
The Best Offline and Online Real Estate Lead Generation Strategies for 2021
Real estate leads are the foundation of your success as a real estate agent. These are the sources of potential income generation. It is a necessity to devote both time and effort towards generating and gathering a maximum number of leads. Now, many real estate agents are used to following just a few tried and tested methods of lead generation.
However, our advice would be to revisit your real estate lead generation strategies. It is worth your while to incorporate some of the following best real estate leadstrategies in both offline and online space to boost your client numbers.
In this article, we shall help you pick out the best strategies to have a pipeline of quality real estate sellers and buyers leads.
The Best Offline Real Estate Lead Generation Strategies
It is vital as a real estate agent not to miss out on quality leads due to an oversight. Although most agents prefer the online channels, we firmly believe that in the real estate business it is necessary to have a dual lead generation approach strategy — that is, you must put in enough effort in both the offline and online mediums for generating quality, reliable leads with a high chance of a conversion.
Cold Calling
Let us start with the one that most agents prefer to skip — cold calling. Most agents tend to avoid calling potential clients as they believe their time could be better used. The thing is, now, with most companies asking their employees to work remotely, a lot more people are at home during the day. This means that this is the year to revisit this type of real estate lead generation. Do make sure that you have a script ready. The initial call is just to garner the interest of the clients, so make sure it is not a long call.
Referrals
A referral is one of the best ways to acquire qualified leads. For a real estate agent, it is vital to maintain good relations with all of your satisfied past buyers and sellers. This will help you gain new clients through their referrals and sometimes the old clients could again be in the market looking to sell or buy properties.
So after successfully closing a real estate deal, make sure to stay in touch with your previous clients. You can send them holiday greetings or useful real estate information. This will ensure that these old clients would refer you to their friends and family. And these new leads would in most cases be all qualified leads of potential buyers and sellers.
Organize an Open House
An open house is one of the best real estate marketing mediums. Indeed it is for helping your client sell their property; however, if you plan well, you can maximize your market reach in the neighborhood easily. Make sure that you obtain the contact details of all those who attend the open house. Meet them and spend at least a few minutes chatting with each visitor.
In real estate, you as an agent do not exist in a bubble. You have to constantly work to market yourself and ensure that everyone knows you as a real estate agent. At these open house events, you can give your contact information to all the visitors in the form of a business card. Now, later when either these visitors or their friends and family are looking for a real estate agent, you are probably going to be their first choice.
Attending Chamber Of Commerce Sessions
One of the best ways to network and build your professional circle and get your name out in the local community is by attending the local Chamber of Commerce sessions. By participating in these events you have a higher chance of meeting other professionals in your area who are engaged in the real estate business.
Not only do you get your contact information out to the community, you also get an opportunity to establish your expertise as a realtor. This ensures that you will get good referrals from people within the community and a good number of quality real estate leads.
Target FSBOs
Most real estate agents try to avoid going after the For Sale By Owner (FSBO) listings as they believe it is not worth the hassle. Our advice runs counter to that. We believe a good real estate agent can convert even a FSBO into a seller lead. The strategy a real estate agent uses matters a lot in such situations.
For instance, there should be no hard-sell approach implemented. Always target those For Sale By Owner listings that have been on the market for a long time or are in the list of expired listings. These property sellers are more likely to be open to expert advice and would be more willing to hire your services as a real estate agent.
They may not be aware of the issues in their listings, whether it was inadequate marketing, wrong pricing, or any other issues that lead to a property ending up on the expired listings. As a realtor, you are in an ideal position to help the sellers get their property sold as you can suggest the right steps to get such properties sold.
The Best Online Real Estate Lead Generation Strategies
Now we shall shift our attention to the online lead generation ideas. We think there would be an all-around agreement that the online medium offers a lot of scope for attracting qualified leads. It lets you target a huge audience of potential buyers and sellers.
Emailing Potential Leads
Similar to the cold calling strategy, but a more refined option, is sending direct mail to potential clients and leads. Now our advice when it comes to email marketing is to make sure that you tailor-make the content to fit a particular category of leads. For instance, you cannot send the same email to a newly married couple, a young family with children, and senior buyers looking for their new house.
All the contact information you would have gathered from conducting the various open house events should be added to your list of potential clients. Categorize them into different groups and send each group an email with information about the real estate business that would be useful to them.
Online Real Estate Lead Generation Platforms
The most useful aspect of the new real estate lead generation platforms is the fact that they help to funnel quality real estate leads towards you. These real estate platforms bring together the best of technology and real estate business on a single easy-to-use website.
