3 Real Estate Lead Generation and Marketing Strategies to Win Listings

2016 is predicted to bring a seller's market. As an agent or broker, you know that gaining listings is virtually a guaranteed payday, and that you already might have a number of potential buyers hanging around waiting or searching for the right property. What you may not know is just exactly what you can do about it that will have a significant impact on the short run to get you more paydays.

Knowing current market trends, what is your marketing doing to take advantage of these trends and put you in the right place? There are three strategies that you can employ to start winning listings now.

Strategy #1: Not Just 'Featured Listings' ...Actually Feature Your Listings

Getting a new listing lead is great – as mentioned before, it's a virtual payday in this market. What you do with that listing or how you take advantage of that listing as an MARKETING ASSET is a completely different matter. Most agents and brokers don't consider listings marketing assets except in marketing that listing.

The truth is that you have something that an experienced marketing team can utilize for real estate content marketing on social media, to power blog posts, to rank on Google search results and a variety of other things. Gaining listings, when used correctly, turns into a positive spiral of gaining more listings.

Every potential home seller wants to work with the agent/broker selling the most homes. You need to take each listing, turn it over to your marketing team with enough information (remember, you now can take video of an actual listing, take more pictures, and describe that sucker), and then let them do their thing.

Strategy #2: Stake Your Claim as Your Neighborhood Expert and Local Specialist

A powerful trend, and one that we have been driving for years, is to become a local specialist and neighborhood expert. The idea is that you want to show from a branding standpoint that you know how to cover a broad base, but you want to appeal to specific local markets that are interesting to you—and to whom you can be interesting.

So, how do you stake your claim? Well, there are a few specific things you can to do make sure that you are the local expert. Again, it doesn't come without work or know-how, but if you know what you want, there are ways to get it done.

• Neighborhood and Local Search Rankings – It is an overused idea and phrase, but regardless, it is effective and essential if you are serious. The key is making sure you don't fall for one of those "We're partnered with Google" callers, but that you work with a group that really knows how to rank you in top placement and focuses on your local market.
• Real Estate Content Marketing – In many ways, this plays with all of the other strategies together. As we have talked about in other posts, content is really the currency of online results. It isn't the only factor, but generating quality and optimized content consistently is core to other strategies working well. In cold reality, most times you are the best mind to do this, but it may not be worth your time to sit and write forever – you ought to have a strategy that gets you the visibility without you doing all the work.
• Local Social Strategy – How are you going to appear in social media? Do you know how to leverage Facebook and Twitter to be the local specialist? This is an essential part of playing this role and being top of mind for the locals.

Strategy #3: Exploit the Real Estate Niche to Pull the Real Estate Leads

This has been a key strategy for every top producer for years and years. So in that way, it's not new. However, the types of niches that are hot tend to adjust and change with the market. The key for you is to identify the right niches that you are qualified and interested in focusing on (short sales, luxury, rentals, etc.) and then direct your marketing team to focus on those areas.

Your content marketing efforts, SEO, and other factors should be including this as an essential piece, and it should bleed through on all fronts, including your initial brand and your visibility. Then it will also come through to your leads.

In Summary

One major note here is that you can tell that we are firm proponents of you not being the jack-of-all-online-marketing-trades. It is really just a stupid approach to your business these days. There is too much speed in technology advancements as well as a high level of competition. To compete, you need to know your marketing team has your back, and how you are going to see the return. Get that right, and you will be able to implement solid strategies to own your market.

To view the original article, visit the Inside Real Estate blog.