Have you seen your open house numbers dwindle recently? People just aren’t coming to open houses as much these days. They’d rather stay home and check their favorite listing with virtual walk-throughs.
If you’re a real estate agent trying to market in this digital age, then branching out with real estate digital marketing could be the best option for you right now.
Did you know that 68% of home buyers use mobile apps to start their home search? And that trend is only looking to increase as the younger generation starts to enter adulthood and become homeowners.
So what are you supposed to do? You didn’t grow up in the digital age. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
Read on to learn how to take your real estate business into the digital world and grow your social influence. You won’t need to hire your teenager to do this. You can do it, and we’ll walk you through step by step.
Create Virtual Tours
People are no longer satisfied with a few pictures and a 2D floor plan. They want interactive pictures that sweep across the room and 3D videos of the house and neighborhood.
Discerning buyers want to buy into great neighborhoods, not just great houses. So, if there’s a great neighborhood park nearby, or the home is close to a good school, feature these extra perks.
This can be an easy process with the right help. Look around your local community and find a freelance photographer who specializes in drone images and videos. Keep them on retainer and have them go out to each of your listings.
Be sure to get not only great aerial images of the house but get video footage of the walk to the park or school from the house. This will set your listings ahead of your competition exponentially.
Most of the major real estate platforms, including Zillow and Realtor, offer 3D virtual tours. So, the next time you list your property on one of these websites, be sure to utilize this great feature. You’ll open yourself up to many buyers who want to see before they call.
In this global economy, you might be selling your next home to someone moving from a distant location. Whether they’re moving across the country or around the globe many people want to have their next home set up before they move.
By providing virtual tours online you’re opening your buyers market up to the entire world.
Outreach and Marketing Through Organic Social Media
Statistics show that many people make major purchasing decisions while on social media. Whether they start their home search by clicking on a friend’s post or a paid ad, you can reach a vast market by taking your business onto the major social media platforms.
You can’t expect your social media accounts to grow with a small smattering of posts and retweets. You must be active on your accounts every day. Post helpful tips and articles about how to find the perfect house.
And remember, the beauty of social media is that you don’t have to reach your perfect client with every post. Try suggesting that your followers tag someone they know who is looking for a house right now. Your followers might know someone who is your target audience.
So, grow your audience every day with helpful posts and encourage your followers to tag someone they know. This type of free outreach is invaluable and shouldn’t be missed as part of your marketing plan.
Improve Your Paid Social Media Game
From organic outreach to paid social media, your social media profiles should be working overtime in bringing you new clients every day. But your paid outreach doesn’t start with your social media account, it starts with your fully optimized website.
After all, you wouldn’t take your best real estate clients to a house you’ve never seen before in a neighborhood you haven’t vetted, would you? The same applies to your website. Don’t pay Google and Facebook to send great potential clients to a shoddy website that doesn’t help your customers.
First, set up your website to offer an amazing experience. From great photos to helpful articles all the ingredients must be there to provide the best user experience for your customers.
From Google to Facebook, paid advertising is no longer optional for real estate agents. For as little as $5 a day you can specifically target very narrow demographics of your ideal buyer.
With some simple coding on your website, retargeting ads are incredibly effective. If this sounds confusing, don’t worry, this is what we do every day. Reach out to us today so we can show you how paid social media can take your real estate business to the next level in sales.
Ask for Testimonials and Influencer Outreach
As they say in the marketing world, your marketing doesn’t end with the sale. You must continue to build your network long after your client signs on the dotted line.
After your next client purchases their home, take a picture with them while they fill out their paperwork. Tag them in your social media profile. Encourage them to share the post on their social media profiles and to tag you.
You never know who they know who is also in the market to buy or sell their home.
Social media outreach doesn’t end with client testimonials. Utilize the power of social media influencers. Even those with a small following could be sitting on a gold mine of potential clients.
Reach out to other business owners in your local area. This includes interior designers, stagers, contractors, and mortgage brokers. Offer to feature them on your business’s Facebook page with a short snippet about what they do and how they could help your followers.
By tagging them and linking them, their followers will also see your business page and might follow you.
This is a numbers game. Continue doing this and you’ll reach enough people to build your sales funnel with more clients than you can help. Won’t that be a great feeling for your business?
You Must Make the Most of SEO and GMB
Did we lose you with that title? Don’t worry, we’ll walk you through it.
SEO is optimizing your website for search engines. GMB is setting up your business with a Google profile. Both of these things can seem very overwhelming.
Both of them also can have easy to implement checklists you can work through to make the most of them. If you know what you’re doing, you can knock your SEO and GMB out of the park.
If you don’t and you don’t want to follow our steps in the article linked above, then give us a quick phone call. We are happy to complete this for you so you can get back to what you’re good at, which is selling amazing houses.
Reach Your Ideal Clients Through Real Estate Digital Marketing
It’s vital to have an online presence in today’s real estate market. From renters to buyers, more and more people are using the internet to find their next property.
If you want to increase your bottom line in your real estate business then digital marketing must be included in your marketing plan.
There are countless tactics and shiny objects to play around with when it comes to real estate digital marketing. But without a well-laid out digital marketing plan, you might as well be throwing virtual spaghetti at the wall.
From paid social media to organic reach your Facebook and Instagram pages must become more about your ideal audience and less about what you ate for dinner last night.
Likewise, if you want to take your business to the next level, then you need to take your graphics to the next level. As suggested, partnering with a photographer who specializes in drone images will allow you to highlight not just the house but the neighborhood as well.
We’ve gone over a lot of information in this article, and we’ve only covered the tip of the iceberg. So, if you know you want to add digital marketing to your marketing strategy, then reach out to us today.
Let’s plan your free 30-minute strategy session. This is what we do, so you can shine at what you do.
Get back to selling houses and let us create a plan that will highlight your business and help you find your next home buyer for you.
