Despite the many articles and videos about generating real estate leads online, most realtors continue to use inefficient lead generation methods such as door knocking.
Real estate can be a volatile industry with feast or famine periods. If you want to be successful, you need to be able to fill your pipeline during the good times to carry you through the lean times.
First, what are qualified leads in real estate?
As a real estate agent, your goal is to find new clients who are ready to buy or sell their home in the next 60 days.
A qualified real estate lead is a person who is interested in buying or selling a property.
An unqualified lead is the contact information of a person who is considering buying or selling a home sometime in the future, but with no definitive plans. A qualified lead is the contact information of a person who is actively looking to purchase their new home, or ready to list their home for sale in the next 60 days.
The text is saying that realtors should focus on getting leads from people who are ready to buy or sell property, and who have the financial ability to do so. Unqualified leads may mean well, but they can end up wasting the realtor’s time with their lack of commitment.
Here are some tips on how to get leads from qualified real estate agents who are looking for the best agent to help them.
1. Use Facebook lead generation ads + captivating creatives
Facebook lead generation ads are just like regular ads that show up in your target’s timeline, but with an easy-to-fill form that users can fill out without leaving the platform. Based on various studies, the fewer steps people have to complete to enjoy your offer, the better.
Here’s how to generate real estate leads with lead gen ads on Facebook:
Use captivating content
Your content should be able to make people stop what they’re doing. This example from the Corcoran group uses short, persuasive copy and a direct CTA to accomplish this.
2. Create video testimonials for social proof
Most people say that reviews have an influence on their purchasing decisions, whether they are positive or negative.
The following text is about how video testimonials can help increase a company’s credibility and business. Random customers talking about a company are more effective in than the company promoting itself. Two out of three people say they’re more likely to make a purchase after watching a testimonial video.
Although you should be more strategic with how you use video testimonials, adding them to your website homepage can make your brand more personable and attractive to potential leads. For increased lead generation, share your video testimonials on social media.
Here’s a step by step process to do that:
1. In order to get testimonials from past customers, have a system in place. If you wait too long to ask (e.g. a month), the customer may be less inclined to provide a testimonial, since they would have already settled into their new home.
If you want to incentivize clients to create video testimonials about your brand, you could offer them a closing gift. Alternatively, you could have your team interview clients about their home buying or selling experience.
Video testimonials can help improve people’s perception of your brand, making it easier to convert people who are undecided about your brand into new leads and prospects.
3. Build your reputation by becoming a thought leader
As a real estate agent who has been in the business for a while, you have likely developed opinions on a wide variety of topics that are related to the field. For example, you may have thoughts on price increases, buyers’ markets, appraisals, local issues, and locations. After all, you are often the one who clients come to with questions about these topics.
Use the knowledge you have to build credibility and become respected in your market.
How do you do this?
If you want to quickly and easily create valuable content for your real estate website, look for ways to repurpose your answers to common questions. For example, if you notice that your current clients often ask similar questions, turn those questions into blog posts. Then, make sure to optimize each article for search engines by including essential keywords.
If you want people to take action after reading your article, make sure to include a call to action in the middle and at the end of the piece. A Leadpages pop-up can make this easy.
4. Launch a referral campaign
Referral campaigns are a way for companies to incentivize past customers to refer their friends and colleagues. Referral marketing is a strategy used by many large brands in different industries, such as AirBnB, PayPal, and Masterclass. Your company could benefit from adopting this practice.
To attract leads through referral marketing, you’ll need to:
- Offer an attractive gift to any of your former customers who give you a referral, e.g., gift cards, a welcome home gift, etc.
- Promote your referral program via your email signature, email newsletter, social media post, word of mouth. If people don’t know a referral program exists, they won’t participate.
- Remind customers about your referral program in your happy birthday emails, anniversary emails, and other emails to past clients.
- Opt for a referral marketing solution if you want to bring more organization to your referral campaigns. Here is a big list of referral marketing software to select from.
5. Start a blog and attract SEO traffic
One of the best ways to increase the amount of traffic your website gets is by ensuring that it shows up in the search engines. A blog that is well-written and optimized will rank highly on Google, which will in turn result in more people visiting your site. According to many sources, blogging is responsible for significantly more indexed pages and links than sites that don’t have blogs. In addition, blogs on company websites result in significantly more visitors than sites without blogs.
There are many ways to gain high quality leads through blogging, but it’s not as easy as it seems. The first problem is creating blogs that actually drive traffic. The second problem is capturing leads through your blog posts.
To bring traffic to a blog, it is necessary to understand or have someone knowledgeable about SEO.
6. Create blog posts with a hyper-local focus
You should create content that is strong, evergreen, and beneficial to incoming residents. This will help prospective clients learn about your service area and show that you have a wealth of local knowledge. Additionally, by taking an active interest in your community, you will further demonstrate your commitment to outstanding service.
When discussing the key highlights of certain neighborhoods with prospective clients, realtors should mention local amenities such as schools, work options, and public transportation, as well as recreation opportunities and the area’s pub and restaurant culture. Walkability is also an important consideration, and even something as simple as updating zoning can be persuasive to potential buyers.
7. Create beautiful contact forms
If you want to generate more leads, you should create a website for your real estate business. However, the people who visit your website may not be ready to work with you. Contact forms can help you identify qualified leads. For more real estate marketing tools, check out this list.
By having a few key questions on each contact form, you’ll be able to separate the motivated leads from the tire-kickers. A good contact form serves the purpose of helping you qualify visitors by having a few key questions on each contact form. You want to have beautiful and snackable contact forms on your property pages so you can separate the motivated leads from the tire-kickers.
