If you are searching for real estate marketing ideas, you will often find good information, but unfortunately, unordered.
Don’t get me wrong, you can find great information out there, but it can be overwhelming. And the usual reaction is a spinning head.
I am a big fan of the 80/20 principle (the Pareto Principle) and the book “The One Thing” by Garry Keller.
I wrote about both already in this article.
So I decided to ask ten experts and real estate pros just one question:
“If you could use only one marketing channel for real estate, what would it be and why?”
So today, you will learn what ten experts and real estate pros had to say about these questions, which will bring a bit of order into the vast amount of information and inspire you to grow your real estate business.
The Categorized List of 60 Real Estate Marketing Ideas
Before we get into the questions and answers from the real estate pros, I wanted to give you a list of 60 real estate marketing ideas, but in a sorted and categorized way.
They are sorted into the three categories I’ve mentioned several times on my blog (Traffic, Conversion, and Economics & Strategies).
You can read more about these categories in this article.
Analyzing each of them in terms of efficiency and marketing metrics would require writing a book.
The least I can do is to give you some order before we move on to the replies to my question: “If you could use only one marketing channel for real estate, what would it be and why?”
Traffic:
- Become a “Digital Mayor” of your area by using a community networking platform such as Parkbench, so you become the go-to hyperlocal real estate expert in your area.
- Market yourself on Zillow and Trulia
- Reach out to your sphere of influence by using direct mail, social media, and email marketing
- Promote your listings using video
- Publish listing information on social media
- Write guest articles
- Implement SEO
- Use Instagram Stories
- Use Twitter
- Publish market studies
- Use local clubs to create special events for your listings to attract buyers/sellers from the luxury segment.
- Run Facebook and YouTube ads for your videos to increase traffic on your website
- Run targeted ad campaigns on Google.
- Use Facebook Messenger ads to increase engagement.
- Submit articles to local magazines or newspapers
- Produce your reality series with IGTV (Instagram TV)
- Do influencer marketing on social media.
- Do content marketing about the area you are operating in
- Meet new people by joining local organizations
Conversion:
- Boost engagement with polls, Q&A Stickers on Instagram Stories, and Contests
- Inject some humor and capitalize on the popularity of the latest internet memes
- Use drone photography
- Add social sharing buttons to your website.
- Market your listing skills by building home valuation landing pages
- Use text messaging to increase your open rates by 390 percent compared to email marketing.
- Have a referral system
- Create a unique signature
- Don’t send normal emails. Send video emails by, for example, using BomBomb
- Use your pet in your marketing material (e.g., listing pictures)
- Make your website user-friendly.
- Write a question and answers blog article for your buyers and/or sellers.
- Create a virtual tour
- Limit showings & create a deadline
- Create a newsletter
- Have a strong bio on your about page
- Develop your brand
- Make yourself easy to contact
- Make your website responsive.
- Employ virtual staging
- Use emotional storytelling
- Send handwritten notes
- Build a personal relationship with conversational text messages (non-pushy ones)
- Get testimonials and reviews from your clients.
- Order unique business cards that stand out.
- Do door-knocking with FSBOs and expired listings.
- Make in-depth infographics, guides, graphs, charts, or maps.
- Publish a local market quiz on your website.
- Make an explainer video showing the behind-the-scenes view of your agency (assuming you are a real estate agent)
Economics/Strategies:
- Outsource when needed
- Use call tracking
- Use Google Analytics to improve your marketing
- Make joint ventures/ partnerships with out-of-state agents to target second-home buyers
Traffic & Conversion:
- Attend conferences and professional events
- Get active on LinkedIn.
- Give a local care package after closing.
- Run a remarketing campaign
- Co-host a webinar
- Build your Google My Business page
- Call expired or canceled listings to find sellers.
- Provide an extra moving truck
Top 10 Real Estate Marketing Ideas from Awesome Experts and Real Estate Pros
Let’s get to the answers from the ten experts and real estate pros.
I asked them one question: “If you could use only one marketing channel for real estate, what would it be and why?”
Here are their replies:
Drew Meyers from GeekEstateLabs
“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach that works for every agent or brokerage.
At the core of any strategy should be building your own audience that can be contacted without paying a tax levied by the brand controlling the audience.”
Bill Gassett, who runs the popular site Maximum Real Estate Exposure
“Thanks for allowing me to share some expertise with your readers Tobias.
One of the most profitable avenues for me has been creating a well-optimized blog. By having a blog, you are able to share your expertise freely with those who need it.
With a blog, you can, in a short period of time, become the local real estate expert. Consumers are on Google daily looking for the answers to their buying and selling questions. A blog is a great way of putting yourself in front of these people.
