The online real estate world is highly competitive. You may find that you’re struggling to take your estate agency to the next level, despite providing a fantastic service to clients and having a wealth of experience behind you. If you’re not seeing an increase in leads, this could mean that you’re not marketing yourself effectively. Although you know that estate agent digital marketing tools are out there, you may not be sure how to get the most of the various platforms available. By revisiting how your estate agency utilises digital marketing and promoting yourself via different channels, you’re much more likely to establish yourself as a trustworthy estate agency to your desired target market.
As soon as you think you’ve nailed down your SEO strategy, search engine giants like Google go and update their algorithms. You may have previously been ranking highly for your focus keywords, but all of a sudden you’ve seen yourself drop of. If you want more people organically landing on your website and taking advantage of the services you provide, you need to be at the top of your game when it comes to estate agency SEO.
Quite often an estate agency wants to rank first for every possible keyword, but this is an unrealistic approach to SEO. Researching words and phrases that your target audience are inputting into search engines will help form the backbone of your strategy. You want to be getting the balance right between search volumes and competition, which is a tricky task in itself.
We’ve all heard the saying that ‘content is king’ and it’s what forms a strong estate agent’s digital marketing plan. Gone are the days where you stuff keywords into your content, what Google is looking for now is something that serves a user. You need to prioritise making site pages and blog posts strong enough to make sure that people are staying, reading, sharing and linking to your content. This means that you should be creating content that specifically addresses a user’s search query. Optimised content should be human focussed and not written just for search engines. It’s important that you keep reviewing your website’s content as new and more up-to-date pieces are constantly being published by other agencies.
Digital marketing for estate agents doesn’t just consist of what is being put in front of a user. Without a website that’s technically sound and stable, the content you produce will struggle with being found online. Technical SEO involves improving your estate agency website by removing or resolving any back-end errors, including duplicate content, redirects, XML sitemap, site architecture, metadata and much more. It’s vast and complex, but will be worth the results once you spend a bit of time working on your technical troubles.
Note: Getting things wrong on a technical level can have a detrimental effect on your website’s performance. Only complete the work yourself if you’re confident you’re doing the right thing. If you’re not sure, enlist the help of the SEO experts over at Property Webmasters.
These days, consumers are spending more time on their smartphones than ever before, which is why your website needs to be fully optimised to work on mobile devices. And with Google now prioritising this over desktop, it’s a critical part of your SEO strategy to get right. If clickable elements are too close together or your content goes wider than your screen, it’s likely that you’ll put your audience off.
Think about your own experiences when looking for a property online. A user’s experience on your website is make or break and you don’t have to be an expert to know whether a website serves its audience well. SEO helps to attract your website’s visitors, but the journey and the experience they have once there can’t be forgotten about. The easier it is for someone to navigate your site, the much more likely it is they’ll find exactly what they’re looking for. This also includes having clear call to actions that don’t bombard the user with information.
Any estate agent digital marketing strategy needs to look at how to attract and engage with an audience. Social media has been proven as a way to successfully generate leads, via both organic and paid methods. The opportunities are endless as there are so many platforms out there for you to market yourself and your properties. With how many people there are on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram these days, social media is a first-rate way of reaching out to your audience. Facebook is the main tool we’ve found that helps estate agents to increase leads, traffic and brand awareness.
Posting organically has its benefits, with successful strategies focussing on creating content that a user can interact with. Doing posts just for the sake of it isn’t an effective form of estate agent digital marketing. Instead, it is far better to use Facebook as a way to promote your brand and interact with your audience. Estate agents shouldn’t necessarily look as organic posting as a sales method, which is why constantly posting properties isn’t going to achieve the best results. You should be creating organic Facebook posts to develop your brand, build a community and showcase your values.
Now, this is where social media gets really interesting! Facebook allows you to create paid adverts that are designed specifically to reach your target audience, ensuring qualified leads as a result. Paid social media campaigns can generate leads, increase likes, boost engagement and drive to your website. It’s one of the most powerful tools in an estate agent’s digital marketing arsenal. This approach can be totally flexible and you can use however much budget you wish.
