Real estate can be a fickle industry. At any moment, the market can take a dramatic turn and have lasting impacts on your business. However, understanding how to capture attention from the right market at the right time can help you win more customers, no matter the market conditions.
With our proven real estate marketing strategy, you’ll learn how to position yourself to generate attention from buyers and sellers in your target market. This system is how top producers “win” consistently. They’re constantly creating attention, then converting that attention into deals.
To be clear, this is not a lesson on how to get “everyone” to know you. This is a laser-focused strategy to drive eyeballs on your brand from the group that matters most: your ideal clients.
Our team at Luxury Presence has been perfecting this real estate marketing system for six years and, as a result, has generated over 45,000 real estate leads for our clients. This system is how we achieved a 1450% increase in Instagram followers in 12 months for one of our clients in Nashville and generated 140 buyer leads at $2.50 cost per lead (CPL) for another client in Miami.
This proven real estate marketing system has worked time and time again for our 7,000 clients. Read on if you want to learn how to make it work for you too.
Find It Fast
Why agents must prepare a real estate marketing strategy now
Now more than ever, with demand starting to slow in most markets, agents need to capture attention with their real estate marketing to keep the lights on. Attention is the currency of the modern era. Everyone’s fighting for mind share. Beyond this, setting yourself up for success now will continue to produce results for years to come. It will also prepare your business for any shifts the market makes.
Why being able to capture attention is so important
Being able to capture attention is the first step in building a real estate marketing system that grows your business. It fits into the bigger picture, which we call the “agent growth flywheel.”
The rest of the flywheel doesn’t matter if you’re not getting attention because you won’t have a business in the first place.
Take a moment to think about your business. Do you actively track how much traffic your website and social media profiles generate monthly?
If you’re not tracking, start.
If you are tracking, look at your numbers – are you growing over time? If the answer is no, or your numbers are volatile and inconsistent, you have an attention problem.
How to capture attention that grows your business
Now that you understand the importance of capturing attention in your market with your real estate marketing strategy, let’s dive deeper into how to capture that attention. Follow the below step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Identify your ideal client profile (ICP) using the PFDD framework
First, you will need to zero in on your target market’s pains, fears, dreams, and desires (PFDD framework). It’s important to remember that you need to be specific here. Talking to everyone means you’re talking to no one.
To identify this, consider your unique strengths as an agent and who those strengths could best serve. Think about the types of clients you have enjoyed working with. Most importantly, think about a market segment that is growing in size and buying power.
PFDD framework examples for real estate marketing
Let’s use the PFDD framework to identify some ideal client profiles using the below examples.
Example 1: Professional athlete based in Los Angeles
- Pains and fears:
- Should I buy a home in the city I’m playing for?
- Will I be home enough to enjoy this investment?
- Does buying a home make sense based on the current stage of my athletic career?
- Dreams and desires:
- Privacy
- Security
- Prestige
- Customization
Example 2: Divorced sellers in the Atlanta area
- Pains and fears:
- How is the money divided?
- Are there any special laws in my area that I should know about?
- Financial pressures
- Legal pressures
- Dream and desires:
- Equitable distribution
- A quick and seamless selling process
The most important thing to do here is document this information, reference it, and update it as you go along.
Interview your past clients who fit your “ICP” if you’re unsure of this.
Step 2: Create your offer
After creating your ICP, it’s time to create your “offer”. To put it simply, this is the value you’re exchanging to get the contact information from your target market. Your offer is used in your marketing campaigns to drive leads for your business and is often an overlooked part of an agent’s real estate marketing strategy.
An offer is not “I can help you buy or sell – call me!” This is what every agent says and traps you into being a commodity.
Similarly, “get your home valuation” is another popular offer many agents use to get seller leads. While you may see some results from this approach, it doesn’t help you stand out and get prospects excited to work with you.
How to create your offer
First, you should reference the ICP document you created and look at your ideal client’s pains and fears. We’re starting with that because there’s an important psychological rule to remember: the fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain.
Then, ask yourself, what resource or content can I create that helps them solve their pain or allay their fears?
For example, if you’re target market is divorcing sellers in the Atlanta area (from the PFDD exercise we completed above), then we know that their pains and fears are the following:
- Pains and fears:
- How is the money divided?
- Are there any special laws in my area that I should know about?
- Financial pressures
- Legal pressures
After you’ve nailed this down, creating your “offer” is simple. You simply invert their pains and fears into content that answers their question.
Knowing the above, you might create a guide that walks through the top 10 common mistakes divorced sellers make or promote a 1:1 free consultation where they can ask all their questions about selling their home when going through a divorce.
