The entry barrier for a realtor is relatively low compared to other businesses. As a realtor, you are your own boss and your earnings solely depend on how much you work to help your clients to sell or buy their property.
So, you get started by getting a realtor license and then getting the property listing and promoting it to your potential clients. However, the challenge for a realtor is that there are so many realtors. And it is so competitive that you will need to have a clear strategy to stand out.
One of the ways is to market yourself as the trusted realtor in your local community. And you are able to help them to buy or sell their property.
Today, we are going to share how you can market yourself as a realtor.
Creating A Real Estate Marketing Plan
To do everything successfully, you need to have a plan that you can follow. The plan doesn’t need to be perfect in the first place. You can fine-tune the plan along the way to perfect it.
To start, you need to identify what is the gap that you want to fill and who you want to serve.
In order to stand out in the competition, you need to be niche and be the absolute expert in your profession. If you are selling a real estate property like anyone else, why do they need to buy from you? You need to create some kind of backstory and unique selling point for them to buy from you.
Think about this, in the market that you are serving, is there any gap present or something that no one else is doing? But it will absolutely improve your business if you do it. Only by understanding the market, you can leverage your strong points to match the gap.
Next, in any plan, you need to have clear goals for the short and long term. What do you want to achieve and by when? Also, how should you achieve it?
Then, who you do want to serve? Your marketing strategy will be designed based on the customers you want to serve. You need to know whether you want to serve people that want to sell and buy property for their own stay, rental property, long-term investment property or short-term flipping property.
Identify Your Target Customer
It is important to identify your target customer in order to effectively market your services and attract potential clients. Some factors to consider when identifying a target customer may include:
- Location: Are you targeting customers in a specific city, neighbourhood, or region?
- Demographics: What are the age, income level, and family size of your target customer?
- Homeownership goals: Are you targeting first-time home buyers, homeowners looking to upgrade or downsize, or investors?
- Property type: Are you specializing in certain types of properties, such as single-family homes, condos, or commercial properties?
By identifying your target customer, you can tailor your marketing efforts and messaging to appeal to the specific needs and preferences of this group. This can help you attract the right clients and build a successful real estate business.
Create A Personal Branding
You will most probably be labelled as another realtor that is marketing for business. However, to stand out from the crowd, you need to sell yourself like a product and create a personal brand around yourself.
Personal branding is an important aspect of being a successful realtor. It helps establish your identity, reputation, and credibility in the market. Here are some tips for creating a strong personal brand as a realtor:
- Define your brand: Identify your unique selling points, values, and personality. What sets you apart from other realtors in your area?
- Create a consistent image: Use the same logo, colours, and font in all of your marketing materials, such as your website, business cards, and social media accounts.
- Build a strong online presence: Create a professional website and maintain an active presence on social media platforms, such as LinkedIn and Instagram.
- Develop a niche: Specializing in a specific area or type of property can help you stand out and attract the right clients.
- Foster relationships: Building relationships with clients, other realtors, and industry professionals can help establish your credibility and reputation.
By creating a strong personal brand, you can differentiate yourself from other realtors and position yourself as a trusted and knowledgeable resource for your clients.
Pick Your Marketing Tool
There are many marketing tools that can be effective for realtors. Some options to consider include:
- Professional website: A website is a crucial marketing tool for any realtor. It should showcase your listings, highlight your expertise, and provide information about your services.
- Social media: Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, can be powerful tools for realtors to connect with potential clients and promote their services.
- Email marketing: Email newsletters or automated email campaigns can be an effective way to stay in touch with clients and promote your listings.
- Networking: Building relationships with other realtors, industry professionals, and potential clients can be a valuable marketing tool. Consider attending local events, joining a networking group, or hosting an open house to meet new people.
- Paid advertising: Paid advertising, such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, can help increase the visibility of your brand and drive traffic to your website.
It is important to find the marketing tools that work best for your business and target audience. A combination of online and offline marketing efforts can be the most effective.
Measure Performance
When you are working without a clear KPI or target, you don’t know where is your direction. And most importantly, whether it goes in the right direction.
There are several key metrics that realtors can use to measure the performance of their marketing efforts:
- Website traffic: This can be measured using tools such as Google Analytics. It is important to track the number of visitors to your website and how they are finding your site (e.g. through a search engine, social media, or referral).
- Lead generation: Tracking the number of leads generated from your marketing efforts can help you understand which tactics are most effective at attracting potential clients.
- Conversion rate: The conversion rate is the percentage of leads that turn into paying clients. Measuring this metric can help you understand the effectiveness of your sales process and identify areas for improvement.
- Return on investment (ROI): Calculating the ROI of your marketing efforts can help you understand the financial impact of your campaigns. This can be done by dividing the revenue generated by the cost of the marketing effort.
