When we talk about lead generation, it happens for all businesses. Even if you are in a non-profit business, you will need to generate new leads for people to donate to your business. Real estate lead generation is the key to grow your business.
As a real estate agent, it’s a very competitive market. If you are still working on just cold calling the phone list provided by your supervisor, chances are very slim.
Instead, you need to be creative and have a marketing strategy to win the game. Today, we will share the 9 best strategies for real estate lead generation.
What is Real Estate Lead Generation
Before we start, let me explain a bit about what is lead generation.
Lead generation is the process of getting potential customers to join your list and you slowly nurture them to be a buyer. In short, we call this MTL (Market to lead) and LTC (Lead to cash).
In the real estate business, lead generation will be separated into two main groups. The first group will be the potential buyers or investors that are looking to buy property. And the second group would be the property or homeowner that is looking to sell their real estate property.
In today’s world, lead generation does not limit to offline methods, but also through digital marketing strategies to get more leads for your business.
1. Word of Mouth
Real estate is a community business. Every real estate agent will be focusing on a specific area and be an expert in that area. So, why not build your reputation as the top real estate agent for the area you served?
When you are serving your customers, get them to leave reviews or testimonials for your service. You can then leverage the testimonials in your social media, blogs or other platforms online.
And for offline, through word of mouth, when they are chatting with their neighbour, they will share their experience of buying or selling the property with you. This will increase your credibility and their tendency to work with you.
In the end, the local community always gets the latest news and knows the area best. Their recommendations are way better than you cold calling or promoting your service.
So, make sure you provide outstanding service to them.
Type of Service To Provide
When you are bringing potential buyers to view the units, in most cases you are not going to view a single unit only. What if you get a luxury MPV to bring them around that area and serve them some high-end mineral water or sparkling water during the viewing session? Or during the handover, if it’s a personal home. You may just give them some pillows or towels for them to use when they move in.
These people are your potential customers for high-ticket items – the property. So, why not spend some money buying quality items for them?
The key here is to do something different to get them to remember you, and recommend you to their friends and family. If you offer those high-quality services, they might share them on their social media. And this will be very good free publicity for you.
2. Build your Real Estate Business Social Presence
Needless to say, social media plays a very important role in real estate digital marketing strategy.
You can do this by sharing your work as a real estate agent showing the units to the customer, and your personal lifestyle, and also sharing tips for making money with real estate.
It can be “how to get a good deal for the first-time buyer”, “house moving guide for new house owner”, or “Real estate guide process and buying guide”.
The key here is to be entertaining and provide value to your potential customers and stay in front of their eyes. So that, when they want to buy or sell property in the future, they will look for you.
Some of the platforms you can try would be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin.
Instagram and Twitter will be good ways to post content for real estate businesses. This is because most of your content is visualized photos or videos. And these platforms still provide good organic traffic.
LinkedIn, on the other hand, is focusing more on high-quality, professional customers.
Facebook organic traffic is bad if you just post it on Facebook. Potentially even your followers or friends may not see the post. Facebook focuses more on ads. You need to pay in order for your content to be shown to a large audience. Nothing bad, Facebook ads are still affordable and effective ways to target the right audience.
Also, you can create a local group and add your potential customers inside. Then, share values about the latest property news update in that area and some tips about the community.
3. Effective Video Marketing Strategy
Do you know there are more people on YouTube and TikTok nowadays? And TikTok is the growing platform out there with over 1 billion monthly active users.
And, video attracts more customers than images. By using video, you can have more interactions with your audiences and share more explanations in the video.
You can have
- Client interviews video explaining their experience buying from you.
- Virtual house tour video where you do a walkaround and explain the property.
- How-to and general information videos for real estate topics to share value
- Local community events and updates video
- Q&A live streams to interact with your viewers.
All these videos that you make are complementary videos to supplement your main content and build a following. However, your main content should be around your listing videos, which show all of them why they should buy the property from you.
Who knows you might close a deal virtually after they watch your videos.
If you are sceptical or don’t know how to start. Don’t worry. You have the best equipment with you. Your smartphone.
I know some of the top influencers start shooting with their phone and a gimbal at the start. Then do some basic editing on their phone only. Investing in professional equipment is not necessary at the beginning. But, I recommend at least getting a gimbal and a microphone for more stable video and sound quality. These are the 2 basics that affect watch time.
4. Create Your Website and Sales Funnel for Real Estate Lead Generation
If you want to explore digital marketing for your real estate business, then you will need a digital asset. It’s like your shop or office where you showcase what your business does and contact you.
To do this, it is very simple now. You can either go out and pay $100 and get a fully built website or just simply use a website builder like WordPress.org or ClickFunnels.
Websites are good to demonstrate your business and build an online presence. However, for a specific action like lead generation or front-end sales, you need a sales funnel to increase the conversion rate.
