Real Estate Marketing Strategies – New Year Resolution
December 28, 2017 Written by DigitalRealtyX
The Real Estate market surged in 2017 and will continue to grow in 2018. A demand for residential and commercial real estate will increase. The DigitalRealtyX team has prepared some concepts to apply for Real Estate marketing strategies enabling you to stay ahead in the market as we ride the digital wave. We have provided our Real Estate marketing strategies you can apply as your New Year resolution for 2018 and onward.
Quality Website Experience
Your website is essentially the first place your prospective new and existing customers view your site. When arrived to your site, that is the goal to capture your viewers, navigate them through a great customer experience site from the banner page, featured listings, communities and any information. A study by Google has shown that more than 80% of buyers, investors and sellers go online to search for real estate…typically that is done on the major Real Estate sites…though they should do the same on your site. Your Real Estate website is critical to gaining brand visibility, acquiring prospects, collecting leads, posting relevant blogs and helping drive sales for you and your brokerage. Fortunately, there are a few strategies that are highly likely to have a strong impact for your resolution and onward. Here are a few favorite concepts we provide as good strategies.
- A Responsive Website is Critical – Make sure your website is optimized for mobile devices (cell phone of all sizes and tablets). Your ability to reach and attract more potential buyers, sellers, investors, increasingly hinge on the user experience of the website displayed on their device. Remember that more than 40% of visitors are now coming from mobile devices, and that number is increasing annually. In order to communicate your brand and services effectively, it is crucial that your site is optimized for all platforms (iOS, Android, Windows) and devices (desktop, smartphone, tablet).
- Relevant News – If a blog is too resource-intensive, consider creating a news section on your site to feature important company updates, press releases, or ingest news feeds that are relevant in the Real Estate market. This will enable search engines (and your clients) a positive signal that your company is active and resourceful, a very valuable and important trust factor and will lead to certain SEO measures that drives traffic back to your site which you ultimately want. Also, given a news section is a feed of content, it requires less focus on that page, easy to maintain and provides extra value to your site experience for your viewers.
- An Active Blog is being Relevant – An active blog is a great marketing tool that can have tremendous impact on search engines, social media visibility, and a great place to begin a dialogue or be informative with your potential client base. Educating your customers and prospects with tips and advice, highlight on trends in the market, key updates, and relevant industry & local market news. As an expert in your profession, it is your chance to demonstrate your knowledge and position yourself as an authority in addition to inviting readers to comment or even provide suggestions which they’d like to share.
- Include a Subscribe to Newsletter Sign-up – An easy and free way to help you build up a database of potential customers and investors, great way to grow your contact list. If you don’t have a concrete email marketing strategy in place, it doesn’t hurt to ask for emails and start building your list in the meantime. There are great marketing tools online to look into to market to your database.
- Creating Local Market Reports – A valuable Real Estate marketing concept is to create a local market report for the respective market you focus on very well. Being relevant in your local market sets you apart from everyone else. This is not just a great nurturing tool but also helps to educate your customers and potential prospects that are viewing your site. Include data points like what the average sales are going for in the market for the month, what is rent going for, averages on year over year growth, economic growth, essentially any significant Real Estate data. It’s good to highlight this type of information on a monthly/quarterly basis.
- Videos, Videos, Videos – Videos are a powerful engine which is becoming extremely accepted as a marketing strategy for Real Estate. Not only does a video market to your audience as a differentiator as a way of interaction with your viewers (and one that generally encourages them to spend a while on your website), but it also allows you to showcase your company, knowledge, creativity, and showcase your properties,… but most of all, make yourself stand out from competitors.
- Gain SEO Awareness – Make sure your Real Estate is fully optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). An effective SEO strategy can help generate massive “free” traffic from Google, Yahoo and many other search engines which will ultimately help you generate more visibility based on targeted keyword terms related to your business. More and more buyers, sellers, investors are using online searches to research properties and relevant Real Estate news & information. The goal is for them to land on your info and straight to your site.
- Track Your Results – When setting up your website properly, make sure you have Google Analytics set up and the tracking code is on your website. This will allow you to track your visitors based on page views, new visitors, returning, bounce rate, any type of marketing performance or conversions you might have set up. This is a good analytics and reporting tool to have and review your data at least once a month. Best news about it, is setting it up is free. This will help you make better, informed strategic marketing decisions in addition to allow you to further understand if your website is having any significant impact. If you are seeing poor results, this is a good indicator to revisit your marketing strategies to drive traffic to your site.
Internet Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve updated and optimized the website, there are several things you can do to drive viewers to visit your site. Increasing exposure through online marketing efforts, you can boost performance, raise the profile of the site and its brand, and stand out from your competitors in new and exciting ways.
- Launch a Newsletter – Email campaigns remain one of the most effective forms of communication for brands moving into the new year and with a higher response rate than almost any other online format. Not only does a regular company newsletter allow you to stay in touch with your most valuable prospects and customers, it provides a means to showcase the activity of your company, offer valuable free information, and build a relationship that transcends the anonymity of your website.
- Video Marketing Campaign – Back to Videos from our previous suggestion. Video is one of the highest engagement rate tactics in digital marketing. You can view it, stop it, come back to it, watch it multiple times, share it, you get the point. People like video and it is more accessible than ever before. Producing high-quality marketing aerial videos of your properties / listings, Real Estate Agent Branding videos, customer interviews, or creating high-quality videos that showcase your company. It is a mechanism that will allow you to drive traffic from YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo. It is worth the investment as its always there as a great video marketing tool.
- Get Active on LinkedIn – LinkedIn has become a critical platform for business professionals to network. The user base is north of 500M and consists of just about every professional in the residential and commercial Real Estate, finance, lending investing, accountants, or legal fields you could meet with. It also offers a powerful marketing and engagement system with blogging, group discussion boards, and search functions. A great way to connect with your colleagues or customers.
- Google Ad or PPC Campaigns – This is becoming a huge push in the Real Estate market and there are various strategies to tackle it. You have options from Google AdWords which offers a fast, efficient and scalable way to target potential viewers online and direct them to your site. These strategic advertising tools allow you to showcase your listing or services you provide in a specific location based on search results, or utilizing display and retargeted ads for people visiting your website. To put it simply, this is the fastest way to get in front of your most likely prospects. At the end of the day, its all relative to your marketing budget spend. Driving folks to your site is great, converting is even greater.
- Run a Re-Targeting Campaign – Re-targeting will allow you to recapture traffic on your website, showing ultra-targeted ads only to people who have already visited or performed a specific action on your website. Essentially, you will be cookied, view other sites and notice strategic advertisements on other visited sites which will ultimately have you click on that Ad to drive you back to the Real Estate site you initially visited. A significant part of your web traffic won’t take an action when they visit your site, you need to make sure they are aware you are there for them when needed. A good marketing budget for this strategy is essential, though won’t always convert to business, but it will provide additional awareness which is key.
- Publishing High-Quality Content – Publishing high-quality content is a valuable currency on the Internet today. You need to produce exceptional, well-written blog posts, write or share informative articles, great quality videos (preferably in HD), any infographics showcasing interesting data, and other educational content that can capture attention from prospects when they visit your website. The more good content you create, it will start converting to building a strong audience and following to your brand and site.
- Optimize Social Media Marketing – Social media marketing is key to additional awareness. Whether that’s coming from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc… it will serve as the ability to showcase specific content and drive viewers back to your site. Share new ideas, events, your recent blogs, relevant Real Estate news & updates with your customers and prospects and to continue growing your network for the upcoming years.
To great Real Estate marketing success!
www.DigitalRealtyX.com