Last Updated on May 30, 2023
41% of homebuyers looked online first when buying a property. If you don’t have a strong web presence for your real estate business, you’re probably missing out.
These days, it’s essential to have a solid digital marketing strategy when building your real estate business and marketing your listings. The internet is a key tool that buyers use to find properties, so you need to take steps to improve your brand visibility.
In this guide, we’ll tell you what real estate digital marketing is and will list some of the main techniques you can use as part of your strategy.
What Is Real Estate Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing can be considered any marketing that is done in the digital space. Generally, this term is synonymous with online marketing but it could also include SMS marketing and mobile marketing as well.
Digital marketing makes use of the internet to market a business or product and consists of many different methods that can be used together to reach a wider and more targeted audience.
A real estate digital marketing plan allows your real estate business to reach new people and generate leads. On top of this, it also allows you to stay on the radar of people who you have already worked with or who are already aware of your business.
Digital Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing for Real Estate
Many marketers find that digital marketing is more effective than traditional marketing and advertising techniques.
Especially in the case of real estate, however, traditional marketing techniques can still work very well. Getting involved in a local community, putting up “For Sale” signs, and running ads in local newspapers can still be useful, especially as a real estate agent.
On the other hand, if you’re not putting a lot of focus on digital marketing then you’re definitely missing out. Digital marketing can be a more cost-effective way to reach your target audience and comes with some huge advantages over traditional methods.
Types of Digital Marketing Techniques
Digital marketing includes many different techniques that you can use together to reach your target audience. Here are some of the channels and tools that you can use.
Website Optimization
Your digital marketing strategy should start with building a professional website.
Be sure that you have a website with an attractive design and easy navigation and ensure that it does a great job of telling prospective clients more about your business. 38.5% of web users will judge a business based on how its website looks at the very first glance, so it needs to be professional and look great.
Also, be sure that your website is optimized for mobile devices since many people access the web from their smartphones these days.
Local SEO
To get the most value out of a professional real estate website, you should also use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
Using SEO can help search engines understand your website and what it offers potential clients. This will lead to your site appearing in search engine results pages (SERPs) more often and being shown to more people.
There are many ways to improve SEO such as by optimizing the technical side of your site, boosting site speed, and adding content and keywords.
Local SEO will go a step further and help ensure that your site shows to a target local audience. Actions you might take to improve local SEO could include claiming your Google My Business (GMB) page, adding local keywords, and getting more local citations.
Content Marketing
Did you know that content marketing generates 3x as many leads as traditional marketing but also costs 62% less? marketing takes an inbound approach to marketing and gives you a way to provide value to your clients first and then market your services to your clients second.
A content marketing strategy could include creating and sharing blog posts but it may include the creation of other types of content as well. This could include real estate photos, videos, podcasts, infographics, or any other kind of content that can inform or grab the attention of your target clients.
With great content, you can engage and educate your audience. You can also help them understand the importance of hiring a professional agent.
Reputation Management
As part of local SEO, it’s important to take steps to manage your online reputation. When you get positive online reviews as a real estate agent, it can make new clients more willing to work with you. On the other hand, negative reviews can scare clients away.
With a reputation management strategy, you’ll work to get more positive reviews while minimizing the damage of negative reviews that are online, such as by responding to them in a professional way.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing can also play a part in your digital marketing strategy. In fact, 46% of Realtors believe that social media is the best tool for generating quality leads, while only 30% believe the same about MLS.
Using social media can help you build buzz surrounding your real estate business and can give you more visibility online. A social media presence will help you to stand out more in your local area and get the attention of prospective buyers and sellers. It can also help you build interest in your listed properties.
Email and SMS Marketing
Not only do you need to get leads in the first place, but you also need to nurture them. It’s important to stay in touch with leads until they’re ready to make a purchase and to warm them up until they’re ready to request your services.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to do this, but you can also use SMS marketing to achieve similar goals as well.
Paid Ads
Running online ads is a great way to generate interest in your real estate business online. Unlike long-term techniques such as SEO, where it can take time to see results, you can get some great results from ads quickly.
Whether you run pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google or Bing or you choose to run ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, doing so can be well worth it.
Planning Your Digital Marketing Strategy
While simply listing your properties online can be helpful for your business, using the right real estate digital marketing techniques can boost your efforts by quite a bit. Consider including SEO, content marketing, social media, email marketing, and paid ads in your digital marketing strategy if you want to get better results online.
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