Everyone knows businesses thrive when they can count on loyal, repeat customers. But successful real estate agents understand that sustainable business growth requires more than just former clients and referrals. After all, if the average duration of homeownership in the U.S. is 12 years, agents have a long wait between repeat clients, meaning they must be constantly attracting new clients to keep their business flourishing. The key to consistently generating new listings is building and sustaining a full and effective real estate sales funnel.
Find It Fast
A step-by-step guide to building a real estate sales funnel
Step 1: Identify your target audience
Consider factors like location, property type, and demographics, and define what kind of client you want to help. You need to not only know who you’re targeting but also understand their pain, fears, dreams, and desires. If you can identify what homeowners are looking for and the challenges they face, you can speak to those pain points and successfully convince them that you are the ideal agent to solve their real estate needs.
Step 2: Build a strong online presence
Now more than ever, agents need a strong personal brand to set themselves apart in a competitive landscape. That’s why an engaging, professional website and active social media profiles are key tools in building a full sales pipeline. Use your website and your social media channels to broadcast to the world exactly the kind of agent you are: Advertise your experience successfully selling properties, speak to potential clients about their challenges, and show why you are the perfect agent to sell their home.
Today, marketing counts more than ever. If you want to take your online presence to the next level but aren’t sure where to begin, reach out to our experts for a free consultation.
Step 3: Build landing pages
Using lead capture forms on landing pages is an essential strategy in building and sustaining a real estate sales funnel. Landing pages are highly specific pages (different from your homepage) that drive your audience to take an intended action. Most often, landing pages offer something of value to your audience in exchange for their contact information.
When targeting sellers, many agents use a free home valuation landing page. Homeowners input their address and contact information to learn what an agent thinks their home is worth. These pages tend to work well because it’s a fair trade: Curious leads get an idea of what their property might fetch on the current market, and you fill your sales funnel with contact information and data about the homes they may want to sell.
Step 4: Develop a compelling offer
Once you really know your target audience, you can hone your offer and move beyond a generic free home evaluation seller lead capture.
Let’s say your ideal client is a professional athlete selling a modern city penthouse. A pain point might be that she has been traded to another team and has to move by the end of the month. You offer a free guide on effective seller strategies to quickly attract buyers in high-end markets on your website. Your potential seller provides her contact information to access it, and you fill your sales funnel with an ideal seller lead—all because you were able to tailor your offer to your lead’s specific needs.
Step 5: Leverage digital marketing
You should consider both paid and organic traffic as crucial ways to boost visibility and reach potential homesellers. Let’s look at the benefits and challenges of each side of a balanced digital marketing strategy.
Paid advertising provides near-immediate results and more highly segmented targeting, but it requires a higher investment than organic efforts. Good sources of paid traffic include ads on Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Let’s examine the pros and cons of each.
- Google Ads: Great for low-volume, high-quality leads, Google Ads are more expensive than other platforms but result in higher intent leads.
- Meta Ads Manager: Facebook and Instagram deliver high-volume, low-intent leads. These leads are less expensive but need extensive nurturing and follow-up to convert.
- YouTube Ads: Creating a video ad is a great way to build your brand and visibility in your local area. You only pay for the clicks you receive and can get massive visibility in your market at a low cost.
Generating organic traffic is a more cost-effective way to reach your target audience. It requires a more significant investment of your time and a long-term strategy, but this often means your visibility gains are more sustainable.
- Search Engine Optimization: Ensure you’re using the best SEO practices on your website to drive traffic; utilize keywords to bring your target audience to your content.
- Content Marketing: Share valuable content like market analyses, selling tips, and success stories.
- Backlinks: When credible external websites link to your site, it helps to increase your referral traffic and boosts domain authority.
Step 6: Nurture leads, nurture leads, nurture leads
Lead nurturing is the most important step in building and maintaining a real estate sales pipeline that’s full of potential sellers. If you don’t actually follow up, nurture, and convert these leads, you’re highly unlikely to score any listings. Research shows it takes at least eight touchpoints to get an initial meeting with a lead. Most agents don’t have the time to do this at scale, so we recommend automating the process with a CRM.
Most quality CRMs allow you to create short-term and long-term nurturing sequences to keep in touch with potential clients. Best practices include personalizing your communication, including clear, compelling calls to action, creating different sequences tailored to your offer, and sending regular updates on market trends relevant to a homeowner’s property or area.
Luxury Presence recognizes the importance of lead nurturing and takes it to the next level with its AI Lead Nurture tool. Once a lead completes a landing page form, our artificial intelligence technology immediately initiates a conversation, learning more about the lead and their needs. Once a lead is warm it’s handed off to the agent. This saves agents time and energy while increasing the odds of conversion due to its focus on the speed-to-lead factor.
A real estate sales funnel strategy that helps close 15+ transactions a year
Our CEO, Malte Kramer, recently interviewed Joey Bergandi of Velocity Realty on how he closes 15 to 20 transactions a year from social media alone. One of his top recommendations for targeting homeowners is to provide something more valuable than the typical free home valuation. His team offers sellers an estimate based on the current market as well as a cash offer quote and a price estimate after renovations.
Joey Bergandi’s social presence is also well-equipped to attract new leads. One of his strategies is using Linktree to link Instagram users to downloadable buyer’s and seller’s guides hosted on his Luxury Presence website. Once users have landed on his website, they must submit their contact information in exchange for access to the guides. This strategy is a simple yet effective way to link your real estate sales funnel to your social media profile without posting a thing.
More listings + Luxury Presence
Fostering long-term relationships is essential for your business, but so is generating new leads. Building an effective sales funnel can help you reach the right clients and take your business to the next level. It takes tight marketing, sophisticated landing pages and lead capture strategies, expert SEO, and top-notch lead nurturing tools.
For help creating and executing a sales funnel strategy that gets you listings, book a free consultation with one of our experts.
