Real estate is a people-driven business. Agents must personally meet with people to show different houses, arrange open houses for the public, be present at closings, be available for phone calls, and much more. Buying or selling a home is such a complicated, emotionally-laden process that agents are a necessity to make sure all the fine details are handled.
Real estate agents could use a little help to juggle all their responsibilities? Not only do they have to help sell houses, they also have to grow their individual businesses. Is there a way that technology can help make that part of their jobs easier? There is, but many agents also find themselves held back by technology, especially independent agents that need it the most.
What Agents Need
There are several ways that technology helps real estate agents, but the ones most desired are four:
- How can you generate more leads?
- How can I lower the costs per lead?
- How can I maximize the amount of profit per lead?
- How can I save time from initial contact to close so I can follow more leads?
Online marketing can help with the first three of these, which is why it’s so appealing to real estate agents. A well-crafted website or landing page never sleeps. It’s quite possible to wake up and have several leads in your email once a system is up and running. Any time or money you save from having to chase new leads is money in your pocket.
The trouble many agents find is that setting up a digital marketing funnel for their real estate business is seems hard. Despite the fact that the industry has been pushing agents to leverage the power of the net for their marketing, many agents feel frustration with digital marketing trying to figure out. Some just drop it completely and try to run on pen, paper, phone, and reputation.
Agency-Provided Tools
Agents that belong to one of the big real estate agencies usually have access to a wide bevy of tools to help them find homes, qualify leads, and track the progress of contracts. But many agents still prefer to use pen and paper due to how they learned, struggles with company tools, or fear of another agent learning too many details about their deals through the company’s system.
Independent agents don’t have that problem, but they also lack the tools and the marketing that the bigger companies have. It’s hard enough not having a recognizable brand name on the signs in the neighborhood. Cutting through all of the competition to get noticed locally can make you feel invisible. The way to overcome that is by constantly beating the streets and making connections.
In both cases, once a client is found there is a huge amount of time that has to be sunk into each client to complete a sale. This time investment makes can make agents look at the learning curve of any marketing technology and go “no thanks, I’m busy enough” even if they know the technology will help them once they master it.
Listings
Another place agents advertise is on listing websites. Yelp is a good example but there are plenty of real estate-specific ones too. These are a way to get a foot in the door and shouldn’t be ignored, especially since you can get good reviews from them.
However, they are also highly competitive. It’s hard to stand out from everyone else when all your competition is on the same site. But if you can create your own marketing campaign on Facebook or Google, you can differentiate yourself much more easily.
Hiring Outside Help
Some agents try to get an edge by hiring an outside developer or marketing agency to build websites and do their internet marketing. This approach can work, but it’s a gamble. In essence, you’re turning your marketing responsibilities to someone else and they may not know the real estate business.
The developer, in turn, may not know just how fast the real estate market can change. Listings change all the time. Prices fluctuate. If your developer or marketing agency falls behind, you could get angry clients wondering why a house that’s on your website isn’t around anymore. It gets even worse if the details are wrong.
Doing It Yourself
This leaves the option of doing it yourself, but developing your own listing website from scratch takes time and knowledge that most agents just don’t have. There are good reasons why outside digital marketing agencies are able to exist. There’s so much to learn, create, and maintain to run a website, time that most agents don’t have.
Then there’s the fact that your reputation will be affected by your online marketing efforts. If you make a bad impression, you’ve just shot yourself in the foot. So, how can you overcome these barriers?
Making Your Own Landing Pages
The simplest way to generate online leads is to create landing pages. Landing pages are small one-page websites that urge people to perform a marketing action. In the case of real estate, it would be to contact you to set up a sale.
Landing pages are often tied with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. So, if someone sees your ad on Google and clicks it, they go to the landing page. From there, they can evaluate your offer and make a decision about contacting you or not.
Using PPC is the easiest way to drive traffic to a landing page because PPC can be targeted to very specific regions. This maximizes the chances of getting a lead that you can help.
But didn’t we just say that doing online marketing yourself requires a lot of extra know-how and time? That’s where we come in. Pagewiz’s goal is to make digital marketing and landing page creation as simple as possible for our clients. By using drag-and-drop tools, users can create their own landing pages. We also have a large variety of targeted templates for different industries that you can modify for your own uses. You can literally go from no landing page to a functional one in about 15 minutes.
Here’s how Pagewiz helps with those first three goals:
Lead Generation
A landing page is a page that is designed to target a particular type of customer with a specific deal, usually tied to an online ad. Most real estate agents focus on a particular kind of real estate, but within the local market, there can be several different customer segments. Using our landing page creation tools and templates, you can quickly develop many pages in the space of an afternoon and tie them to your ads or website.
Our goal with each of our templates is that they just work out of the box. Here is a sample of some of our real estate templates. Everything you need to make a house listing or a sales pitch should be right there (and if there’s something missing, let us know and we’ll make more!)
Lowering Cost Per Lead
Pagewiz’s landing page system lets you develop an online marketing funnel that converts at a far lower rate than hiring an outside developer to create one. Additionally, you get complete creative control over what goes on your page, if you so choose. Our drag-and-drop page builder lets you do that and has tools to help you build beautiful, well-proportioned pages that work on all devices.
You could also learn to do it all on your own, but the lost revenue you could be making selling houses spending the time to learn HTML, CSS, JS, PPC, SSL, Google Analytics, web hosting, and other technologies just to build a single secure landing page isn’t worth it. You went to school to sell real estate, not be a web developer!
Maximizing Profit Per Lead
Online marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it task. There is always room for improvement, and it’s always necessary to see which pages are doing well and which ones aren’t. We have built-in tracking on all of our landing pages. You can measure the number of visits and conversions each of your pages gets. Using our A/B testing tools, you can gauge the effectiveness of two different landing pages, taking the traits of the best ones and creating new ones that cause more visitors to pick up the phone and call you.
You can also use your landing pages to segment particular clients. For instance, the language that persuades a person buying a 100k+ home and the language that persuades the buyer of a 750k+ home are quite different. By using the right copy on your landing pages and ads, you can see which segments perform the best in your area and maximize your profits.
Sign-up free for a month and see how Pagewiz can help your real estate business’ digital marketing. Here is the link. Why not start by giving one of our real estate templates a spin? Edit them to fit your needs and start selling more homes.
Emily Hunter develops content and resources for businesses in all niches, ranging from computer security to retail. She has worked for both national marketing agencies and mom-and-pop stores, learning much about each of them. During the summer, Emily cheers on Carolina Crown and all of the great DCI corps.
