For a lot of real estate agents, their digital strategy consists of building a website, putting it online, and then just kicking back and waiting for the leads to roll in.
If only it was that easy…
The truth is, while having a strategic, on-brand, well-built website that appeals to your target audience is pivotal to digital success, it’s only 50% of a successful, overall digital strategy.
The other 50% is your marketing strategy, or more specifically: your plan around how you’re going to get your website in front of the right people, at the right time, for the right reasons.
And to see success, the two definitely have to go hand-in-hand. Taking the “if you build it, they will come” approach is a recipe for failure.
No matter how great your website is, if no one can find it, it won’t be successful; and vice-versa, no matter how great your marketing strategy is, if your website isn’t well-planned out, your marketing won’t be successful either.
And that’s because, generally speaking, the primary goal of your marketing strategy should always be to push someone to your website. That’s where you’ll be able to give the best, and most controlled, experience of how you want people to see your brand and your business, and ultimately, have the best chance to convert them into leads, and eventually clients.
★ Pushing people, through your marketing strategy, to your website is also important because it helps you determine what worked, and what didn’t, through lead source tracking. Want to learn more about lead source tracking? Have a look at this post called: Using Lead Source Tracking to Improve Your Lead Generation Plan.
That’s especially true if you’ve planned and built your website with a specific target audience in mind; doing so not only helps you get better, higher-quality, more-targeted leads that you actually want to work with, but also, allows you to build a more authoritative, more direct, and ultimately, more successful marketing strategy that converts.
Much like your website should be planned and built with a specific target audience in mind, to be successful, so should your marketing strategy.
Want to learn more about building a specific, more targeted real estate marketing strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Carving a Niche to Get Better Real Estate Leads
- Building a Hyper-Local Real Estate Marketing Strategy
- How (and Why) to Build a Real Estate Marketing Segmentation Strategy
- How to Connect, Reach, and Engage Your Target Audience Online
While there are a lot of complexities that define a “great website”, primarily, it’s that if the right people visit it, they end up converting in some way, but to get conversions, you have to get people to your website through your marketing strategy.
The key to a successful marketing strategy starts with building a good marketing mix, meaning, having the right traffic from the right traffic sources. Your marketing mix should also have a certain distribution of traffic sources in your acquisition metrics. A long-term, successful marketing mix should look something like this:
- Organic Traffic: 50-75% of traffic sources
- Referral Traffic: 20-30% of traffic sources
- Direct Traffic: 10-20% of traffic sources
- Social Traffic: 6-10% of traffic sources
- Paid Traffic: 5-8% of traffic sources
If you want to do a deeper dive into this, have a look at this post called: Establishing a Successful Marketing Mix In Your Website Acquisition Strategy.
So what does this look like in practice?
A diverse digital marketing strategy encompasses both active and passive marketing activities.
It’s your SEO strategy being the basis for all your website content. It’s posting regularly on social media, interacting with your followers, and making sure all your social posts have a strong CTA leading people back to the site. It’s sending a monthly newsletter to engage your subscribers providing both a valuable update as well as keeping your brand front of mind. Maybe it’s incorporating Google Ads into the mix.
You get the idea…
Separately, these digital strategies could work well in getting the word out about your brand and driving traffic to your website; but together, this is the basis for your greater digital strategy and every smaller component helps to support the others.
Without a solid marketing strategy in place that pushes people to your website, chances are, no one will find it; and if no one can find your website, it doesn’t matter how great it looks. Your website and your marketing strategy are not standalone entities, but rather, they’re integral to each other’s success.
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.
