9 Real Estate Marketing Ideas
Although marketing is principally the same in many industries, real estate is not one of them. The level of competition and the constantly changing priorities of the target audience make promoting a real estate business trickier and more demanding. In this article, I aim to help real estate business owners by covering the fundamentals of real estate marketing strategies and how to adapt these strategies based on seasonal, financial, and personal changes.
Understanding Your Target Audience for Real Estate Marketing
A “real estate” may mean many different things based on the intent of the potential buyer. The priorities, content consumption, price expectations, and evaluation of a property will drastically change between commercial real estate and residential real estate audiences. Although segmenting commercial vs. residential audiences sounds obvious, it may require a strategic approach as each of these segments has their own sub-segments which can overlap in some instances.
Using High-Quality Visual Content to Promote Your Real Estate Business
Visuals matter in marketing in most industries, but when it comes to life-changing decisions such as buying real estate or luxury items, potential buyers demand more from the visuals before they visit a property. This is even more accurate for inexperienced buyers (first-time buyers). A good example would be my primary residence. The seller didn’t have a realtor, and the images of the house were of low quality and quantity, but I wanted to see it myself (I learned my lesson from my first purchase). The house was the best one in the neighborhood, with a custom-shaped concrete pool, a large backyard, a large front yard, and modern internal architecture. Because the visuals weren’t great, it had low on-site visits and, hence, less competition for me. The market value of the house increased by 40% in 3 years.
The real-life example above shows how the lack of visuals and detailed content impacts the seller negatively, while it’s a great opportunity for a seasoned buyer.
Making use of the latest visual technology, such as virtual walkthroughs (3D), can also enhance the user experience significantly. Real estate companies should invest (in-house) in the equipment and automation of these technologies rather than working with third-party companies. In the long term, automation and owned talents/equipment will make more financial sense.
Optimizing Online Listings for Better Real Estate Marketing
The content of the online listings is the first impression for the viewers. Now, when it comes to real estate, the content of a listing demands more than simply copywriting skills. Using artificial intelligence, you can build a framework based on real estate type. Before you do that, make sure to identify your categories. Here is the categorization by Zillow to give you a broad idea:
| Home Type | Price Point | Bedrooms | Bathrooms | Square Footage | Lot Size | Year Built | Amenities | Property Status | Location (Climate) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single Family Home | $150,000 - $300,000 | 1 Bedroom | 1 Bathroom | Less than 1,000 sq ft | Less than 1 acre | Built in the last 5 years | Pool | For Sale | South: Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina |
| Condo/Co-op | $250,000 - $400,000 | 2 Bedrooms | 1.5 Bathrooms | 1,000-2,000 sq ft | 1-2 acres | Built in the last 10 years | Fireplace | For Rent | North: New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan |
| Townhome | $400,000 - $550,000 | 3 Bedrooms | 2 Bathrooms | 2,000-3,000 sq ft | 2-5 acres | Built in the last 20 years | Garage | Recently Sold | West: California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada |
| Multi-Family Home | $550,000 - $700,000 | 4 Bedrooms | 2.5 Bathrooms | 3,000-4,000 sq ft | 5-10 acres | Built in the last 50 years | Central Air Conditioning | New Construction | East Coast: New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Maine |
| Apartment | $700,000 - $1,000,000 | 5+ Bedrooms | 3 Bathrooms | 4,000+ sq ft | 10+ acres | Historic homes (50+ years) | Waterfront | Foreclosure | |
| Mobile/Manufactured Home | $1,000,000 and above | 3+ Bathrooms | Mountain View | Coming Soon | |||||
| Land | Golf Course |
These are widely known industry categorizations that will create the foundation of your content framework. You can further customize the frameworks by submitting more specific details about the listing, such as:
- Your historical average sales price in the neighborhood
- Average buyers’ credit score
- Average income level of past buyers
- Pain points/objections of the buyers before they purchase
You must train your realtors and have a feedback loop process so that all inputs coming from your potential buyers can be used to feed AI for the most relevant content outputs.
Now that you have categorized the real estates and identified the buyer personas from your past closed sales, you may now have an AI platform to create frameworks.
Email Marketing for a Real Estate Business
Email marketing is another channel you can use to maximize the visibility of your real estate portfolio. Emails are great ways to apply content frameworks you built earlier to reach out to relevant audiences based on their most recent interest, past engagements, or even purchases. You can create custom workflows per segment and update your database as the data moves (i.e., a potential buyer rents a house instead and becomes a potential buyer towards the end of 12 months).
Social Media Promotion for a Real Estate Business
Although it’s unlikely, not all potential buyers use real estate websites often. Utilize your social media channels (especially Instagram) to target your segments by sharing videos and stories of your properties. You can also have a retargeting plan in place to show relevant properties your potential buyers have shown interest in on your real estate website.
Benefiting Major Real Estate Websites to Promote Your Real Estate Business
Get even before you get ahead. You may impatiently want to be the next Zillow and shake the market, but how can you reach such a level without first building your real estate portfolio and enough sales? Websites like realtor.com and zillow.com can be excellent platforms for real estate businesses to reach a wider audience quickly.
Influencer Collaboration to Promote Your Real Estate Business
When many of us hear “influencers,” we think about these super-famous celebrities or famous social media profiles. Influencing doesn’t have to always be about being globally or nationally known. The owner of the best restaurant in town who uses social media for her business might be a perfect fit for an influencer profile you could work with. You can build lasting relationships with these profiles and agree on the terms to refer each other or even pay them per lead.
Hosting Open Houses
There are some channels in marketing that can help a business not only increase the demand but also enhance their networks by adding more names to their list and understanding their interests. You can try both traditional and virtual open houses to widen your network. A contact for a realtor means a lot more than it does to many other businesses. Once you have your client (buyer or seller), you can do business with them for a lifetime as long as you build trust with them.
Traditional Marketing for a Real Estate Business
Print media is much less efficient for some industries, such as consumer goods, with the dominating involvement of e-commerce giants like Amazon. When it comes to real estate, however, I believe print media is still an efficient way to promote your business. Printing high-quality visuals of your real estate portfolio, giving away your fridge-magnetic business cards, and free pens with your company name on them are some of the ways you may utilize print media advertising.
Conclusion
Being good in the real estate business vs. being good at promoting it are different things. I tried to open new perspectives for you so that at least you know how things work on the marketing side of a real estate business. If you are a startup and want to “get to it” sooner rather than later, you can consider hiring a fractional CMO to set up the foundations of your marketing organization. Thanks for reading.
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