Real Estate has always been a slow adopter of technology compared to the rest of the sector. But this is changing in the coming time. If you are working as Real Estate or adjourning vertical, then you know that competition is the name of the game.
Economic uncertainties have made its presence felt in Real Estate industries all across the globe. Technological advancement, changing consumer demand, volatile markets, changing political climates are critical challenges in the field.
Growing in this field is undoubtedly a task with slow economic growth and fierce competition in the market. Real Estate is an industry that needs a highly tailored approach in its operation.
If you have a competitive edge, then it will only increase your income potential. As the whole population moves on the internet, the next sensible step is Real Estate online Marketing.
Digital Marketing for realtors’ will help reach a large audience and generate more quality leads and revenue. As more and more internet penetrates, its roots people are coming online to find the details or review about the product.
Adapting a digital shift in the marketing approach will significantly help your business. This article will discuss the strategies to help Digital Marketing for Real Estate agents, Real Estate companies.
This guide will help to do digital marketing in Real Estate overall. Digital Marketing executed correctly then will help to resolve the following queries
- How possibly can I increase my real estate sales
- How to attract high-end real estate clients
Define Your Goals For Your Real Estate Digital Marketing
Before starting with actual Digital marketing, this first step is to understand what result you want to achieve and what will be considered success or failure after each campaign.
The campaign can be about
- brand awareness reaching a certain number of your audience,
- Acquiring a certain number of inquiries about the properties.
- Increased engagement with local business, increased number of calls to drive referral industry.
- More Social Proof in the form of reviews, testimonials, and shares, and higher rank in search results
A simple thumb rule to follow if you are starting is considering your business goals as a Digital Marketing goal.
Digital marketing is about gathering data and analyzing to optimizing your strategy. Make sure that your business goal is specific and measurable. For instance, blogging requires strategy to get more clicks from the search engines. You can learn how to start a blog from the scratch.
Having vague goals won’t help to achieve your goals. Unrealistic goals are rarely attained.
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Business Website
A business website is the official face of the business online. Website is the place where all other platforms are used to draw the funnel traffic to an endpoint.
It is estimated that roughly around 75% of the buyers are using mobile to scout the properties. Having a website that is optimized or mobile-friendly. It is also a critical aspect in the recent Google Algorithm update and will also help in site SEO.
It is reported that a picture is worth a thousand words. Use good quality property photos, which will help you set your site apart from thousands of websites that exist on the web today. Using a quality photograph can show off the catalog of properties you have sold and have in inventory.
SEO
SEO traffic is generating traffic that is free of cost. Recently there is a high rise of SEO skill individuals as this helps businesses generate free traffic. Your prospect will start the journey by searching for a specific need on google.
Google search will provide different websites along with the other various websites. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) involves optimizing your website for a higher ranking and taking time to show the effect.
Digital Marketing for Real Estate’s general idea is creating content that is relevant and helpful for your audience. The more relevant and useful, the higher the search engines will rank your website.
Search Engines use the combination of website technical performance with search engine and trustworthiness of your site. Performing in detail keyword research is 50% of the battle’s own.
Your audience will be as per our targeting and intended with the demographics. While selecting the keywords, there should be a balance of high volume and low competition and relevancy. Putting time in auditing your website and its pages, evaluate how the traffic is being driven to your site.
SEO is dynamic, which combines technical aspects of SEO and writing content along with the keywords. It works like a compounding effect that works slowly at the start but keeps on growing over time. SEO is a must for Digital Marketing for Real Estate Agent
Social Media Platform
In Real Estate, there is a saying which goes by “You are the brand.”
Social media profiles give you visibility to your brand across the platform where your audience spends time. Generally, people turn to social media to find information about their property developer, Real Estate agent, or the property.
No matter what kind of realtors you are, your potential customer spends time on a social media platform like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Having social media presence will give you credibility by individuals being able to content to business.
