings from real estate professionals about competing with the likes of Zillow and Trulia. This is no easy feat to say the least! Content marketing is an effective way to even the playing field and help give your brokerage an edge.
You know your market best, let that knowledge carry over into your content marketing strategy. When planning your strategy, keep a few things in mind:
- What keywords would your target audience use?
- What questions are they asking?
- What information do they need to help them make real estate related decisions?
The key to making content marketing successful is having a well planned strategy and committing to it for the long haul.
Marketing Funnel
One common mistake I see many real estate brokerages make is only having one or two ways for a website visitor to convert. Most real estate websites will have contact us forms/# and a registration form to search their IDX. If this describes your website, you're missing a lot of opportunities!
Think about the buyers journey and include calls-to-actions on your website for each stage. For example, a website visitor that may be a year out from buying a home is unlikely to fill out your contact form, or input a valid phone # to search your IDX. If that is all you have for calls-to-actions, then that website visitor will leave without giving you any contact information.
One way to remedy this is to offer top-of-funnel content downloads to trade for basic contact information. For example, offering a buyer checklist or eBook could provide great information to that visitor while giving you the opportunity to collect their name and email address. Building your list of contacts to follow-up with is the next best thing to currency!
Paid Traffic
If you haven't noticed, Google and Facebook are always making changes. Many of the changes they make affect the "free" traffic they provide. Google is constantly changing their algorithm and Facebook isn't showing updates to as many people for free as they used to. One thing that hasn't and won't change, is paid traffic.
Both Google and Facebook are businesses and offer products to help you drive qualified traffic to your website. The pay to play model is always a safe bet. Neither company is going to make an adjustment that would negatively affect their advertisers. This is why it's smart to leverage their technology to drive qualified traffic to your website!
Google AdWords provides you with people actively looking to buy and sell real estate. Facebook's robust targeting options allow you to stay top-of-mind and generate leads. A well planned paid traffic strategy will ensure your website always has qualified traffic and gives you the opportunity to convert those visits to leads, prospects and sales. This should be a staple lead generation channel for real estate brokerages who want to grow.
Retargeting
Not every visitor will convert. That's just how it works. In fact, most of your website visitors will not convert to a lead on the first visit. Leveraging retargeting is a powerful way to get those visitors to return to your website and become a lead.
Use retargeting ads to offer website visitors a reason to return. Promote your eBook, listing alerts, home valuations etc. in your retargeting campaigns and start increasing the conversions you get from your website traffic. You'd be surprised how many extra leads you can generate with the same amount of traffic with a well planned retargeting strategy and campaign.
Marketing Automation
Your time is valuable. There is definitely a time and place to manually follow-up with your leads. However, you don't need to personally email every contact all the time. This is where marketing automation can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Create email marketing drip campaigns to follow-up and nurture prospects to leads on autopilot. It's well worth the time in creating marketing automation campaigns! If you do offer top-of-funnel conversions such as an eBook download, have that trigger an automatic email follow-up campaign. Couple this with lead intelligence and behavior based actions and you'll begin to notice prospects begin to raise their hand for your help. The best leads are those who are educated and ready to move forward, especially when it's on their own accord. No one really likes to be sold so replace your aggressive manual lead follow-up with a smart marketing automation campaign.
As mentioned earlier, there are many ways to generate real estate leads, the 5 ideas mentioned in this article are proven to work. If you're not currently leveraging all 5 of these tactics, start now and begin to reap the benefits!
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