As a real estate agent working in a competitive business, you’re always looking for leads. If you don’t have a lead generation plan in place, you won’t have many incoming leads that you can nurture until they become clients.
In order to get real estate leads, a lot of agents will turn to digital advertising, but often, they don’t get the results that they hoped for.
Let’s discuss why…
You Need to Have a Plan
First off, you should never hope for results; you should plan for them. Having a successful advertising campaign requires you to put in some time to develop a strategy and think about all the components of your campaign individually and how they affect each other.
If all you think about is the ads themselves, then you’re setting yourself up for failure.
The first step is defining how you actually determine the success of your campaign: i.e: what you want to happen.
- Do you want people to fill out a form and/or call you?
- Do you want them to download something to get them into your database?
- Do you just want to bring them to your website so you can retarget them later?
Also:
- How many of the conversions above to you expect to get?
- How much are you willing to spend to get those conversions?
Planning for everything above before you actually launch an advertising campaign sets you up for success, and as well, sets the basis for you to understand if it’s performing well or not.
★ Looking for more information around conversions and advertising? Take a look at these posts:
- The Anatomy of a Successful Real Estate Retargeting Campaign
- A Plan for Getting More Website Conversions
Where Should You Advertise?
A lot of agents don’t really know where to advertise, and may just boost content on Facebook without much thought or definition of success; but that’s not really much of an advertising strategy: it’s more hoping.
The first thing you really need to consider is where your target audience is. If they’re not on Facebook, you shouldn’t be advertising there. If they’re not on LinkedIn, don’t advertise there either.
There are a ton of different platforms you can advertise on of course, but understanding where the audience you think is most likely to convert actually is and building your advertising campaigns there sets you up for success.
Where Do Your Ads Go?
When you begin a digital advertising strategy, whether that’s on Google PPC, Facebook, or anywhere else, the one thing agents often forget is that the ads themselves are only 50% of your strategy. The other 50% is where the user is actually directed once they click an ad, and that is so important to the success of your advertising strategy.
If you’re running an advertising campaign and directing people to your homepage when they click the ad, you’re probably wasting your money. Why?
Because if someone has clicked your ad, it likely means they want to take an action, like filling out a form or calling you; and by sending them to your homepage, you’re making it more difficult or to convert as the main action you want them to take isn’t as obvious.
You only have a few seconds to convert someone that has clicked on your ad, so you need to send them to a strategic, well-built, and well-planned lead page where they have a really high chance of successfully converting.
What Happens on Conversion?
You also need to think about and plan out what happens when someone actually does convert. Maybe that’s just giving them a call when they submit a form, but if the lead you’re getting is softer, you’re going to want to nurture that lead until they are ready to convert.
★ Want to know more about nurturing leads? Download our Lead Nurturing Workbook right here.
Understand that You’re Never ‘Done’
A successful digital advertising strategy requires reworking the components of your campaign constantly.
That means looking at what’s working, and what isn’t working, until you develop a formula that works for you and your goals.
For example:
- If not enough people are seeing your ads, you should rework your audience and platform.
- If not enough people are clicking your ads, you should rework the design and messaging of the ads themselves.
- If not enough people are converting once they actually click through on the ads, you should rework your landing page.
Knowing that your advertising strategy is never finished, and you need to continually adjust it based on how people are responding to it is a key part of building a successful advertising strategy that does bring in leads.
With up to date marketing trends relevant to today’s market, our report is a selection of curated content, information, and data that will give you an outline of what’s working right now in real estate marketing.
