A lot of why many realtors don’t last long in the business is because they don’t have the needed hustle and as such they don’t have a critical component of what it takes to be successful in the business. If there were a few handfuls or realtors the thousands potential clients in big cities everyday it might be a legit get rich-quick and easy opportunity but the reality is that there are thousands of real at any time there too.
This is why developing a real estate marketing plan that puts a big focus on making themselves stand out from the crowd and distinguishes them as a service provider in a more unique way. You can likely still list a few homes a year, but one of the things that’s true about real estate in North America is you’ve got to be hungry for the money if you’re going to stick with this and you’d better have the hustle that goes along with it.
One of the approaches these profit-minded agents are taking is to buy paid real estate leads. Real estate lead generation is always a big deal if you’re working as an agent in a competitive big city, and the way these paid leads work is the realtor will buy a packaged where they receive X-number of buyer and / or home seller leads each month. The leads come from people who voluntarily complete online surveys that are used to gauge how likely they are to buy or sell a home in the near future.
Being fast-tracked to being in touch with genuine potential clients is going to be huge for any agent’s Real Estate Marketing, and with homes bought or sold come the commissions that allow agents to invest even more in the growth of their business. The question then becomes how to continue to farm leads organically and use both approaches to be feeding new prospective clients into your sale funnel to greatest extent possible. You can take the 2-prong approach, collecting your paid leads and working hard to drum up leads offline too.
You can definitely grow your real estate brand this way, especially if you can showcase your satisfied clients along with homes bought or sold through you as the agent. But only if you have the right marketing collaterals and really good self-promotion through content publishing and the like.
Effective Plans Always
Top-performing agents know excel with the development and implementations of effective plans for growing their business. Some will be on their way to ‘top performer’ status in the office, but even the ones with more modest success with clients from the month will need to be doing well real estate lead generation too. And maybe revisiting their efforts with it if their current plan for getting more real estate clients and increasing their gross commission income isn’t turning out to be as effective as they thought it would be.
So that’s what leads us to be here, where the agent needs to learn how to craft a well-developed real estate marketing plan that enables them to generate more leads and then turn more of those leads into clients.
There are plenty of free online resources for content and worksheets for people to take inventory of their business, ones where you can be walked through the process of building your brand, setting attainable goals, and creating an actionable plan for yourself that is more likely to lead to success in real estate. With this blog entry we’ll cover what should be included in a real estate marketing plan, and are all the organized strategies, systems, and schedules that individual agents, teams, and brokerages are using to guide their marketing efforts successfully the same ones you’re using.
You can start by defining your target market, and this may be something where you’re not sure who is the person most likely to use you as their agent when buying or selling a home anywhere in Canada. Make it so that more of them may well have seen you as a local realtor and you’re well on your way to grow your real estate brand.
Know Target Market
There are gains to be had if your marketing efforts become focused on a narrower audience so that’s there are serious improvements in terms of lead-to-client conversion rates and maximizing your transaction volume. Identifying your farm area or ideal client’s profile to have a more accurate understanding of what you need to do to fine-tune your branding and marketing to cater to the specific needs, challenges, and interests of a particular type of person.
Build Brand Structure
A weak brand means you’re more likely to lose focus, disappear in the crowd of competition, and be inaccurately representing who you are as an agent. This may take away from your productivity and hinder your ability to acquire and retain quality leads.
Data & Analytics
Agents that are armed with statistics, analytics, and insights are better able to set goals, track progress, and make their success something that can be recreated. Without data, marketing efforts are more likely to have energies not channeled in the way they should be, with some focuses not getting the attention – and budget – they deserve.
Technology & Tools
Technology and tools is a big part of real estate marketing now too, and it’s going to be increasingly so all through the long foreseeable future too. It’s a must for customer relationship management, direct marketing, or any of your transaction work. The best real estate marketing plans will have a customizable website, fully integrated CRM, social media management tools, and marketing automation software.
Social media strategy, video content, robust marketing automation tools, a customizable real estate website, and a fully-integrated CRM are also going to be among the best real estate marketing plans. But you need to how to use these tools if you’re going to get maximum benefit from them.
Lead Sources
Most cities have a highly competitive, low-inventory housing market, and that means very few people if any don’t have a realtor they know long before they need to work with one. In order to do well with real estate lead generation you need cast a wide net and get as much of a volume of leads that you can to work with. There are different categories for lead sources:
- Online – social media, paid ads, using your website
- Offline – signage, direct mail, hosting open houses
- Referrals – your network, and sphere of influence in real estate
- Prospecting and outreach – cold calling, community involvement, summary offences, sending prospecting letters
- Buy real estate leads to build your client base with online leads
You need to have a methodology if you’re going to do well with this, and it is also better to have specific goals. It is an important part of real estate marketing and these should S.M.A.R.T. goals – smart, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
Here’s some examples of S.M.A.R.T. goals in real estate
See average number of leads I generate every month increase by 20 percent by the end of this year.
Minimum one webinar or guide bout real estate lead generation best practices downloaded every month throughout 2024.
Commit to determining the real estate website provider that has the best websites for generating leads and take what is learned to build a new website from that provider by the end of the first quarter.
5 Recommended Estate Marketing Strategies
Goals are likely to go unachieved if they don’t have specific strategies in place to help them become realized. Your plan should be actionable, and the actions seen to be the ones most likely to produce the results you’ve desired – in this case, getting more real estate clients and having them come from leads you’ve met and convinced to use you as their local real estate agent.
We’ll conclude this week’s entry here with five real estate marketing ideas that are sure to generate more leads.
Be Advertising
Realtors have always needed to advertising their services, but these days it’s more needed than ever as you’ve got to be doing everything you can to be visible as often as possible Someone is going to be looking to work with an agent like you, but are you the agent they’re going to see or hear of first?
Develop Referral Strategy
Do well and it’s possible to have former clients referring someone who is also needing to work with a realtor for buying or selling a home. In the early part of your career you should explicitly ask to receive a referral if you are certain that they clients are very pleased with how you helped them with such an important decision. Over time referrals really start to spread well and they start to serve the interests of your real estate marketing plan.
Use Marketing Automation Tools
Marketing automation tools can do so much now. You can have every aspect of your marketing efforts improved upon with a fully-integrated CRM that you operate through your real estate agent website and the ability to automate new listing alerts, newsletters, and print and digital content pieces like postcards, flyers, and video-enabled mobile-responsive emails.
Leverage Social Media’s Power
Social media has quickly grown to be such a huge part of real estate marketing, and that’s because it is increasingly where would-be homebuyers and sellers are interacting around the topic. Realtors who spend the time to look can find a shortcut for implementing an efficient and productive social media strategy with the many ‘social media cheat sheets’ that are out there for better knowing the audience, tone, and user intentions applicable for each channel.
Paid Buyer & Seller Leads Delivered to You Exclusively
Sign up with Real Estate Leads and you’ll receive a monthly quota of qualified buyer and / or seller leads that will only be going to one realtor – you. That means you’re the only agent in the region who’ll be tipped off to those folks who might be ready to work with an agent to buy or sell a home. This is definitely a value-loaded scenario, as with greater understanding of converting leads into clients you start making huge gains as you grow your real estate brand .
Do well with real estate lead generation and you can have more time you to spend with client prospecting in other ways, which sets you up even better for the future. Learning how to get the leads in real estate is one thing, but converting those leads into clients consistently is how you reach your sales goals and have a fairly large group of clients that you’re working with at any given time through the year.