As a realtor, before you can help any new client buy or sell a home, you must first sell yourself and your expertise. To do that, you have to stay top-of-mind for potential leads and grow your network by constantly marketing yourself. In today's ever-more digital world, you can automate most of your marketing, which frees you up to service existing clients and follow up with new leads. We'll cover a few areas that hold great potential to reach your audience, and feature automation tools that help deliver your marketing communications to prospective clients throughout the sales process.
Review Your Digital Presence
Your digital or online presence is as important as any physical office anymore. In fact, most new customers will likely find you online through a search. To start reviewing your digital presence, you'll want to take a fresh look at how your business is presented online. Where is your contact information listed? Is it up-to-date? It's worth the time to check anywhere that your contact information is listed, from websites to social media pages and Google listings.
Automate Your Email Marketing
Along with an established digital presence, email marketing is a must-have capability in your marketing plan. And if you're using the right email marketing platform, you can easily automate it, so you're not constantly sending emails manually. Personal email won't work for marketing because you can't automate it, limiting how many emails you can send at once. An email marketing platform also ensures you honor laws that stipulate that you must honor a recipient's "opt-out" request within 10 business days, thus protecting you from potentially incurring hefty fines. With your choice of email marketing software, you can send template emails to large groups at once while also taking advantage of scheduling/automation tools and analytics.
A great advantage of automated email marketing is the “recast.” This means you can programmatically categorize customers who just purchased into a separate funnel, enabling you to send them unique/custom messages, such as “Happy Holidays,” etc. This also gives you the ability to send “lifecycle” marketing messages – targeting individual customers with messages tailored to their particular stage of homeownership. For example, you know that most people live in their first home for about 3-5 years, while the U.S. average length of purchased home residency is 13 years (source NAR). Targeting your customers with specifically timed, highly relevant messages along their homeowner journey based on information like the above can help you stay top-of-mind with them, and increase your likelihood of guiding them back to you for their next real estate transaction.
Social Media
No modern marketing plan is complete without social media, which has immense benefits if you take the right approach. It starts with focusing on platforms that make sense for you and your target audience. For example, Facebook. The business features built into Facebook are perfect for real estate businesses. Facebook allows businesses to publish branded updates and content, while also offering post scheduling so that your business page can schedule posts days, weeks, or even months ahead of time, based on your strategy.
Plus. Facebook Ads Manager allows you to target various demographics and users who have shown a specific interest in buying a home or property in your area. You can automate these ads to run for any period of time on Facebook and Instagram.
LinkedIn is another great platform to engage with established experts in the mortgage industry. Elevating your business's presence through regular content updates on LinkedIn helps build credibility and a network of clients and partners. To get the most out of a platform like LinkedIn through automation, you should consider investing in a social media scheduling software, such as Hootsuite.
Appointment Scheduling
At some point, all marketing efforts have to get to “the point,” and in real estate, that point is usually a meeting in person, over the phone, or a showing. And with the help of appointment scheduling apps, you can take control of your clients’ agendas and schedule showings while staying on top of your own calendar. Scheduling software such as Calendly offers a great opportunity to streamline and automate your efforts. These apps link directly to the calendar of your choice, such as your Google or Outlook calendar. From there, it allows you to send your open schedule with available time slots visible to others. Then the clients can select the day and time that suits them to book a real estate appointment.
Marketing is a vital component of success in real estate — especially in today's digital world. Taking the necessary steps to streamline and automate your marketing efforts will help maximize future opportunities while also helping you better communicate with and serve your existing clients.
Guardian Mortgage has not reviewed all of the third-party sites and softwares referenced herein, and is not responsible for the contents of any such site or software. The inclusion of any third-party link or reference herein does not imply endorsement by Guardian. Use of any such link or reference is at the user's own risk. You understand that when going to a third-party web site or software, that site or software is governed by the third party’s privacy policy and terms of use, and the third party is solely responsible for the content and offerings presented on its website or software.