Real estate marketing ideas are constantly evolving and staying informed isn’ t easy. As a real estate professional, no one really shows you how to market your real estate business successfully. Typically, you learn from your mistakes until you find a system that works for you. Or until you run out of ideas.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
So if you’re ready to roll up your sleeves, let’s dive into our comprehensive list of real estate marketing ideas!
First Step – Creating A Real Estate Marketing Budget
A marketing budget will help you plan your resources more effectively. Your budget should be as detailed as possible. Include daily/weekly/monthly projections for expenses, and research your options thoroughly.
Keep in mind that a marketing budget isn’t written in stone. Adjustments throughout the year will be necessary, but at least you’ll have clear objectives to work towards, and metrics to assess your progress.
Things You Need For Your Real Estate Marketing Kit
Before you start spending on ads, yard signage, or fancy business cards, make sure your marketing toolkit is stocked with these essentials:
- Professional Headshot – Clear, bright, and high resolution. Get a few angles and use a local designer to extract the transparent version and save them as separate files so that you can use them later.
- Facebook Business Page – Most of your prospects are on Facebook, multiple times a day, so you should too. The right branding on your business page can help you connect with influencers, brands, industry professionals, like-minded agents, and, of course, prospects!
- IDX-Integrated Website – An absolute must for any real estate professional is to have a good looking IDX website featuring all the listings in your local area. It’s also a great tool to present to your clients under your own branding.
- Neighborhood Blog – If you haven’t started your own real estate blog, what are you waiting on? A blog can increase monthly traffic to your website as much as 4x! Digital home shoppers who find your posts can become subscribers, and valuable referral sources!
- Real Estate CRM – To store and manage all of your contacts in one convenient database, you’ll need a robust CRM. There are many CRM brands that specialize in real estate, but any relationship-management software that suits your budget will also do.
Real Estate Marketing Ideas To Grow Your Brand
Target your farm area to generate quicker results with your branding. Identify the streets you want to work. You can dominate your farm or subdivision simply by focusing on a small geographic area. Don’t go too big when selecting your area if you are a beginner.
Get out into your farm and walk around on foot every day. Even if it’s your lunch hour, get out of the office and meet the people in the area you want to serve.
- Mail out a calendar to local residents (renters) or everyone in your CRM. Drop off the calendars in person with the property manager.
- Provide a free shopping bag with your branding.
- Send branded postcards to all the local business owners introducing yourself.
- Print branded pens/pencils to give prospects. Create colorful ones for prospects with children.
- Create neighborhood T-shirts and offer them for free (ie I love Parkdale!)
- Go door-to-door and offer free, branded, seasonal apparel (umbrella for spring, scarf in fall, shades in summer)
- Put in a lot of effort with your own open houses
Offline Marketing Ideas For Hyperlocal Real Estate Agents
Getting out and being seen in your farm or target neighborhood is one of the fastest ways to build brand recognition. By targeting a select geographic area, you’ll be much more productive with your time and resources.
If you consider yourself a community-minded agent, or a neighborhood specialist, your daily face-to-face interactions can be spontaneous and fun.
Consider some of these ideas for marketing yourself to local homeowners and residents:
- Sponsor a local youth recreational team.
- Host a ‘Meet Your Neighbor’ event at a popular local venue.
- Offer local homeowners a free ‘Garage Sale’ sign in Spring.
- Volunteer for a local community group. Choose a role that suits your availability and be wary of overcommitting.
- Mail a thank-you card to every client or prospect you meet with. Again, it’s a reminder of your name and face. Recognition builds awareness and trust.
- Prepare a loot bag for new homeowners you have worked with as a gift. Fill it with useful household items such as light bulbs, kitchen towels, and a branded coffee mug for him and her!
- Start a ‘Random Acts of Kindness Day’ in your farm or neighborhood. Hand out single stem roses to 20 strangers, or buy coffee for someone next in line. Ask them to pay it forward. Take a photo and write about it on your blog!
Contest Ideas & Offers for Real Estate Agents
Everyone wants to be a winner. Helping local residents save on their needs is a great way to attract prospects to your website or blog.
Seek strategic partnerships with local business owners and create promotions prospects will value. Review your social media feeds to find out what matters to your target audience.
Consider some of the ideas below and use them as a launch pad for your own contests:
- Host a raffle for local homeowners to receive a free home valuation.
- Partner with a stager and as many local home furnishing stores as you can find. Host a raffle for a free home makeover.
