What Are the Most Effective Acquisition Channels for Your Real Estate Marketing?
Define your positioning, know your prospects, set business objectives, choose the strategy best suited to your needs … These are essential steps to deploy your real estate marketing strategy. But steps that hold theory.
Now we must enter the field of practice. Concrete. And nothing more concrete than this question: how to feed your marketing processes? Where do you find the contacts, and how do you get them on the right path — the one that will lead them to the appointment, then to the estimate, then to the signing of the mandate?
Answer: by setting up your acquisition channels. What are the most effective real estate marketing channels? That’s what we’ll see right away.
Print and Web Media, Main Channels of Real Estate Marketing
Let’s start with your main real estate marketing channels, those that allow you to connect with your future customers and push them in the right direction. We are talking here about the supports that make the link between your agency/network/ promotional company and the prospects that evolve in your sector. This is one of the keys to your marketing.
There are two types to distinguish:
- Digital media, whose importance continues to grow. This category includes everything that is done online: the website as a digital showcase of your brand, the real estate blog as an information medium for Internet users, emailing as a means of communication for multiple purposes, accounts on social networks to stay in touch with your community, etc.
- The print media, which are far from having said their last word despite the omnipresence of their digital cousins. Indeed, you will always need to count them among your real estate marketing channels: business cards, brochures, catalogs, flyers, advertisements, and of course, window cards. These are essential because your prospects like to deal with people of flesh and blood, even if they start their research on the Internet.
Print and digital real estate marketing channels serve as points of contact with your brand. Sellers and buyers go through there to get to know you, to get in touch with you, and to advance in their real estate project.
Above all, do not just use one at the expense of others: your marketing strategy will be all the more effective if you can take advantage of their complementarity. Because prospects can come from everywhere: some will fall on the articles of your blog while searching on Google, the others will contact you after having received you at their place during a door-to-door session.
Prospecting and Events, Essential to Remember
The most modern real estate marketing channels, while effective, can never replace prospecting. This is the bedrock of your real estate activity, the service station with which you provide fuel (in terms of prospects) to supply your engine (your marketing strategy).
Prospecting is the active search for your prospects, a way to make you aware of the inhabitants of the sector (more often they see you, the better they hold your face and the sign that you represent), but also a way to meet the needs of the population. Through door-to-door, boxing, phoning and even real estate freelance (to a lesser extent), you gently impose yourself on the inhabitants — who will naturally contact you when they need your services — and you give the first impetus to their real estate project — playing the role of advising sellers who plan to embark.
Among the “physical” real estate marketing channels, we can also talk about events. Closely linked to your Inbound strategy, event planning is a great way to catch the attention of prospects and push them to get in touch with your brand. This is all the truer as events can involve many people at the same time (unlike overly targeted communication) and make the buzz in the sector, especially if you relay information upstream to reach a maximum of people.
Point-of-sale events, contests, open days, events linked to the calendar, events that bounce on specific events (local or national) … The possibilities are endless, and organizing a happening is never very complicated. It is, therefore, a simple way to acquire contacts likely to become customers.
Beyond the Channels: Acquisition Strategies
You cannot settle for real estate marketing channels alone. Simply because it is not enough to build roads for the motorists to want to use them: they must be visible, easily accessible, and lead somewhere where drivers want to go.
Your real estate marketing channels must, therefore:
- Be made visible, in particular by using SEO and sponsored links campaigns (so as to increase their presence on search engines, massively used by Internet users to start their real estate project). This is valid for digital real estate marketing channels.
- Be easy to access, which means giving people the ability to use these channels easily. For example, if you have a website and a blog, make sure they are displayed correctly on mobile devices, as mobile devices are increasingly used by sellers and buyers to browse the Internet. If you are organizing an event, do it on your premises or clearly indicate the address of the planned site, so that people can go there safely.
- Follow a relevant direction, which means that you need to connect your real estate marketing channels to media where contacts can find information that interests them, and opportunities to convert to prospects (relevant content, forms, CTA, landing pages, etc.).
In short, do not overlook the acquisition strategies that go with channels. Otherwise, you risk losing a lot of the leads generated through your marketing actions, because you cannot manage them properly and know how to take care of them.
Originally published at Entrepreneur News and Startup Guide.
