With the right strategies, you can get quality leads that increase sales and decrease the time you spend selling.
Cold calls and “for sale” signs may have been effective marketing strategies once upon a time, but as home buyers increasingly look to the internet for answers, traditional strategies are no longer enough. These days, you need to use real estate lead generation strategies fit for the modern age to find potential home buyers (and even seller leads) who you can convert.
For real estate professionals to sell more homes, it’s important to meet your potential leads where they already are. Today, 50% of home buyers are purchasing homes they found initially online. This number is only set to grow as young millennials and members of Gen Z become big parts of the home-buying market, making the internet the place to be.
If you want to get ahead of real estate lead generation trends and increase your lead sources, here are some tips you’ll want to put to use.
Real estate lead generation ideas
When you begin ramping up your real estate marketing, it’s important to remember that not every lead is a quality lead. Collecting contact information may help you build awareness for your real estate business, but increasing your conversion rate depends on quality over quantity.
The following lead generation ideas will help you connect with truly interested home buyers and sellers who are worth your time.
1. Create a landing page
Sometimes known as lead capture pages, landing pages are subsets of your website that are designed to rank on Google and encourage visitors to take an action. In the case of real estate lead generation, this can help you collect contact information from audiences who are interested in exactly what you have to offer.
As an example, you may create a landing page that offers sellers a free home valuation in exchange for their name and email. For buyers, you may offer a quick consultation to receive contact information.
Custom landing pages are effective. Business owners see their leads increase by 55% when they have 10-15 landing pages. Whether you’re seeking more organic leads or better Google Ads conversion rates, multiple landing pages that target unique Google searches can help you generate regular, relevant leads.
2. Promote your open houses
Open houses aren’t a modern invention, but they remain effective opportunities for realtors to get highly interested leads. These are people who’ve already taken the big step of visiting their potential new home. While placing an open house sign in front of your property will only attract passersby, promoting your event online can reach people at scale.
Your social media pages are great channels for promoting your upcoming open houses. If you’re willing to pay for results, Facebook ads will help you take your targeting to the next level and ensure you’re spending your marketing budget on the right audience.
Free advertising sites like Craigslist are also effective digital platforms for you to reach a local audience with your open house or general property listings. These platforms are frequented by consumers who are already interested in home buying and heading straight to the real estate section to find their match.
On the flip side, you can even use social media and advertising sites to find current sellers who may need a little help from a real estate agent. Just scroll through Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and other websites with for sale by owner (FSBO) listings and reach out when the potential for a relationship is there.
3. Set up a drip campaign
Collecting contact information is only useful if you’re effectively reaching out to your potential clients. To ensure your leads keep you and your properties top of mind, you’ll want to set up a custom email drip campaign to drive buyers and sellers toward the decisions you want them to make.
Whether you’re using Mailchimp or a more advanced CRM like HubSpot for your lead management, you can build targeted campaigns to full a number of roles:
- Acting as a follow-up to recent open house visits and online interest form submissions
- Telling buyers about the benefits of a home or neighborhood through a series of emails.
- Telling sellers about the current real estate market and why now is the best time to sell
With mobile accounting for 46% of all email opens, you’ll want to make sure that every email in your marketing campaign is suited for smartphone users.
4. Create your Zillow profile
With over 180 million users visiting Zillow every month, the platform is easily one of the world’s most-visited real estate websites. By creating your Zillow realtor account and setting up your searchable profile, you quickly increase your visibility among high-quality leads in your local market, since you’ll be appearing right where they’re searching for homes and real estate agents. As your profile drives valuable leads to you, you can easily manage your inbox through your Zillow realtor account and follow up in a timely manner.
Creating your profile will also allow you to generate Zillow realtor reviews. When 72% of consumers won’t take action until they read reviews, allowing your former clients to add their feedback on relevant review sites is an important step to building trust. With this trust, you can turn even skeptical first-time seller and buyer leads into clients.
Using Podium Reviews can further help you increase your online visibility by directly inviting your clients to review your page on Google, Facebook, Zillow, Realtor.com, and more websites specific to the real estate industry.
5. Follow up with clients
We’ve already mentioned the importance of following up with your leads, but it’s equally important to follow up with your current and former clients. The majority of home buyers and sellers still find their real estate agents based on referrals from people they trust, which means building up your network of referrers is a must for broadening your sphere of influence.
You can keep your home buyers and home sellers subscribed to a newsletter or schedule recurring touchpoints where you’ll personally send out an email or make a phone call. Whenever a former client gives you an effective referral, make sure to thank them or even send them a gift for the consideration.
Of course, you can always use less organic methods for your referral-based real estate lead generation. Some realtors will openly advertise a cash reward or gift card in exchange for any referral that leads to a successful sale. This encourages your audience to send you the potential clients that are truly interested and already encouraged by a strong recommendation.
In some cases, real estate professionals will even team up to give each other referrals when a lead is more suited for one agent than another. Many of them use various apps on their mobile devices for these tasks – that’s why the market for real estate application development has grown over the past few years
Find the leads that matter
Homebuyers and sellers are no longer seeking properties or realtor services through newspaper ads or by stumbling upon open houses in their neighborhoods. Instead, the majority are going directly to the internet and websites like Zillow to inform their decisions.
As traditional marketing strategies fall by the wayside, using modern platforms to boost your real estate lead generation is more important than ever. By selecting the right channels and techniques, you’ll spend less time on false leads and increase your lead conversion rate.
If you leverage referrals and reviews correctly, while growing your online reputation, you can become one of the leading realtors in your market. To help you build trust in your community even faster, take a look at these local marketing tactics and the tools you need to master them.
