Real Estate Marketing Guide
Lead Generation
As an agent, you want to constantly be attracting new leads and nurturing existing ones. This involves asking for some leads, meeting new people in person, creating leads from word of mouth, and paying for advertising online and offline to gain leads.
The more leads the better to increase your chances of converting them into a new client. How many leads you collect per month and the activities you do nurture them will dene your success as an agent.
According to the NAR, The top 3 tech tools that have given the highest quality of leads: social media at 47%, MLS site at 32%, brokerage's website, and listing aggregator site, both at 29%.
Social media was the tool cited as the best source for generating high- quality leads among REALTORS®, followed by Multiple listing service (MLS) websites.
You’re also going to want a certain number of both seller leads and buyer leads. You’re going to need a way to segment these groups. You can create separate email campaigns for each or simply label them as a buyer or seller lead in your contacts. That way you can divide up your leads and filter them to the email, text, and other marketing campaigns that are personalized for them.
Leads can also be purchased from data source companies. However, it’s a best practice and a legal issue to only email contacts who have opted in to receive your emails. Sending large numbers of emails to people who didn’t sign up for it will result in messages being marked as spam, causing your email address to potentially become flagged.
It’s best to create inbound marketing campaigns where leads opt-in to receive your content, get more information, or get in contact with you. All the more reason that diversifying your marketing efforts gives you the opportunity to have multiple touchpoints with potential leads across media.
When you do amass a large email list, be sure to A/B test your messaging amongst your group and split test to see which message opens with a greater rate of success. Testing will allow you to constantly improve the effectiveness of your messages and increase your productivity and business.
One key point with leads is to follow up with them quickly after they come in! Think of it, your prospects are looking at a large number of homes, and probably have the attention of many other real estate agents all competing for business. A great way to stand out is to always follow up with your leads instantly if possible! Their window of time when they can potentially be open to hearing more about why they should work with you is short, and their period of interest won’t last long as they continue their search.
It’s important to be able to receive leads quickly on your phone so you can respond quickly. Paying for a service that offers instant notifications such as text message leads means leads come through to your phone and allow you to respond easily. Just because a lead text or emails, doesn’t mean you can’t call them!
The best approach could be a text, call, and email so that they have your information no matter where they look. Remember, you are building name recognition and, in time, a potential relationship with your clients. Respond quickly but don’t repeatedly send spam messages so often that you annoy and turn away your clients!
One great way to attract leads is to build SEO on your website by creating content that is relevant to people’s searches on Google, such as “8 great reasons to buy a home in Austin”. If someone is searching Google for “buying a home in Austin”, your article may show up as a search result.
Once prospects are on your site, make sure your contact information is prominently displayed on every page, and even include a call to action or content offer of value that potential clients can download in exchange for their contact info. An example would be “download my insider guide for getting the most for your home”.
Content offers are great lead-attractors that can help customers do their home buying research in a more well-informed manner. Also, a piece of content like a PDF is a more distraction-free form of media, so it’s a better experience for simply reading rather than browsing a full website.
Free real estate leads
There are no such thing as free leads. Any offer of free leads is spam. The most meaningful leads are the ones where you make a true connection with the contact, and they are a qualified lead, meaning they’re ready to buy or sell in the near future.
Best real estate lead generation system
Look for “scrubbed leads” where someone has verified the leads are real humans with a qualification to buy or sell a home. Also, leads you have a personal connection with such as a referral or mutual friend are highly valuable because their trust in you via their connection to you will more likely lead to becoming a client rather than a random website form submission lead without a working phone number and don’t offer the opportunity for instant response.
In summary, leads can come from sources like:
Advertising – lead capture digital ads that point back to your listings contact form or your website contact form.
Listing portals like Zillow, realtor.com
Friends and family
Referrals
Content offers – offered on your website portraying you as the expert; offering value to their home search
Networking
Connecting with other agents
Direct marketing to your niche
Open houses – potential buyers that go to an open house might be interested in another property you’re selling
Door to door farming of your target neighborhood
Buyer Leads vs. Seller Leads
Generally speaking, when you first start as an agent, you’ll have your friends or family ask you to find them a house! This is great because you’ll build experience getting to know your clients, listening to their wants, needs, desires for what they’re looking for in their next home, and using your local market knowledge to find some viable home choices for which to show them.
Largely, you’ll be assisting with customer service – making sure your buyers are happy with your service and making them feel like they’re important and that you’re finding homes for them that fit the bill.
On the other hand, seller leads mean that you’ll be listing the home. You’ll be not only marketing that home, but you and your seller will have the common interest of selling the home for top dollar as quickly as possible so you can move towards your commission faster. It’s a partnership.
You might wonder which type of leads are more valuable. For one, homes typically only stay on the market for 3 weeks, while most buyers wait on average 10 weeks to close on a new home. So your commission from seller leads will come faster than buyer leads.
Seller leads will also be more challenging to convert into customers. You’ll need to build deep trust and earn the listing by winning over the seller with your expertise. This is why a listing presentation is such a critical tool in converting your seller leads.
Let them know the benefits of the sale of their home. You’re looking for the motivated seller.
Your best way to convert a lead into a sale is to simply offer them the best solution to whatever problem they’re facing.
The problem with buyer leads is that it can be challenging to decipher how serious or far along in the process a buyer lead is. Buyers that are relocating due to work have much more at stake for example than two newlyweds taking their time to move out of a rental into their first home.
Filtering these leads and understanding who’s serious and who’s not will be part of your job. Of course, you don’t want to spend too much time or effort trying to sway somebody that’s not ready to buy. That’s why sheer lead volume is important because if a certain percentage of leads are “ready”, the more leads you have the larger number of ready buyers you’ll get the chance to earn a commission from.
Read this article for more creative ways to earn listings.
CRM
CRMs for real estate agents
One thing you will need is to keep tabs on is all your leads. Having a place you can store contacts, keep up with communications, reminders, and customer information all in one place is super important to stay organized. Staying in touch with all your prospects is important for you to stay top of mind. A CRM, or client relationship management software, gives you a database to add all your leads into and create contact lists that you can use for different marketing campaigns. For example, you can have a list for ready to buy, or a list of friends not necessarily looking right now. Or you can create emails for first-time home buyers.
You can segment your lists in the CRM how best you like. You can also have a record of what emails you sent to a particular lead, or even find out if they opened it or not!
CRMs provide order for the chaos of your real estate business. It provides you a system to manage lead nurturing, lead generation, and lead conversion. Ideally, a CRM saves you time, closes more deals, and helps you keep on top of your clients’ needs.
A good CRM should also allow you to follow up with prospects quickly and customize email campaigns for leads that ll out a form on your website. Another thing you can do is re-engage with past clients or leads that went cold to keep dripping their email inbox over time. They may have not materialized into buyers yet, but if you stay in touch when they’re ready to buy or sell you will remain top of mind.
Here's some of the most popular CRMs to choose from:
Hubspot CRM
Includes contact management, email templates, meeting schedule. Option to add full-service marketing and sales tools.
Zillow Premier Agent CRM
See your clients’ Zillow search activity, free mobile app to respond to leads.
Freshsales
Straightforward interface offers lead scoring. Offers a free forever plan.
Contactually
Brought to you by Compass. Features include lead qualification process facilitation, automated lead campaigns, and referrals feature that helps you get referrals from past clients.
Property Base
Property Base is a complete integrated marketing platform for real estate agents. You can do many things including managing your listings, task management, and more. You can also create and build your real estate website using their web design tools that connect directly with the CRM features. Pretty handy!
Wise Agent
Custom-tailored CRM for real estate agents. Features include automation, time scheduling