- Offer weekly discount coupons from local businesses. Make them exclusively available through your monthly newsletter.
- Find a local contractor. Partner with them and offer a 50% discount on the installation of a deck, fence, or patio, along with a free home valuation.
- Partner with a local air duct cleaning service and host a raffle giveaway through the local HOA. Offer homeowners a coupon for a free cleaning.
- Host a weekly movie club at your local library or community center during the summer holidays. Many families will be seeking inexpensive extra-curricular activities for their children during the summer months! And make sure everyone who attends receives a free branded gift.
- Use Facebook Live to host an interview with a local business owner. Offer a discount coupon from the business as an incentive to anyone who logs in to view the interview.
Educational Marketing Ideas For Real Estate Agents
Homeowners spend weeks researching online before they select their real estate agent. It’s important that you set yourself apart by reaching out to your audience and providing valuable content that helps them in their home buying or selling journey. Education content also helps generate trust and establishes you as an authority in your local area. Here are some ideas:
- Start a real estate blog and build subscribers. Aim for 2000 if you want to build a steady flow of referral business. Write a lengthy weekly article focused on local stories of interest to homeowners and prospective buyers/sellers.
- Become a featured contributor to a popular local blog.
- Offer visitors to your blog a free first-time homebuyer’s E-guide. Create a landing page to capture contact information in exchange for the e-guide and add the contacts to your CRM. Lead magnets help you build your database
- Publish a 50-page, branded handbook for FSBO’s. Make it available either for free as a lead magnet or at a discounted rate. Include your own strategy for selling a home and your contact information.
- Host an informative 1-hour webinar for residents of a local apartment building. Target curious renters considering a home purchase in the near future. Provide them with answers to questions about homeownership. At the end of the webinar, include a questionnaire to qualify the interest level of prospects before you add them to your CRM.
- Start a YouTube channel and interview local business owners each week/month. Showcase their business, product or expertise in an informative, short video. Remember to share it on all your social media.
- Write a case study outlining how you helped a client overcome a crucial challenge in the homeownership process.
Bonus Tip: Launch Your Real Estate Podcast
Launch a real estate podcast to keep local residents informed of market trends. Podcasts are growing in popularity and largely appeal to educated, affluent millennial consumers. A podcast offers subscribers to your blog a hands-free alternative to reading your articles while they travel. You can also feature other agents, local personalities, etc, to expand your sphere of influence.
Real Estate Social Media Marketing Ideas
Social media is a great tool for extending your sphere of influence. Here are what we consider to be the most essential social networks for agents:
- Facebook Ads- Most of your new customers will discover you via Facebook Ads targeting homeowners in your area.
- Instagram – Users are highly engaged on Instagram, second only behind Facebook. Insta-stories is a great feature for posting short videos from your smartphone.
- Twitter – Send out important business updates, press releases, and connect with local media on Twitter.
- LinkedIn: A great resource for finding other industry professionals. You can also generate referral business on LinkedIn with the right strategy. We created a comprehensive guide for any agent looking to get started with LinkedIn marketing.
- Pinterest – Store, discover and share a vast library of unique images for your blog and social media posts. You’ll also find stagers and real estate photographers showcasing their work.
- Youtube: Owned by Google, Youtube is a popular discovery tool. Locals seeking informative how-to videos and real estate advice could become your loyal subscribers.
Marketing Ideas To Attract Local Listings
Getting people to list with you isn’t easy when you’re new. Lead generation is costly, especially in competitive markets.
Instead of competing for leads with more established brands and agents, focus your marketing on targeted segments.
If you’re willing to pound the pavement locally, you’ll also uncover listings a lot sooner for less:
- Target FSBO’s with an online video explaining the Do’s and Dont’s of selling a home without an agent. Create a landing page that offers your free FSBO handbook in exchange for their contact information. Many FSBO’s fail to sell their home, so your chances of winning their business are fairly high.
- Find expired listings on your MLS. Create a cold calling script and book a listing appointment. Impress them with a free CMA report that is branded and comprehensive.
- Go door-to-door in your farm and invite homeowners to a Sellers’ Q&A. Give everyone you speak with a branded item such as a novel keychain. Even if attendance is poor, your item of value will remain as a reminder of your brand.
- Visit every open house in your farm. Network with as many new people as possible.
- Create a retargeting campaign that markets strategic offers to online visitors based on their buying signals.
