Image plays a huge role in establishing a brand, perhaps no more so than in the real estate industry. When vendors are looking for the agent to get them the highest price possible, they look to the agents who have achieved success in the past. This can and has been demonstrated at every point of reference with the potential client from expensive cars, pages of print advertising and billboards adorning the city’s arterials. Seeing your real estate agent driving a beat-up little Hyundai Excel isn’t going to instill too much confidence.
But now in a digital age there are so many more opportunities to attract vendors or sell houses than getting out there and projecting a successful brand and relying heavily on large advertising budgets.
Here are five real estate marketing ideas for the modern agency to complement their existing marketing strategy into the coming years.
Mobile Website
You’re not using an old brick so don’t assume your potential vendor or buyer is either. Smartphone usage is skyrocketing and all predictions see web traffic via smartphones and tablets surpassing traffic via PCs within the next 18 months.
So it’s imperative that when someone visits your website on a mobile or tablet, they see the best possible version of what you have to offer them. Google even tells us after their own research that 61% of users say they’ll abandon a mobile site if they don’t see what they want right away.
There are a couple of options here if you’re looking at a mobile website including an alternative version hosted at m.yoursite.com.au or the same version that responds to the size of screen. The latter choice is aptly named responsive website design and this is our suggested approach and this is backed by Google.
Industry examples of mobile websites include realestate.com.au, domain.com.au and realestateview.com.au. I checked out all three myself and each one serves a different version of their desktop site, at m.theirsite.com.au. Domain and RealEstateView redirected automatically whilst I had to go to RealEstate’s non-optimised site to then click on a link to send me to the mobile site.
Search Engine Optimisation
Having a great looking website that displays properties for sale is a great start but relying on people to Google your business is restricting your opportunities. This strategy still relies on the offline branding for the browser to remember your name and then find your website.
Think about the amount of real estate related searches on the key search engines.
Buyers will be searching key terms such as ‘Properties for sale’ and then the local adaptations such as ‘Properties for sale Melbourne’. Where are you when they do this? Are you advertising and appearing in the top three results at the top of the page? Or are you ranking organically in the top three – five results directly below the advertising?If you’re not in either then you’re losing out on a lot of buyers.
Vendors will also be interested in researching online to find quality agents to sell their house. Peer reviews will be significant in making a decision. If friends or family have not referred them already they will seek the online reviews of others. So when they Google ‘Trusted real estate agent Melbourne’ what appears? Do your competitors have a great review that will grab the attention of the person searching and influence their behaviour? Are you there?
Blogging
A blog for a real estate agency will serve a number of purposes and is one marketing idea that you should really follow through with. Blogging will dramatically increase the traffic to your website, primarily because your blog posts will be targeting secondary search terms, for example ‘Property Hotspots Melbourne’. Share your knowledge of Melbourne’s Property Hotspots and when browsers are researching where to buy, they come across your content and your website and before you know it they are looking at your property listings.
A blog will also provide the extra information for potential vendors to help them make the decision to contact your agency. For if they’re undecided, is there anything on your website that sets you apart from your competitor? Is your copy more convincing than the others? It may or may not, but a blog will provide that unique difference and so much more content for the potential vendor to understand that you know what you’re talking about.
Further to this, a blog provides you the content that people share on social media and this can then help advertise your business.
Site Retargeting
It’s been around for a couple of years but really only starting to be made more accessible to those without the massive budgets. Site Retargeting allows you to follow up with visitors to your site. It would work like this for a real estate agency – A visitor comes to ABCRealEstate.com.au has a look at a couple of property listings and then leaves to continue surfing the web or checking out their Facebook page. This is where the magic begins, that visitor is then served your display advertising when they’re looking at other websites. The settings can be configured to detail exactly how many times you will restrict the amount of ads served in the next 30 days and more. For real estate this is a fantastic opportunity to advertise a new property listing to a person who visited your website two weeks earlier.
Affiliate Marketing
Has been around for ages but it seems for many industries, particularly in Australia, it is under-utilised. From a real estate agent’s perspective you’re not going to sell advertising space on your website but you can create an affiliate program to serve your advertising.
If you haven’t followed me let me explain. Affiliate Marketing will help you serve your display advertising around the web and to the people that matter to you. Whilst it’s not Adwords and being able to advertise to someone actively searching for a relevant term, you can still target a demographic and it helps to build your brand.
Create a suite of display ads promoting your agency and sign up with an affiliate platform that allows you to create your own affiliate program. Offer websites that serve your ads an incentive, which can be based on impressions, clicks or registrations of your email newsletter for example. You can review applications from publishers so your ads are not serving on sites you do not approve and are serving only on sites that will see your target audience.
It is a really affordable method of driving traffic and leads if you get the incentive right.
All the best with your real estate marketing efforts and if you’ve tried any of the above and would like to tell us all how you went please leave a comment below.
Quentin Aisbett is the strategist at OnQ Marketing. He loves social media, SEO and mobile. Blogging all the time, tweeting even more so and found rambling on Google Plus at+Quentin Aisbett. Be a little old school and email him.