If someone is interested in a property, they should be able to easily fill out their contact information. There should also be a form on the homepage or real estate landing page that allows visitors to tell the company what they are looking for in a home. That way, when there are listings that fit those criteria, the company can follow up with the leads. The Contact form 7 plugin allows users to create forms on WordPress websites that integrate with Getresponse, making it easy to follow up with leads.
8. Find a niche and cater to it
Realtors who want to be successful should innovate and break through the barriers and clutter.
If you want to get ahead as a real estate agent, you need to take risks to get new leads and stand out from the competition. Seasoned agents may be able to get by without taking risks, but if you’re new to the field, you need to be willing to take some chances.
So, consider your local market and the makeup of the current and incoming population:
- What fraction of the population are buyers?
- What fraction of those are couples without children?
- How many with children?
- How often do they move?
- What percentage moves to another location in your service area?
- How many move outside your service area?
Find your main interest and create a label based on that.
While all realtors may want to help as many buyers and sellers as possible, it is often wiser to specialize in a certain area. This way, you can set yourself apart from the competition.
If you want to control a certain sector of the market, you have to make sure you are appealing to that sector and make it more likely that they will buy from you in the future.
Your digital presence should match your sector’s pain points and desired solutions once you have established your brand.
9. Speak at conferences, meetups and events.
As your real estate business grows, you may start getting requests to speak at events. Even though speaking at conferences and meetups is a bit of a different kettle of fish in this post-pandemic period, it’s a great way to improve your personal brand and image.
You should only accept invitations to speak at events and conferences where your target audience is present. This way, you will be able to deliver value to them and also win new leads.
Due to the current pandemic, many events that would typically take place in person are now being held online. If you’re looking to take advantage of this, one option is to organize an online event or webinar. You can generate leads for this by requiring registration in order to attend. To make your event more successful, try partnering with someone who is an expert in your field or in the real estate industry. You can also create buzz around your event by having people share it on their social media platforms.
10. Send out personalized ‘thank you’ postcards
Handwritten thank you cards can make a good impression on people, especially new clients and clients who have just closed on a deal. You can even send cards to warm leads.
Thanks.io is a service that allows you to send thank you postcards for as little as $0.49/card.
11. Do circle prospecting plus automated follow-ups
The difference between cold calling and circle prospecting is that cold calling is reaching out to people regardless of whether they are interested or not, while circle prospecting is only reaching out to people who might be interested because they live in the area.
Did you know that your neighbors at 110 Smith road just listed their home for sale? This is much more personalized than saying “We have clients that are looking for homes in your area” or “this is John from ABC real estate”.
How to Circle Prospect There are a few ways to go about circle prospecting. You can drive around your target neighborhood and look for For Sale By Owner (FSBO) signs. You can also look up recent home sales in the area on your city or county website, then look up the addresses of those homes on Google Maps. If the homes are close together, they likely fall within the same school district, which is a good indicator that they would be good prospects for your services. Circle prospecting is a process of finding leads by identifying homes that have recently been sold or are for sale in a specific area. This is done by looking for For Sale By Owner (FSBO) signs or by looking up recent home sales on a city or county website. The homes that are located close together are likely to fall within the same school district, which makes them good prospects for your services.
There are various tools available that can automate your process, such as RedX Geo Leads and power dialer, or Slydial broadcast for voicemail. Another option is to run Facebook or Google ads to capture emails in a particular zip code, and then run a drip email sequence with Getresponse.
You should have a plan for following up with prospects so that you have more than 3 opportunities to make an impression. Providing valuable content in your follow-ups, like a newsletter on saving money on closing costs, can show that you are worth their time.
If you have the money to spare, a multi-channel marketing strategy is the way to go. The most successful type of prospecting uses a combination of direct mail, emailing, and cold calls. You can also use retargeted ads on Facebook to up your touch points and increase the number of leads you get.
12. Run Google Ads directly to listing pages
If you want to get more people who are ready to buy to come straight to your listing pages, try running targeted Google Ads campaigns where the ads include the address and neighborhood of the home. Link the ad directly to your listing page.
If you do this, you will only have to pay for advertising clicks that go to your landing page. Also, put a link on the landing page that allows people to call you, and consider those clicks part of your campaign’s conversions.
To ensure your Google Ads are reaching the people most likely to use your products or services, target your ads to a specific city or zip code level. This way, you can be sure that your ads are being seen by the people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
13. Skim traffic from your competing realtors with Google Ads
You can get high quality leads at a very low cost by using Google Ads to bid on your biggest competitor’s names.
Start by finding the top real estate agents who are doing a lot of marketing online and offline. These are the people who are most likely to show up when you do a search online. Use that to your advantage by bidding on their name as a keyword. This is a common strategy for companies who are in a competitive industry.
Make sure your ads focus on you and how you can help your clients, not on bad-mouthing your competition.
14. Become a source of local real estate investing advice
Some real estate investors are always on the lookout for new real estate agents to either partner with or ask for advice. If you establish yourself as a reliable source of useful information, you’ll be able to attract these investors both online and offline. For example, you can connect with potential investors on websites like Reddit, the Biggerpockets forum, and Quora. You can also attend local real estate investing events and seminars to meet investors in your area. Additionally, you can advertise investment opportunities to past clients who might be interested in making money through real estate investing.
A good way to attract professionals – investors, builders, mortgage professionals, and real estate seller leads – is to position yourself as a source of factual local market information.
An example of how Manausa real estate has built a strong market presence is by being an authoritative source of local Tallahassee market information.
