Content
5 Evidence-Proven Ways To Generate Leads In Real Estate
October 5, 2023
15 mins
More and more property managers are using digital marketing tools as the best-fit solution to market their rental properties and attract new tenants. To catch up with the competition, real estate players bet on qualified leads.
To win this game, you should master proven lead-generation strategies in real estate. In today’s article, real estate marketing experts at Promodo are sharing their hands-on experience on digital approaches to winning clients for your real estate business.
Simply put, lead generation (aka. lead acquisition) is about transforming visitors into future customers on your site.
A sound starting point to generate local leads for your properties is to launch an online survey and ask people about their estate preferences. This is also the way to collect personal emails to generate the base of your potential customers.
Most importantly, as a feasible means of opening communication, online surveys will help you personalize demand for local properties and address current property problems faced by your target audience.
This baseline advice is only the tip of the iceberg. Generating real estate leads is a serious business. Much depends on your strategic approach and overall business capacity to keep the ball rolling.
Lead generation is the way to attract prospects to your real estate services and heat their interest in your services. This is how you convert users into the end customers. All means are effective here ranging from crafting quality content on your site to organizing live events.
In this pursuit, be sure to explore local options and pursue the finest mix of lead generator strategies. With that, do not attempt all opportunities at once; opt for the ones that will bring you the most qualified leads instead.
You’ll mostly generate qualified leads from the prospects who best fit your ideal customer profile, the ones with the largest purchasing intent. The more qualified leads you engage, the healthier is your real estate sales pipeline.
To generate qualified leads, attract them to your brand with special offers, seasonal discounts, one-time offers, and anything else that best works for your real estate business locally.
This is to say that the often misunderstood marketing term ‘lead generation’ is all about warming up potential customers to use your real estate services. Through this vital transition, you naturally satisfy people’s organic interest in your property business.
Understanding your lead is of primary importance in real estate marketing to know the audience with an innate interest in your services. The big question here is whom are you targeting:
You may even target them all at once. Still, the better you know your potential clients, the more qualified leads you’ll generate.
The big truth about lead generation in the real estate business is that leads are not the same. Much depends on their lifecycle stage.
For example, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) may be engaged with your brand, though they are not disposed to receive property offers from you. Still, MQLs may fill out forms with property offers on your site.
Another category embraces sales-qualified leads (SQLs) who express direct interest in your services and are most likely to turn into your paying customers. This category is most likely to contact you for additional questions about your real estate services.
Finally, service-qualified leads (SQls) are the contacts who are ready to buy from you.
Lead generation comes into play when you’ve managed to attract a relevant audience with high conversion potential.
To do it right, rely on inbound marketing as part of your lead-generation strategy. Focus on crafting valuable real estate content to resonate with the essential needs shared by local customers. The deeper this bond is, the sooner you’ll inspire long-term relationships with your real estate customers.
The lead-generation process starts with attracting strangers or occasional visitors to your site. Then you convert these people into leads. Further, you close them as your customers. And, finally, you incline them to promote your real estate services.
Initially, people get to you through one of the marketing channels, like your website, email, or social media platform. Then, the most interested ones click on one of the call-to-action (CTA) buttons or pop-ups to learn more about your real estate service in exchange for their contact information. CTAs are strategically important as they re-direct your site visitors to a landing page where you capture lead information in exchange for a digital offer or a gift.
There is a whole variety of topics you may explore to attract locals and occasional visitors to your website. You may offer snapshots from real estate market research, or any other data that resonates with actual needs and current demand for properties shared by locals:
Our hands-on lead generation experience shows that people are willingly sharing their emails in exchange for a piece of valuable local property data. This is the best-fit strategy to personalize your local customer base and further re-market them with your property offers.
Your digital offer should hold enough value to attract potential customers.
Working in full-funnel digital performance marketing, we cannot suggest the best way to generate real estate leads.
Simply put, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach here. The most relevant solution is to combine a few marketing strategies and implement lead-generation campaigns through the most effective digital channels.
As a digital marketing strategy in its own right, lead generation is a less intrusive sales tactic compared to cold calling or aggressive emailing targeted at the wrong prospects uninterested in your local property offers at all.
Still, you’d better take lead generation as a constituent part of a larger strategy aimed at paying clients.
Search engine optimization (SEO) assumes your website optimization so that Google ranks you higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for locally searched keywords and phrases.
This is how your local property offers will match user intent (the most popular real estate searches) among your prospects. Simply put, SEO is the best-fit approach whenever someone searches for a real estate agent or property manager in your area.
Your task is to explore locally-bond keywords and phrases people type while looking for homes and other properties online. We suggest incorporating these terms as part of your page titles.
Another piece of SEO advice is to focus your long-term lead-generation strategy on content. Incorporate the most popular search requests for properties into the content on your blog and core locations on your website.
Your real estate business will be better recognized in Google Search and Google Maps once you list your company in the Google Business Profile. This is the most recommended way to set your contact information, location, and working hours. Adding corporate photos and customer reviews will add to your brand awareness.
Let’s assume, you are selling “apartments in Cleveland OH.” Then the locally-bond phrase “apartments in Cleveland OH” may sound like a feasible option for you.
We’ve analyzed this keyword option with the reputable online research service Semrush.
To understand the overall value and whether the keyword is worth your investment, we’ve additionally performed the bulk analysis:
1. The keyword phrase ‘apartments in Cleveland OH’ matches informational intent. This means that users are likely to type this phrase in the search feed when they want to know more about the available apartments in Cleveland, Ohio.
2. Keyword trend depicts the popularity of a keyword. In this case, we see how the searchers expressed interest in local apartments over the last 12 months. The keyword trend metric varies depending on monthly search changes.
