Marketing for Real Estate Agents Made Easy: 7 Action Items for 2019
As a real estate agent, your job involves so much more than just selling homes. You have the dual roles of marketer and salesman. And while a lot of seasoned agents learn through trial and error, we're here to give some real estate marketing shortcuts that are perfectly positioned for young, Millennial home buyers.
You are responsible for marketing your clients’ properties to potential buyers. To be successful, you also have to constantly market yourself, your knowledge, your value, and your services. Sounds exhausting, right? But you can start on our strategic marketing for real estate agents action items right now on your laptop or your mobile phone.
To help kick this year off strong, we've compiled a list of essentials that are actually easy and budget-friendly.
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Strategic Marketing for Real Estate Agents in 2019
We've worked with hundreds of real estate agents over the years and found some strategies that they use to be successful. We narrowed that list down to seven essential real estate marketing ideas that we think every agent should have in their marketing toolkit.
1. Post Videos to Social Media
Video marketing is about more than just building brand and product exposure. Video campaigns are more intimate, and this intimacy makes them well suited for building trust with prospective clients.
Some common trust-building videos that you can begin using in your social media campaigns include:
- Brand Videos: These tell a narrative about your brand’s identity, voice, mission, and goals.
- Customer Testimonials: Customers naturally relate to other customers, so including testimonials can help build trust quickly.
- Tips for Home Buyers: If you find that customers are asking the same types of questions over and over, then answering them on video can be a great way to engage future customers.
Keep in mind that most social channels are accessed from smartphones and tablets. So, your videos should be formatted for mobile marketing use.
2. Create Virtual Tours
Virtual tours have a lot of advantages for real estate agents. Through virtual reality, prospective home buyers can explore a property on their own. As they move through each room, they're able to focus on the aspects that interest them the most.
A tour recorded using Instagram Stories or through a Facebook Live also hold a viewer’s attention longer than plain text or still images. This is advantageous for you because the longer a client spends looking through different areas of the home, the more they can imagine themselves owning it.
Video tours also save you more time. Instead of having to stage a time-consuming open house event or walk people through one couple at a time, a virtual tour is permanently open for anyone that wants to visit it. This allows you to spend more working with prospects to close deals while window-shoppers show themselves around.
3. Add Social Sharing Buttons to Online Listings
One of the simplest real estate marketing ideas to implement is social sharing buttons. Sharing buttons act like word-of-mouth publicity for your listings. Social sharing buttons make it easy for someone that is viewing the listing to share it with their friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social channels.
4. Create Awesome Business Cards
Business cards are an easy and effective way to get your contact information out there and grow your business. Your cards add to your first impression, so make sure they look great. Business cards make it easy for people to keep your information readily accessible throughout the home buying and selling process.
Also, the National Association of Realtors did a study that found that 89% of home buyers would go to the same agent again or would recommend their agent to others. Business cards are a great way to make it easy for past clients to pass your contact information along to others. Be sure to leave some behind even after the deal closes.
5. Launch a Text Marketing Program
SMS marketing is one of the simplest tools that you're likely missing out on in your real estate business. Text messages allow you to easily send listing information to leads within seconds of them requesting it.
Texting is fast and has a high response rate. In fact, numerous sources confirm the following statistics:
- Text messages have an open rate of 98%. This is five times higher than email.
- 45% of text messages are responded to. This is seven times higher than email.
- One-third of Americans prefer text messages to calling.
- 78% of consumers wish they could send text messages to businesses.
Text marketing can be used to provide information, answer questions, remind people of appointments, and so much more.
You can even place a simple message on the for sale sign in front of the property. "Text HOME to 858585 to get links and photos of the best new properties!" Your text message marketing software will automatically reply with the requested information. The software will use either SMS for text-based messages or MMS for marketing with messages that include photos or videos. When ordering your new, attention-grabbing business cards, add that same keyword and short code and even include it as a call to action at the end of any video tours that you post.
6. Sponsor Local Events
When you sign up as a sponsor for an event, you are paying for exposure to that event’s audience. Typically, the level of exposure you receive depends on the amount of your contribution.
For a real estate agent, building relationships is essential. Events give you an opportunity to gain a lot of new exposure with like-minded clients. You can find events that align with your personal causes, hobbies, and pastimes. Having this common ground with your audience makes it easier for you to spark up conversations with new potential clients.
7. Optimize Your Google My Business Page
Setting up a Google My Business account gives you two main advantages over other real estate agents that don’t have one. The first is an exponential increase in your visibility above-the-fold when someone searches for things like your company name.
The second advantage is that you will now begin to appear in Google Search and Google Maps when a customer searches for businesses like yours or businesses in your industry. For example, if someone located near your office searches for “real estate agents,” you'll appear in Google's local results section.
Outpace Your Competitors with Ready-Made SMS Message Plays
Many of the items on this list are pretty self-explanatory and easy for you to get started with. You already know that there is no shortage of real estate agents out there to compete against. If you want to outpace your competitors and move more homes, then it's important for you to master the best marketing channels available.
Real estate text message marketing could be just what you need to set you apart.
- 98% of all text messages sent from the EZ Texting platform are read by recipients.
- 90% of those messages are read within the first three minutes.
You simply won't find numbers like this with any other marketing channel.
EZ Texting has been leading the text marketing service industry for over a decade. During that time, we've worked with a lot of successful real estate agencies, and we've learned what works and what doesn't.
We have assembled some of our best tips into a powerful Real Estate Text Message Marketing Playbook. Download your copy today to get started crafting your successful SMS marketing campaigns.
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