An online real estate lead generation platform like Dorrmat provides registered agents with quality seller leads. It ensures that at no point are the real estate agents without any potential clients and leads. They also offer a host of additional services such as a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, a branded landing page to showcase your achievements, and many more features.
A platform like Dorrmat is an excellent way for real estate agents to build their real estate business in a professional and hassle-free way.
Google Ads
An excellent real estate lead generation strategy is Google ads. Although it is a paid ad format, it can get the ball rolling and help you gather a good number of quality real estate leads in a short span. These ads are in the form of Pay Per Click (PPC) ads. You need to ensure that you are using the right and optimal combination of keywords to ensure that your Google ad campaigns are a success. With the combination of the right keywords for marketing and having a landing page with high conversion potential, you can utilize google ads in an excellent way to generate real estate leads.
Leverage Social Media Presence
Social media has become such a ubiquitous presence in our lives that as a real estate agent, if you are looking to generate real estate leads of good quality, then you cannot afford to ignore the various social media platforms.
Facebook Ads
Similar to Google ads to a large extent, Facebook provides you with an opportunity to reach the vast population looking for a house. An average person is spending roughly 35 minutes browsing on Facebook every day. This means as a realtor, this is a golden opportunity to reach the right potential clients and acquire quality leads.
As Facebook is a more visual medium, an excellent copy with high-resolution photos can help you generate leads. The best part about Facebook ads is the granular target options you can set. Depending upon your expertise as a realtor you can decide to target either first-time homebuyers or retired couples or any other real estate segment that you would prefer to cater to.
LinkedIn Ads
Despite the fact that LinkedIn is a networking tool for professionals, with a little effort from your end you can ensure that you are able to generate real estate leads from this source too. Start with a professional-looking business page. Make sure it has all the relevant contact information. Make sure that the page is professionally designed. You are trying to target both potential clients and fellow professionals in the real estate business with whom you can build a relationship to widen your professional circle.
Develop a showcase page to market your achievements and link back to your business website or blog for further conversion of potential clients.
Running A Blog / Website
It is integral to your success as a real estate agent to have your own real estate business-oriented blog or website. Rather than pulling potential clients towards you, a blog or website ensures that the potential leads are drawn to you. In order to do this, you must focus on both the structure and the content of your real estate website.
In terms of structure, make sure you have a professionally designed website. Ensure that the landing page is well made, you want all your first-time visitors to turn into potential clients. There should be a provision to gather the contact details of all the site visitors. And strategically placed Call To Action (CTA) buttons to guide them to engage with the content more.
In terms of content, always ensure that the blog page of your website is regularly updated. Keep contributing quality real estate advice. Offer tips and strategies to home sellers and buyers. You can even include advice on how one can go about enhancing the property value. These will ensure that the website visitors keep coming back to your site and turn into potential clients.
Local SEO
It is not enough to merely have a website. You also need to ensure that your website has search engine optimization in order to ensure that the website is high in search engine rankings. The local SEO will comprise a few different aspects.
It begins with an SEO audit to determine how well your pages are performing. Whether the structure and content of the site are according to the search parameters set by Google? Is your site structured for multi-device visibility?
All these aspects are calibrated to ensure that your site ranks high in terms of visibility on local searches related to real estate. This will bring your site in the view of all the potential local leads who are currently looking for a realtor to help them or are looking at properties.
Video Content Marketing
One cannot ignore the reach and potential for real estate leads that are possible with quality video content. You could choose to have your own YouTube channel or opt to contribute videos to other real estate blogs and forums. It has been found that real estate listings with videos tend to generate a higher number of inquiries from potential clients than those which only have photographs.
You have a wide range of choices when it comes to the kind of video content you can use for marketing. You should definitely have videos of new listings, if you are interested you can even host a live Q&A session or even videos where your give expert real estate advice to home buyers and home sellers.
Summary
In these constantly changing times, is extremely crucial to adapt our real estate lead generation strategies to the changing nature of the real estate business. We have outlined some new and some old strategies to completely change your real estate career's success graph. These lead generation ideas applicable for the real estate business have been handpicked to help you have a strong and effective way to target new leads.
Now some of these lead generation strategies are very cost-effective and some may be a bit high priced. Our advice would be to pick a combination from both offline and online lead generation strategies, those that you can start implementing immediately. You can revisit the other strategies once your real estate business has achieved more success.
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