Decisiveness is something you need to have for yourself if you’re going to have success as an independent service professional of any type. This certainly applies to real estate agents too, and the importance of being able to make smart decisions and make them quickly is even greater when you’re in a profession where the entirety of your income is based on commissions. This is especially true when it comes to deciding how you’re going to spend money for your marketing / prospecting budgets. These days many realtors are wisely putting investments into online lead generation for real estate agents. And that’s wise.
The reason it is a good decision is because nowadays so much of what happens to bring new clients into the fold for realtors occurs via digital means. It’s why so many realtors have signed up with us to receive paid real estate leads as the people who will be buying or selling homes are often very active online in the months leading up to their decision to either list a home or start seeing ones with their finding agent. They volunteer information to online surveys based on those intentions, and they end us as leads we provide to agents who’ve signed up with us.
It’s one of the newer offerings with real estate lead generation services in Canada, and we can honestly say that this is what we envisioned happening when we got this up and running many years ago now. But these are not organic leads in the most literal sense of the definition, and even agents who have great success with paid leads are still going to want to go down the more traditional pathways when it comes to getting those organic leads. For the most part that starts with having an excellent real estate agent website and plenty of backlinks pointing homeowners and home buyers in that direction.
For anyone asking what is the best lead generation strategy in Canada there’s not one easy or definitive answer. Agents with good decision making abilities are probably also deciding to go with paid ads for their services, and Google Paid Ads and FaceBook paid ads are often where they’re looking most primarily. The reason they do that is because this is almost always money well spent. It’s hard not to get measurable results and an increase in new clientele when you have these ads putting you in front of the right people and at the right time – meaning when they’re getting close to making the decision about buying or selling a home.
So with this week’s blog entry we’ll look at paid ads versus organic leads and what tends to be working best for realtors in Canada these days. The extent to which one might be better than the other will depend on where realtors are working as well as where they are in their career trajectory and whether they’re aiming to secure as much new business as possible, or if they’re winding down and are fine with just a few new select clients over the course of a year.
Provide & Be Recognized
Agents who have success with organic lead generation tend to do well with content. Providing potential clients with valuable, engaging content positions you as a local real estate expert and streamlines search engine results. This makes for gradual but effective self-promotion and you you gain trust and establish yourself as someone who can be trusted with what is always a very major decision – buying or selling a home in Canada. Organic marketing often focuses on search engine optimization (SEO) and the most standard approach is to have your realtor website properly equipped with content that has strategic placement of topical keywords across all of it. These signal to search engines that your page is a good place to bring information-seekers and your site ends up coming up higher in the search engine result pages.
This is why SEO services Canada for small business are in demand the way that they are. And as it relates to real estate if your site has good SEO value then it is more likely clients will be made aware of you when they search for Vancouver real estate agent, or Toronto real estate agent. The same can apply for any city in Canada and the best combination is to have those SEO keywords incorporated at the right density (%) and then have them among helpful accessible content to your website visitors.
You’ll also need to ensure that your site is clean and efficient, loads quickly, and includes inbound and outbound links in each piece of content. A quality website with good organic marketing can be coming up high in search engine results into long foreseeable future, and especially if paid marketing campaigns are run simultaneously.
Invest in Clicks
Taking the opposite approach can be different if you’re choosing to put money into your aims to get new clients in real estate. Paid ads where payment means a temporary ranking or audience are best for driving sales and getting results quickly. Having a good website for realtors is connected to this approach too because these paid ad should point to a product page, a landing page, or something else that will present you as a reputable local real estate agent.
The appeal of this type of paid lead prospecting is that it is more immediate. Instead of waiting months for results, you should start seeing flowing traffic, clicks and conversions shortly after your campaign goes live. Another big part of the appeal is that you have full system control because pay-per-click ads for real estate are entirely manageable for the purchaser. You set the budget, analyze, and review how many impressions, clicks, and conversions you get for the budget you set. This helps you accurately estimate the budget for paid advertising you want to invest in. Which is different from organic marketing as it can’t be measured at such resolutions.
Online lead generation for real estate agents needs to be evaluated carefully based on these considerations, and again a big contributing factor will be where you are working as an agent (the specific city or town) and what the market is like at this time. Keep in mind with PPC ads for real estate that targeting, goals, creative, and reporting all need to be maintained and updated and based on changing realties within the market. There are going to be times when the market cools off, and you should be able to draw back on your ad investments when that is the case.
Mix of Three
Most real estate agents in Canada will be investing in Paid Ads, and many of those same individuals will be looking into real estate lead generation services in Canada like the one we have here. What you’ll see with realtors who have the greatest level of success with getting new clients is that they’re utilizing both those resources but are also super active on social media and promoting themselves there as well. Social media for real estate agents is a topic that’s seemingly hotter all the time for realtors who are keen to find the best way to dig up new leads.
If you can be active on the right platforms and be quick to be putting your real estate expertise on display then people who are soon going to buy or sell a home are going to take notice of you. Ideally you then provide them with a means to be redirected to your Facebook Business Page and / or your real estate agent website. We’ve talked about his before, but FaceBook tends to be especially good because it’s become the social media of-choice for older people, and of course those are the people who are more likely to be homeowners or people who will be able to buy a home.
These are exactly the people you want to be meeting as potential leads on new business, and you can also be uncovering these folks by paid leads or organically-generated leads. It’s all about being smartly choosy and deciding on where you can best make your investments of time and money. The right mix of all of these approaches will vary from one realtor to the next based on many different factors, but often with something of a trial-and-error approach new realtors can soon figure out what’s the best approach for them.
Sign up for Real Estate Leads here and you’ll immediately be working in conjunction with one of the best real estate lead generation services in Canada. Your subscription will mean you’ll get a monthly quota of qualified, online-generated buyer and / or seller leads and the leads will be going to you and you only. No other realtor will receive those same leads, even if they are working in the same region of the country that you are. This means you have an exclusive opportunity to be the first realtor to contact these folks, and obviously there’s immense value in that. Put your best foot forward when you meet them and they will consider choosing you as their realtor.
