Multichannel Marketing Tips for Real Estate Agents
It isn’t enough to simply be visible online and wait for people to find you. That worked in the early days, but there are too many options now that you need to be proactive. You need to figure out where your prospective customers spend their time while online, and find ways to reach out to them. That’s what multi-channel marketing is all about
So as we march onwards into 2019, how can real estate agents start working multi-channel marketing tactics into their strategies? Let’s take a look.
Create promotional materials that can be repurposed
One of the biggest problems with adopting a multi-channel marketing strategy is the sheer amount of material that entails. Each channel has unique requirements, and they run the gamut from the practically-unlimited creative options of website and emails to the strictly-restrained choices of social media platforms. How can you find the time to cater to them all?
Well, the key to this is to start with platform-independent resources that can be tweaked to suit anything. Consider images, for example. If you start with a small image suitable for a phone screen, you’ll have trouble when you want to scale up to desktop size — but if you start with the biggest image size you can get, you can simply scale it down to suit whatever size you need.
And if you want to write something lengthy, such as a guide to your real estate services, keep it mobile-friendly from the beginning. Use compact paragraphs and simple layouts. That way, whether you want to turn it into a PDF or provide it as a mobile page (or both), you won’t have too many issues achieving a good level of polish.
Monitor social media posts for relevant keywords
You can’t reasonably expect anyone with the slightest interest in buying or selling property in your area to simply announce it to you. People don’t think that way, particularly when it comes to big matters like real estate. They mull them over, weighing up their options, and by the time someone contacts a real estate agent, the idea might have been on their mind for months.
But the internet affords you incredible opportunities to make a mark ahead of that curve. By paying close attention to social media, you can identify opportunities to reach out to people and offer your services. Imagine a phrase like “thinking about moving”: add local terms that might appear in locations or biographies, and you have a search that could bring up valuable results.
All you need to do then is send the poster a simple message, noting that you’re ready and willing to help them buy or sell in that area as soon as they’re ready. They might decide to simply go for it, but even if they wait, they might well think of you first when the time arrives.
Find blogging angles based on trends
The humble blog remains one of the most valuable tools at an online marketer’s disposal, because it has such obvious cross-platform appeal. Once you have a post up, you can market it anywhere, promoting it in such a way that people will readily click (we’re conditioned to understand that blog posts don’t take an age to read) — try checking out a podcast like Perpetual Traffic to get some general blogging tips.
And something exceptional about the real estate market is that it’s so easy to find parallels with almost anything. Whenever there’s a notable political story, you can write about how you think it will affect property prices. If there’s a celebrity in the news, you can write about the style of their home. You don’t need to go about it in a tasteless way, but it’s undeniably a compelling option.
Spend some time looking through Google Trends and social media tags in general to see what terms keep coming up — and whenever anything relevant to real estate comes up, make a concerted effort to be one of the first real estate agents to write about it. You ultimately want to become established as an online authority.
Be sure you know where value is coming from
Channel attribution is a core part of multi-channel marketing, because you can’t assess channel value if you don’t know where your traffic is coming from. Imagine that you implement a multi-channel strategy and see your month-on-month traffic increase by 30%: do you know where that traffic is coming from? Twitter? Facebook? Your email campaign?
But bear in mind that it isn’t always so simple to allocate value. Marketer Ken Jurina talks at length about digital touchpoints in his recent interview for Marketing Speak, saying “A lot of folks are common to attributing 100% of a sale to the last click and not necessarily looking at the different things that happened along the journey that contributed to that actual sale.”
In short, you need a careful plan behind your multi-channel marketing. You need to be able to fully track click sources and understand the role that each channel plays in visitors’ overall journeys. When you have the opportunity to talk to people directly (for viewings, for instance), take full advantage to ask for some more details about how they found you. That information might prove invaluable.
In 2019, going multi-channel isn’t a choice — it’s mandatory if you want your business to survive and thrive for years to come. Follow these tips when creating or expanding your multi-channel marketing plan, and you’ll have a strong chance of succeeding.
If you are an educated, experienced REALTOR® that uses social media in their business, you should apply to join the PrimoAgents REALTOR® Referral Network. You will be given an exclusive area to represent and the opportunity to increase leads and referrals for a very low cost. Click here to apply now.
Patrick Foster is a writer and online commerce expert from Ecommerce Tips —a community ecommerce blog dedicated to sharing entrepreneurial insights from the business sector. Check out the latest news on Twitter @myecommercetips.
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