Make no mistake about it though, blogging takes passion and effort. Like most things, you can’t expect to throw up a few articles and have instant results. It takes time, effort, and dedication. If you don’t enjoy writing, then blogging would not be a wise choice for a real estate agent. Most who start blogging without enjoying it will quickly drop out. Another pitfall is not seeing immediate payback.
The third major problem to avoid is not taking the time to learn basic SEO principles. You can write the best content but if you don’t have a plan for building an audience, it will go to waste.”
Andrew Fortune from Great Colorado Homes
“I recommend YouTube as the main marketing channel because it’s evergreen and gets tons of search queries every day.
People rarely look at content on Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform unless it was posted within the last few days. Once your content is a week old, no one ever sees it again.
YouTube is different. People search YouTube all the time. Your videos from years ago can still get traction on there.
Also, it’s easy to add links in your description to guide people away from YouTube and onto your website. For these reasons, I personally prefer YouTube over every other marketing channel.”
John Fedro from MobileHomeInvesting.net
“My answer is, to any real estate professionals interested in mobile homes, check out this guy‘s channel because mobile homes rock! 🙂 ”
Bob Gordon from BoulderRealEstateNews
“I recommend — all the time — that agents write their own blogs. I’ve created listings and buyer side transactions from writing fresh, original content on my website’s blog over the years.
I blog quite regularly at boulderrealestatenews.com — such as that post about what to do before listing your home for sale.”
Jennifer Okhovat from Jennyohomes
“If I could only recommend one marketing channel to real estate professionals for 2020, it would be Instagram.
This is because Instagram is a platform I continue seeing growth in. Since it is now owned by Facebook, the platform is constantly evolving and improving.
In my experience, many clients and the millennial sphere are focused on Instagram more than any other marketing channel.
Also, one can connect their Instagram to Facebook so that posts are automatically shared on all platforms, removing an extra step of work.
Instagram allows every user to upload the type of content they are comfortable with: whether that is photo or video, so one can find their niche or comfort level and use it however they please.”
Brian Beatty from listingsincharleston
“When someone hires us to help them sell their home or to find a new one, they want to know what we are going to do, specifically, to find opportunities they don’t currently have access to.
For our team, the most dramatic change we’ve seen in our business as it relates to marketing our properties for sale stems from our ability to proactively target specific people.
When we take a new listing, we ask ourselves, “who would be the ideal buyer for this home?”
From there, we build a demographic profile around those types of buyers and overlay that with specific online behaviors. If we are selling a home that would cater well to a growing family, we build a demographic profile centered around parents.
After that, we include additional criteria that combine the online behaviors of a parent also searching for real estate online.
In this example, we might look for people who have researched schools in a zip code different from the one they currently live in AS WELL AS those that have searched for homes for sale in that same new zip code.
Ultimately, our ability to target people through social media based on their “online blueprint” and demographic profile allows us to confidently offer a cutting-edge approach to selling real estate proactively, rather than waiting and hoping that a buyer comes to us.”
Dan Smith from bydansmith.com
“I’d recommend being a Zillow Premier Agent. While not a traditional marketing channel, I believe it is the best use of marketing funds to lead generate.
The quality of leads is, in my opinion, the highest in the industry.
The leads might be more costly than other sources, but 100 $5 leads from more traditional and budget-friendly options that don’t convert to business have no value. Zillow leads are costly, and profitable.”
Jay Seier from JollyHomes
“In-person networking because nobody else is doing it.
Everyone is running ads on Facebook and other social media sites, but agents aren’t picking up the phone or getting face to face with potentials.”
Dustin Brohm from Massive Agent Podcast
“Podcasting. The power of podcasts is greatly underestimated.
Show me another platform or medium where the vast majority of listeners or readers come back for every single episode, and listen to 65-75 percent of each episode on average?
That means people are listening every week for 40+ minutes for the average podcast.
If you have an average watch time on YouTube of five minutes, you’re crushing it. Podcasting is the best way to grow your brand locally.”
In Closing
Thanks a lot for all the great contributions!
And as you can see, there isn’t one marketing idea that makes all others easier or unnecessary, as Garry Keller would say in the book, “The One Thing.”
It also confirms something I’ve written in the past, that you don’t just find the right marketing channel. Instead, you make it work after testing many different ones.
And once one is working for you, you can branch out to others by testing until you find the second one that works for you and keep expanding that way.
You can decide which one to use or begin with by analyzing them beforehand and finding some metrics, such as cost per acquisition, cost per click, cost per view, conversion rate, etc.
But usually, this data is average numbers and only reliable to a certain degree.
The best data comes from first-hand experience and your different marketing tests.
This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.
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