As a real estate agent, the title of marketing specialist is one of the many hats you have to wear on a daily basis.
One of the key aspects of marketing that makes it difficult is that it’s always changing and evolving. What works now isn’t necessarily what will work next year. So, you need to continually change, adapt, and reinvent your strategy for it to be effective.
Here are a few things you should consider doing in 2020 to continue the evolution of your marketing strategy:
Be Authentic; Be Yourself
Being authentic isn’t new for 2020, but few agents truly focus on it.
The main point: don’t lie, and make sure you understand your audience. For example, a lot of agents want to break into the luxury market, simply because they like the idea of the financial gains that come along with it. But, if that luxury market is not part of your authentic brand, then chances are, you won’t succeed.
Ask yourself: Who is in your referral sphere? What do you like? What can you relate to? Being authentic means understanding your audience and being able to relate to them. From there, you can build compelling, and authentic, marketing efforts to match.
Your audience will always skew aspirational. They want to work with someone who gets both them and their unique needs. When you go out on a limb, embrace who you really are, and line up your marketing materials to match, it will really start paying dividends.
Building Text Messaging into Your Marketing Strategy
Texting: a clear, comfortable medium that almost everyone uses.
Featuring an extremely high open rate and near-instant response times, text messaging is an extremely efficient way to reach your audience. Going into 2020, everyone is jumping on board and building it into their strategies.
As an agent, you probably already communicate with your clients via text. That said, you should really be taking things to the next level. It’s as simple as creating lists of your clients, based on numbers that can receive texts, and adapting your strategy to communicate with them there.
For example, some of your email marketing campaigns can be moved over to text messages. This could include sending clients information about new listings, recently sold homes and new content that you post on your blog.
Although communicating by text may feel intrusive, it’s really not. If clients consent to receiving messages, it may even be more convenient for them to digest and respond to the information you have to offer.
If you want to begin sending mass text messages as a marketing campaign, check out Salesmsg.
Adopting Push Notifications for Content Delivery
When it comes to reaching people, taking a different approach is key in 2020.
A tried-and-true method is to get people to subscribe to your email-based newsletter. If you’re offering something of value, there’s still a strong case to continue doing just that.
But, with notifications and content delivery getting a lot more sophisticated, another approach is to push out your content through push/browser notifications.
When someone visits your website, you can trigger a popup that allows them to subscribe to notifications on their desktop (maybe you’ve already seen this on other websites you’ve visited, like this one).
Once they say yes, it gives you a lot of power to distribute your content right there in their browser. It’s also really useful to the subscriber if they’re interested in your content.
What can you send them? Basically anything you want. It could be new blog content, new listings, upcoming events, the choice is yours. In addition, when new content is published, notifications can be tailored to send whenever you want.
It’s like having a direct line to your clients, or potential clients, at all times. You can share pressing news, insight, and other updates they won’t find anywhere else. Ultimately, it’s a truly powerful way to deliver your message to your unique audience.
If you want to add this to your website in a straightforward way, check out OneSignal.
Make Your Email Marketing More Personal
Email marketing isn’t dead, but to be successful at it in 2020, you need to make it more personal.
Not everyone is interested in everything, so you should build your email campaigns around what people actually want.
Everyone is used to getting mass emails that are meant for everybody on a group list. That said, the more time you can spend making the person receiving it feel like it was created just for them, the better you can make yourself relatable and build authenticity with your audience.
A strong approach is what we would call segmentation. This is taking a large, wide-ranging email list and breaking it into smaller groups. You can break it down by interest, someone’s progress in a particular sales funnel, or simply a region or neighbourhood where people live.
If you’re sending out emails with all of your new listings to everyone on your list, try breaking them out into smaller email lists based on interest. So, instead of sending out an email called: My Featured Listing, separate them into different housing types or different categories.
Think of lists like lofts, open-concept spaces, or homes that are great for new families. Couple that with ensuring you have some personalization in the email, like mentioning their actual name a few times, and you’ll build email campaigns that have better interaction, better CTRs, and better lead conversions.
The fact is that email marketing for agents has gotten too formulaic. Instead, you need to think not only how you deliver a better message, but how you can provide tailored content to specific market segments. Real estate is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and your emails shouldn’t be, either.
Building a Voice Content Strategy
Have an Alexa or a Google Home? Chances are a large amount of your audience does, too.
With the growth and adoption of Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri, voice technology is everywhere. Right now, for real estate agents, there’s a lot of opportunity to dominate in it.
This rings especially true for agents that want to produce content, but don’t want to spend time writing long blog posts or behind the camera recording videos.
Most people aren’t really sure how to get into this space and build a meaningful voice content strategy, but the easiest way is through news/flash briefings.
It sounds complex, but you can absolutely plan it and build it all on your own, and for free. If you want to learn more about how to build it yourself, click here to read our tutorial.
If you truly believe in early adoption and leading the industry, voice content is where you should be. It’s a golden opportunity to create meaningful content before anyone else has the chance.
Collaborate with Influencers
Even in 2020, influencers still reign supreme.
Influencer marketing isn’t going anywhere in 2020, and it’s a huge opportunity for agents to build there brands and promote their listings.
Imagine the power of having a celebrity real estate agent or a person that has a large online reach, speak to your target audience pushing out information about you or your listings.
Instantly, you can get your brand and your business in front of a ton of new eyes that maybe haven’t heard about you before. Instead, they are engaging with you based on your affiliation with someone they respect.
Whether in the home renovation industry, the entrepreneurship space, or anything like that, if someone has an embedded audience and can relate to real estate, you should be reaching out.
What could that look like? It’s simple, it could be a social media post, a guest blog on your site, or a video if you really want to go all out. Influencers are valuable because people trust them, leverage that trust to build your business.
Stay Strategic
One of the most important things to know about your marketing strategy is that it shouldn’t be fixed and it’s never finished. You should constantly be adopting new technologies and studying new trends around what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s new.
Doing so will ensure your marketing strategy stays up to date and current. After all, real estate is an industry that is always changing and evolving. To stay at the top, you need to be employing new strategies that truly move your audience and cement your status as a key leader.
Want to plan your digital strategy on your own, and set your business up for success? Download our workbook: ‘The Digital Business Planning Workbook’. It’s a self-guided, interactive, strategic workbook where you answer questions about branding, SEO, content, design, and a lot more, so you can set goals for your website and your digital marketing efforts. And, it’s free to download.
