Strategies Include:

1. Design a Website Built to Convert Leads
2. Leverage a Reputation Management System to Get Reviews
3. Create Real Estate Content Marketing System
4. Use Search Engine Optimization to Increase Organic Search Traffic
5. Develop an Advanced PPC Advertising Strategy to Close Sales
6. Leverage Social Media Marketing to Build a Buzz
7. Become an Industry Expert in Your Local Community
8. BONUS Lead Generation Strategies

Since it’s rapid expansion in the early 1990s, the internet has been revolutionizing the way we find and communicate with our customers, opening the door to an incredibly diverse range of lead generation opportunities online for nearly every industry. However, due to a large increase in the number of realtors in North America, most lead generation strategies for realtors have become incredibly competitive.

“We have almost as many people selling houses as making them.” – Toronto Real Estate Blog

In fact, there are so many realtors out there who are already doing great marketing that for many up-and-coming real estate tycoons, developing a successful strategy for generating high-quality real estate leads on a regular basis might seem like an enormous mountain to summit.

The good news for you is that all mountains can be summited with the right knowledge, equipment, and a bit of patience.

The question is no longer “How do I generate leads online?” The question has now become:

Which real estate lead generation strategy is best for me?

In our opinion, the best place to start is from the perspective of your customers. If you were buying your very first home, where might you start looking?

Perhaps you might start with some online research, ask a friend or family member for a referral, or even post a query in a local Facebook group. Perhaps you even already know several realtors in your network that you would like to work with. The truth is that Realtors in North America have become so good at marketing that by the time you are ready to start looking for a home, you have probably already been targeted by Realtors who knew based on certain behaviours or interests that you might be ready to buy a home soon.

This means that moving forward, some of the biggest opportunities for generating new real estate leads online will come from discovering soon-to-be home buyers before they begin reaching out to realtors, and building a relationship with them until they are ready to buy. Below are some of the key strategies being used by the best marketers in the real estate industry.

Best Lead Generation Strategies For Realtors

1. Design a Website Built to Convert Leads
2. Leverage a Reputation Management System to Get Reviews
3. Create Real Estate Content Marketing System
4. Use Search Engine Optimization to Increase Organic Search Traffic
5. Develop an Advanced PPC Advertising Strategy to Close Sales
6. Leverage Social Media Marketing to Build a Buzz
7. Become an Industry Expert in Your Local Community
8. BONUS Lead Generation Strategies

1. Design a Website That is Built to Convert.

Since your website will be the central hub of all of your marketing. it’s important to go beyond the basic home, about and contact pages. Instead you should think about your website as a machine that turns cold traffic (new visitors) into life-long customers through the implementation of effective, value focused sales funnels.

Not your Grandfathers Sales Funnels

We’re not talking about those cheesy funnel pages popularized in the early 2000’s with flashing buttons, countdown timers and unfortunate stock images. Your modern day website funnel should be focused on providing value until your visitor has built up enough trust and interest to provide you with their contact info through a lead magnet or call-to-action (CTA).

Along with your usual Home, About & Contact pages, your website should also include unique pages for each service you offer, complete with relevant content, resources, images, and even short videos designed to inform and provide value to your visitors. Combine that with strategically placed lead magnets, contact forms and other call-to-actions and you’re on your way to building a powerful lead-conversion machine.

“Great web design without functionality is like a sports car with no engine.” ― Paul Cookson

Along with a page for each service, we highly recommend creating a unique page for each of the cities or target areas that you’re serving. Not only will this create an opportunity for you to demonstrate your knowledge of local markets, but it will also increase your odds of showing up in Google when someone searches for a realtor in their city. We will speak more about this in the Use SEO to Increase Search Visibility section.

If you want to get real technical, developing an IDX integration to display your real estate listings is another fantastic way to build a valuable real estate website. Not only will this show off your local listings but it is a great way to create local website content that can rank in google search, get shared on social media or be turned into paid ads.

Website Optimization is Critical

You’ll also want to make sure your website is well optimized and loads quickly. If it is difficult for your customer to navigate your website quickly, you run the risk of visitors leaving before your page even loads. If your pages load slowly, have broken links or other issues, you will also undermine any other marketing efforts such as SEO and PPC campaigns. There is no point in increasing exposure to a web page that performs poorly.

Since almost all of your marketing efforts will point back to your website, it’s critical that you optimize your website to convert visitors into leads. Having a high-quality website that is full of relevant content will give both you and your business more credibility and greatly increase your ability to generate real estate leads.

