January 02 2018
With the new year in full swing, many real estate agents are busy thinking about how to leverage marketing more effectively in order to grow and boost profits in the year ahead. If you didn't have much time to think strategically about marketing in 2017, or if the strategy you were executing on didn't yield the kind of results you were hoping for, now is the time to think about what you can do differently this year.
This article will provide you with 11 tips that you can use to create a clear, actionable, and growth-driven real estate marketing strategy for your business in 2018.
When building a real estate marketing strategy for your business, the first thing you need to do is compile information about your target audience. In order to make informed decisions about which campaigns and efforts to invest in, you need to first have a firm understanding of who it is that you're trying to reach.
In order to build an effective strategy, you should know:
This customer information should be organized and kept updated within a spreadsheet or CRM tool that you can easily access on a regular basis.
When building a marketing strategy that serves homebuyers, it's also important to understand one key concept: you're not in the business of selling houses. Instead, you're in the business of selling experiences. As we've mentioned before on this blog, people don't get excited about a new house—they get excited about what a new house means for them and their family. Understanding this concept is a crucial part of being able to develop marketing campaigns that make an impact.
To sell experiences and connect on a personal level with your target audience, you have to know who they are and what they care about. That's why the previous tip in this article is such a crucial step to take before you get too deep into the development of your marketing strategy.
Selling experiences over houses also means working to become a trusted resource in your community and among your target audience. In order to be successful as a real estate agent, you can't just be an expert on houses—you also have to be an expert on your community. For example, if you typically work with young families, you should have a good understanding of all the parks, play areas, and kids' activities that are close by to any house you're selling.
To be successful as an agent, build marketing campaigns that illustrate how you can help people gain experiences and create memories that you know will matter to them.
In the early days of social media, it was tempting and even common for businesses to create a presence on every social media site that existed in order to connect with online audiences. That meant trying to pay attention to and engage with people on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and others still.
As many business owners have learned from experience, it's not a sustainable or realistic way to invest your time. Instead, you're much better off focusing on the one or two platforms that you know your audience spends the most amount of time on. The problem is, before you can make an informed decision about which social communities to invest all of your time, money, and energy into, you have to know where your target audience is spending their time. It shouldn't be a random guess, so the question is, how do you find out which social sites your clients and prospective clients care about most?
You have a few options:
Leveraging insights in this way can help ensure that your time on social media is being well spent, and that the opportunity to connect and engage with the right people does exist.
In 2017, more businesses and brands invested in live video as a way to connect and engage with their target audiences than ever before. It makes sense when you consider the following statistics on how social media users tend to engage with live video vs. other types of content being shared on social media sites:
If you haven't tried going live on Facebook before to connect with and engage with your audience, give it a try in 2018. Not sure what to talk about on your live? Here are a few ideas:
Going live on Facebook can help you build trust and nurture relationships with your target audience, differentiate from other local agents, and help you position yourself as an influencer and value-provider in your community.
In the last few years, the social media space has become increasingly competitive for businesses and brands who are all trying to connect with and serve the same audience. As a result, it's no longer possible to get traction from organic efforts alone. In order to get any sort of ROI from your efforts on social media, you need to be willing to pay to play. What does that mean? It means allocating part of your monthly marketing budget to create, launch, and optimize social advertisements. Social ads on sites like Facebook can help you boost personal brand awareness, target ideal customers and clients, leverage yourself as a resource, and close more deals.
If you've never launched a Facebook ad to promote a listing before, spend some time exploring one of these resources:
If you want to invest more in Facebook advertising, but you just don't have the time, let us help. Our product, Boost, can help you automatically promote listings and open houses on social media by creating a beautiful ad, optimizing the copy, building the audience, and running the campaign for you, giving you full control if you want any changes.
In order to effectively connect with your target audience in both offline and online environments, you need to leverage yourself as a trusted resource. I've mentioned this a few times on this blog before, and within this article already, but I feel it's important enough to highlight here: the real estate industry is incredibly competitive and saturated. In addition, there are now more tools than ever that make it much easier for people to navigate through stages of the homebuying process. As an agent, it's your job to help people understand why they should work with you and not someone else. You have to focus on providing value and help to people—help that they can't easily get from anyone else.
To leverage yourself as a trusted resource for your audience, follow these steps:
Leveraging yourself as a resource that people can rely on will help you boost your reputation, establish more relationships with people, capture more leads, and sell more homes.
Digital should be an important part of your marketing strategy, but that doesn't mean you should ignore traditional marketing tactics that have worked well in the past. The trick is to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy that blends both traditional and digital tactics and opportunities.
For some agents, that might mean:
The key is to serve your audiences from everywhere. Some people that you work with are going to spend a lot of time online and want to interact with you there, while others will want to interact with you in more traditional settings. Cover both bases to ensure that you don't miss out on any opportunities to reach and engage with people who might want to work with you.
To build trust with people in the community that you'd like to work with, you should also set aside part of your marketing budget for supporting local businesses, causes, and teams. When it comes to buying houses, people want to work with agents who actually care about the community and neighborhood they sell homes in.
Show people you care by picking a few high school sports teams and nonprofit organizations that you can support throughout the year. Don't go out of your way to promote the fact that you're supporting these organizations—you don't want people to feel like you're only doing it to drum up business and leads. Instead, be genuine about your participation, and interact with people at events when it makes the most sense to do so.
Another important piece of your real estate marketing strategy should be email. As mentioned, it's becoming increasingly difficult to reach target audiences on social media, at least from an organic perspective. Email provides you with a unique opportunity to directly communicate with leads and nurture them down your funnel.
In 2018, work to build your email list. You can do it by creating opt-in forms on your website or blog, or asking people for permission to add them to your email list when you meet with them in person. Don't just send people on this list marketing messages or updates about listings. Take the opportunity to share value with them (blog posts, ebooks, links to videos, tips) and continue to nurture relationships by leveraging yourself as a trusted resource.
In real estate, word-of-mouth is everything. Your business can thrive or die based on the reputation you establish for yourself, and what people say about you to their friends in both online and offline settings.
Instead of wondering what people will say, or wondering if people are talking to their friends about you, be more proactive about leveraging your happy clients and customers to drive more referrals to your business.
How do you do it? Here are a few ideas:
Use these ideas to transform your happy clients and customers into loyal and active advocates for your business.
To build a scalable real estate marketing strategy in 2018, you need to automate whenever possible. Think about the marketing tasks that took up most of your time in 2017, and look for tools that can help you streamline efforts. Here are a few ideas:
Your goal should be to free up your time so that you can spend more time executing on and optimizing your marketing strategy month-to-month.
What marketing strategies are you planning on implementing or testing in 2018? Tell us about it on our Facebook page.
To view the original article, visit the HomeSpotter blog.