Adapting your estate agency’s digital marketing techniques is crucial. With email campaigns becoming more dominant than ever in the real estate industry, your estate agency needs to be taking advantage of it. Emails are able to generate a 4,400% ROI – but to achieve this, there needs to be certain things you do.
When someone subscribes to your newsletter, this is when they’re most engaged – making this the perfect opportunity for you to reach out to them. Welcome emails have a 42% higher average open rate while click throughs are also 5x more. By starting things off on the right foot, you’re much more likely to convert them further down the line.
The data you collect is an important part of your estate agency’s email campaigns. By collecting information that’s useful to yourself, you’re able to send highly targeted emails to your subscribers. This is great for providing potential customers with content and information that’s relevant to them, such as specific properties. By finding out what a subscriber is interested in, the chances of your emails being successful are increased. Based on your results, you can then refine and adapt your strategy. You can do this by running tests and measuring the quality of the leads that come through that campaign.
Not only is email marketing a great way to market your properties and services, it’s also ideal for reinforcing your brand. Custom-branded templates allow you to create emails that your subscribers will recognise instantly. By branding your emails effectively, people are less likely to see them as spam. To make sure your campaigns don’t end up in someone’s junk folder, create something that is eye catching, professional and informative.
With the property industry performing like it is, estate agent digital marketing is more critical than ever to get right. First-time buyers are leading the way and marketing towards them is helping estate agencies around the world succeed online. Estate agents quite often struggle with the same issues, which is why they often enlist the help of property professionals like Property Webmasters to help with their digital marketing while they focus on other areas.
Although estate agent digital marketing is a highly effective way of attracting and engaging with your audience, getting out there and meeting people face to face shouldn’t be overlooked. Communication is key for estate agents; if you don’t communicate with people then they will never engage with you. You may offer the best service possible, but if you don’t communicate then people will never know about what you offer. Start engaging and communicating with the local community to see how this can work perfectly hand in hand with your estate agency’s digital marketing strategy.
Look to attend events, offer sponsorship to local community organisations such as sports clubs, schools etc. This gets more exposure than you might think and it really engages with your local audience. It is also an effective way of building trust.
You’ve all heard of networking events, you’ve all been invited to networking events, but do you go? If not, why not? They are a great way of interacting with other local businesses. Networking opens doors and allows for face-to-face conversations, which is a great way to market your services to those who might not know about you.
Many agents that we speak to get so focused on advertising their properties that this is what almost all of their marketing budget goes into. But you should also focus on telling people about the services you offer, this way you are much more likely to attract customers as you are telling them what you can do for them.
Sometimes overlooked and considered a dated way to advertise your agency, for what it costs to organise and distribute a leaflet campaign then why not? If nothing else, people will know you exist. A tried and tested marketing campaign that takes things back to tried and tested marketing techniques.
As an estate agent, you are primarily a marketing company for properties, you market other peoples properties. So consider your approach when speaking to potential clients, tell them exactly how you are the best agency to market their property, what do you do differently? Let them know!
Don’t overlook the free alternative property portals, many of which are free! Don’t just focus on the mainstream portals in your country. The property market is a global marketplace now, there are people from all over the world looking for your properties so use that exposure if you can
Keep the clients that you have previously worked with informed. The easiest way to do this is to approach people you have previously worked with and given a good service. Let them know if you now offer a new service, let them know if you have a special offer… Keep that relationship going as long as you can, they will come back to you and they will let others know about you. Word of mouth is still incredibly valuable. Engage with people using things like email marketing.
Be proud of what you achieve, submit your company to local, regional and national business awards. You will gain plenty of exposure – even if you don’t win. You can engage with people leading up to the awards ceremony and ask them to vote for you if that is the format, this can become viral and if nothing else it’s fun!
You can’t scrimp on your appearance, which is why it’s essential that look as professional as you can. That includes everything from business cards to office layout! As you’re in charge of peoples’ biggest investment, you don’t want to come off as unprofessional.
