Real Estate: Digital Marketing strategies are the key to sell more homes
- June 22, 2021
The real estate market is a very challenging one. Buying a property is very complex and encompasses the emotional side: it involves high prices, which means making a large investment.
What is Real Estate Marketing and how does it work?
Real Estate Marketing is the set of defined and implemented strategies, both online and offline, with the ultimate goal of increasing leads, sales, and the number of customers of a company in the niche. When properly executed, these strategies lead to increased brand awareness, greater engagement with the target audience, customer loyalty, and better control over results. In this article, we are going to focus on Digital Marketing, that is, on the most effective online strategies for the real estate market.
Advantages of Digital Marketing in Real Estate
- It saves time and money – communication is done through more practical ways, which makes it possible to achieve more sales with fewer resources – as long as the content is effective
- It increases your company’s visibility and reputation – the greater your online presence is and the more relevant the content you share, the more people create a positive association with your agency together with trust
- Allows your agency to stand out from the competition.
- Accelerates the sales cycle – the sales cycle in this sector tends to be longer, due to the complexity associated with the purchase. Interaction with customers through social networks and the creation of useful content that clarifies users’ doubts and insecurities tend to reduce the sales cycle time.
- Your agency is more likely to be recommended – People who are or have been clients of your agency, as well as those who view the content of your page online, are more likely to recommend or mention it in conversations with friends, family members, or acquaintances who are looking for this type of service.
- It improves your relationship with clients and allows you to retain clients – through real estate marketing, your company becomes a reference and increases your clients’ trust in your agency.
- Allows you to measure results – Measuring results in a digital way is crucial, so you can understand what works and what needs to be improved or adjusted, allowing you to make strategic decisions based on real numbers.
Main challenges of Real Estate Marketing
- Strong competition – try to invest in disclosure, in developing a strong relationship with your customer, and in building a strong image to differentiate yourself from your competitors
- Market with many specificities – it is necessary to analyze the supply, demand, trends, and consumer habits
- High investment – it involves a complex and high involvement purchase, in which the customer feels the need to do a lot of research before making the purchase decision, which makes the sales cycle longer. Therefore, it is crucial to create strong relationships with customers.
How to take advantage of Digital Real Estate Marketing?
When the need or interest in buying a property arises, the first thing anyone does is to search the internet. Can you see the importance of having a strong digital presence, right? There are a few factors that must be considered in order to see positive results:
- Invest in developing strong relationships with your customers – very few people will want to buy a house from a person or entity they don’t trust.
- It’s important to create a website that converts – In addition to being intuitive, responsive, adaptable to any device, and easy to use, your website must be prepared to convert visitors into leads and leads into customers.
- Use real estate platforms – increase your business reach and your website traffic. It can be a good way to attract people who didn’t know your agency.
- Analyze the results. Then review and adapt your strategies.
- Create a referral program – offer benefits to customers who recommend your company. In addition to attracting new customers, it increases your brand’s credibility.
- Create content:
You might also be interested in this practical guide: how to sell on Instagram
How to increase sales through Digital Marketing?
- Invest in high-quality content – the photos and videos you use to show a property must be of high quality. Also, think about providing virtual reality options to your website visitors – this option allows people to make a virtual visit to the property.
- Do not forget about the importance of mobile devices – they are the most used devices, so it is very important that your website is compatible and adjustable to any screen size and type of device.
- Invest in email marketing – (we’ll develop this more deeply in the following section) it’s a very powerful tool. Take into account the stage of the sales funnel in which each contact is, and adapt/customize the content to be sent. Use tools to bundle multiple links to improve your online catalog. They can be very useful, as they allow you to send multiple properties to recipients from a single link, and also allow you to adjust the type of properties you want to share, depending on the location or the characteristics that are crucial for each client.
- Invest in online ads: social networks, Google Ads, or other platforms – if it makes sense for your agency, you can adapt the campaign’s location, ensuring that your ad is only visible to people who are in certain locations. (Learn how to increase the conversion rate of your campaigns with this quick guide to Google ADS)
- Create Landing Pages – these are pages with the objective of converting visitors into leads and great for collecting customer contact information, which you can use later in Email Marketing.
- Implement Chatbots on social media and on your website – they answer simple questions for you, saving time for you and your customers.
So, what are the best tools and how should you take advantage of them?
In addition to Content Marketing, already developed above, you should invest in a strong and consistent presence on social media, in SEO, Email Marketing, and in online campaigns on different social networks and other platforms, such as Google Ads. We give you the reasons why.
Email Marketing
As mentioned above, email marketing is a very powerful tool. What are the advantages? Well, the reach is not limited, so all the customers you send the emails receive them. Start by sending a welcome email to new contacts, describing your company, and conveying confidence to the recipient. Then, invest time in making a mailing list – with the contacts you collect on the Landing Page – and adapt the content to be sent according to the recipients’ interests, location, and needs. (Read more about why creating a customer database can increase your sales) These tasks can be automated if you have access to a link aggregator or tool for link-bundling.
Social Networks
Social Media are great tools to spread information and organic content. They also have a huge potential to function as informative and functional platforms, representing an opportunity to interact with your customers, thus strengthening relationships, trust, and awareness of your brand.
SEO
SEO – Search Engine Optimization – allows you to achieve better positions in search results organically, i.e. without paying. This means that if you invest time in search engine optimization when an interested person searches the internet for terms related to your business, the probability of your website appearing earlier in the results is higher. If you are interested in going deeper on this topic, we advise you to read this quick guide to understand what SEO is.
Ad Campaigns
When you invest in paid ads, both on social media and other platforms, it becomes easier to reach people who actually have an interest in the products you sell. These platforms offer different segmentation options: depending on the geographic location of the audience, interests, positions, behaviors, among others. While ads on social media are seen in the news feed, stories, and elsewhere, on Google Adwords these ads appear at the top of the search results page, before organic results. In the second case, you need to define keywords and a bid (the actual amount you are willing to pay) and Google will show your ads only to people who search for the keywords you’ve set. This type of ad makes sense for the real estate market because it allows the broker to generate traffic to the website. It means that people who visit it are the ones who are already interested in the real estate market.
What KPIs should you analyze?
KPI’s are, as the name implies, Key Performance Indicators, that is, important indicators that allow you to draw conclusions about your content, advertisements, and audiences. These are some KPIs that you should analyze:
- CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) – indicates the amount you need to invest to acquire a customer
- ROI (Return On Investment) – Indicates the return that a given investment has brought you
- Customer acceptance on the website – you must take into account the number of visitors, the time each visitor spends on the website, and the click-through rate.ç
Remember the importance of maintaining a consistent and strong presence on social media and developing useful, interesting, and appealing content for your target audience. In addition, don’t forget to explore other tools – such as paid ads on social networks and Email Marketing – in order to make it easier to face the challenges this market represents, attract more customers, improve your competitive advantage and save resources.