Some Strategies that can help in Commercial Real Estate Digital Marketing
- Creating blogs that educate the clients and also help to navigate through queries
- Promoting the communities in and around business
- Listening to customers and engaging with customers comments
- Using Augmented Reality and Virtual reality to give virtual 360 views in and around the property. As a result, it provides a quick view and virtual tour of the property and its chances of being converted.
PPC ( Pay-Per-Clicks)
For businesses, only having online advertising should not be the only preface of your digital marketing strategy. It will be considered a miss if this article is not viewed. This is a costlier and short-term method of gaining results and can be useful for business.
Consider platforms like Google Ads you pay for the cost per click to appear in the sponsored ads section for specific keywords. This is a competitive market, and the whole success depends upon analyzing the data and optimizing it as per the pattern noticed in the data.
This is where SEO is cost-effective compared to PPC. Social Media platforms offer an advertisement model on their platform. Instagram uses a cost per 1k impression, which is aimed at creating awareness compared to conversion. The Linkedin platform offers CPC and CPM pricing structures depending on preferences.
These paid structures will help you understand where the money is being used on. This will help you understand the ROI for the strategy you adopt in digital marketing for reals estate.
Always try to interpret the data. There are specific ways to understanding the demographics.
To make an effective PPC campaign
- Look what your keywords competition is using
- Consider the customer intent while searching for the products
- Have a compelling call for action
- Select bidding strategy and set a budget for Adwords
Nurture your Client
Like most of the things that have moved online similarly, networking has also moved online. Social Media is an effective channel that can send loyal clients on your way as stated by Wordstream. A good salesperson knows that follow-up is crucial to maintain good relations with new clients.
For Realtors, Real Estate Agents, most of the business comes from the referral or maintaining relationships.
One of the effective channels that are available for nurturing is Email Marketing or Drip Marketing. A personalized email has a very high ROI approach and can make effective targeting using your client data.
To have an effective conversion of Effective conversion
- It starts with improving the database of the clients and segmenting them into different groups according to stages of the home buying process of each client is based on
- Identifying the level of engagement and making the definitive priority list
- Deployment of drip campaign to create awareness of new schemes or property listing to develop customer base interest.
- Start a newsletter to your existing audience to make them aware of the latest update in the industry.
Once you segment your audience and identify them, then send them the content which is relevant to them. You can send the bulk email to send the mail and do the heavy lifting work for you.
Analyze The Data For Your Real Estate Digital Marketing
If the open email rate is low, that means that content is not relevant or the title is not good enough to catch your audience’s attention.
If your mail has been opened, but a low click-through rate means that content is not working, it’s magic, and you need to rework the content.
Creating Leading
Real Estate Brokers and Real Estate Developers can use persuasive techniques to use a lead magnet to create effective pipelines of leads.
Lead magnets can be of a different form.
Ebooks- creating guides or checklists that are available to evaluate a property before buying. Ensure that the principles you make are a value add this is the first step to create trust in the minds of new incoming leads.
Webinars: You can host a webinar to help people understand the Real Estate industry and the new technology coming up. Also, the new property schemes make sure this does not seem like a sales pitch.
Create online tools for our visitors – Tools like home loan calculators; mortgage calculators are in high demand. This can help you attract an additional set of visitors and show the content informational content which relevant to them as they are on the internet to find information.
You should show content related to financing a property, banks which provide low-interest rate on the property so and so forth.
Create a unique landing page and run ads on those pages, which will help you to draw the audience to that specific landing page. This landing page should provide more information about the product or the services. Incorporate the FAQ’s that can help the landing page visitors about the terms and condition and whole process of availing the product or service
You can also create a specific landing page for lead magnets to draw the audience to download the freebie in exchange for necessary information available to leads as they have shown interest in your lead magnet.
Local SEO For Your Real Estate Digital Marketing
Optimizing your website for the optimum search engine ranking will help your business; you may want a more targeted approach. You don’t want just anyone landing on your site and need to target relevant and local traffic.
