Marketing a real estate agent or realtor is very centred around trust, knowledge, your selling capability and your listings. It’s not as common for real estate agents to be active on social media and use all of the marketing channels available to them, but this allows a gap for other agents to step in.
Overall, you want to educate while you sell. Help first time buyers find the right home for their budget, help parents find the right school zone they need, or help people moving from out of town find the suburb that will make them feel most at home. Plus there’s always the investment property gems and wisdom to share with first time and experienced buyers.
You may want to create a lifestyle around certain listings, show off their best parts and storytell, but the best way to do that is through information. People will envision their own lives in this home, so you only need to add to that in small doses.
Not all agents choose to have their own website, preferring to have listings on the common home listing websites, and on their brokerage's website.
If you choose to have a website for yourself, you’ll need an about page to show off your accolades, the number of sales you’ve had, information about the area you work in and a little story about who you are. This shouldn’t take over too much of the site, so you’ll need to balance this out with your listings, information for sellers and buyers via your blog, and a button to take them to the next step in the process on each page.
In your listings on your website, it’s important to keep the details obvious. That includes open home dates, auction dates, the number of bedrooms, square footage, size of backyard. It can be more helpful to people if they can filter your listings by those features, as well as by price. A website may be something you push your office to upgrade, so you can collectively make use of this functionality on one unified website. If you want to add listings to your own website, make sure this is an option before you pick which platform to set yourself up on. The simplest way to manage your listings will be to use a template, which all platforms differ on.
You’ll need to show off the photos and videos of the properties well to truly showcase the home. Be mindful that large image files will slow down your website so be sure to compress them, and use carousels to allow people to load the page with smaller images and click into the images if they want to see more. This helps to speed up their experience, meaning they are likely to stick around instead of going to a more general listing aggregate site. This behaviour also adds to your search ranking possibilities.
You might choose to allow people to register for updates on specific properties by email or SMS. They can join your full newsletter list, but they can be notified when you add new open home dates, set an auction or sell the property.
It can work wonders to show you’re an authority on the area by creating blog content about school zones, traffic or where in the area to find certain styles of homes. You can also share your knowledge of real estate by sharing information that helps sellers as they go through the listing and selling process, or for buyers to help them make the best offer.
This content isn't the same as speaking with you directly, but it allows people to know that you care and have the knowledge to share with them as they go through their own process while they are doing their research. It’s also a great list of resources to guide your clients as things become relevant.
To give your search ranking a bit of a boost, set up a Google My Business account. You can add photos of yourself or sold listings, information about how to get hold of you and allow your clients to leave you reviews. This will then show on the right hand side of the search page when it is the best match to a search.
The platforms you use will always change depending on who your target market is and what is popular in your area, but Facebook, Instagram and TikTok can be great places to show up for people. TikTok specifically can help you go viral in a wider area, but the platform also shows your content to local people and is great at identifying whether your content resonates with local people more than those further away.
Keep your expectations in check. These are platforms you get to use for free, and so any reach or new leads you gain are going to take some time investment on your end to create great, engaging content on a regular basis.
In general, you’ll need to post often and engage with all comments you receive within a couple of days. Sometimes cracking social media is as simple as knowing what you can post. You can get a copy of our content prompt deck for ideas, but here’s some specific real estate content ideas for you to try:
You might like to follow @lololester or @homesweetchatt on Instagram for some inspiration.
You could choose to run a Facebook group, or a community on a platform such as Mighty Networks, to grow a group of people around you. It’s more helpful for your business long term if it is something loosely tied to real estate and not a group for those actively selling or buying as the churn rate would be higher. This could be a mums group, a business owners group, or a fixer upper group, but you would be the facilitator and not the focus. This helps to grow your network by letting people know you work in real estate and are friendly and approachable, but it's not a place to simply push your listings, that can be done publicly. You might prefer to join other existing groups, but if you see a gap, why not fill it.
Email marketing is an established and reliable form of marketing. You may need to pay for a software to help you facilitate this, although many softwares have a free plan to get you started. Email is a great space to gain trust and share your expertise.
