… but what else should a real estate site have to serve the business of a real estate agent and his clients?
While our design tips drive visitor engagement and facilitate real estate search, they also drive traffic through social networks, web marketing, and natural search results. You do not have to spend a fortune to get a site optimized for the real estate industry, visually oriented and highly informed.
So, what should each real estate site include?
Optimized for photography
All real estate sites should be oriented around real estate photography. Make sure your site supports the use of high-quality photos in slideshows and lists to enable better viewing of assets. Today’s homebuyers are looking for a lot of properties online before picking up the phone to talk to a real estate agent, so help them by giving them access to great photos.
Registration of visitors
Once a customer or prospect accesses your site, you want to encourage them to return to your website and use it as a reference real estate site. All real estate websites should offer the opportunity for customers or prospects to sign up to receive updates on certain properties or alerts for new listings in certain cities.
Integration of the Facebook page
Social media is proving to be a great playground for engaging real estate agents with potential customers, customers, and partners. Providing easy access to your ads through your Facebook business page ensures that you give your customers easy access to good information.
Pages for each city
Sites that deliver quick results for cities and communities make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for. We encourage real estate agents to include pages for each city in their area, which includes all the listings.
Featured slideshow
This allows real estate agents to highlight their own ads on their homepage. Customizing a site to reflect your region and ad lists will make it easy for your customers to see what you have and market your existing properties.
Optimized for natural referencing
Many websites come today with a non-optimized structure for SEO. The challenge is that real estate agents are busy focusing on their own lists and their own clients and they do not have the time to learn how to do real estate marketing for their website. Make sure the website you are implementing is optimized for your cities, region, and name. The organic SEO of a real estate site is one of the most important things for it to be found online.
Real Estate Prospection and Inbound Real Estate Marketing
Real estate prospecting and inbound marketing are two complementary approaches that will help you boost your notoriety and return mandates!
Do you think that real estate prospecting and inbound marketing are two different approaches to lead acquisition? That digital strategies are still a little too risky, especially if they involve going less on the ground?
Think again: Prospecting and inbound marketing go hand in hand. Digital acquisition levers, as effective as they are, need to rely on direct contact and human relations. For its part, real estate prospecting has everything to gain by relying on a marketing method that consists of building relationships of trust and increasing its reputation. These two approaches are not contradictory, but rather complimentary! Here’s why.
The foundation of your business is real estate prospecting
Even if real estate prospecting and Inbound marketing are now linked, you must never forget that the base of your business remains prospecting. Whether it’s going to the field to knock on doors and slip flyers into mailboxes or contact prospects by phone, this work is the basis of everything. Because it allows making contact with sellers, to return mandates and thus to have catalog goods to show to your buyers.
A match is not played in the locker room, but on the field! Although behind-the-scenes preparation is essential to ensure results, it’s the D-Day performance that really matters. And that gives value to all the work done to achieve it.
This is all the truer as:
Real estate is a local business: your customers evolve around your agency, not far from you. To make known and recognized is therefore essential.
The customer lifetime value in this sector is long: a customer relationship in real estate is always a long-term commitment. It requires a lot of work on trust and demonstration of true expertise.
You may say that digital has shaken these certainties. That this base, as real as it is, is being crumbled under the pressure of the web. After all, 57% of the prospect’s decision is already made before they contact you – because they’ve already checked in online. How to fight against this new real estate reality?
A mixed prospecting real estate strategy and Inbound marketing have its role to play!
Inbound allows you to take the digital turn.
You can no longer ignore it: the web is at the forefront of the real estate scene. Every month, million people Surf on a website devoted to real estate.
In all, 90% of real estate projects start with an online search. In fact, your prospects are used to drawing the information they need on the web before making contact. How can the good old prospecting field fight against these figures? The prospecting and Inbound marketing duo form part of the answer.
Because the Inbound is not just a web marketing method among others. This is the strategy that allows you to take the digital turn without risking the accident, and ensuring long-term results. In short, Inbound consists of:
Increase the volume of visitors to your website by optimizing your SEO
Generate qualified leads by offering high added value content to create inspiration upstream and promote exclusive mandates;
Maintain relationships of trust to convert these leads into customers, then build loyalty and push them to commit to your real estate agency/brand.
Inbound builds targeted communication to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time – and then create the conditions for that person to feel like trusting you when the time comes. It’s still the best way to get leads where they are, while they do their research upstream of their project, and fight the dominance of the portals.
A mix of prospecting and Inbound marketing to boost your communication
Let’s summarize the methods specific to each of the two approaches (Inbound marketing and prospecting):
Field prospecting is the basis of the real estate business. It aims to take (exclusive) mandates by contacting prospects, creating trust, maintaining human relations and boosting your notoriety, all at the local level.
Inbound marketing makes the most web acquisition tools. It aims to take (exclusive) mandates by generating skilled traffic, building trust, maintaining human relationships and boosting your brand awareness, all on a more global level.
Although different in the absolute, Inbound marketing and prospecting have the same objectives: to touch sellers and to return mandates. And it is precisely their differences that make it two complementary approaches, playing on both scales: local and global; possible contacts in your catchment area and opportunities offered by the web to broaden your horizons and attract qualified leads.
So, the Inbound marketing and prospecting mix will not add up your chances of capturing leads, but multiply them:
You will use the Inbound to better know your prospects and “hatch” in the lead tunnel (lead nurturing), then promote contact with mature leads. This is a way to make it easier for your salespeople by increasing the “quality” of the prospects with whom they are responsible for communicating.
At the same time, you will search for local prospects via field prospecting and send them to your digital media to qualify and convert them. You will be able to guide them throughout their real estate project with adapted content while reassuring them with a human presence.
By the way, you will be able to make your campaign costs profitable, because Inbound marketing costs on average 62% cheaper than a traditional strategy, and each euro spent generates 3 times more leads. This will allow you to control your marketing investments.
All this, enhancing your brand image – and giving a boost to your local reputation!
So, what are you waiting for to boost your business by mixing real estate prospecting and Inbound marketing?