Real estate agents, especially new ones, have to spend majority of their day finding new business. They have to “sell” their services and persuade prospects to hire them if they are looking to buy or sell a property. Host open houses, cold calling, attending community events, creating flyers, buying media spaces, and knocking on tens of door every day quickly becomes a part of daily routine.

Wouldn’t it be better if you were spending more time working with clients than finding them?

Hey, don’t get me wrong. Traditional Marketing is great stuff and if it’s working for you, then kudos to you my friend. In fact, I know how tough all of these can be and the kind of commitment it requires to work.

However, the purpose of this blog is to provide you with an alternative approach to in-person lead generation called “Inbound Marketing”. In Inbound Marketing, the people looking for your services come to you instead of the other way around. With inbound marketing for real estate you don’t have to waste away all those hours and let your marketing strategy do the work for you.

Nowadays, it’s customers who are in the driving seats. They control what and when they will make a purchase. The objective of inbound marketing is to be “found” at the right moment, also called “Zero Moment of Truth”. It’s to nurture your prospects so when they finally decide on buying or selling a house, you are the one who they talk to. In that, Inbound marketing is very different from traditional marketing. It’s not interruptive.

Here are three things you can do as an agent to start using inbound marketing to generate more exposure, engagement, and qualified leads:

Create Helpful Content

Agents work in the real estate day in and day out. You acquire more knowledge and experience with every transaction you help out with. Your clients don’t.
If they have to sell, buy or invest in property, they will have questions. Rule # 1 of inbound marketing for real estate agents is to provide helpful content to your clients which helps you stand out as an expert.

You can answer their questions, outline the process, show local property trends, and help them avoid costly mistakes through creating visually appealing infographics, guides and checklists.

If you are a member of GREL, then you will get pre-made tools with your real estate licence which you can use to provide more value to your clients through your website.

Optimize Your Website For Search Engines:

If you aren’t found online, you don’t exist for your clients. Everything in inbound marketing strategies for real estate agents relies on their having a solid, optimized website.

The primary service that search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo provide is showing the relevant and best results for what you put in the search bar. To do that, they index (safe) websites, see what they are all about and what kind of experience they provide to users.

Now, once you have a website, you need to optimize it for your local clientele. That would mean investing in a SEO specialist who can find the right keywords for you, optimize the content on your website, and then do off-page optimization. This is pretty technical stuff but is very very very important.

You can outsource it to someone through freelancing websites like Upwork, learn how to do it yourself or get your assistant to help you out with it.

Here’s an amazing SEO guide for beginners that you can use to get started: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo.

Also, make sure you have lead capturing pages and your contact information on the website because without them all the traffic coming to the website will be wasted.

Stay Active On Social Media

Once you have your business website ready, it’s time to market your services. Creating great content and using the right promoting channels is very important part of inbound marketing strategy for real estate agents.

Some agents often complain about not having time or the patience for social media marketing. The truth is that social media has become crucial for survival of agents. If you have a real estate agent licence and are truly committed. You need to really active on social presence and create memorable posts who educate and engage your prospects.

The first requirement is to stay active. If you are not active, you are basically sitting out of the game. You can create interesting quizzes on your website which range from the history of your town, famous people who resided in the area, or even broader topics like music, movies, etc.

You can also make videos of your working with buyers and sellers, walking your audience through the process and giving them some real life snippets of what you can do to help sell or buy the property.

You can also use virtual tours of the property and client testimonials to build your credibility as a great real estate agent. Your audience, knowing that you care about what you do, will reach out to you by themselves when they need your services. You can also modify the same strategy to generate more referrals.

Well, that’s it. The three steps we mentioned above will help you start generating inbound leads and work them instead of running around like a headless chicken. You will be able to save time, money and the grunt work that goes into lead acquisition through inbound marketing. Atleast give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised!

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