It can be difficult to come up with real estate marketing ideas that are unique, original, and remarkable on a daily basis, especially when you spend a lot of your time traveling to meet with clients and potential leads.
The best way to combat marketing fatigue is to think outside the box and identify ways to make your primary marketing channels – website, SEO, email marketing, paid advertising and social media content – stand out from the competition.
This guide is comprehensive, so we have categorized the marketing ideas. Click the links to go to the section that interests you.
Build a Rock Solid Marketing Foundation
44% of all home buyers, and 99% of millennials, use the internet when finding properties for sale. As a real estate professional, If you want to increase revenue, you need a professional website.
As home buyers search for homes, they expect quality and the REALTOR® that best fits their needs. Tools that help you stand out include:
Branded messaging and images
Responsive design
IDX integration
Blog content
Lead capture landing pages
Area pages
Your brand identity is conveyed to visitors through your website, and a responsive website ensures that your content is accessible no matter what type of device your visitors are using.
As a member of a multiple listing service (MLS), you gain the ability to use IDX to pull your listings into your website. High-quality images are key to standing out and providing prospects a clear picture of what life looks like once they purchase a home from you.
17 Outside-The-Box Real Estate Marketing Ideas
1. Publish a local market quiz on your real estate website.
BuzzFeed is known for its quizzes on a variety of topics. See if your audience is knowledgeable about things like local celebrities and historical facts. You can also create questions about broader topics like music, movies, and pop culture.
If you want to gain the confidence of your leads, you should create a quiz on the ins and outs of buying or selling a home.
2. Create awesome listings
Today, when people are making major purchases, they often do a lot of research online before making a decision. For example, when I am looking for a place to rent, I will use Google Maps to find the address, use Street View to get a feel for the area, see which businesses are within walking distance, look at home photos, and ideally take a virtual tour of the property.
The text is saying that your property listings should be easy to find and navigate, with clear descriptions and photos. It also suggests including walking distances to nearby locations and public transportation.
3. Hire a photographer
It’s very important to have beautiful photos of your properties. The time of day or angle can make a big difference. Hire a professional photographer (preferably with experience photographing homes and architecture), or if you have sophisticated equipment and are confident in your abilities, try taking the photos yourself. Just remember that this is one of those situations when it’s worth it to bring in a professional.
5. Answer buyer/seller questions on your blog
An effective way to get ideas for blog content is to identify questions your target market is asking. Two tools help you find these lists of questions:
Answer The Public
People Also Ask
Answer The Public is a free tool that generates a list of questions based on your keyword search. For example, if you type in “los angeles homes”, the questions received from this search may include:
Should I buy a los angeles home?
How much is it to buy a los angeles home?
6. Add some flavor to your real estate video marketing.
While sending an email to your contacts wishing them a happy holiday likely won’t have the same lead nurturing effect as blog posts and promotional email messages, getting in the spirit for widely celebrated local or national events can humanize your brand.
The team at Modern Life Realty took a typical video marketing technique and turned it around by speaking to the camera with something the featured gentleman is wearing. Meanwhile, the team at ERA Justin Realty jumped on the “Call Me Maybe” bandwagon (which has been abandoned for a while now) and took advantage of its 15 minutes of fame.
4. Create lead magnets
To generate leads, offer something of value to your audience in exchange for their contact information. For example, you could create a guide called “X Common Mistakes New Homeowners Make” or “X Features to Look For in a New Home.” Offering free ebooks in exchange for an email address (and zip code, in the case of real estate) is a great way to capture high-quality leads.
7. Focus on user experience
If your website is difficult to navigate, all the great property pages in the world won’t be of much use. Make sure your visitors have a good experience on your website by brushing up on your user experience design skills and information architecture.
8. Do your SEO
A website that no one can find is not doing you any good! This includes:
On-page SEO: Including the keywords you’re targeting for each page in that page’s title, meta data, image file names and alt text, and naturally in the body text.
Off-page SEO: Getting other sites with high domain authority to link to yours. This SEO audit checklist will help with this and your on-page SEO.
Here are some ideas on how you can use social media to market your real estate business.
9. Set yourself up for social
The three most popular social media platforms for real estate marketing are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You should make sure you fill out every field available on your accounts so that you can be found by relevant users.
10. Use the right hashtags
, and can also be used to measure any engagement with your posts. Use our guide to hashtags to come up with a mix of hashtags that are relevant to your audience and will help you get found by the right people. You can also use hashtags to measure engagement with your posts.
Local hashtags: #[city]realestate #[city]realtor #[city]realestatebroker #[city]living #[city]homes #thingstodoin[city]
Social media affords real estate businesses many opportunities to build an audience, engage with followers, and strengthen relationships. Here are just a few real estate social media marketing ideas:
Use YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram live to do home tours and Q&A sessions.
Provide bite-sized real estate tips
Share news relevant to your community and niche.
Post your new listings, of course.
Join relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups
12. Add social share buttons to property pages
Home shoppers want to share the photos of the houses they like with their friends and family, so you should make it easy for them to email and share properties online by adding social sharing buttons.
13. Run social ads
If you’re looking to land new clients, investing in paid Facebook ads is the way to go. Although the organic reach potential is lower than other platforms, the targeting capabilities for paid ads is unrivaled. You can get very specific with who you want to target, such as single thirty-somethings who work from home and own a pet, or LGBTQ couples looking to buy a condo. Use our real estate Instagram ad examples and real estate Facebook ad examples as inspiration.
14. Develop a blog post or video series highlighting great area restaurants and entertainment.
Although property prices, size, style and features are the main considerations for modern home buyers, living in a community with plenty of food and leisure facilities is also becoming increasingly important.
There are a lot of websites that offer reviews and details about movie theaters and restaurants, but it can be hard to find the right information. That’s where you, the all-knowing real estate agent, comes in.
If you want to attract homebuyers to your market, create a series of blog posts or videos showcasing the best restaurants and businesses in the area. Highlight what makes these places special and why they would be appealing to potential buyers.
Think of your favorite places to see a play or go out to eat with friends and share your opinions on why you love those places.
15. Order unique business cards that stand out.
Your business card is one of the first impressions potential customers will have of your business. Make sure it is memorable by using an interesting design or by adding a special touch.
Get some business cards that will make people take notice. For example, these eye-catching cards featured on ViralNova.
Look for a business card creation service that offers to develop different versions of the card, like the one above. This will help people remember you after the conversation ends. Marketing for real estate agents is becoming more competitive, so focusing on small details like this can help you stand out.
16. Incorporate your pet into some of your real estate listing photos.
Not every home buyer wants to see pictures of animals on a real estate website, but some people might find it appealing.
You could use a picture of your own dog, or a dog belonging to a friend or family member, in your listing photographs. (If you manage to get the dog to sit in a relaxed pose like the one in the Curbed article, you could start a side business as a dog whisperer.)
17. Use Instagram Stories
The best way to build your brand on Instagram (and any other social media platform) is to get really good at getting your followers to engage with you. Instagram Stories give you a way to create engagement and get your brand known in the process.
You can use Instagram Stories to run a giveaway or contest. Get followers to take screenshots as they listen in to your IG Live segment and direct message you those images. Choose a winner and give them something fun or helpful (a free book about qualifying for a loan, for example).
Use the above method to share content across your social media channels. For example, share a live video on Facebook and then share it on Twitter to get followers from both platforms to discover you on Instagram.
