For any real estate agent, looking for new customers should be an ongoing process. Repeat business is possible, but homes are long-term investments, so all your recent clients will not return for several years. Your focus must, therefore, be on creating new business through efficient lead generation activities.

The million-dollar real estate lead generation question: it’s just plain hard. Depending on your strategy and strengths, you may be looking to target buyers, sellers, or investors—or quite possibly all of the above. Capturing more information will help improve results, but a scattershot marketing method isn’t always effective.

The generation of buyer and seller leads in real estate is the most important part of your business. If you lack a proper strategy, it becomes hard to find quality leads or prospects and eventually turn them into clients. Since your real estate business is commission-based, more leads would mean more chances of closing deals. However, how you get real estate leads depends on the time and money you can invest.

Lead generation involves collecting personal information about prospects who could be potential clients. Leads may include people willing to buy or sell a house, investors, or people interested in your offer as a real estate agent.

A customer who shows interest in your business by visiting your website, filling out a form, calling you, or sending you an email automatically counts as a lead.

This is far less intrusive compared to cold calling or emailing people, and you will get warm leads interested in your services.

Lead generation is only part of a bigger lead nurturing campaign. It lets you convert those people into paying customers. When somebody gives you personal information, that truly means that they are interested in your real estate business and would like to know more.

In this way, you are able to reduce the need for cold calling and other intrusive sales pitches, hence increasing overall efficiency in your marketing efforts by concentrating on the creation of activities.

Lead generation is a process designed to obtain contact information from a prospect through a website form, email, call, or in-person interaction. This is done to establish the prospects within the sales funnel and turn them into paying customers; strategies vary according to time and budget.

One of the major challenges real estate agents should know how to overcome is effective self-marketing since it leads to increased lead generation. Social media provides a great way to network with fellow professionals and keep up on local market trends while reaching out to potential clients. It helps an agent network within the industry by joining communities or groups, and through social media advertising, an agent can reach potential home buyers or sellers.

Social media ads, particularly those placed on Facebook and Instagram, are a very inexpensive method for lead generation. They provide highly measurable metrics from impressions to conversions and can be used in targeting demographics, driving traffic to your website, or even garnering contact information straight from the social network.

Even without paid ads, keeping an active presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram is paramount if you’re looking to generate leads, because you never know who may be looking to buy or sell a home within your extended network.

Lead generation strategies help collect personal information, such as emails; however, what is important is nurturing these leads so that they turn into customers. Once you get their contact details, start building a relationship by sending communication targeted at these leads.

Your emails should provide useful information and encourage them to visit your blog or other pages of your site to learn more. Segmentation of your leads will allow you to share the most appropriate information by separating those leads ready to buy/sell now versus those that are a month, six months, or even a year from making a decision. You might want to add this question to your lead generation form: “How soon do you want to buy or sell a home?”

Using a robust CRM platform, automate email nurturing based on lead segmentation, correctly timed to correspond with where they are in the process. If they’re not ready to buy, send over blog posts about buying a home. If they are going to sell their home in three months, send them sales-focused emails trying to win them over to list with you.

To really stand out in the real estate business, develop your personal brand. Since a real estate agent is a brand, having a professional website with detailed pages of services and information about your process is indispensable.

Even if your business thrives on referrals and word of mouth, it is important to provide prospects with a place to learn more about you. The best real estate websites feature service pages and testimonials that can help build trust, tailored to your specialties. If you work only with sellers, you won’t need a homebuyer page.

You passively generate real estate leads while you continue to market and advertise. However, branding is much more than just having a website. It sets you apart, differentiating you from other agents, and key messaging—what makes you better.

For example, if you help first-time home sellers get the best possible offers, mention that in your marketing material and add testimonials from satisfied clients. You want to be synonymous with this area of expertise, and the way to do this is through focused marketing and advertising.

Real estate agents have local businesses; therefore, the more people that know you and have met you, the higher your chances that they are going to hire you. Start out by reaching out to those in your community whom you know, and engage in activities such as open houses to make new contacts and find new leads.

Since many real estate professionals get much of their business from referrals, never leave home without your business card on you to hand out to people you meet or talk to; they might know someone buying or selling a house.

Build relationships with businesses in related but non-competing areas of business that can refer business to you. For instance, most real estate agents cultivate relationships with mortgage lenders, bankers, and insurance companies as a means of garnering referrals.

These relationships should be symbiotic. For example, a real estate agent may form an alliance with a mortgage company where the lender refers potential buyers to the real estate agent and, in turn, has the real estate agent refer the lender to their clients.

Traditional marketing does work, much better when combined with a digital strategy. Many real estate agents have significant success through billboards, benches, buses, and local newspapers and publications.

You can capitalise on these methods by pointing prospects to your website for lead conversion. For example, you can add a QR code in your local magazine ads and prospects can scan the code and land in a form, entering your sales funnel.

Since so much of the process of buying or selling a home will be done by you, it’s crucial that customers know their best interests truly are the top priority. You can build credibility and trust with prospects even before they become leads by investing in local PR and becoming viewed as an expert in your field.

Want to be a thought leader? Contact local publications and offer yourself as a source for future real estate articles. There are also local online platforms that might want to host guest posts on subjects in your wheelhouse.

It’s not just lead generation that stops once a person’s information is gathered, but how the gathered information is put to use is what matters for the success of your business. This is succeeded by the process called lead nurturing, which ensures that your leads turn into real customers.

Proper CRM software will also help you in generating leads. Develop relationships and build trust with buyers and sellers through automation, audience targeting, and segmentation. MailChimp and other tools make it quite easy to collect leads on your website and nurture them to grow your business.

Effective lead generation is the central part of a real estate agent’s work. This comes down to developing an ongoing stream of new clients. Reality means that through nurturing relationships, views will naturally become sales. Capitalise on social media, email marketing, and quality CRM to take your game to the next level. Organise a strong personal brand and strategic partnerships that visibly improve the manner of your lead generation. By marrying traditional with digital, you’ll have better reach/frequency; with local PR and thought leadership activities, you can gain credibility. Success means lead nurturing. These strategies ensure that there’s always a good flow of quality leads coming into your business. Looking to maximise your real estate potential? Feel free to drop by Create Real Estate to discuss professional advice on superior services and the very latest listings of Melbourne’s housing market. Be it buying, selling, or investing, Create Real Estate has got your back.

Source: Mailchimp