How Solving Your Audience’s Problems Gets You Higher Quality Leads
When it comes to real estate marketing, most agents rely on outdated outbound marketing practices – usually because that’s what they’ve been taught or seen other agents in their market do.
Outbound marketing is the typical, cold-outreach marketing techniques that might get you noticed, like generic postcards, handwritten letters left in mailboxes, or even cold calling someone and asking if they’re thinking about selling their home.
While these tactics might prove effective once in a while, overall, they often come with the risk of making you, your brand, and your business look desperate, outdated, amateur, annoying, or all of the above.
That’s where inbound marketing is different (and often, much more effective when it comes to generating high-quality leads), because ultimately, it’s rooted in helping people through providing valuable content, resources, and experiences that solve their specific problems.
When you focus on helping someone navigate a difficult or confusing situation, you aren’t just a real estate agent anymore; you’re a problem-solving, helpful real estate agent who’s proved they’re knowledgeable and trustworthy.
When set up correctly, inbound marketing works because it helps you solve someone’s problems proactively, rather than chasing them with a solution to a problem they likely don’t even have in the first place.
★ Want to learn more about inbound marketing? Have a look at these posts:
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
- Using Familiarity in Your Marketing Strategy to Get More Business
- How Establishing Empathy in Your Marketing Helps Build Trust Before You Meet
- Why Slow Leads Are Better Leads (and How to Get Them)
The Practice of Solve, Don’t Sell
There’s a big difference between selling someone and solving for someone, especially when it comes to results.
When you solve a problem for someone, they’re more likely to be a higher-quality lead that’s engaged with your brand and feel a sense of loyalty to you before they even pick up the phone.
The only thing to note is that building an effective, results-driven inbound marketing strategy takes time, but ultimately it’s worth it: the leads you generate will be more within your target audience, more engaged, and more likely to trust you with their next transaction.
By solving problems through inbound marketing, you achieve three main goals that selling them through outbound marketing can’t:
1. You Build True Trust: You can’t buy trust; you have to earn it. When you provide the information someone needs, even if it doesn’t lead to an immediate sale, you prove your expertise, your knowledge and that you have their best interests at heart.
2. You Establish Authority: If you consistently show up with answers to the questions your target audience is asking, they’ll naturally associate you with being the expert in that particular niche.
3. You Pre-Qualify Leads: People who find you through your helpful content are already interested in the specific expertise you offer. They aren’t just looking for any agent; they’re looking for someone like you (and inbound marketing helps them find you).
Step 1: Define Who’s Problems You’re Solving
You can’t solve everyone’s problems (nor should you even try or want to). For your marketing strategy to be effective, you have to know exactly who you’re trying to talk to, and what they want you to answer for them – and that’s where defining your specific target audience is key.
Remember, your target audience is always:
- Your Current Clients: People you work with now,
- Your Future Clients: People you want to work with in the future, and
- Your Anti-Persona: People you don’t want to work with it all.
And from there, you have to outline the problems that the people within your target audience need you to solve for them (which are sometimes referred to as marketing events), and in real estate, there’s no shortage of problems you can help solve for people. For example, they might be looking for help with:
- Moving from a smaller condo to a larger house with a growing family,
- Downsizing from an older home to an easier-to-maintain townhome after their kids have moved out,
- Selling their large property in the city to a developer for development into multiple properties,
- Or any other specific situation that applies to them and their real estate needs.
Once you know the problems your audience is looking for help solving, it’s time to put together a solid content strategy that does just that.
★ Want to learn more about target audiences? Have a look at these posts:
- How to Connect, Reach, and Engage Your Target Audience Online
- Why You Should Define Your Anti-Persona (Who You Don’t Want to Work With)
- The Steps to Building a Trustworthy Personal Real Estate Brand
Step 2: Build a Content Strategy That Answers Their Questions
Through inbound marketing, the best way to solve problems for your target audience is through your content strategy, specifically through providing valuable blog posts, case studies, resources, or anything else that provides enough information to show your expertise (and help your audience come to a solution).
And ultimately, the more specific you get, the better results you get. For example, instead of writing content about “top tips for sellers”, it’d be better and more effective to write long, detailed, thoroughly researched content that outlines something like “everything you need to know about selling your house during a divorce”.
Not only does this provide a real, actionable value for your audience when they’re in a stressful situation, but it also shows you as being empathetic, knowledgeable, and trustworthy.
★ Want to learn more about topic ownership? Have a look at this post called: Switching Your SEO Strategy from Keyword Matching to Topic Ownership to Get Better Leads.
★ Want to learn more about building a content strategy that solves problems for your target audience? Have a look at these posts:
- Creating a Content Strategy Based On Emotional Search Intent (To Get Better Leads)
- Pivoting Your Website Content Strategy to See More Success in AI Search Results
- The Benefits of Building a Long-Form Real Estate Content Strategy
- Creating a People-Powered, People-First Content Strategy
- Creating an Evergreen Real Estate Content Strategy
Step 3: Be Found Everywhere People Are Looking for Answers
It’s no longer enough to just have your content show up only in traditional search results. Although you should still work towards that, a modern, effective search strategy is more about building a balance between traditional search results and AI search results.
If you’re not optimizing your content to be found everywhere that your audience is looking for answers to problems, you’re missing out on opportunities to be found, be noticed, and to position yourself as an authority.
And that’s especially true if it’s in the form of a topic ownership strategy, which is where, rather than creating content where you attempt to rank for a specific keyword, you work towards dominating an entire topic, which gives you more opportunities to display in both AI and traditional search at the right time.
★ Want to learn more about topic ownership? Have a look at this post called: Switching Your SEO Strategy from Keyword Matching to Topic Ownership to Get Better Leads.
★ Want to learn more about AEO and building AI visibility? Have a look at these posts:
- Building an Answers Engine Optimization (AEO) Strategy for AI
- Why You Can’t Build an AI Visibility Strategy Without a Website
- Creating an AI Visibility Strategy for Your Real Estate Brand
- Building a Successful SEO Strategy for AI Search Results
- Bridging the Gap Between SEO, AEO, and GEO
Solving Problems Means Getting Better Leads
If you want to connect with your target audience, the best way to do so is to help them with real problems they have so that they associate you, your brand, and your business with being a solution – not just someone trying to sell them something.
Embracing an inbound, problem-solving strategy can feel like a big shift from traditional real estate marketing, but it’s a shift worth making if you want to get better, more high-quality leads that want to work with you because you’ve truly helped them.
Want to get better, more qualified leads and build your authority? Our Inbound Marketing Guide is a walkthrough of the overall philosophy of inbound marketing, why it’s effective, and how you can build it into your own real estate marketing strategy to get better marketing results.