If you don't have a website, and plan to combine the email list, blog and website into one combined site, check out Beehiiv. It's a newer option, but their features are very competitive including SEO optimised pages, polls and audience segmentation. This option allows you to share you emails publicly, like a blog post, but email each to your subscribers. The larger plans allow for you to add other pages to the site.
For those who already have a website separately and are looking for a tool just for email, is Flodesk. Their templates and platform make it super easy to set up. They don’t yet integrate with many platforms at the click of a button but you are able to embed the forms on your website, or link to a landing page if you don’t have a website yet. It does integrate well with Zapier, the glue of the internet, so you can likely connect it through Zaps to your CRM software or property management tools.
You might find that your softwares for managing leads and property listings send broadcast style emails, and staying lean might be your best way to go.
Whichever you choose, you’ll set up forms on your website, and link to them from social media. You can offer downloads or other incentives so people opt in for some sort of lead magnet. For real estate, this might be a suburb guide, information on how best to style your home, information about how you market properties, or your current listings in a catalogue. This incentive should be something which they will be willing to share their email in exchange for it.
It’s best to keep your email list and the list of people who want to hear from you personally separate so people don’t feel like you’re contacting them too much. A welcome sequence is a common way to educate people about yourself and how to reach you after they first subscribe, and this is a great place to give people the option to book a call with you, or join a separate list for more information. By signing up for a freebie or incentive, they understand they will be emailed some content as a general subscriber, so you don’t have to hold back completely.
So that they stay subscribed and start to grow more of an appreciation for your services, you should continue to share valuable content with them, behind the scenes, new listings, or helpful content.
Depending on the size of the list of those who choose to receive your listings by email, this could become a selling point for prospective clients, especially in a large city.
This is where you can show off yourself or your listings to the right types of people, based on gender, age and interests. You’re ultimately showing up for them even though they haven’t followed you or sought you out to spark more interest. You might like to be specific in your target audiences to get the best cost per click, or so that you can show different content to different people.
You’ll want to get people to your website, and usher them towards the next step like booking a call, coming to an open home, or joining your email list.
You can show up in front of people in your area and expand from there, depending on how the ads perform. You can also target people who are parents or certain age ranges, or by age, but as someone working in real estate you’ll need to use Special Ad Audiences on Meta.
With current tracking standards, you may not be able to create audiences based on who has subscribed to your email list, but there are still options for running a remarketing campaign. This is when you show up in front of someone who has taken a certain step, but not the next one. Maybe they visited your website but didn’t view a certain page. This type of advertising should be used wisely in real estate since people can take so many offline steps, but it can be used successfully as well.
Content wise, you might like to mix things up between content about yourself, a carousel of your current listings, or to promote listing their home with you.
You might like to show up for more people on search results when people search for a real estate agent in your local area, but it's common for the national headquarters or other real estate sites to be in those top spots as they have the history, breadth of content and authority.
For your specific area, you can run ads for more general searches, so people can find you when they search, but it’s best to not try to rank on other people’s names. When someone is searching for a brand name or agent specifically, they generally know what they want, and it’s a waste of ad budget to show up for them. You can dabble with it, but this is a general rule to guide you.
To be even more specific you might limit your ads to show to only existing homeowners, or non-homeowners, either because of the price point of your listings, or to split the groupings and create ad content for each group separately.
You may like to run display or YouTube ads which are visual based ads to show on certain websites or beside videos. These have to be extra attention grabbing since the person will be actively doing something else when they see it.
Because the money made per listing and sale can be substantial, you’ll have more room in your ad budget to get in front of people at a higher cost per click, compared to another type of business like a t-shirt seller, but be mindful of how your ad spend in this area is leading to sales to determine whether it’s worth the investment in the long run.
Disclaimer: This blog post is a small guide to some platforms this business type could use to expand their marketing. It is not a marketing plan or marketing strategy and is not tailored completely for your business. If you are looking for a marketing strategy, let’s chat.
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