The destination resort real estate market is one of the most competitive and fast moving industries today! With the current hot mountain real estate market, effective and creative strategies need to be implemented in order to reach buyers and to gain inventory -- sellers. Digital marketing and the plethora of online channels can be effectively combined to reach leads and potential clients in today’s competitive real estate market.
To most effectively leverage omni-channel strategies to your advantage, a robust digital marketing strategy must be developed. From creating and updating a blog to managing your brand's message across social media platforms to sending relevant and timely emails, Imagine That can help you develop a roadmap to achieve growth in your lead pool and ultimately an increase in sales. The list below include proven, highly effective real estate marketing strategies that can be brought to bear for you in order to boost branding outreach, lead generation, client engagement, and overall sales to grow your business.
1. Build a Professionally Designed Website
In our digital first world, customers use the internet for research before making any decisions. This fact is especially true for the real estate market. Companies that lack a beautiful and engaging website are at a severe disadvantage. Not only does a personally branded website provide potential clients with information about your company, but it offers an opportunity to understand your brand and values through your branding, content, and design. You should also pay attention to the web design of your site. Use illustrations, pictures and clipart that stand out and attract visitors attention. Find some clipart inspiration here: plant clipart, sheep clipart and calendar clipart. Websites should act as a virtual location for you and a gateway to other digital marketing channels.
Modern website design incorporates many best practices in order to capture user interest and keep them engaged, regardless of what kind of device they are using. A responsive design will re-format itself so it will look just as beautiful on mobile devices as it does on high definition, wide screen monitors. Imagine That specializes in designing and building websites that effectively attract and engage the needs and of mountain real estate buyers and sellers.
2. Leverage Data to Optimize Online Marketing
Once your website is built, tracking codes are added to utilize Google Analytics, a powerful tool that sets your website up to glean insights about how users navigate your website and how they interact with your content (video and text on your website, blogs, etc.). Tracking codes are also used with promotions and social campaigns to track ROI (return on investment ) of paid advertising and external links from partners, social media, and other places where you might gain website traffic. Armed with this information you can optimize your content, and develop strategies to capture more traffic, keep visitors engaged, and drive lead generation.
Other tools we use at Imagine That enable us to track competition and know exactly how client's websites are stacking up against top competitors. By understanding who is dominating the space, opportunities are revealed and lead to more aggressive strategies when it comes to the development and deployment of content across different channels online.
3. Layer in Great Video and Photography
Our modern world is fast paced, and data shows that most people prefer watching videos and perusing high quality images rather than reading large blocks of text. When marketing for real estate, we recommend using high-quality video and advanced photography such as Matterport to create virtual tours of top properties your buyers want to check out. Giving potential customers a direct view into the properties you offer helps build your credibility and goes a long way toward establishing yourself as a trusted resource. Further, having video and beautiful images increases the time people spend on your site - an important metric that popular search engines use when determining the rank of websites in their indexes.
4. Build and Grow Your Email List
Newsletter sign ups and gated content are designed to entice visitors to provide you with their email in exchange for premium content. Elements such as an updated market report or exclusive floor plans for specific home models within a new development are great examples of gated content. In addition to providing relevant information to clients, one of the main objectives of a website it to generate leads for growing your business. Visitor email addresses are valuable resources that can be collected from a website and used to nurture relationships with email subscribers to move them down the buyer funnel and convert them into new buyers or sellers for you. Imagine That can help you to determine which elements to include on your website that will attract potential clients and help gather valuable contact information on visitors and leads.
5. Send Engaging Emails
Once you have your growing email list, you can expand your content marketing strategy directly into the inbox of potential clients. Combined with a well thought out buyer journey and an email list, you can create a powerful "drip" campaign. By sending information relevant to where potential clients are in their journey, you can increase conversion rates and ROI on your marketing spend. Imagine That guides you through the process of mapping your customer's journey toward a purchase and we have both the visual design and writing talent to help you create an engaging email marketing plan that will inform and excite potential clients.
6. Maintain a Professional Blog
By creating a fresh library of content in the form of a blog you provide expert insight into the local real estate market, information about current events, culture and mountain lifestyle, you enhance the visibility of your website online and grow your credibility as a strong resource for local knowledge and real estate expertise. Continually updating your blog with new and relevant content will keep users returning to your site, and can be in the form of a video, photos, or text.
Talking about a text, Google Docs can be a great solution for working with textual content. With its numerous add-ons, Google will power up your marketing efforts. Let's take Extensis Fonts Google Docs add-on. It gives you access to more than 900 Google fonts without leaving Google Docs. Amazing!
Also don't forget to optimize the content on your blog to provide a boost to SEO (search engine optimization, effectively your position when someone searches for your services online) and increases the number of pages that are indexed in the major search engines. Imagine That specializes in creating engaging and informative blog posts that also seamlessly utilize SEO principles.
Blog content can also be pushed out through social media and in outbound emails, so the work to develop great content is well leveraged across lots of outreach to prospective clients.
7. Establish a Presence on Social Media
Flourishing companies take advantage of the most popular social media platforms in order to establish branding and credibility, and to attract and engage with new and existing clients. By taking advantage of each platform's reach to different demographics and the way people use them, you reinforce your image and the credibility of your brand by being where people are spending the most amount of time online.
Creating and regularly posting on a business Facebook page, using relevant trending hashtags on Twitter, or finding new audiences with great visual Instagram content is a powerful way to engage with past and potential new clients. Promote new content published on your blog, promote new listings, or just show some highlights of life around town to help potential clients get excited about the possibility of investing in a property in your market. This provides unique opportunities to engage with users and foster relationships that can lead to more leads and ultimately sales.
8. Drive Leads from Paid Digital Advertising
From Google and Bing PPC (pay per click) advertising placement to boosted Facebook posts to targeted internet ads, there are numerous ways to farm the Internet for leads and generate website traffic. Whether you want to target a specific search term and have your business come up as the answer to the users' query or want to be more social, we will provide recommendations on ways to leverage your advertising budget to get the best return on investment for your ad dollars.
Facebook is a great place to promote your listings with compelling property photos and video, as well as grow your page followers, build your email list, and generate leads. Instagram is growing, and lends itself to great images and fun video, with hashtags helping grow your outreach to new audiences. YouTube pre-roll (the short video at the beginning of other videos) and longer video helping viewers understand the area or anything to do with real estate really enhances your credibility. And targeted digital advertising finding buyers or sellers can be a great way to pull people into your buyer funnel.
9. Integrate Classic Marketing Methods into your Strategy
While digital marketing strategies give your company a great edge in the market, utilizing tried and true methods like radio and print should not be overlooked. Indeed, they form an important part of any integrated marketing strategy, especially with older audiences.
While the real estate market in mountain resort communities is extremely competitive, an aggressive omni-channel marketing strategy can put you in the drivers seat. Imagine That brings ten years of experience working with real estate leaders in local markets and are ready to provide you with all the resource and expertise you need to develop and execute an effective digital marketing strategy. Contact us today to discuss your goals and put our expertise to work for you to put you on the path to closing more deals.