The only constant thing is change. As a real estate professional, keeping abreast of the housing market and home buyer trends can be challenging. Real estate marketing strategies that worked even five years ago might be hopelessly outdated now.
A recent study by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) found that 88% of buyers purchased their home through a real estate agent or broker. The demand for real estate agents is still high, but the market is more competitive than ever. What are the best ways to reach prospective buyers?
Today we’ll review 17 tried-and-true marketing ideas for realtors that will help you generate leads and grow your business.
1. Build a Strong Team
Start with a strong foundation. If you have office staff to support you, make sure you choose associates aligned with your mission and values. Presenting a united front helps create and solidify your brand and offer a consistent customer experience from the first meeting through closing.
2. Stand Apart From the Crowd
What makes you different from other real estate agents in your area? Do you specialize in specific properties or neighborhoods or have some other niche you can capitalize on? Creating a unique persona for yourself takes time, but it will help you stand out to potential buyers.
3. Create Single-Property Websites
Single-property websites give prospective buyers a quick and easy way to view properties for sale. Rela’s real estate website template designs are made for modern browsers and mobile devices, ensuring a beautiful and fast user experience that leaves a positive impression.
Are you tired of spending hours on new listings? Rela enables you to create stunning sites in minutes. Its features include an easy-to-use site builder, lead tracking, social media marketing tools, 3D tours, videos, and basic analytics.
4. Take Excellent Pictures
Don’t rely on your cellphone to take high-quality listing pictures. Professional real estate photographers are worth their weight in gold. A professional photographer knows how to capture the best angles of every room, showcasing their unique features while downplaying their faults in creative ways.
Using drones to showcase aerial views of the property and surrounding neighborhood gives a unique vantage point that was unavailable to home sellers and buyers in the past. Take advantage of this technology and watch appointments soar.
5. Build a Cohesive Brand
Ensure your brand image is the same across all marketing channels to build recognition, trust, and familiarity. Building brand awareness is not a haphazard process. According to Hubspot, strong brand awareness “is a result of multiple simultaneous efforts that extend beyond trying to get paying customers.”
Projecting a consistent brand identity across channels builds a loyal audience that recognizes and chooses to do business with you over competitors.
6. Craft Quality Content
There are many ways to establish yourself as an authority in your field. Offering quality content that informs, instructs and enlightens potential customers helps establish you as a helpful resource.
For example, create a monthly newsletter keeps customers informed about current marketing conditions, home improvement trends and buying or selling opportunities.
Feature blog posts on your website that draw people to subscribe to your newsletter content. Link to valuable resources that make potential customers feel you’re looking out for their best interests rather than just selling to them.
7. Use Facebook Ads
There’s nothing like Facebook’s scalability to appeal to local home buyers and sellers. Rela integrates with Facebook’s robust advertising platform and enables you to create and publish Facebook Ads right from your dashboard.
Rela takes the guesswork out of creating effective Facebook campaigns. Its ad-smart technology automatically identifies the best target audience based on your listing's location, type and price range.
8. Meet the Neighbors
Help buyers meet their new neighbors! Gifting a bottle of wine or box of chocolates from your buyer to their surrounding neighbors creates community while reaching new contacts.
9. Create a Virtual Tour
If you can’t bring your buyers to the listing, bring the listing to your buyers. Virtual tours and open houses let potential buyers see their new home via Facebook Live, Zoom, Google Hangouts or the live stream platform of your choice.
10. Use Multi-Channel Marketing
Use multiple methods to reach your target audience, including email marketing, SMS texting, social media platforms (like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube) and direct mail.
When customers interact with you across various touch points, it helps solidify your identity, reminding them to turn to you for their real estate needs when they’re ready.
11. Get Analytical
You won’t know how your marketing campaigns are working without diving into your analytics. See who's viewing your property website and which campaigns are driving the most leads.
Rela’s software enables you to track the impact of your marketing efforts from your property dashboard. Never miss out on an opportunity to follow up and win the client. Get notified as soon as a lead makes contact and route that lead to team members for quick turnaround.
12. Use a Responsive Website Design
According to a recent survey by Statista, mobile devices account for approximately half of global web traffic. If your website is not mobile responsive, you’re losing business — period. Rela’s template designs are created with mobile devices and modern browsers in mind and work perfectly on desktop and mobile.
13. Get Active In Your Community
It’s not enough to have your picture on grocery store carts anymore. Join your local Chamber of Commerce, sponsor kids’ sports teams and participate in local events to build relationships in your community.
14. Ask for Google Reviews
Social proof casts an indelible mark on real estate agents today. Gathering good reviews helps increase your local business by having customers share their experiences with you and your staff. Once you've completed a successful purchase or sale, ask your happy clients to post their feedback about doing business with you on Yelp.
Consistently offering good service and value will eventually build a strong base of customer reviews. Include your Google My Business profile on your website and email signature to encourage participation.
15. Ask for Referrals
Did you know 91% of buyers would recommend their agent to others or use their agent again?
Once a deal has closed, don’t be shy about asking your clients to refer you to their friends and family for future business opportunities.
16. Go Old School
Be different. Be unique. Be old school. Sending handwritten thank-you notes, remembering clients’ special occasions and building genuine relationships may seem passe to many. Still, it’s the simple things that help set you apart in a competitive marketplace.
17. Zoom Over to Zillow
Buyers and sellers are turning to Zillow to search for prospective properties. Zillow gets your business in front of thousands of new prospects.
A strong Zillow profile allows you to connect with potential clients by sharing your listings with a massive audience. Traffic to Zillow’s websites and mobile apps reached a new record in 2021 of 201 million average monthly unique users.
Choose Rela to Create Stunning Single-Property Websites
Rela is an easy-to-use real estate marketing platform that allows agents and photographers to generate a custom single property website in minutes.
Rela can provide all of the marketing materials you need, including a website, print materials and a Facebook Ads integration to market your listings.
Here are some of the features you’ll get with Rela:
- Interactive Floorplans: Create a guided tour with our Interactive Floorplan builder.
- Automated Reporting: Send scheduled lead or visitor reports to clients or associates.
- Mobile Ready: Rela’s templates work perfectly on all devices.
- Lead Capture: Our built-in CRM lets you easily track and manage leads.
- Custom Domains: Purchase a custom domain directly from Rela and upgrade to include SSL for extra security.
- Advanced Analytics: Track page views, social referrals, visitor counts and more with our analytics tool.
Create your first listing today — no credit card required.
Create your first listing today — no credit card required.