Don’t worry, and Google Analytics provides an in-depth report on who is visiting your site with their tool. You can see if you are reaching an audience within your town.
Optimizing for local SEO should be a priority because these people will most likely be your prospective clients. Then, you need to develop a digital relationship between your target location and your online assets.
Here are the steps to take for your real Estate Digital Marketing:
- List your locations of operation on your website. Think about including a map and address. (If your territory is more extensive than average, you may want to refrain from being too specific. It could bottleneck results.)
- Make sure addresses across all platforms are the same as it will eliminate confusion for the ranking algorithms and well as the users.
- Don’t forget to include your city and target locations as the keywords you rank for. It is beneficial because prospective clients will indeed search for some point, ‘real estate agents in [your location].’
- Let your former clients leave testimonials on your website and social media. It does not only build credibility, but satisfied customers are more likely to refer you.
How much budget should you allocate for Real Estate Digital Marketing
You shouldn’t spend the least amount possible on real estate digital marketing because it won’t be useful, and the quality of the services you get will be relatively poor. On the other hand, big-budget digital marketing comes with different tradeoffs, such as a higher price tag but fantastic quality.
The exact pricing keeps varying from client to client. Digital Marketing for Real Estate is not “one size fits all” for pricing real estate digital marketing.
Many companies exploit a percentage of their revenue on marketing activities. However, there is a vast difference in what companies and industries will set aside.
The real question to ask is how much you should invest?
According to the COM unique survey COVID–19 edition: June 2020, firms spent an average of 11.4% of their revenue on marketing.
COM also found out the percentage spent on marketing varied based on B2B and B2C companies and whether they sold a service or product.
Platform | Services | Product |
B2C | 15% | 13.9% |
B2B | 12% | 8.3% |
The above figure is an average and should give you a rough idea about the investment you should make according to the profits and revenue generation.
The same numbers try to fall in line with our clients’ digital marketing budget – In the 6% to 20% range.
If you are unsure how much budget you must allocate, we would recommend setting aside 6% of your overall business income. Then, slowly, you can work hard and make your way up to a higher percentage. Always remember that marketing is not an investment. It is an expense for your future profits.
Engagement Models
Below, we have provided the most common engagement models followed by the most extensive digital marketing companies. I have also Provided a rough estimate of how much it worth. Remember that costs will vary based on your industry, region, and the purpose of your needs.
Hourly based Model
With this Model, all hours the agency spends on your project is charged regardless of the given job. You only pay for what you use. The cost likely to start from $50/hour and may increase up to $250/hour depending on the type of digital marketer you hire.
Project-Based Model
The cost is for one-time projects is fixed. The scope of the project is highly recommended to define before you sign up for the deal. If you want to add anything when the project is in progress, it will cost you extra money. A rough cost for each project start between $1,000 – $7,500.
Monthly Retainer Model
As you acknowledge, digital marketing is a continuous process. You cannot spend in it for six months and expect returns for years together. There must be a continued investment. Only then can you enjoy the benefits.
Suppose you feel to continue with your real estate digital marketing activities regularly. A monthly retainer model is perfect. In this Model, the scope of the work and the cost price will be fixed beforehand. An invoice will be issued at the end of the month, including regular updates on the completed work.
If there is an increase in marketing activities, the contract needs to be updated, and monthly fixed costs will vary depending on your demands. The project fees typically range between $1,000 – $100,000
Conclusion
In the end, you may ask what business needs digital marketing? The simple answer would be any business looking to increase its brand presence and revenues should invest in Digital Marketing right away. Your digital marketing goal should be gathering people to guide them down your sales funnel.
Always try to benchmark which platforms’ performance is working for you and which platform performance needs to be optimized to get the platform’s benchmark result. Use content marketing as a form of lead nurturing by providing values to clients.
If you can follow these digital marketing guides in real Estate, you will be on your way to generating a real estate marketing strategy.
Start and invest now to see the growth in your business.