8 Ridiculously Simple Ways to Improve Your Real Estate Marketing Skills
It’s time to upgrade your marketing skills. You’ve done the standard marketing to generate leads and sales, but everyone does that. As an agent in the real estate industry, you’re basically a small business owner. You cannot do the bare minimum and wait for business to come to you. Constant prospecting is required to generate new leads and close sales. These real estate promotional ideas don’t require much money; just time, thought, and creativity.
- Get to Know Your Target Audience
You may have done a little of this in the beginning, but to improve you need to really explore your target audience. Your marketing strategies should be tailored to each group you market to, so you need to gather as much information about them as possible. Marketers often create consumer profiles of likely customers that includes information such as income, geographic areas, cultural cliques, age groups, and lifestyles. Then they design marketing strategies targeted to these specific people. Identify the most likely buyers of your property and brainstorm the “lifestyle benefits” for them, which will inform your marketing materials and social media posts.
- Get to Know Your Market
Real estate is local. The art of prospecting requires putting yourself in situations where you can meet potential clients and referral sources. Make in-person networking a habit. Becoming an expert on the local area will help you attract clients and sell the community when negotiating deals. Attend local events, meetups, charity functions, and festivals and conduct homebuyer or seller seminars. Get your name and face into the local community so lots of people in the county know who you are and what you do. This grows your sphere of influence, which increases your number of potential leads and eventually serious clients and buyers.
- Blog, Blog, Blog
You love real estate, right? So, open a blank document and start writing about it. Helpful blog posts about the local real estate market, open houses, or the financing process can illustrate why people should hire you. Get into the habit of daily or weekly writing, brainstorming ideas and shaping engaging content. Draft a publishing schedule to ensure you’re consistently producing interesting content. If you only publish once in a while, people will drift away. Then promote each blog post on your social media accounts.
- Email Lists and Newsletters
Once you have a buzz-worthy blog going, you have an opportunity to build a valuable email list of consumers. Get customers’ email addresses whenever you can. Then offer free stuff like market reports, buyer and seller checklists, webinars, podcasts, infographics, and real estate newsletters. Gather some of your best blog posts and put them together with local news items, photos, and free buyer and seller guides, and you have an attractive email newsletter to offer.
- Referrals
You’ve probably seen data on how referrals is the most effective marketing technique. People trust comments from friends, family, and former customers more than an advertisement. Marketing of all kinds is so ubiquitous, we’ve become blind to most of it. A habit to establish that will improve your marketing success is working for referrals. Keep promises and deliver more than you promise. Give clients meaningful gifts to generate goodwill. When you’ve created happy clients and customers, ask for referrals.
- Stunning Visuals
Humans are highly visual creatures. Professional-looking photos and videos should be an automatic part of your marketing campaign. You want people to say “Wow!” when they look at listing photos. Attractive photos inspire prospective buyers to attend your open houses. With all the photo-sharing apps and capabilities available these days, beautiful property photos can easily create a great first impression.
- Develop Your Personal Brand
This business is about personal relationships. Your clients and customers need to trust you and have confidence in your skills. Your knowledge and experience is communicated via personal branding when you establish yourself as a local real estate expert. You’re communicating your brand identity through a variety things big and small: web site layout, your bio, your headshot, your social media posts, even the fonts and colors you use. To draw in more clients and buyers, put more thought and intention into branding elements.
- Turbo Charge Your Social Media Marketing
Everyone is always on their smartphones checking Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and all the others. Why not engage consumers where they are? If you’ve implemented the methods above – research, blogging, email and newsletter, community outreach, visuals, and branding – you should now have plenty of great content to entice followers through social media. Read these Facebook Marketing tips here. These skill improvement methods are really habits that are simply how you do business. One bonus tip for you: professional development. There's always more to learn. A fabulous idea for success is acquiring new skills. Take online real estate courses, which easily fit into your busy schedule.
