7 Steps in Online Marketing Strategy to Attract Leads for Real Estate Agents
What have real estate agents found to be the best online tools for getting leads? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
The best way to attract leads online is to have a good online marketing strategy and an online presences.
I have been working with real estate agents for the past 4 years. The biggest issues I see is that agent don’t create an online presences. Being listed on real estate agent’s directories and having a website your broker gave you is not a good online presences.
First Step: Get Your Own Website
Having a custom website will help you stand out. There are over a 1 million agents just in the USA and I bet in your area there has to be over 5–10k (depending on where you live). So why should someone chose you if your website just looks like another agents? So make sure you make a custom mobile-friendly website.
Also it’s very good to be independent from you broker when it comes to website. For example, I had a client that had worked for her brokerage for over 22 years. One day, couple of years ago, her broker decided to let her go. When she was kicked out of the broker, she lost her website, leads, directories, etc. After working for 22 years in this industry, she had to start over again. DON’T MAKE THIS SAME MISTAKE.
Step 2: Capture Leads on Your Website
Have some type of lead capture form on your website. Make it simple and quick for people to fill out their info. The one in this picture is a tool from WooAgents. When someone fills that our it shoot you a text saying a new lead is inquiring some info on your website. It also shoots a text to the person who filled out the form letting them know you will contact them soon.
75% of leads generated online are lost due to long response time. With tools like this you will be able to contact your leads instantly.
Also this tool will automatically add the lead into the WooAgent CRM (I will talk about why the CRM is so important later on).
Step 3: Attract Lead with SEO
It so odd to me that agents don’t spend time and resources improving their SEO. Don’t you want free organic leads? SEO stand for Search Engine Optimization, it’s pretty much a fancy way to say how popular you are on Google and other search engines. Improving your SEO from day one will help get organic leads to your website that you did not even have to pay for.
Step 4: Social Media Presence
Have a social media pages! I don’t mean your personal Facebook or Twitter page, make a professorial page for your real estate business. I would advice that you make a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTuber and Instagram pages.
On your social media, don’t always be posting about your listings. Post fun articles and pictures to get people to engage with you more on there. Seem like a cool human being and not like a real estate robot!
Step 5: PPC Ads
Trying to get leads in an organic way does take some time and effort. So run PPC ads! This way you are starting to get leads NOW. The best place to run ads are on Facebook. In my past 4 years of helping real estate agents, I have use Facebook ads as the number one lead magnate to attract leads. It’s very simple to use and there are so many people on there that you are bound to find your next client.
Remember with ads, you have to have a landing page. Having a good landing page is crucial on where that person will become a lead or not.
Step 6: Track & Nature Lead
You would be surprised to see how many real estate agent’s don’t track their leads. Having a good CRM is important! Just because they didn’t pick up your phone or if they said “we aren’t in the market for a home right now” doesn’t mean they will not be your clients. You need to hold onto their info. The CRM above is by WooAgents, it makes it easy to track leads so you don’t forget about them.
Just having leads info isn’t enough, you need to nature them. This pretty much means “warm” them up with info about you and the housing markets. Now I know that you don’t have time to sit there and contact each lead so use tool such as email marketing or smsCloud (provide by WooAgents) to automatically send these stuff out. Picture below is an example of what I mean:
Set up email campaign to send emails concisely to your leads and track to see how they are reacting to it.
Send SMS to your clients to interact with them. SMS has 90% open rate so your message will be seen by more people.
Step 7: Come Up with A Plan
Put all of these step together or just use some. You will have to come up with that depending on your time, skills, and budget.
I have mention WooAgents a lot in this answer. I believe this is the best solution since they offer new and better tools to make you stand out and make capturing leads easier. (I may be a little bias since I do work for them). But using these tools I have help a lot of agents save money while getting better results!
Contributed by Nikesh Chapagain, Marketing Consultant at WooAgents (2014-present)
