Real estate leads generation boils down to two approaches: inbound and outboard marketing. A real estate lead is a prospect that has already shown an interest in renting or buy a listed property. By the time they leave their contact details, be it an email address or a telephone contact (or both), it’s evident they are considering purchasing or renting your property.
How do you generate real estate leads? The following are eight must-know strategies for how to generate real estate leads that translate into commissions and sales:
1. Create Landing Pages
If you’re a realtor or an agent, having a website is one of those non-negotiables. According to statistics, more than 80% of real estate agents earning over $150,000 have websites. As visitors reach your site, they should find a landing page that’s designed to gather specific information. They should be able to sign for a newsletter, make an appointment, download a buyer’s guide, or determine the value of the listed property.
You can do much more with a landing page. The idea is to capture the details of different users for further follow-up.
2. Local SEO
Having a landing page or a full-fledged website is not a cure-all. The website or landing page has to be found to convert a visitor into a lead. What this means is that it has to be search engine optimized. To show up in a visitor’s search results, the website needs to be configured with the right keywords, meta tags, descriptions, among other SEO best practices.
If your site is optimized correctly for search engines, it stands a better chance of appearing among the search results.
3. Community Pages
When a buyer is seeking to buy a home, they are buying into the community as well. In order to generate real estate leads, create community pages, so your website is viewed as the go-to place for the community. Among topics you can cover in your community page include schools, demographics, climate, local businesses, hospitals, and more.
4. Social Media Marketing
Today, a majority of people have an online presence. They spend most of their time socializing on social media. Facebook, for instance, has 3.2 billion users. What this means is that most of your potential buyers spend copious amounts of time on social media. You can connect with them on Facebook or Instagram, the two leading social networking platforms.
In any case, paying for advertising on Facebook and Instagram is highly cost-effective. Besides the ability to reach more potential clients, the networks gather enormous valuable, actionable data that helps you in targeting specific demographics with selected offers.
5. Retargeting/Remarketing
To present ads to previous visitors to your website, you need to retarget or remarket to them. These are people who had earlier shown an interest in your services or products listed on your website. As such, they are more likely to convert to quality leads and perhaps even become customers. For your retargeting strategy to work, make it highly targeted by customizing each stage of the buyer cycle and provide them with offers that are relevant and specifically targeted to them.
6. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Most people start their property search online, often via a search engine such as Google. However, getting a spot at the top search results is not easy. This is because, first, the competition for top search positions is very high, and, second, paid ads appear first on search engine results.
To stand a chance on the major search engines, you should consider paid search programs. These include Google ads and Microsoft Advertising. With paid search, your website appears on top of most searches, and then you only pay when someone clicks on your link.
7. Content Marketing
To attract genuine traffic to your website, you need to offer original, valuable content that visitors find helpful. Once you’ve driven visitors to your website, the next step is to make them stay long enough to look around. Content marketing drives potential visitors to your website, converts them into leads, and all this because they feel you have something valuable to offer them.
Besides being free, content marketing makes visitors feel like you care about them. This builds trust and strengthens your brand. Content marketing involves publishing infographics, videos, articles and blogs that answer specific questions that users would be glad to have answered. Other forms of content marketing include guides, eBooks, and interactive content.
8. Live Chat and Chatbots
With the rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots and live chats are becoming more intuitive. Today, you can hardly tell if you are chatting with a real customer services representative or a bot. That live chat you had recently was most likely with a chatbot. Website visitors are more likely to chat than fill out a form or call. Whether you are chatting with a real person or an automated chatbot, live chat engages visitors in a way that they feel valued and respected.
