To be successful as a real estate agent, one of the primary goals you’re likely trying to accomplish as part of your marketing plan is to generate leads. And that doesn’t get any easier as your team grows because the more people you have on your team, the more leads you need to bring in; not just because of the increased expenses that come along with having a team, but also to keep them busy and motivated. Lead generation is an endless cycle.
★ When it comes to leads, the most important thing you can do is first determine what a lead actually is to you. You can learn more about how to do that right here.
However, when a lead does come in, most agents are just happy they got a lead in the first place, and they often don’t pay a lot of attention to the source of the lead.
But as an agent with a marketing strategy and a solid history of successful deals behind you, you can use that lead source information to your advantage to tighten up your marketing and improve your overall lead generation strategy so you get more leads; and you can do that through lead source tracking.
Lead source tracking is the process of determining how your leads discovered you, your brand, and your business.
Typically, as a real estate agent, there are a lot of different lead sources you could have in place as part of your marketing strategy, like:
- Organic search engine traffic (through Google search results, etc)
- Paid search traffic (through PPC, display ads, etc)
- Direct mail campaigns
- Social media
- Referrals from previous clients
- Traditional advertising (like billboards, etc)
There are a number of different ways to conduct lead source tracking, but one of the simplest is to build it into the initial part of your lead generation process by simply asking the person.
★ Do you think you have a lead generation problem, and you want to learn how to fix it? Have a look at this post called: What To Do If You Have a Real Estate Lead Generation Problem.
You can include a field in your contact form, you can ask in your first text communication, or you can ask when you first speak to them, but…
Regardless of how you do it, when you first communicate with your leads, one of the questions you should be asking them: how did you hear about me?
But even while their answer is really useful, in a lot of cases, it probably won’t give you the full picture. Most people won’t really accurately remember or describe how they truly first heard about you, your brand, or your business. For example, they may say that ‘they found you on Google’, which at first sounds like an organic lead, but really, they could’ve found you in a PPC. Again, it’s still really useful information to know, but you can get a much clearer picture of your lead sources when you combine it with more accurate information.
And that’s where leveraging technology comes in.
By using software that already has lead source tracking built in, you’ll be able to get an accurate picture as to how someone initially found you; and while there’s a lot of software out there that provides some form of lead source tracking, most begin with your CRM.
There are several CRMs that, once built into your website and overall digital strategy, can show you the original source of the lead, in addition to a lot of other useful information. A few of the best ones to check out are: HubSpot, AgileCRM, and Insightly.
★ If you want to know more about these CRMs, check out HubSpot’s article: The 30 Best Real Estate CRMs for 2021.
Once you have lead source tracking measures in place, both by leveraging software and by making it a habit to ask your incoming leads, you should be able to put together a clear, high-level picture as to where your leads are actually coming from; and from there, you can apply it to your marketing plan and improve your lead generation strategy to get better results.
Looking at where your leads are coming from, you can do that in a few different ways:
- Focus on where you’re already getting the most leads by doubling down on your investments there.
- Focus on close opportunities by investing more in the second or third highest lead sources.
- Focus on low level opportunities by investing in where you get the least leads but think you’ll be successful.
By having a really clear picture of where your leads are actually coming from through lead source tracking, you’ll be able to identify opportunities that you can focus on to pivot and adapt your marketing and lead generation strategies to get better and more targeted results.
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.