Instead, a sales funnel is built to get them to take a very specific action (and only that action). Specifically, one action on each page. Usually to submit their email address or make a purchase.
We use ClickFunnels to build our sales funnel. It\’s a drag-and-drop platform with all the useful elements for a landing page/sales funnel pre-built. Simply select the elements you want and you can start customising your page. Not to forget, there are plenty of free templates available for you to start with.
Get a Free ClickFunnels Trial Now!
5. Group Your Leads
When you have more followers or leads, not all of them are in the same stages. We called this the sale funnel stage. And there are four main stages, Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.
For people in different sales funnel stages, you need a different message to interact and convert with them. For example, someone in the awareness stage might not have a huge trust in you and will need more persuasion to list their property or buy from you.
And this is different from people in the desired stage, they are looking to buy or sell their property but had not finally decided yet. And for these people, all you need to do is to give them a kick to take action.
When you fully understand your audience and are able to segment them, you will find that your marketing strategy will get a huge improvement.
People in the desire and action stage will need a more personalized message to get them to take certain actions, while people in the interest stage will need more nurturing. And people in the awareness stage, your message shall be focused on providing values and building trust with them.
What is an Autoresponder
And how we do this is, first we will build a landing page to collect their contact details. Then, we will manage those leads collected with an autoresponder. Software that we use to manage contact lists and send automated emails.
Then, based on their stage, we can segment them in the autoresponder and create an automated email sequence to be sent out to each segment.
We use GetReponse as our email autoresponder as the tool is easy to use when managing the email list and also the automation workflow which is extremely useful to visualize your customer journey.
6. Join To The Community Service for Real Estate Lead Generation
To be at the top means to stay in front of the eyeball of everyone. What you can do is join more community events. For example, if there are some charity events or festive events you can always bring your team to join the event or sponsor the event.
By doing this, you can promote the event on your social media page, and at the same time, the participants of the event will see your company as one of the sponsors. This might be the first touch for them to your company.
Ultimately, this is what is required to build a reputation with the community and get more listings and potential buyers.
7. Consistent Content Creation for Leads Engagement
For your marketing content, you should create a content strategy where you can create a piece of content that can be used across a variety of platforms.
For example, a long video can be posted on YouTube and Facebook and at the same time, it can be cut to shorter videos by sections to be posted in your TikTok, Instagram story, and YouTube reels.
Now, your single piece of content is duplicated across different platforms.
We will share three different types of regular content that you can content besides social media posts.
Email Newsletter
We talked about creating an email list before this, and stress the importance to create a high-quality email list. An email list is very useful for you to create and send a regular newsletter about some updates in the community, new listings, tips and tricks in real estate, or for building relationships.
You can send them a newsletter three times a week to share all the useful information and get engagement with them. With this, you are able to build a good relationship with your potential customers. Don’t worry, there is a script for the regular newsletter. You can read more about the Daily Seinfeld Email Sequence.
Blogging
A blog is a very useful way to build your organic presence online. With a consistently updated blog, you can optimize it to rank at the top of the search result. That’s when someone is searching for a property in {your city} or searching for real estate to sell their property in {your city}.
Boom, your content and name come up in the first result. How nice is that?
8. Build Your Value Ladder
A value ladder is a series of actions or offers that you offer to your customer. With the increment in steps, the value or price of the product sold will increase as well, just like a ladder.
You can start by providing free consultation or valuation to their units. This is your profession, but you are doing it free for them now without even them engaging with you. This is good as your added value to them.
Then, you can have a customized user experience for house viewing and also the key handover process. All these are done so that they will remember you and buy from you in the future. Or even recommend you to their friends and family.
You may also provide regular updates on the real estate market pricing or new nearby developments that they might be interested in. The goal here is to provide value and build your reputation and credibility.
9. Local SEO To Increase Search Visibility for Real Estate Lead Generation
Local SEO plays a key role in organic traffic and lead generation in real estate. This gives you two benefits. The first one is of course the free organic traffic from Google with potential customers that are ready to buy or sell.
And the second one will be building your credibility. When someone searches for a local property agent or sells property at {your city}, your name came out to be the first result.
This will increase your credibility and their trust in you as the market expert.
Some ways to do it include, creating your Google My Business profile, high-quality SEO-optimized blogs contents and your social media.
Again, consistency and up-to-date content are the keys to SEO success. No one likes a dying website.
Final Thoughts – Key For Real Estate Lead Generation
Real estate lead generation is the key to business growth. No matter you are planning for digital marketing way or offline way, these strategies will work for you.
We recommend a hybrid way to combine both online and offline lead generation strategies to improve your lead generation conversion rate.
Nevertheless, it’s something that anyone can start to take action to build and get some results. Then, you can implement something more advanced when you already master the skill.
Now, get yourself a free trial of ClickFunnels and start implementing the strategies.