If you have decided to set up your own real estate agency/company and haven’t yet found a way to give your business a boost, consider implementing these five real estate marketing strategies that will help you absorb more potential customers and increase sales opportunities.
As a real estate developer or agent, you have to plan properly in order to get your important tasks done without becoming a slave to your work or getting distracted by unimportant details. Implementing a marketing strategy takes the same type of planning. In order to plan a marketing strategy properly, you need to understand your industry and the competition so you can detect opportunities. To do this, start by analyzing the real estate sector.
According to a Grand View Research report, factors such as rapid urbanization due to migration in search of better facilities, the growing demand for residential real estate space and economic growth in many African countries and developing regions in countries such as India, China have improved income levels and helped the real estate market.
It’s a good time to take advantage of this market recovery and put in effective marketing strategies to improve your business. A good marketing plan will help you attract loyal customers and increase your real estate sales.
- Identify the target market
This is probably the number one and most important strategy that you can use to become truly successful as a real estate agent or developer.
Many real estate brokers and businesses focus on a niche market and become an expert in that market. This gives you an idea about what’s driving the target market currently, what risks are involved, and most importantly where the market is headed in the short and long term.
For example, a real estate broker who knows the details about a new transportation or school project coming locally could change his marketing strategies accordingly.
2. Offer virtual tours of your properties
Your potential clients don’t want to waste time and will appreciate knowing as many details as possible before visiting one of your properties in person. Virtual tours are the best way to offer a complete and detailed view of the properties in order to help potential clients get a real idea about the home in question.
In this way, you don’t only gain an advantage over your competitors who only use photographs to show their properties, you can also optimize your resources and your time. In-person visits with your clients will be much more profitable since they’ll know the property in advance and will likely be more interested and willing to make an offer when they decide to schedule a visit.
There are many ways to create virtual or immersive tours. Here are some options that you can choose from in order to find something that best suits your needs, preferences, and budget.
- Use property virtualization software: While the 360 videos that you can upload to YouTube or Facebook are sequences of images linked one after the other, there are some tools like Sytemap that add interactivity allowing your potential customers to move around the different points of the space at will and navigate your property using the floor plan of the house, among other functions. Here is an example
- Create 360º photos or videos: This is similar to the same technology used in the Street View of Google Maps. These are interactive images that allow you to move the camera frame 360º to see everything in the environment from a fixed point. You can create a video by linking recordings of your property to 360º from different points and upload it to YouTube and then embed it on your website or even share it on Facebook.
3. Organize a webinar to generate leads
You have definitely heard of webinars, the free online video conferences in which an expert offers valuable information about a specific topic in exchange for a name and an email address.
Webinars are one of the key techniques of inbound marketing. This is the type of marketing that happens when a potential client is actively seeking a solution to a problem through a product or service and comes to your business willingly. This is different from outbound marketing which is when you pursue clients who may not be actively looking for your services (think print advertisements, billboards and the like).
In addition, webinars work very well in B2B companies so it can be an effective marketing strategy for real estate if you dedicate yourself to the sale of commercial or industrial properties. According to a Content Marketing Institute survey, more than 60 percent of B2B marketers use webinars as part of their content strategy.
4. Email marketing, your weapon for customer loyalty
Email marketing is the main drive of customer retention for 80 percent of marketers, according to a study by eMarketer. Therefore, one of the main objectives of any content marketing strategy is the generation of leads.
It’s a channel that grants direct and personalized communication with users, which allows you to stay in your customers’ minds and continue to cultivate the relationship you established with them. As Katherine Barchetti, an expert in sales and customer service, says. “Make a customer, not a sale.” Don’t focus only on selling through the content of your emails but on earning the trust of your subscribers.
When developing an email marketing campaign for real estate it’s not only important to strategically plan the content that your emails will include, but it’s also essential to invest a portion of your time in determining when and how often emails will be sent to the clients.
5. Plan for success
Regardless of whether you are a real estate agent or a real estate developer, you will need a real estate development business plan. This will set you up for success. You can plan your expenses, contingencies, and other risks with the help of a real estate development business plan.
Many people fail when they work in this sector without such planning. For example, you can plan your budget for next year’s real estate marketing strategies with the help of a well-documented business plan.
