Success Guide: Online Marketing-Lead Generation

ONLINE MARKETING AND LEAD GENERATION

Each year, RE Technology develops a guide that focuses on Online Marketing and Lead Generation to support agents and brokerages in understanding how digital solutions can make the Internet a key strategy for reaching consumers.

Online Marketing is the effort to communicate a narrative that combines information about the brokerage and its agents along with properties that they have listed for sale. Today, online marketing can be delivered though an array of channels. These channels include e-mail, text message, social media, blogging, listing syndication, and tracking.

Many professionals realize that online marketing is used in three ways. The first is to attract new clients. The second is to promote seller listings where buyers start their search. The third is to stay connected to existing contacts to develop a customer for life relationship that drives repeat and referral business.

Online Lead Generation goes hand in hand with Online Marketing. Great online marketing delivers digital engagement from people you reach. These engagements are commonly referred to as an opportunity or a lead, but they vary in the likelihood of converting to a transaction. Remember that every possible touch point with a customer has value in the development of your business.

 Latest Online Marketing and Lead Generation Trends

Online Marketing and Lead Generation is a constantly evolving science. In the early days of the internet, simply putting a property online with text was a big chore that required agents (or their development partners) to have html programming skills. The next big evolution happened around 1999 when the industry launched the first Internet Display program called IDX. This allowed agents and brokers to publish all of the listings from the multiple listing service on their websites and enable consumers to search. This was quickly followed by the emergence of national property advertising portals like Realtor.com, MSN, Yahoo! and others.

IDX and listing portals delivered a great savings to the real estate industry who was focused on newspaper and magazine advertising at the time. It was not uncommon for listing agents or brokerages to spend between as little as $300 or well over $1,500 in the marketing of a property. Online home search grew in popularity among homebuyers as access to internet connected computers grew.

The next huge growth in this category came along with the consumer adoption of internet connected mobile phones and tablets. Today, more than 50% of all property searches happen on a mobile device. Nearly concurrent with the adoption of mobile, popular social media sites have became conduits for accessing real estate information including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and now Instagram and Snapchat.

The options consumers have today for looking at property is almost absurd. There are millions of agent websites, hundreds of thousands of brokerage websites, and hundreds of property portals. The abundance of these options has created some interesting consolidation. It is estimated that the top 10 real estate portals in America are visited more than 500 million times a month. Given that there are only about 5.5 Million transactions a year in America, it makes you wonder what all of those people are doing.

Agents and brokerages are recognizing that digital marketing and advertising is changing from "spray and prey" to highly focused and localized marketing. To accomplish this, solutions have emerged that support real estate marketers with geotargeting to a particular house, neighborhood, polygon, or zip code. Within those geographies, real estate marketers can tune their marketing for attributes like age, renter vs. homeowner, or any number of filters that narrow the audience.

Another major development is the connection between customer management solutions and online marketing. There is an appreciation that one goal of online marketing is to help build a database of potential customers. This famous sales strategy of collecting contacts and staying in touch was famously dramatized in The Wolf of Wall Street where Leonardo DiCaprio encourages his sales team to stay in touch with the customer until they buy or die.

Some research has emerged that provides some good guidelines for real estate agents who hope to develop a digital marketing farm. A good target is to focus your efforts on a group of 2,000 to 2,500 households. With a steady focus of targeted digital marketing, agents should be able to develop a sales funnel that will yield about two trades a month. The important ingredient to developing this volume of units from this number of transactions is the frequency and quality of your marketing and lead conversion efforts. Always remember that digital marketing only works if you respond inside of five minutes to an inquiry - or ideally inside of 1 minute. Consumers expect you to be ready to serve them right away.

What to Look for When Buying Online Marketing and Lead Generation

There are three flavors of online marketing and lead generation solutions. There are some that work great, some that are ok, and those that over promise and under deliver. Doing your research will not only help you sort between the good and the bad, but also enable you to understand which solutions are matched up well to your personality.

Begin your research by talking to your broker and/or franchise, and multiple listing service and/or Association of REALTORS®. Nobody wants to help you sell more real estate than your broker who lives off of a portion of your commission. Brokers are highly focused on helping you by offering effective tools and providing training and support to make sure that you know how to use them. Your MLS and Association are also great places to start. Like your broker, they have your best interest at heart.

One of the drawbacks to tools offered by your brokerage or MLS is that they offer them to all agents in your office or market area. You can find yourself using a tool that is used by everyone in your area which may undermine your ability to create an online marketing and lead generation plan that differentiates you.

Look at the methods used by top producing agents and teams in your area. Again, these are likely to be tools that have a proven track record of being effective. Another great tactic is to look outside of your area to see what top producers are doing. Look at the Real Trends top 1000 list to find successful agents and go online and search for homes in their area like a consumer would. Test the experience. Moreover, feel free to call them.

Read RE Technology every day. We are constantly highlighting stories of solutions that work in the industry. Pay close attention to our Webinar section. We are constantly hosting online meetings that allow you to learn about new tactics and trends. And do not forget to attend industry conferences. These offer a great way to learn and talk to vendors and fellow agents to discover opportunities to make the right choices.

ONLINE MARKETING PRODUCTS