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Generating real estate leads online isn’t just the premier way to earn new home buyer and seller clients today. It’s also the premier way to scale your business and get well on your way to earning six figures — and perhaps eventually seven — as your marketing, sales, and overall business strategy evolves.
But first thing’s first: You need to understand how to generate real estate leads online — including and especially through your REALTOR® website — and this process starts with implementing attractive and unique custom lead capture forms and pages across your site.
Discover the step-by-step system for making the most of these forms and pages throughout your agency website below, including what you can offer your visitors behind these forms and on these pages and the specific types of copy and imagery that can help convert them into authentic, ready-to-nurture real estate leads.
Securing a website provider that offers lead capture forms can ease your lead gen efforts greatly.
Let’s skip ahead to the part where you have an abundance of appealing content that can direct more of your prospective leads right to your digital front door.
(If you’ve already accomplished this feat, well done, my friend. Keep it up with your content efforts).
You have two main options when it comes to setting up custom lead capture forms on your site:
- Work with a templated website and marketing service provider that offers pre-made page themes that come with the previously mentioned lead capture forms.
- Find a lead capture tool or plug-in that syncs with your agency website and allows you to create custom versions with different headers, body copy, and styles.
If you want to take the most efficient (and inarguably easiest) route here, you’ll find a real estate website that already offers custom lead capture pages and forms right out of the box — thus saving you the hassle of researching the undoubtedly numerous lead capture services offered online today.
Assuming you go with this option, you can turn your attention to actually building your various forms. In Placester, for example, you can build and save passive, aggressive, and custom lead capture forms:
Passive forms can appear after, say, a handful of pageviews on your website. Aggressive forms can show up a bit sooner than that, such as after 10 or so seconds after a user lands on your site.
Custom lead capture forms — well, in terms of the Placester versions — can be passive or aggressive, depending on your preferences (hint: Test both out over time to see which yields the biggest crop of new real estate leads from your site).
When placed on custom lead capture pages, however, these forms are built into the page — static, if you will — and allow you to add much more complementary language to the side of the form, as if you were developing a standard page for your site.
Here’s a primary example of an attractive custom lead capture page you could create in the Placester dashboard for your real estate website (in this instance, a gated offer for a home buying guide):
Notice how there are the standard form fields — first and last, email, and phone number — along with another qualifier field: selling timeline. That’s just one instance of a “bonus” field you can add to your forms that can help you derive more insights into your new prospects.
Whether it’s this, the type of home a buyer is looking for, the biggest pain point for a seller, or another piece of important criteria you want to learn about from your leads, these fields offer you the opportunity to get inside the minds of your prospects and understand how to best nurture them post-conversion.
For instance, if you noticed a lead said they want to purchase a newly built single-family residence and no other kind of property, you can share an email nurture drip for these real estate leads with them featuring only new single-family construction in and around your market — meaning content that could actually help you earn their business someday (possibly soon).
Learn about Placester’s Custom Lead Capture Forms and Pages — and how they help agents convert more real estate leads.
Generating real estate leads via forms requires the aforementioned content and other “offers.”
Let’s fast-forward yet again, when you’ve secured a website provider that offers custom lead capture pages and forms and makes generating real estate leads from your online presence a simple(r) task (deserving of yet another “Well done!” and pat on the back).
This means you need to develop a relatively lengthy list of “offers” for your prospects who visit your IDX website: both in terms of content (market guides, local real estate reports, buying/selling advice videos, etc.) and consultations (listing presentations, coffee meetups, Skype chats, home valuations, etc.).
There is truly no end in terms of the number of inviting offers you can incorporate across your website to generate more real estate leads.
Whether they’re featured on some, most, or all of your site pages or on a dedicated custom lead capture page, you have myriad opportunities to obtain your visitors’ contact details, housing preferences, and other tidbits that can help you qualify and, eventually, grade and prioritize them in your CRM database.
The important thing is to give your visitors a reason to fill out a form.
With that in mind, here are some of the premier ways to court your real estate leads, so to speak, and convince them to fill out forms:
- Be human and relatable in your lead capture copy. Show off some humor and be conversational in your CTA language.
- Use images and videos to persuade your potential prospects to hand over the contact info and take advantage of your offers.
- Don’t wax poetic — get right to the point with quick-hit, direct copy that briefly but clearly explains your specific offer.
Again, it can’t be stressed enough that these are the basic rules of CTA creation, but that you also need to test out different types (e.g. different copy lengths, multimedia inclusions, actionable language) so you find the right mix for your real estate lead generation efforts via your site.
Re-optimizing your website over and over again is the path to better lead gen success in the long run.
Aside from conducting call-to-action tests to enhance the effectiveness of your forms and pages featuring forms, it’s also essential to use your website analytics to ensure your audience is actually seeing them in the first place.
You know Google Analytics is a supremely beneficial tool for your marketing … but if you don’t know how to use it correctly to gauge the performance of each page on your site, it’s no use setting up an account with the software.
Having said that, there are even more intricate data-collecting tools that can ensure your forms are being viewed and pages are being engaged with so you can enhance lead capture. For instance:
- Heat-mapping resources can show you where on each website page your visitors tend to view and click the most.
- Page-loading tools, like Google’s, can give you insights into how long it takes your pages to populate. The quicker, the better.
- SEO add-ons can analyze every nook and cranny of your IDX website to ensure it’s fully optimized for search engines.
The bottom line is this: Your website’s performance needs to be up to modern standards — standards your potential leads expect with each and every session they have on your site — so make sure you have a top-tier web presence that makes it easy for your persona(s) to find your forms and easily discern the value in filling them out.
