Resources: eBook Every agent’s road to success in real estate marketing
Week 1: The fundamentals of digital marketing
mar·ket·ing
[mahr-ki-ting] noun
- The practice of promoting a business, brand, person, or product.
- In real estate, the practice of promoting a brokerage, agent, or properties for sale.
As a real estate agent, marketing is—or should be—a Big Priority. After all, to make your sales, you need clients, and in today’s ever more digital world, where traditional cold advertising methods don’t always work as expected, you need digital marketing to find clients.
But dictionary definitions aside, what is digital marketing? How does it work for real estate agents? And what makes it so different from traditional advertising? Let’s find out.
What is digital marketing?
As we mentioned earlier, digital marketing is the practice of promoting a brokerage, your own agent business, or your properties for sale in an online environment. More specifically, it consists of phases of continual outreach through repeatable tactics designed to give you a dependable flow of new clientele for your agent business.
The phases
As we mentioned earlier, digital marketing is the practice of promoting a brokerage, your own agent business, or your properties for sale in an online environment. More specifically, it consists of phases of continual outreach through repeatable tactics designed to give you a dependable flow of new clientele for your agent business.
Phase 1: Attract
As we mentioned earlier, digital marketing is the practice of promoting a brokerage, your own agent business, or your properties for sale in an online environment. More specifically, it consists of phases of continual outreach through repeatable tactics designed to give you a dependable flow of new clientele for your agent business.
Phase 2: Nurture
In this phase, your goal is to create consistent communication with the new prospects you brought in, warming them up over time to your value for them as a real estate agent.
Phase 3: Convert
In this phase, your goal is to create consistent communication with the new prospects you brought in, warming them up over time to your value for them as a real estate agent.
The tactics
Tactic 1: Your foundation
This includes core components of your marketing strategy, including a website to act as your online home base, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to handle leads, landing pages and lead magnets, and more.
Tactic 2: Nurture marketing
This includes repeatable methods for staying in touch with prospects and warming them up to your value as a real estate agent, including email campaigns, SMS campaigns, and more.
Tactic 3: Social media
This includes methods for sharing listings and key information, as well as building communities of clients and prospects, both through organic social media posts and paid advertising options.
What’s a lead magnet?
We’ll go over this more in a future module, but for now, suffice it to say that a lead magnet is an asset—like a custom generated CMAs, a generalized market report, or a digital guide—that potential clients would be willing to give their email addresses or phone numbers to access.
How digital and traditional marketing differ
As a uniquely hyperlocal industry, real estate often relies on equally hyperlocal tactics to find potential clients. That’s why door-to-door tactics like canvassing, door hangers, and even mailers have always been so popular.
However, with cultural shifts in the wake of recent years, these methods aren’t always as popular with prospects anymore. Today, the majority of potential clients live in a virtual environment, and tend to experience things online more than anywhere else.
95% of consumers start their real estate journeys by looking online.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, has grown in popularity in many industries over the years as a method that allows businesses to reach far beyond their own local limits. With online advertising, globally accessible websites, and more, suddenly they can reach into pockets of potential consumers around the world.
For real estate agents, that global reach isn’t necessarily the biggest draw. After all, your clients still need to be relatively local to the area you cover. But with its ability to target clients by geographic regions, interests, and much more, digital marketing is quickly becoming an incredibly viable strategy.
What’s next?
Stay tuned for the next stretch in your road to real estate marketing success, where you’ll learn why it’s important to define your specific value for your potential clients—and how to discover what it is.
In the meantime...
Learn more about digital marketing in real estate on the Lone Wolf blog here.
