You work hard every day to help your clients find their dream homes or sell for the best price. Eventually, though, each one will sign on the dotted line and move on with their lives. With so much turnover, how can you ensure that you get a steady stream of satisfied buyers and sellers?

In this day and age, it’s all about digital marketing. In fact, according to almost 90% of marketing influencers, digital is becoming more and more effective at spreading the word about your real estate services.

It’s time to work smarter, not harder. With the right real estate marketing strategies — quality content, a search engine optimized (SEO) website, savvy social media posting, and personalized email campaigns — you’ll stay on your existing customers’ minds and keep new clients knocking on your door.

Let’s get started. 

1. Build your own website   

Even if you have a page on your brokerage site and a profile on Zillow, you need your own website. Why? There are a few key reasons.

It makes you easier to find. Did you know that 68% of all website traffic comes from a search engine result? When you have your own site and not just a page on someone else’s, the chances are better that a search engine will find you when someone looks for real estate services in your area.

It provides value to potential clients. When you meet with a potential client, they’ll usually expect you to spend some time educating them about the home buying or selling process. With a personal website, you can offer educational materials to people before they’ve even signed on with you, creating a relationship that’s stronger from day one.

It helps build your mailing list. It’s easy to add a section on your website where people can enter their email to get more information. You can even offer free informational content, like a “how to search for a home” PDF, as an incentive.

Don’t worry about creating a complex website right away. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to bulk up your site over time, so just start with the basics.

When creating a new website, you’ll need:

• A homepage with enticing photos
• A Contact page to make it easy for people to find you
• An About page so people can get to know you
• A Search page so people can see your listings
• A Blog where you can share helpful articles 

Need some help creating a website? This simple guide will show you how to build one that sells.

2. Market with SEO and local SEO in mind

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the next step in your real estate advertising strategy. It’s how you tell search engines that your site is high-quality and answers the questions that your customers are asking.

Don’t worry — SEO is nowhere near as complicated as some marketers make it sound. You can improve your SEO just by making sure you can answer “yes” to the following questions about your website:

• Does the content answer the questions that people would ask you? (e.g. “How much is a home in {town}?”)
• Do you have your qualifications listed so people know you’re an authority?
• Is your site easy to use on mobile?
• Do you structure your content so it’s easy to read? (e.g. small paragraphs, headings and subheadings, bullets, etc.)

As a real estate professional, you’ll want to pay particular attention to local searches. About 97% of consumers learn more about a local business via the internet, and 42% of Google searches are specifically looking for local information.

To capture those local searches, it’s important to:

• Have as many correct online mentions of your professional address and phone number as possible. You can check your existing mentions easily on Moz.com.
• Make sure that you have as many links as possible to your website on industry sites like Zillow, and on your social media pages (more on those later).
• Write locally focused content for your website and see if you can guest post on local blogs.

Finally, make sure you’ve officially claimed your Google My Business profile and filled it out completely. This makes it easier for people to reach you and makes you more appealing to prospective clients.

3. Make the most of email marketing

Have you heard that 80% of people prefer to shop with brands that personalize their experiences? Today’s consumers are used to customized marketing, and they’ve come to expect it.

You have a lot of different people in your audience. Some are casually exploring their options, while others are returning after buying their current home from you. It’s not always easy to reach all of these customers in a personal way, but email marketing makes it easy.

Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing channels. It lets you communicate meaningfully with people at all stages of home buying and selling because it lets you divide your audience into groups of contacts called segments.

If you serve both buyers and sellers, you can create different segments for each. You can also segment based on how ready a person is to buy or sell, whether they’re a first-time homebuyer, whether you’ve worked with them before, and more.

Once you’ve created segments, plan a series of emails for each group and schedule those emails to send automatically. You can have each email in a series go out after a certain amount of time passes or when someone takes a particular action, like searching on your website for a property.

4. Tackle your social media marketing

If you’re looking to grow your client base, you need to be incorporating social media. About 72% of American adults use social media, and that number has been going up for the past 15 years.

Reaching these users isn’t difficult — you just need to share helpful content. For example:

• Feature photos of newly listed properties on Instagram
• Post updates of what your office is doing (open houses, new services, etc.) on Facebook
• Re-share articles about the local real estate market on LinkedIn 
• Share local news on Twitter
  

You don’t have to post every day, but consistency does matter. Start with one channel and develop a schedule for posting regularly. Then, as you get more comfortable, you can start adding more channels.

Paid advertising lets you reach even more users on social media. When you’re going that route, though, keep in mind that real estate is a Special Ad Category on Facebook and, by extension, on Instagram. Special Ad Categories exist to prevent discrimination in areas like housing, and they work primarily by restricting audience targeting options. 

You can still target by location, but your radius has to be 15 miles or more. You can target specific interests, but you can only include rather than exclude people. It’s a nuanced strategy, so if you’re planning to run ads on social media, check out the full Special Ad Categories guide for more information.

5. Develop a content marketing strategy

More than half of marketing influencers — 58% to be specific — point to content marketing as their most effective tactic. 

You can jump on this powerful bandwagon by sharing helpful, professional content with visitors to your website. Start by posting useful information on your blog and linking to those posts on your social media pages. Plan to post at least twice a month, though weekly is better if you can manage it.

Focus on your geographic location, discussing topics like sales trends in your area. You can post general information too, like how to stage your home for sale, but be sure to drop in local mentions. The more relevant you can be to local buyers and sellers, the better.

The takeaway

Now that you have a basic understanding of how to promote your business using your website, email list, and social media accounts, including how to incorporate SEO techniques and quality content, you can start coming up with some specific real estate marketing ideas.

Take a look at The Download, our comprehensive marketing strategy resource for today’s real estate professional. Then put at least two action items on your marketing to-do list.

Will you claim a domain name for yourself? Start creating a social media calendar? The sky’s the limit, and it’s never too soon to get started.

The post 5 Real Estate Marketing Strategies to Get More Clients appeared first on Constant Contact.