Marketing ideas for your Real Estate Business

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Running a real estate business is hard work. Conducting open-houses, giving house tours, commuting from one location to the other to, and constantly working towards making a sale requires a lot of effort. Trying to constantly find new ways to market your real estate business can seem like a huge task. We understand! So, we decided to put together this guide to help you market your real estate business better. Here are …  ways you can use to market your real estate business.

1. Strengthen Your Online Business Presence with Business Listings

Getting your real estate business listed on several online directories that is specific to your industry helps you establish a strong online presence.  In doing so, you will increase your chances of appearing on searches where consumers are looking for your services. Aside from all the major directories and listings sites like Google My Business, YellowPages, Yelp, your local Chamber of Commerce, your business needs to be listed on niche listings sites for realtors. Here are some listings sites that are specific to the real estate industry.

• Zillow.com
• Realtor.com
• Trulia.com
• Loopnet.com
• realestateabc.com
• Connect.homes.com
• Rentals.com
• Reals.com
• Valuecom.com

You can read more about other real estate business directories and search engines in this post. The business information you’ll need to enter includes your business name, address, phone number, business category, email address, business hours, etc. It is best to make sure that you add information about your amenities as well like parking facilities, or if your premises is handicap friendly, etc.

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2. Create an Impressionable Logo

Your company’s logo is a visual representation of everything it stands for to your customers. With a well-designed company logo, you’ll leave a lasting impression on consumers.  Here are some tips to get you started, or before you :

• Decide on what you want your main message needs to be.  Maybe you could use your company’s mission statement to help you narrow down on what your logo should represent.
• Look up logos of the best performing businesses in the real estate industry and see what you can learn from them.
• Your design needs to flexible, that is, your design needs to look good when it is blown up to appear on a billboard, or when it is sized-down to appear on a business card.
• Make sure you choose the right colors for your logo.  You don’t want your logo to get very cluttered, or to look too gaudy. So, you need to make sure that there is a balance in your logo design.  As a rule of thumb, try not to exceed three colors.

When you are creating (or re-creating) the business logo for your real estate business, remember that you’re illustrating your entire company and what it represents in to a certain picture.  You can get in touch with a graphic designer through Fiverr or Upwork. In case you want to do it yourself, you can use Canva that comes with a variety of templates and fonts that you can use. For more ideas to create logos, you can even use GraphicSprings’ logo generator.

3. Engage Your Target Audience Through Blogging and Guest Blogging

Starting a blog or writing guest posts can help you reach your potential customers and engage with them. The best way to do this is to make sure that your blog is search engine optimized; it will help your content appear on searches that are conducted with regard to the real estate services that you offer. Choose keywords that are trending and have a good search volume, and write actionable content accordingly.  Your content needs to have a minimum word count of 500 words to be eligible to rank online.  Make sure you add CTAs (Call to Actions) that can help your customers get in touch with you.

Take a look at Redfin’s article on How to Buy a Home in 7 Steps. Here’s what you can take away from it:

• The article is based on a very popular keyword “how to buy a home”.  (Yes, I checked.  It has a search volume of 2400 searches per month.)
• It has seven actionable steps.
• It also has a CTA on the page that puts you in touch with one of Redfin’s Agents. Take a look at their CTA.

In doing so, you’re bound to increase website traffic and better the results of engaging with your target audience. In addition to writing on your business’ blog, you can even reach out to blogging sites that have a good audience following and write a guest post for them. You can read more about guest blogging here.

4. Create a Strong Social Media Presence

Your business needs to have a social media presence. In addition to the listings and directory sites, you need to add your business to social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. Having to live in the age of social media, you are given several opportunities to help your target audience find you. Here is a list of to-dos to get you started:

• Create a social media content strategy that can help you establish your business presence. Read more about how you can create a content strategy here.
• Make sure that you build a following on your social media handles.
• Make sure you schedule your posts on all your social media handles.
• Run ads on your social media handles.

You can learn how to add your real estate business to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter here.

5. Ask Your Customers for Testimonials

Customer testimonials are more elaborate versions of reviews and help build trust among your potential customers. Get in touch with your happiest customers and ask them to give your business a testimonial.  It is best if you ask them to leave you a picture of themselves to make the testimonial something relatable. Once you get this done, add it to your website’s homepage.

6. Build Your Business Reviews

Reviews are integral to strengthening a business’ online presence. Your potential customers need to know about your first-class services.  Here’s why they are important:

• Reviews help other consumers make purchase decisions. As a matter of fact, 97% of consumers refer to online business reviews before they make purchase decisions.
• Reviews are also huge contributes to your business’ local SEO. Search engines use reviews to determine if a local listing is worthy of ranking higher on the SERPs by looking at business reviews and star ratings.

