Digital marketing can seem intimidating, often yielding little return. Every marketing company out there is selling you on how to expand your sphere of influence using the newest platforms, tricks and hacks. Automation! Growth hacking! Ads! Seminars! Social media! All useful, but without a sound strategy, can be overwhelming.
Where do you start?
If you’re looking to generate leads online, you want to have a proven owned presence. This means you have your own brand, database and follow-up systems in place, as well as processes to take qualified prospects from lead to escrow to close.
Top performing real estate agents know their most valuable owned assets are the ones that produce a return on investment (ROI) time and time again. Generating high-quality leads online is one of the fastest ways to reach people outside of your immediate network.
However, knowing what to look for can be tricky. The following are my three best tips for generating high-quality leads online.
1. Use specific listings, new homebuyer programs and new construction offers for your marketing
Specificity is key in marketing. Identifying specific audiences to reach allows you to focus your message on one target audience rather than trying to speak to everyone at the same time.
“With the massive amount of customer and behavior data at our disposal, it’s even more important to identify the key characteristics of audience segments that are most significant to a brand — to better understand the behavior that drives more positive interaction, sharing and conversions among different groups of customers,” Trevor Paulsen, senior product manager for Adobe Analytics, wrote in a blog post on why specificity matters.
Applying this to your marketing leads to exponentially higher-quality prospects. How?
Looking to target mid to top of your market? Focus your marketing on listings in those ranges. Spend time in those communities, both online and offline. We see some of our highest-quality prospects generated from using mid- to top-end listing advertisements on social media.
Looking to help first-time homebuyers? You can do this by advertising first-time homebuyer programs and focusing your messaging on the benefits of these programs. Be prepared to offer credit repair services. Based on the responses we see in our campaigns, many of these prospects will range from poor to fair credit.
Looking for more new-construction transactions? Tailor your messaging to new construction by promoting new-construction properties in your market and the benefits that come with it, like increased negotiation leverage and smoother transactions. Creating specific marketing channels allows you to attract the exact kind of prospect for each offer.
I’m a big advocate of creating targeted digital advertising campaigns for each of these segments. This allows you to properly segment your leads, monitor which channel they come from and track your true ROI from lead to close for each channel.
2. Take advantage of exclusive conversational surveys to generate leads
The days of “name, email and phone number” are over. According to Marc Wayshak, a leading sales strategist, at least 50 percent of your prospects aren’t a good fit for what you sell.
Disqualifying them right away allows you to save a ton of time and energy from engaging with prospects that aren’t a good fit.
Surveys give you the opportunity to generate a significant amount of information. They let you know exactly where your prospects are before you call them. In particular, surveys that use conditional logic are an excellent way to do this. Conditional logic surveys allow you to create different paths for respondents based on they way they respond.
For example, if someone says they have poor credit, you can ask them if they’re interested in credit repair instead of spending time with a lender only to have them fail qualification.
After tens of thousands of dollars of ad tests, our data shows that using exclusive surveys allows teams to focus on high-quality prospects instead of having to sort through prospects that may have filled out contact info for every other property out there.
3. Look for organic marketing on social media
If you’re looking to target high-income buyers or sellers, here’s a quick trick. Your most ideal prospects are on LinkedIn.
In fact, LinkedIn has the highest earnings per user at $17.10, nearly doubling Twitter’s $9.22 per user, based on research published by Digital Information World.
Not to mention, LinkedIn’s advanced search options go well beyond what you have on most social media sites. Connecting with ideal prospects is much more straightforward. Go to LinkedIn, search for high-income industries or job titles in your region. Then, add people, be friendly, and let your long-term content marketing strategy nurture them over time to help you stay top of their minds.
Bonus: When marketing on Instagram, make sure to use local hashtags so you show up in front of people in your market. What’s the point of tagging #realtor? The only people who will see that content are other Realtors! Try something more specific like: #losangelesrealestate
Or, find a trending local hashtag, and use that in your post.
According to Kallie Branciforte, the creator behind But First, Coffee, “by positioning yourself locally with hashtags and geo-tagging, you immediately shrink the size of the pond you’re swimming in — making it a lot easier to stand out. Instead of trying to reach everyone across the entire world, you’re focusing your efforts on standing out to people in your state, region, or city.”
Elisha Israel is the founder with Escrow Leads, an AI Digital Suite LLC brand. He travels full-time, providing real estate marketing services to clients anywhere in the United States.