By regularly tracking and analyzing these metrics, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your marketing efforts and drive business growth.
Top Marketing Strategies for A Realtor
Digital marketing strategies are easy to implement and can give fast results.
1. Build A Website and Landing Page
A website is a foundation for your brand and business. A website might not be the most efficient way to collect leads and convert customers. However, it is very important to make your business look more credible and trustworthy.
It works as an online brochure for people to view all your profiles and experiences before buying from you. You can also include your property listings on your website so that interested people can view and enquire directly.
Together with your website, you should also build dedicated landing pages or squeeze funnels to convert specific customers. A squeeze page funnel will consist of two pages.
The first page will be the squeeze page and the second page will be the thank you page. And then after the thank you page, you can direct them to your website to learn more about you.
For a squeeze page, it doesn’t need to be complicated. It will only consist of a headline, a short video to explain your offer, a free lead magnet and an opt-in page for them to submit their contact details.
2. SEO and Blog for Organic Traffic
People are searching for almost everything they want to know online. And imagine your website is on the top when people are searching for things like “top realtors near me” or “Best realtors in LA”.
Organically your name will be identified as a trusted realtor. And these are the hot buyers. They are interested in buying a property, and that’s why they search for the term.
By ranking top on these keywords, and appearing in front of them, you will get lots of free traffic and hot leads. Not only that, but you can also provide value to your potential customers while ranking on SEO by having high-quality blog posts.
People trust search engines, and being able to rank top naturally gives them a feeling that you are credible and trustworthy since Google is ranking your website top as well.
3. Be Active On Social Media
Social media is the fastest way to let your audience know you are there. People are communicating on social media. By creating conversations, you can bring your realtor business in front of many potential buyers.
You can start with an organic method by reaching out to people in related Facebook groups where they might be interested in buying a property or sharing a video on the property selection guide on YouTube or TikTok. Then, direct them to your landing page and collect them as your lead.
To do this, you should first find out the social media that your target customers hang out with most.
You may select a few popular ones and see which works best. Then, focus on that social media and build your followers on it.
4. Content marketing
All the digital assets that we built like the website blog or social media are good mediums for content marketing. Content marketing is used to create value for your potential buyers and build relationships with them. Start engagement and communication with them. You may also provide free help to resolve their problems.
But very important is your contents need to be genuine and high quality so they will share it with their friends and family. By always trying to sell something to them, you won’t be successful. They will be more rejected by you. Instead, you should create a topic with a sense of fun to get viral on social media.
Social media are meant to be entertaining, so don’t make it an educational platform with plain and boring content.
You can run a home tour for your latest property listings, explain about the property and share about the good and bad of a property and how to choose a good one.
It can be also a daily shooting when you are bringing your clients for house viewings. Or a live Q&A session to interact with your audiences. Or a session where you share a topic like how to buy their first property or things to consider when buying a property.
Finally, you can have your past clients record short testimonials for their experience buying the property from you and how good is your service.
You are building your branding here. The sales come later. If you are too salesy, chances are people will have a strong rejection of your content.
5. Email Marketing
After you had collected their contact details on the landing page, it’s time to build relationships with them. This is the list of potential customers that you own.
If Google stops sending you business or Facebook decided to ban your accounts, how can you still be contacting your potential customers?
An email list is what we call the traffic that you own. A list that you can send your promotional materials anytime you want. And it will stay in their email inbox. They will have the chance to read it when they want. It’s fewer interruptions to their life compared to cold-calling or instant messaging.
Your email list is built using the squeeze page funnel by offering them a free lead magnet in exchange for their emails.
6. Paid advertising
Paid advertising is great if you want fast results. You are buying your way in. As long as you create the ads and start to pay for them, platforms like Google or Facebook will show your ads to different audiences.
One of the beauties of paid advertising is that you can have a laser target for the right audience. Based on your customers’ demographics and interests, you can target the ideal audiences. For example, if you are selling a home for first-time buyers, you can target new-weds or those who just have a first child.
By showing the right message to the right audiences, you can get results within hours.
7. High-quality images, videos
People buy with emotions and justify with logic.
Using words only is not enough. You need to add images and videos to show them how it looks and feels.
A real estate business is a visual business. A compelling image and video will be able to catch their attention to know more about it. When your image and video catch their heart, they will stay in their mind and some even in their dream.
This is why the key here is to have a high-quality image and video that will leave good first impressions on your potential customers.
If possible, create 3D visualization or even AR virtual house viewing so they can view multiple units in one place instead of travelling around for different units.
Final Thoughts – How To Market Yourself as a Realtor with Digital Marketing
With the right marketing strategies and tools, you can build your real estate business online too. With the right mindset and genuinely helping and serving your potential customers you will be able to win the competition game.
Get started today and build your online presence.
