In the sea of options and advertisements out there, how does a real estate agent really get known in their neighborhood? How do they stand out as the best option? How do they shine a light on themselves and their skillset?
There are many great tools available today to connect with your audience. Learning to use them and create personal messages to connect with your audience takes patience, skills, and confidence.
Let’s look at some of the best ways you can not only get your name seen, but connect with the right audience to build your career as a realtor.
Digital Marketing for Realtors
The internet has revolutionized the real estate industry. It has changed the ways real estate agents connect with their clients, find new business, and the expectations clients have. While digital marketing will continue to evolve, it’s best to learn as much as you can about handling your digital marketing today so you can get ahead of the curve.
Create An Information Rich Website
Clients expect you to have a website. They expect that they will be able to find a professional on a Google search. They expect to see a functional website design that says this is an experienced realtor who cares about the face of their business. Meeting these expectations is one more way you can build trust with a new lead.
At its most basic, your website should have a page with information about you and easy to find contact information. It’s wise to put your contact information in bold at the top of the main page, at the bottom, and on a contact page that can be found in your main navigation. If you have social media accounts and listings on another website, these would also be a good thing to link to.
If you want to step up your game with your webpage, you can create a blog. This would need to be consistently updated on a regular basis. Your blog would be rich with information relevant to your local area and include a smart plan for search engine optimization (SEO) so that customers can more easily find you through online searches.
Stay Consistent With Your Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is separated by organic reach and paid marketing.
Organic social media is posting on your accounts and connecting with your followers, while paid social media marketing is putting up cost-per-click advertisements to find new leads.
It’s important to stay consistent with how you post on social media. This means keeping your post style consistent with your brand and it means posting on a consistent schedule. While it’s not necessary that you always post on Wednesdays at four o’clock, your followers will notice if you tend to post three times a week or once a day. Consistency reads as a professional on social media.
An essential part of organic social media marketing is that if you are going to set up an account on a social site, you need to make sure you will be checking your inbox. It doesn’t pay if you set up an account on Instagram, turn off notifications, and never reply to the messages you receive there. In fact, clients are unlikely to attempt to contact you another way once they feel ignored. They will move on to someone else who replies.
This doesn’t mean you have to be logged on to every account all day. It does mean you should have a plan. Check all your accounts twice a day, or set up email notifications for all messages. Whatever works for you.
For paid social media marketing, you can look into tools like Google Adwords and Facebook ads, which will also allow you to post ads on Instagram. One of the great things about these tools today is that you can easily target them by geographic location. Are you having a local event you want to invite a whole neighborhood to? Use cost-per-click (CPC) ads to send out a targeted message.
Word of Mouth Marketing
While people will search the internet and check online reviews to find businesses they want to work with, if they are recommended a company or relator by someone they know and trust, they put more weight on that recommendation than what they found online.
So how do realtors get recommended to others?
They stand out. They connect with their clients. They offer a personal touch.
In every type of marketing today, we’re looking at more ways to become more personal. You want to send targeted messages that are relevant to the lives of your clients. Once you’ve connected and are working with someone, this doesn’t stop.
Clients will remember that you were a good listener who paid attention to what they wanted. They will remember that you sent them a card on their birthday with a personal note. They will remember that you went out of your way to help them.
All of these extra touches take more time and may feel extraneous, but they pay off in referrals in the long run.
Direct Mail For Realtors
Direct mail for realtors has become an even more effective tool in recent years, for those realtors who really know how to utilize it.
Like with digital marketing, we are seeing that customers now appreciate a more personalized approach. This means discussing targeting your message to your audience, saying something that is likely of personal interest to them.
With a service like Wise Pelican, you can target a specific neighborhood to send a custom designed postcard to. On this postcard, you can mention things relevant to homeowners in this neighborhood to better grab their attention. You’re not talking to anyone. You’re talking directly to them. This creates a better level of connection and interest that earns your mailer a better response.
It may sound like a lot of work to create targeted messages like this, but with Wise Pelican, you can use their online tool to update your postcard template to be relevant for each mailing, so it’s easy to handle the design and the mailing all in one place. There are no minimum orders on Wise Pelican, so you can be as targeted as you want for each neighborhood you mail to.
To get more bang for your marketing work, consider connecting your digital marketing efforts with your direct mail by adding links to your social media accounts. You can also add a QR code people can scan to be taken directly to a page of interest. For example, if your mailer discusses your listings in the neighborhood, the QR code could directly link them to your website with your listings. This could also be used for events.
Direct mail is a straightforward way to put something tactile in the hands of potential customers. In a world where we’re so often on our phones, this shouldn’t be underestimated as a powerful tool to connect with leads.
Always Keep Your Personal Brand In The Forefront
When it comes to building your career in the long term as a real estate agent in your neighborhood, you want to leave a positive impression on everyone you come in contact with, whether in person or through a marketing message. Create personalized messages, send them to targeted audiences, and connect with your future clients by going that extra mile to stand out. The more you work on your marketing, the more it will build over time and you’ll become known in your local area.
To read more on topics like this, check out the success category.
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