Real estate is a competitive industry and is slowly gaining traction after years of outbreak. Although real estate agents remain busy, competition amongst the industry is tightening, and companies look for new ways to survive.
So, having the same industry as your competitors, how can you make your company stand out? After all, creating awareness to grab the attention of customers is crucial. This can be achieved by using digital marketing for real estate
Along with gaining new users, digital marketing for real estate can assist in expanding the brand’s exposure and enabling it to attract more customers.
As per the online survey, 92% of buyers research a product before making a purchase decision. This is where companies with a strong digital presence stand out from their competitors.
So, throughout this blog, we’ve outlined real estate marketing, its importance, and some hacks for digital marketing that will work for your company in 2022!
Let’s take a quick look!
What is Real Estate Digital Marketing?
The Importance of Digital Marketing for Real Estate Business
Realtors and brokers often overlook digital marketing for real estate. It not only promotes brand awareness but also differentiates brands from their competitors. Here are a few reasons why digital marketing for real estate is crucial.
- People use the Internet to find information: The Internet has become a must-have in today’s world to find almost any information. The reality is that no one wants to waste time asking a person for information when a smartphone or computer can do the job.
It is for this reason you should have your real estate business online to improve brand visibility. Since leads hang out here, you should not miss out on the opportunity to be found by people.
- Reviews online are essential: An online review is one of the most accessible means of gaining credibility for businesses. A Google business page allows customers to review your business. And a first positive review on your page can increase trust for someone trying out your service for the first time.
As a real estate agent, you have to entice clients to part with their money to make significant property investment decisions. This trust factor is essential.
- Tracking performance easily: A physical banner print might look good on the surface, but what about its conversion rate? No metrics exist to measure your performance, and you cannot track your success rate or how many people view your videos each day. You can track your results and how well (or poorly) your ads perform with PPC and other digital marketing tactics. This way, you can see where your traffic comes from, which marketing strategy will work for your campaign, and what has worked in the past.
- Reaching the target audience is more accessible: A banner or poster around town isn’t necessarily seen or noticed by everyone who lives there. When you are trying to reach people living outside your area, you must turn to digital marketing.
Through digital marketing, you can reach a large audience outside your local area. For example, you can use digital marketing ads to get a market interested in landed properties rather than just the general public. In short, digital marketing ads will target the right audience. After reviewing the importance of digital marketing for real estate, let’s uncover some digital marketing hacks to help you along your real estate journey.
7 Hacks of Digital Marketing to grow Real Estate Businesses
- Take the leverage of Instagram and Facebook: If you regularly use social media, you likely know that there are 1.47 billion people who use platforms like Facebook and Instagram. You can take this as an opportunity and use social media to scale up your real estate business. The only thing you need to do is set up your business page and look at your page insights regularly (like Facebook insights) to learn more about your real estate fans. By doing so, you can tailor your messages to suit your fans’ needs. If you are selling homes in a family-oriented neighborhood, you can target your ads to house-hunting young people based on their location or interests. As a brand, you can also increase visibility by using other platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and others. A similar trend is expected for 2022.
- Virtual Tour: Virtual tour hosting strategies have been implemented in the real estate industry by most experts. This Digital marketing for real estate strategy doesn’t just boost revenue for marketers; it also simplifies the home-buying process for potential buyers. It can be challenging to buy a home, which is why you as a marketer need to make it easier for your customers.
Here are some tips for making your virtual tour a success:
- Make use of real footage instead of digital illusions
- Ensure your video is responsive on mobile and desktop.
- Make the 3D tour user-friendly.
- Strategize the use of social media
In the end, you want your listings and content to be relevant to the searches your customers conduct.
- Develop user-friendly website: How often do you close a website because it didn’t load fast enough? Realtor websites can be a web developer’s nightmare because they have so many files and links. Fortunately, real estate professionals can build mobile-friendly responsive websites with the help of a professional web designer and knowledge about what clients want. Most web browsing is done on a mobile device now, so your clients will not be able to browse your site comfortably if your site is not designed to be mobile-friendly.
To give your clients the best experience, make sure you have the following on your mobile-friendly website:
- The latest new listings
- Providing them with home-buying guidance
- Legal, moving, and home inspection links
- PPC/ Paid Ads: When it comes to generating leads, Pay Per Click advertising is an excellent choice for realtors who want to place ads that can generate revenue for them when someone clicks on them. Professionals looking for genuine clients should turn to PPC since they only pay for clicks. Often, PPC advertisements target individuals who have searched for similar keywords on Google or other search engines.
- Email Marketing: Email marketing is another digital marketing for real estate strategy that has become increasingly helpful for agents who want to keep their clients informed. While this is the best time to engage your digital audience with effective email marketing, agents should benefit from it. Email marketing campaigns are expected to be highly effective in 2022 for most real estate professionals.
- Local SEO: The phrase “SEO is dead” is incorrect. Search engine optimization is an essential factor in increasing your website’s indexation on Google. As the SEO landscape constantly changes, Google emphasizes the difference between search intent and regular search terms.
As a result, a strong SEO strategy can help your website rank higher in search engine results. The importance of SEO is increasing, and keywords play a significant role since they’re what users search for online.
Hence, you should always carry out keyword research in your Digital marketing for real estate and use them in your blog and articles. Besides this, you can also follow some other SEO elements to stand out.
- Create Referral System: Researchers found that people buy more often when referred by a friend because they believe the referral is from a trustworthy source. They can trust their coworkers, friends, etc., to make a good recommendation.
Similarly, you can use Referral programs for marketing purposes, as most companies rely on them to build their brands.
By implementing a referral program, a business rewards existing customers for referring their products/services to other people. This last technique plays a fundamental role in growing the customer base.
Having learned the hacks of digital marketing for real estate, you might wonder how to choose an agency to work with. Don’t worry! We’ve got you covered in our next paragraph.
How to Choose an Agency?
Here’s what you need to consider when partnering with a digital marketing firm:
- Services and Skills: It’s important to discuss the services your company needs before searching for a real estate marketing service provider. No matter how big your team is, you’ll need to create a list of services you need. Once you’ve done so, you can look for marketing agencies that specialize in those areas.
- Work Well with You: Asking if the marketing agency shares your values is not a hurry, but it is worth your time to find out if the agency shares your culture. You need to learn how the marketing team deals with conflicts, how they work, and what else they have.
- Flexible: It is no secret that technology is constantly advancing in the real estate industry. Therefore, the marketing agency must also be flexible to keep up. Identify how they have handled previous projects and changes in other sectors to help you make that decision.
- Experience: If you want to reach local consumers, your digital marketing agency must know about your local area. Ask about their creative output and their experience.
Ask them how they develop strategies and plan Digital marketing for real estate that appeal to specific markets if they have no knowledge of your industry. You can gain insight from this so that you can make informed decisions.