Remington Begg
Selling homes and commercial real estate can be a tough job. You are constantly following up on soft leads that often don't amount to much. There are countless other agents competing for your property listings, and sometimes you find yourself staring at the phone waiting for it to ring. Yes, being a real estate agent is a "hustle your face off" type of job, but I'm about to tell you about a way to work smarter, not harder. Let me introduce you to the lead generating machine called inbound marketing.
Introduction to Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing is, without a doubt, the perfect marketing strategy for real estate agents. It's a lead generation model that works by helping answer people's questions and provides them with specific information they are looking for, when they are looking for it. This information comes in the form of strategically crafted blog posts that address your specific buyer persona's pain-points. Obviously, this is just the tip of the inbound iceberg. Let's dig a little deeper and find out how inbound marketing can help you generate more real estate leads.
Real Estate Buyer Personas
Inbound marketing is based on content creation. This content is written with a purpose and targeted to you buyer personas. What is a buyer persona? I'm glad you asked! A buyer persona is a fictional character or representation of a target customer group, in this case, real estate buyers. Each real estate agent typically has a specific type of buyer and location that they specialize in. With inbound marketing, the content generated will speak to the needs of those specific buyers.
Buyer Centric Content
What is content exactly? Content lives on your real estate website in the form of a business blog. This blog can be updated with photo galleries of new homes, video tours of an office building, or it could be articles written to educate buyers about a particular neighborhood. Anything you think your specific buyer persona needs to know when contemplating a property purchase. This valuable content helps attract the right type of traffic to your real estate website. Then once they are on your site, the content and eye-catching calls-to-action (link to CTA blog not live yet) work to convert those visitors into solid leads. I told you this is a perfect marketing strategy for real estate agents!
Here's how it works. These blog posts use keywords that are specific to what your buyer personas are typing into the Google. Using Southwest Florida as an example, these might be some things they would search for:
- Best schools in Fort Myers
- Best waterfront property in Cape Coral
- Homes with low flood insurance cost
These are blog topics that would answer your potential home buyer's Google search.
- Top 5 High Schools in the Fort Myers School District
- How to Live the Waterfront Lifestyle in Cape Coral
- Best Areas to Save Money on Flood Insurance
Your job as the real estate agent is to write content that answers these types of queries. Excellent, new people just landed on your real estate website! Now What?
Convert Website Visitors to Real Estate Leads
The next step in the inbound marketing method is to convert those site visitors into leads. A specially designed call-to-action in the blog content and site pages will direct people to a free offer. Why a free offer? As a real estate agent, collecting a person's name, phone number, and email address is important. In order to get that information, you need to give something in return. Creating an eBook on something like the Joys of Living in Southwest Florida, or a guide to the Fort Myers Intercoastal Waterways, if the content focuses on waterfront property. Make sure the free offer and call-to-action relates to the surrounding content. This will increase the conversion rate and make your leads more qualified.
Once the prospective home buyer's contact information is collected, it's time to reach out with emails. These emails give the lead more specific information on homes and the area, pulling them further into your marketing funnel. This consideration stage content is designed to see how ready the buyer really is. If they respond to this next, more property-centric call-to-action, then you'll know the lead is highly qualified and ready to be personally contacted. The more content you produce, the more opportunity for leads to flow into your lead funnel. This best part is all of your original content will continue working for you, it doesn't get tossed out like a flyer or newspaper ad.
Inbound marketing is a powerful lead producing engine. The real estate industry is a lead consuming juggernaut. The two are a match made in marketing heaven. A perfectly symbiotic relationship if you will. Selling anything is about forming relationships. Inbound marketing helps kickstart those relationships by giving the buyer useful information to help them with their home buying journey. Stoke the fires of that relationship with trust building, problem-solving content. What started off as a simple blog post, might just end with a handshake and handing over the keys. To learn more about inbound marketing download this free eBook.
