If you want to focus on generating quality leads, then you'll likely need to build a real estate marketing funnel. Real estate marketing is competitive and in order to really prosper, you should find better ways to operate than your competition.
Attract
Every real estate marketing funnel needs to be filled with targeted traffic. There are lots of ways to do this such as:
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Facebook Ads
- Google AdWords
Each one of the channels above enables you to control the targeting, and the traffic it brings in. It's important to complete your persona research and creation prior to building out your funnel as you'll need to know what makes your target market tick. What keywords do they use when searching for help, what are their goals, challenges and pain points? You'll need this information to use in your marketing funnel.
Top of funnel offer
Once you generate targeted traffic, you'll need several conversion opportunities on your website. Surely you already have a Contact page and maybe even another lead form or two and potentially an MLS account registration.
Another conversion path is to create a top-of-funnel offer. This could be an eBook, report, video etc. Create your top-of-funnel (TOFU) offers around the information found during your persona research. For example, if you're targeting second home buyers, is there specific information they would need to know about your market or the process itself of buying a second property? You could create an eBook providing this valuable information to your website visitors in exchange for their name and email. These TOFU offers enable you to better convert website visitors who aren't necessarily ready to buy now, but very well could in the near future. Plus, if their first website visit is their first brand impression, then they really don't have much reason to chose you yet anyway!
Lead nurturing
Now that you're building a nice list of targeted prospects, you'll need to have mechanisms in place to nurture them from prospect to lead. One of the ways to do this is through marketing automation.
Lead nurturing through marketing automation gives you another opportunity to continue to deliver value, stay top of mind and nurture them through the buyers journey. In your lead nurturing sequences, you'll want to take a funnel approach to this process as well. Meaning, begin with valuable content such as additional blog posts or TOFU offers. Be strategic about the content you send them. Remember to keep their goals, challenges and pain points in mind and use it to drive the types of content you send.
Once you've delivered additional value in your lead nurturing sequence, you can begin to move closer to converting them to the next step, a marketing qualified lead. You can do this by having another content offer that provides deeper information in exchange for their phone number. It's also an opportunity to begin showcasing how you can help and why you're different.
Most of your competitors have one type of lead. All forms on their website ask for phone number and the barrage of calls begins as soon as the form is filled out. Instead, if you build strategic real estate marketing funnels, you can let your automations do half the selling for you, so the leads you do call will be genuinely interested. Remember, work smarter and not harder!
Retargeting
To really maximize your marketing funnel, leverage retargeting in addition to your lead nurturing marketing automation. For example, if a prospect enters your funnel by downloading a TOFU eBook, you could retarget them with the next conversion step in your funnel. Maybe you have a really great video or a comprehensive report, a condensed sales presentation, something that a prospect would find helpful and be willing to trade their phone number for.
Your retargeting ads would promote this offer only to those who have entered your funnel via the TOFU offer. You can use Facebook Ad retargeting as well as Google AdWords retargeting. Often times, this type of advertising is less expensive as you're bringing your own list and the targeting pool is much smaller. Your competitors may be retargeting, but I bet it's only to previous website visitors and not those who entered their marketing funnel.
Prospect to lead conversion
As I mentioned earlier, you'll need another conversion offer to convert prospects to leads. Remember the value exchange. People that take the next step in your marketing funnel will do it for a few reasons. Either they're interested in talking to you to learn more about what you offer, or the additional information you're offering seems valuable enough to give their phone number for. Either way, this should do a great job in pre-qualifying your leads as most people that aren't interested in what you're offering aren't going to give you their phone number. Sure, some will give bogus numbers, but you'd be surprised at how many don't!
Instead of manually calling hundreds of leads to find the one or two people who actually want to talk, create real estate marketing funnels to do this heavy lifting for you! Once you build this marketing engine, you'll always have a steady stream of marketing qualified leads to call. Smart real estate professionals are acknowledging that consumer behavior has changed and they're choosing quality leads over quantity.
Learn more about ways to help your website convert more visitors to leads by downloading our free eBook below.