So, you need to make sure that you’re spending adequate time on building your reviews for your business. Creating an online presence is quite easy, but building your reviews is the hard part.  Here are some tips to help you build reviews.

• Use a review handout generator.  It is a printable piece of copy that resembles a pamphlet which comes with a set of instructions that can help your customers leave you a review.
• Incentivise your review generation process. This is important because your customers might have had a good business experience, but they might not want to go out of their way to give your business the review it deserves. You can give your customers a discount or a gift voucher when they leave you a review.
• The easiest and most underrated way of building reviews is asking your customers to leave you one (or four). It was found that 68% of customers leave businesses reviews when they are requested to do so.

7. Make a Repository of the Best Keywords

The whole purpose of an online presence is to make sure that your business appears when they search for you. This is why keyword research is crucial to what your content contains. The best-suited keywords for your business have a good search volume. Here’s are three rudimentary methods you can use to find keywords ideas:

You can run a normal search on Google and get keyword ideas on the search bar itself.

In addition to just running a search on Google, you can even install a free Chrome Extension like Keywords Everywhere. Once you run a search, you’ll get the search volume alongside the keywords that appear in the search bar.

You can even get Keyword ideas by using Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest will generate a list of keywords with information like competition for the keyword and its search volume. Furthermore, pick the region you’re targeting, you can choose the keywords you need and download them in a .csv file format.

You can even try the same with Google Keyword Planner if you have a Google Adwords account. Once you pick the best suited keyword, you can promote all your content (website, blog, landing pages, etc.) and ads using these keywords to reach the people who are conducting such searches, and rank for keywords on SERPs.

8. Don’t Forget Traditional Marketing

It might seem like traditional marketing is becoming less relevant by the day. But the truth is that it is still a viable marketing option.  Using offline marketing methods like billboards, TV or Radio commercials, posters, or bench advertising, can always help you build your brand and engage with several prospects. Here are some ideas you implement:

• Capitalise on your direct mail marketing efforts.  Don’t just send out postcards or newsletters, but give your readers something to look forward to. Send them Amazon gift vouchers or gift coupons. Make sure that your postcards and newsletters are well-designed.
• Advertise on the radio with a catchy jingle. You can most definitely engage with your target audience and make a solid impression with a good jingle. Remember, nobody can rid themselves of an earworm very easily once they’re hooked.
• Sponsor a community event with your branding displayed in key areas.

9. Get Quirky with Your Marketing

The real estate industry is a huge marketplace. According to a study, there are two million active and licensed realtors in the USA. As a real estate company or a realtor that is unique, you need to stand out from this demographic to consumers. So, try to appeal to the humor in your consumers by applying this idea to your marketing.

It might seem like a daunting task to come up with humorous, quirky content.  But you can always draw inspiration by looking out at what is trending or popular among today’s youth. It can be the “dad” jokes that make you cringe, popular gifs, lol cats, you name it.  Try to give it a popular meme a “real estate” edge! Here are some tips* to get you started:

People love memes. Create and share memes that are funny to keep your social media followers engaged with your business. You can use free meme generation tools like ImgFlip or Make a Meme.

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Create a parody music video. A group of realtors from Santa Clarita, California, came up with a music video, parodying rapper, Rick Ross’ Everyday I’m Hustlin’. The video was executed very well with the realtors rapping about their professions.  Such an idea can help you gain more eyeballs, and you can reach a larger audience.

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Get creative with props. As a realtor, you’re always using placards, posters, pamphlets, etc. Try to personalize and recreate your props to outdo standard expectations.

10. Make Walkthrough Videos

A walkthrough video is basically a video tour of the house. You can shoot these videos using your smartphone or a professional camera. So, it can cost you somewhere between a little expensive or nothing at all. By putting up one of these videos, you can provide your clients with a sneak-peak before they want to see a house. The prospective buyers will be able to take a virtual tour of the house and get understand what the house truly looks like.

11. Get a Squeeze Page or a Lead Gen Tool

A squeeze page is a lead generation tool that appears on websites in the form of pop-ups, opt-ins, CTAs, etc. By creating a lead generation tool, you can build your list of contacts and nurture them to become prospective buyers. These tools usually have a bit of copy, a call-to-action (CTA), and a contact form.  Determine the web pages that give your website the most amount of relevant traffic, and add these tools to these pages. Just keep these things in mind while you build a build a lead generation tool:

• Make sure that you have convincing copy text that is brief and to-the-point. Make sure that you mention how the user will benefit from filling out your lead generation form.
• Use colors that will stand out on the page, getting your reader’s attention.
• Make your CTA button copy interesting.
• Keep your form simple.  You don’t want to ask users to fill out too much information. They might lose interest.

You can build these tools using TypeForm or Sumo to grow your leads.  For more ideas, you can read about high converting lead forms here.