Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Real estate, like any other business, works best when you can generate great leads. Marketing yourself as a real estate professional is a full-time job in and of itself, and the results are clear: good marketers generate lots of good leads, and that often translates to plenty of conversions into clients. This simple equation means that lead generation is a major factor in your success as a realtor, and real estate professionals have always spent lots of time and energy fine-tuning their lead generation process.
Today, much of that process has moved to online spaces. Thanks to the ever-increasing speed of wireless internet and how widespread the use of mobile devices has become since the invention of the smartphone, we’re all increasingly interconnected online. We connect with friends over social media, conduct business over Zoom and email – we even do our banking online. This is why, as a realtor, you need to have your own online presence to market yourself. Here are some great real estate website tips to help you generate more leads.
Since so many of us now live our lives online to such a huge degree, it’s only natural that people who are looking to buy and sell property also use the internet to do so. In fact, the National Association of Realtors says that a staggering 97 percent of people use the internet to conduct house searches. A website is an ideal place for agents to educate clients and provide valuable resources. At that rate, if you don’t have at least some sort of online presence, you’re severely limiting your ability to reach potential clients.
In other words, having your own real estate website offers you nearly limitless opportunities to increase your visibility and nurture leads. However, having an online presence isn’t enough – you also need to make sure that presence is a strong one, that it’s designed to attract leads, and that you’ve got a pipeline set up to convert those leads. Let’s get into exactly what you should do to ensure your real estate website does what it’s supposed to do.
The real estate industry is highly competitive. There are only so many buyers and sellers to go around, and there are a lot more agents than there are potential clients. You need to differentiate yourself from the competition, and a real estate website with a solid landing page helps you do just that by providing personalized content that adds value to your reader.
Developing a rapport between you and anyone who visits your real estate website showcases your professionalism, your expertise, and your value as a realtor. Providing readers with detailed information on the process of buying or selling a home, having tools available like mortgage calculators, and showcasing the resources available to the community you specialize in will all help establish a connection with site visitors while also offering them added value in the resources you provide them. This raises the likelihood that prospective clients will want to work with you.
The business of real estate is all about buying and selling homes. A realtor that has their own real estate website can and should use that site to showcase properties they’re looking to sell, and they can do so in ways that a generic MLS website simply can’t. The idea is to add value to a visitor’s home search by providing them with information that they can’t get anywhere else.
There are dozens of ways you can accomplish this. Hosting virtual open houses over streaming video, recording house and neighborhood tours to highlight important or noteworthy aspects of both, interacting directly with interested home buyers by answering questions about a certain property – all of this can be accomplished easily through your real estate website. And since this content is all personalized and interactive, your website will be the only place where visitors can find it.
Let’s address the elephant in the room: just about everyone is on social media today. If you don’t have a strong social media presence yourself, it won’t matter how great your real estate website is, as nobody will know it’s there. This is why integrating your website into your social media presence is one of the best ways to improve your reach.
Think of social media as an integral component of your real estate website. Always share content from your website on relevant platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It improves your reach, prevents visitors from bouncing away once they do arrive, and gets more eyes on your expertly crafted content. And what does all of this do for you? Increases your chances of not just generating quality leads but also converting those leads into clients.
If all of this sounds overwhelming to you – don’t worry. A real estate professional has to wear a lot of hats in order to be successful, but you don’t have to start teaching yourself web development from scratch. If you want the best real estate website you can have with great content that’s sure to attract leads, you’re going to need some expert help. That’s why outsourcing your web design to a trusted source is always in your best interests.
This does, of course, involve investment. Good websites don’t come cheap, and it takes time, energy, and money to generate great content to put on a good website. Yet if you do everything right, a good real estate website that brings in great leads will easily pay for itself and then some. So if you’re ready to step up your game and start attracting better leads in larger quantities, get your own real estate website up and running!