- Launch a 3-month Facebook Lead Ad campaign targeted to first-time buyers. Partner with a lender to offer every new subscriber an appointment to determine their approval rating.
- Partner with another like-minded agent and interview local business owners. Promote the interview as a blog article or video on all your social media. Offer each business owner you promote a bonus for each referral that leads to a listing appointment.
SEO Related Real Estate Marketing Strategies
A key part of any successful real estate marketing campaign is to have an effective SEO strategy.
Here are some basic SEO tips to maximize your online visibility:
- Register in multiple online directories. Anyone searching locally for an agent by mobile or laptop will find you in the search results.
- Create a Google Plus profile. Google uses this information to authenticate your business, which improves your SEO.
- Include a physical address with map directions on your website. This will improve your SEO and raise your visibility in search results.
- Research hyperlocal keywords buyers and sellers may use to search for a home or neighborhood online. By using the right keywords in your blog articles, images, and website, you’ll make it easier for prospects to find you online.
- Launch a Parkbench website for your neighborhood. Parkbench helps over 1000 agents across North America generate qualified referrals in their geographic farm.
- Encourage Yelp reviews as you grow. Businesses with reviews are ranked above those that don’t in search results.
- Hire a backlink service to build backlinks for you. Backlinks are still the key to building authority and visibility with search engines. With more backlinks, your marketing efforts will be even more effective.
Advertising Ideas For Real Estate
Finding listings is one of your top priorities as a new agent, but beware of spending on lead generation. The cost of lead generation and advertising can quickly soar, while your conversion plummets.
Strong brand recognition and a loyal following will make your advertising much more effective and strategic. Don’t use advertising as a method of lead generation. Instead, think of it as part of your marketing strategy to build brand awareness.
Once you have subscribers in place and a local sphere of influence, you can invest in more aggressive advertising.
- Create a Facebook messenger bot to engage and qualify visitors to your website or blog. You’ll save valuable time and gain deeper insight into user behavior and intent.
- Implement a retargeting ad campaign on your blog or website. Retargeting is an essential element for your real estate marketing strategy
- Launch PPC campaigns (Google Adwords & Facebook Ads) to promote your open house.
- Create a compelling landing page with a strong call-to-action to drive registration for your open house.
- Become a Zillow Premier Agent.
- Advertise your listings on Trulia.
- Collaborate with local professionals for your real estate marketing campaigns
Real Estate Video Marketing Ideas
Online video consumption is growing at a rapid pace. Consumers are hungry for video content, and that includes digital home shoppers. Whether you focus on buyers or sellers, you can create low-cost video content with your smartphone that attracts your target audience. Implementing videos as a part of your real estate marketing strategy is essential. Here are some tips:
- Create a video tour of your entire neighborhood or farm.
- Host a Facebook Live Event each week for your neighborhood.
- Use 3D Virtual Technology to enhance your online listings.
- Submit a press release to promote your Youtube channel or podcast.
- Upload a transcript of your Youtube videos. This will make it easier for prospects to find your content with keywords.
- Use Google Trends to identify topics of interest on Youtube. Find out which search terms are popular with your target audience.
- Include an end screen at the end of your Youtube video to direct viewers to other content you are promoting.
- Buy the right video equipment to create stunning videos for your real estate marketing campaigns
Content Marketing Ideas For Your Real Estate Business
Content marketing is a cost-effective alternative to paid advertising. Branded content that you create belongs to you forever.
Take the time to invest in quality content. Research your competitors and go the extra mile to offer more value to prospects searching online.
Once you publish it on the internet, your content will drive interest and traffic to your website for years to come.
- Create a bi-weekly or monthly newsletter for your farm area. Do not talk just about real estate. Share local news and events.
- Publish blog articles weekly.
- Share blog articles and posts from industry thought-leaders and local influencers regularly.
- Create and share your own real estate infographics.
- Hire a writer to write SEO-friendly, long-form blog posts about neighborhood and real estate topics.
- Write detailed reviews of the businesses in your farm and feature them on your blog or website.
- Attract opt-in subscribers to your blog by offering a free home valuation with their subscription.
Conclusion
Marketing your real estate business won’t be easy when you first get started. There are so many services promising outstanding results, but not all of them will be effective for you.
Don’t leave the success of your real estate career to chance or blind luck. Research your marketing options thoroughly and create a budget with goals to guide you.
Experiment and measure the results of different marketing strategies to ensure you maximize your efforts.
Employ some or all of these real estate marketing ideas early in your real estate career and your business will grow steadily.