Real Estate Marketing 301: Focus on Off-Page Engagement
Your website is good to go, and all that’s left is to optimize your off-site channels. This may sound easy to accomplish, but to complete this activity, you first need to list every single digital locale in which you have a presence and figure out which need to be modified for your real estate marketing plan first. One place that makes the most sense to begin this effort is on social media.
7) Converse with fans, followers, and favorite-ers on each of your social media channels.
“Social is the way our work gets discovered. Content that is truly exceptional, unique, and useful can earn tremendous awareness through social media, and that social amplification often leads to great links, which leads to great rankings.” This tidbit from Moz Founder Rand Fishkin epitomizes the mentality agents need to have with their real estate social media marketing channels — but it’s only half of what’s needed to truly succeed on social. The other half entails reaching out to those who engage with your brand: from ardent fans and followers who comment on your status updates and pins to the occasional retweeter who messages you to ask a question.
Start your offsite marketing optimization by making sure your social media presence is strong, both in terms of the content you share, which should be enticing and interesting, and the engagement levels you have on each medium. Be thorough and prompt with your responses to those who reach out to you. Also, don’t forget to take initiative and message those you think would enjoy your content (for instance, those who may have shared some of your blog articles on Google+), and friend request/connect with others who aren’t yet in your social network circles.
8) Produce Oscar-worthy videos to publish on your YouTube channel.
One thing many agents forget is YouTube is a social network — one that’s home to hundreds of millions of channels and receives billions of views monthly. As renowned marketer Amy Porterfield notes, social media and video go hand in hand: Your YouTube account can drive more traffic to your other social profiles, while sharing your videos on social networks helps garner more traction to your YouTube channel. Moreover, social media posts with videos are shared 12 times more often than updates with just text and/or links.
The evidence is there: Video marketing is not only here to stay, it’s a growing factor in practically every brand’s online marketing plans. While it may take some time to learn how to produce stellar real estate videos — or, at the very least, find the right third parties to create them — map out how you can fill web pages, blog posts, and social media messages with videos so you can enhance your digital presence. Moreover, don’t forget to optimize your YouTube channel, which entails more than publishing a regular stream of videos.
9) Make your online presence known on other prominent and pertinent sites.
From guest posting to content syndication, there are a wealth of content promotion opportunities at your disposal — the trick is building the right network of influencers and industry connections willing to share your content with their networks.
This marketing approach requires first reaching out to dozens of people to gauge their interest in sharing your content and researching those who regularly share others’ content to see what drives them to do so. Sometimes, these promotion partners ask for something in return, like promotion of their own content or products and services or an IOU for a spot on your blog at some point down the line. The bottom line is that getting others to spread awareness of your content requires some give and take.
Read what more than a dozen marketing experts told BuzzSumo they do to ensure their content receives considerable amounts of promotion to get the most mileage out of their content. For instance, SEO marketer Steven Sparber noted, “Original, creative observations will generate content that resonates with people.” In other words, make your content unique and intriguing to a wide audience and you vastly increase the odds others will share your content online.
If promotional share requests don’t pan out, you can simply interview well-known personalities for your real estate blog. Since you’re giving them a platform to speak their mind, you don’t have to convince them to share your content: They’ll do that on their own.
10) Develop drip real estate email marketing campaigns to nurture leads.
Three-quarters of marketers believe email marketing will offer excellent return on investment for their brands in five years. The primary reason for this widely held belief is simple: Email — and, more specifically, email drip campaigns — prove more and more effective in nurturing leads through the marketing funnel. Real estate lead generation is every agent’s focus, but many agents forget once they secure those leads, the job is far from over.
Manually sending email to each and every lead is a thing of the past. Nurturing leads with real estate email marketing drip campaigns allows you and your brand to stay top-of-mind with buyers and sellers as they wade through their options and consider hiring an agent or searching the market for listings. If you have a group of leads who fill out a form to access your home buying or selling checklist, for example, you can set up an automated workflow of email to these prospects, gradually offering them more relevant information and, eventually, offering your services to help them.
Create numerous email messages — or use a service that offers them pre-made — to implement and send over time to engage your leads and influence their decision-making.