4 Online Marketing Tactics for Real Estate Pro’s
For any business, your online presence can be essential to your success (or failure) in generating new leads and clients. Here, we will share some specific strategies that you can use to promote yourself and your real estate business. That’s already assuming you have the basics in place – namely, a website, blog and social media presence.
Responsive Web Design
A must for any business. The number of website visitors using mobile devices is continuing to rise, making the need for a mobile-friendly site imperative. Responsive web design is simply a design that is fluid— that changes with the visitor's browser size.
Studies and statistics have shown that sites with responsive web design have higher conversion rates and increased sales. Potential clients can visit your website from anywhere with any device.
Host Local Content
In the real estate business, creating helpful content for home buyers and sellers is a must. They usually tend to spend a lot of time researching the buying and selling process, especially if it's their first time.
In addition to the basics, you'll also want to focus on creating content for the locations you cover. People looking at moving to a new area will be interested in neighborhoods, statistics, events, fun facts and so forth. If your website can offer them content on such topics, they will ultimately come across your services as well.
Solicit Reviews
Real estate sites like Zillow receive, on average over 16 million visitors per month. Web statistician Alexa ranks Zillow above other home listing networks such as Trulia, Homes.com, and Movoto.
More and more customers are making use of Zillow to find houses and scout for real estate agents in the area. Reason enough for you to not only have an agent profile on Zillow, but also encourage your clients to review you.
You don’t need to be shy about asking for reviews; these can be extremely valuable for your business. Anytime when a client expresses praise for your service – be it over phone, in person or via email, use the opportunity to ask them for a review on the network they used to find you.
Make sure to post unique testimonials on your pages to instill confidence in anyone who will likely contact you.
Answer and Engage
There are many places online where you can connect with potential clients by simply answering their questions. To start off, the City-Data.com forums have people ask questions about global locations. There are specific sub-forums states in the US and for the largest metropolitan areas within each state. In addition to real estate sites and social media, you also have question and answer networks like Quora that have people to ask questions about all topics, including home buying, selling and relocating.
All you need to do is find and join such forums where potential clients are likely to discuss their real estate needs and start answering questions. Devote some time each day to checking each network for potential questions and answer them.
Even if you don't succeed in converting a query, it will generate more exposure as others will view your answer.