Nowadays, the way you market your listings really matters to potential sellers, and so does your ability to explain it.
The push to digital has made sellers a lot more savvy and informed about the digital space, and a lot of them will want to know about your plan to market a property effectively, online, to an audience that may not even see their home in person.
When you have a new listing that you’re ready market, there are a lot of things you have to do to set it up for marketing success: working with photographers, videographers, stagers, advertisers, and more, all to ensure the property looks it’s best and gets a wide reach.
Regardless of which services you use and which you don’t, there are 2 main goals when you’re marketing a property:
- To make sure it shows well and is visually appealing to potential buyers.
- And, to make sure it’s seen by as many people as possible.
As an agent, there are a lot of personal goals to marketing a property:
- To bring in more traffic to your website.
- To connect with potential buyers that aren’t working with another agent.
- To get more exposure for and to promote yourself.
- To show that you’re an active agent with an active portfolio of properties.
As a general rule of marketing measurement, the better your listing looks, and the more people that know about it (and learn about you, your business, and your brand in the process) the more successful your marketing campaign was.
The second part of your listing marketing goal is all about reach by casting as wide of a net as possible to get the listing in front of as many people as you can, and there are a lot of ways to do that:
From Your Social Accounts
Social media is one of the first, and most obvious, place to tell people about and promote your listing. It gives your community the opportunity to learn more about your listing, but also, shows them that you’re active as an agent.
However, a lot of agents make one common mistake here: they give their audience way too much information about the listing and remove the need for them to learn more.
One of the main reasons to promote a listing on social isn’t to get people to see the listing in a social post, but rather, to be interested enough that they click it to bring them to your website to get more information about it.
As part of your promotion on social, you should be focusing on the highlights of the property, but you should always encourage the user to go to your website for more information. This goes back to the goals that are less valuable to the seller and more valuable to you as an agent.
★ If you need help creating a more professional, consistent look for your listings on social media, download our free social media template pack for real estate agents right here.
From Your SEO Strategy
In an ideal world, when you someone searches one of your listings online, the search results will have a link to your listing, on your own personal website, in the first couple of results; but that isn’t easy to achieve, and in some cases, it might even be impossible without putting a lot of work in beforehand.
If you haven’t invested much in the overall growth of your SEO strategy and domain authority, then getting your listings to rank organically in search results is going to be difficult.
The primary goals of search engines is to return the best, most relevant results for the person searching, and even though it’s your own listing, chances are, your website won’t be authoritative enough to beat out the bigger, higher traffic websites.
But, if you have a well-planned and well-built overall digital strategy, and you’ve invested in your SEO strategy and domain authority, then you might be able to do it successfully, and of course, doing so would pay off in a major way by bringing in a lot of organic, authentic traffic from an audience that’s actually interested in your the property (and maybe even about the agent that listed it).
Having your listings organically rank in search results is also a valuable, well-earned stat to brag about to tell potential sellers as part of your listing pitch; it’s a big accomplishment and a solid part of your marketing strategy to get quality exposure to the property online.
★ If you want to learn more about SEO and raking your listings, have a look at these related topics:
- Building a Well-Rounded SEO Search Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
- Strategies to Get Your Listings to the Top of the Search Results
- Does Your Real Estate Website Only Need Manually-Added Listings?
- Why You Should Stop Using Single Page Property Websites for Your Listings
From Your Email Marketing Database
When you have a new listing, it makes sense to promote it to your email marketing database.
Probably the most obvious way to do this is through an email marketing campaign that showcases the property and its features. By sending out a marketing email that encourages people to clickthrough to learn more about the property, you’ll be creating a few different opportunities for yourself:
- You’ll be able to build interest in and get more exposure for the property.
- You’ll get more traffic to the listing on your website.
- You’ll have an excuse to reach out to your marketing database to remind them that you exist.
- And you’ll be able to show your database that you’re active and carrying listings.
From Your External Source Strategy
As an agent (even one with a strong marketing strategy in place) you’re still going to have a cap on the reach that you have. To get more exposure, having your listings display on other reputable websites is a valuable strategy.
I’m not referring to it displaying on other competitor’s websites via an IDX feed, but rather, in a more detailed, long form article about the property itself. For example, a lot of digital publications, like blog sites or online news sites, write long-form content about interesting properties that are for sale.
Getting other websites to showcase and link back to your website is a great way to not only get more exposure, but also to build your backlink strategy. The more exposure and traffic the other website gets, the more likely you’ll also get more exposure and traffic as well; and also, you’ll be getting a valuable linkback from a website with a high-domain authority, so it’s a win-win for you.
For example, an article like this one right here, with detailed content about the property and a backlink to the agent’s website from a quality online publication that has a high domain authority is really valuable as part of getting more reach and building your own domain authority.
Building Reach and Interest Means Building Exposure
With a solid method of marketing your listings, you’ll be able to build more interest and create more value for your clients through online exposure; and as well, you’ll be able to get more people to your website to look at your listing, so that you can promote yourself, your, business, and your brand.
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.