3. On average, a sound keyword search volume across the real estate industry varies from 100 to 1000 searches a month. This indicates that the higher the monthly search volume for a particular keyword, the more organic traffic you generate. In due case, the selected keyword combination ‘apartments in Cleveland OH’ showed an average of 320 monthly searches over the past 12 months. In each individual case keyword volume will depend on various factors like industry, location, search intent, competition, and seasonality among others.
4. Keyword difficulty (KD) (aka. SEO difficulty, or keyword competition) indicates the difficulty of ranking a specific term in SERPs. The value of this parameter depends on (1) domain authority, (2) page authority, and (3) content quality. KD necessitates a great deal of referring domains with backlinks to your website. High-quality referring domains will ensure your site a decent link profile and higher ranking in SERPs.
Moderate difficulty keywords are in the range of KD between 30% and 70%. These are the keywords with high search volumes and lesser competition. However, in the real estate industry, the KD score of 67% assumes a decent amount of local competition, so you’d better target more specific keyword combinations:
This is your SEO homework if you are still asking: How to get more real estate leads?
Another relevant option at stake is known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This is essentially about paying for the clicks on the keywords that will trigger your advertisements. With every paid click, you’ll send people to your landing page where they should take some action.
To make further performance marketing analysis more comprehensive, our lead PPC expert, Oksana Zhuk, has dived deeper into the complex terminology.
Three main metrics will help you evaluate the effectiveness of advertising:
The outlined metrics depend directly on the technical settings of advertising, as well as the website's conversion rate optimization (CRO). With that, the CPL advertising pricing model additionally involves the work of the sales department. The strategic task here is to convert your website user from a potential customer to an interested customer. Oksana Zhuk, PPC expert at Promodo.
The bulk analysis of our keyword phrase ‘apartments in Cleveland OH’ embraces a strategic PPC metric known as cost per click (CPC).
Lead generation with PPC assumes three fundamental metrics:
Mind that the whole difference between CPC and CPL is that with CPC you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, while in the case of CPL you pay when users submit their contact information on your site through the call-to-action (CTA) form.
More to that, your strategic task in pursuing a lead-generation strategy is to track the lifetime value (LTV) of every lead with the consideration of real estate transactions, especially the high-value ones.
Your major PPC goal is to measure the quality of the leads you generate with a strategic focus on the conversion rate (CR) and the percentage of leads who’ve eventually closed transactions.
CPL and CPC in real estate depend on key factors like property location, target audience, ad format, and competition.
As estimated, the average CPL for real estate ads on Facebook is about $1.81, while the average CPC is about $1.72 respectively.
The average CPC for real estate keywords in Google ads varies from $0.40 to $6.35 depending on property location and local competition. In our case, the CPC for the keyword phrase ‘apartments in Cleveland OH’ is 1.09 assumed as the average rate across the industry.
To optimize your lead generation budget, be sure to track current industry benchmarks and experiment with more specific keyword combinations.
If you opt for PPC as a lead-generation strategy, much will depend on where you’ll place your ad:
By all accounts, an average CPL in real estate is rather costly in Google Search (i.e. $10 to $50). Considering your local market and rivalry, we suggest bidding higher on less competitive real estate keywords.
Alternatively, Google Discovery comes as a multichannel ad option that captures multiple Google properties:
By contrast to Google Search, the average CPL for real estate ads on Google Discovery will cost you something from $3 to $10.
Finally, the most cost-effective option for property realtors is Google Display Network (GDN). An average CPL depends on the ad format and targeting and is close to $1.76.
High-quality content is decisive for the success of your real estate performance marketing strategy. This is a stepping stone beneath all your promotional efforts. Content is equally crucial for your brand awareness and higher rankings in SERPs. Therefore, we highly recommend crafting a quality real estate and property management blog on your website.
Fill your content with keywords and phrases relevant to informational and search intent shared by your potential prospects. Finely designed informative blog pieces of about 600-800 words will best resonate with public interest in local properties and statewide real estate trends.
Be sure to share valuable content with your readers free of charge. The content-based organic strategy will help you stay open to people’s property needs and preferences. This will help you generate local traffic and build brand awareness as a trusted local realtor.
To earn people’s loyalty, be sure to launch a YouTube channel. While the effort may sound like a separate lead-generation strategy, it is all about generating niched content, getting customer feedback, and resonating with essential property management concerns shared by local dwellers.
An email list reflects the potential customer base you can further follow up. These are the most interested leads in your real estate offers and property management services.
Regular maintenance of a local customer base is among your strategic priorities. Keep in touch with your leads through informative emails. Benefit from newsletters as the sound means of sharing your content among your most loyal leads. With email marketing, you’ll pursue a direct customer relationship that will help you boost your brand awareness and expand your clientele over time.
Email marketing is essential to customized targeting which works well in such a sensitive and responsible niche as real estate. This is because while purchasing, selling, or renting properties, people oftentimes make their lifetime choices and need you as a real estate expert and reliable advisor.
Eventually, you’ll turn far more leads into end customers by nurturing their interest in your real estate services.
While online presence is a must-have in today’s digital age realms, you are hardly likely to expand your local real estate business without getting visible on social media. Regardless of generational identity, the overwhelming majority of your property customers are spending a fair share of their daytime on social media platforms, like Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube among others.
These are the popular spots for virtual socialization through networking. Your task is not to penetrate all these platforms, though make sure you know where your real estate prospects are.
Depending on demographic and other essential factors, you’ll soon discover the best-fit social media platforms where you can contact your potential clients directly.
Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
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