To recap, you should tailor your offer to the pains and fears of your target market. This will help you get your foot in the door and appear as a trusted advisor, placing you in a league of your own and escaping the “commodity agent” rat race.
Step 3: Align your messaging on your digital “real estate” to speak to ICP
Now that you’ve gotten clarity on your ideal client profile and created an offer that speaks to their pains and fears, the final step is to craft a compelling message that drives your ICP to take action.
Your website copy, ads, blogs, social media posts, and emails should all speak to and resonate with your ICP.
To do this, talk about their problems. They won’t care until they understand that you understand them. Then, speak about how you can help them solve those specific problems. “I can help you buy or sell” isn’t enough anymore – you need to be specific to stand out.
A stronger message would be, “I help sellers in the Atlanta area who are going through a divorce. I have a process that helps keep everyone moving forward and avoids conflict.”
Next, we’ll dive into tactics you can implement immediately to do this.
Tactics for capturing attention
There are two ways you can generate more visibility (traffic): organic (pay with your time and energy) or paid (pay with your money). Pick one to start with, but you need both to run a sustainable business. Let’s dive into the pros and cons:
The advantages of paid traffic for real estate marketing
With paid traffic, you will see results immediately and get the exact type of traffic you want – down to targeting if they recently started looking for homes or are considering selling.
Ad networks like Facebook and Google are extremely smart. They have hundreds of thousands of data points on their users and give advertisers, like real estate agents, access to this data to target the right audience with the right message at the right time. This is not really possible with organic, except by focusing on long-tail keywords that show intent, like a Google search for “sell my home in boston ma.”
Paid traffic is also easier to scale. You can easily adjust your budget to spend more on the ad network to get more results if it’s working.
At Luxury Presence, we operate very goal-oriented with paid traffic, using certain metrics and cost-per-lead, conversion rates, and overall engagement to judge whether or not a campaign is successful. All of these metrics are determined at the beginning of the process. We only add more budget to the campaign if the numbers hit the success metrics we determined with the agent initially.
The disadvantages of paid traffic for real estate marketing
When you stop paying, you stop generating traffic. It can be tricky to get right. Several variables go into a well-performing real estate marketing campaign. But there are critical elements of getting your paid traffic to be profitable for your business that has to do with messaging, campaign structure, and more. An article we wrote on the best real estate Facebook ads breaks down some top-performing ad campaigns we’ve run for our clients if you want to learn more about this.
Our favorite paid media tactics for real estate marketing
Below are some of our favorite tried and true paid media tactics for real estate marketing:
- Google Ads
- Great for low volume, high quality leads. Google Ads are more expensive than other platforms but result in higher intent leads.
- Facebook & Instagram Ads
- Great for high volume, low-intent leads. These leads are less expensive but need extensive nurturing and follow-up to convert.
- YouTube Ads
- A great way to build your brand and visibility in your local area. You only pay for the clicks and can get massive visibility in your market at a low cost.
The advantages of organic traffic for real estate marketing
Organic traffic is evergreen, meaning you don’t need to keep putting dollars behind your content to get eyeballs on it.
It’s also generally sustainable, so despite algorithm changes or trends, your site will still generate traffic, provided that your content is high quality, which is what Google uses as the leading indicator for SEO. It’s no longer enough just to do simple on-page optimization and get some backlinks. Your content needs to be high quality and original to compete.
The disadvantages of organic traffic for real estate marketing
You’re not able to accelerate results in a short time frame. Organic traffic is very much a slow and steady process. You also don’t have the targeting options that paid traffic offers. Additionally, it can take a long time to start seeing success and is usually a pretty significant investment of your real estate marketing budget.
At Luxury Presence, we’re working on building new technology that lowers the barrier to entry to capitalize on organic traffic for agents, both from an investment and learning perspective. However, it’s still very much a long-term real estate marketing strategy.
Our favorite organic traffic tactics for real estate marketing
Below are some of our favorite tried and true organic traffic tactics for real estate marketing:
- Organic search content
- Writing blog content regularly can help position you as an expert and help you rank higher in search engines.
- Referral backlinks from your local network
- Have your local restaurants, cleaners, home inspectors, and other local businesses link back to your website (and return the favor). This will help you increase your referral traffic and improve your domain authority over time, giving you a better chance at ranking for terms like “real estate agent near me”.
The bottom line is you’re going to either invest your time or your money to capture attention in today’s market.
Concluding Thoughts
You’re now equipped with the knowledge you need to position yourself to generate attention from buyers and sellers in your target market. These are the exact real estate marketing strategies we’ve helped top-producing agents implement to grow their business, and now you can use them too.
If you’d like help with how to implement these real estate marketing strategies in your own business, book a free strategy call with our team.