2. Leverage a Reputation Management System for Getting Reviews and Testimonials

Reviews and Testimonials are arguably the most important aspect of your real estate lead generation strategy. Whether a potential customer has discovered you online, or has been referred to you by a reputable source, they are going to look you up to see if there are any reviews of your service. Here are a few noteworthy stats about reviews;

• 91% of customers from the ages of 18 to 34 trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations.
• Reviews account for about 15% of the method Google uses to rank local businesses.
• Negative reviews can stop an average of 40% of buyers from wanting to buy from a business.
  source: https://learn.g2.com/customer-reviews-statistics

Unfortunately, without a system in place to manage reviews, you are much more likely to receive an unfair balance of negative reviews, which can be detrimental to your business. This is due to the fact that consumers are more likely to leave a negative review after a negative experience, and leave no review after a positive experience. Because of this, it is critical for you to begin asking for reviews as soon as possible.

How Realtors Can Use Reputation Management

There are many different Reputation Management services and platforms out there, but the concept of managing your reputation is quite simple and can be created easily. It’s all about increasing the potential for positive reviews and reducing the potential for negative ones.

After delivering service to a customer, you want to ask them privately to provide you with feedback on how you did. Typically we recommend emailing them a very short survey with 3-5 questions about your service, and to rate your service overall with 1-5 stars. If they gave you a 4 or 5-Star rating, you can email them back and ask them to share their review on Facebook, Google or wherever you are collecting reviews. If they gave you a 1-3 Stars rating, this will give you a chance to dig deeper into what went wrong and what can be done to fix it (if anything).

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” – Warren Buffet

It’s important to remember that your biggest critics can often turn into your biggest fans. However, in order to turn a negative experience into a positive one, you’re going to have to set aside how their review makes you feel, and focus entirely on validating their experience. Sometimes a sincere or thoughtful apology is enough, and other times you may need to work hard to turn the negative experience into a positive one?

3. Create a Realtor Content Marketing System

There is a popular adage in digital marketing that “Content is King,” and although there are more important aspects to your marketing strategy than content, it still plays a key role in the development of a successful real estate lead generation system. There are two main types of website content that you should focus on creating; Pillar Content and Supplementary Content.

Pillar Content for Realtors

Pillar Content is the content that is most important, useful, or commonly misunderstood by your target audience. Pillar Content should provide highly valuable insights, answer your customer’s most commonly asked questions, and contain resources your potential customers might want access to in exchange for their contact information.

“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.” – Andrew Davis

Some examples of Pillar Content for the Real Estate Industry are;

• The Ultimate Guide for First Time Home Buyers
• 10 Tips to Sell Your Home Above the Market Average
• How to Become a Real Estate Investor in 5 Years

This type of content is beneficial for a few reasons:

1. It supports your sales cycle by positioning you as an expert in your field.
2. You’ll educate your readers and spend less time answering frequently asked questions.
3. You can use it as a lead magnet to get contact information from website visitors.
4. It will allow you an opportunity to demonstrate the unique value you bring to the table.

When creating pillar content, a great exercise is to write out all of the frequently asked questions you have gotten in the past, or questions you feel would be helpful for your customers to know the answers to. We also recommend using a service like SEMrush to see what types of articles are ranking high for keywords related to your services such as “First Time Home Buyer,” or “Selling Your Home.“

Supplementary Content for Realtors

Supplementary content is created to supplement your pillar content and can be helpful to keep your fans engaged and your website up to date. In most cases, this content is used in conjunction with SEO best practices in order to rank your content for specific keywords in order to generate organic traffic from search engines.

Some common examples of Supplementary Content for Real Estate are:

• 12 Things to Consider When Buying Your First Home
• 18 Strategies to Increase Your Curbside Value
• Why It’s Important Not to Change Jobs Before Closing

Supplementary Content should still be highly valuable or interesting to potential clients, but you can cover topics that are less critical or frequently updated. For example, maybe you have a real estate seminar coming up that you want to promote or have a few features homes you want to showcase on your site.

Build a Real Estate Content Creation System

The best advice we could give to anyone starting to develop their content is to use the Topic Cluster method, aka Content Cluster, Content Silo. With the Topic Cluster method of creating content, you start with a topic like “First Time Home Buyer” and create Pillar Content like “The Ultimate Guide to Buying Your First Home.” Next, you would create 3-5 Supplementary Content posts all of which are centered around First Time Home Buyers and link these back to your Pillar Content. Finally, each of these posts can be further broken down into chunks that can be posted on Social Media.

By using this Topic Cluster method you can turn one topic into a dozen or more posts, all of which rank for specific keywords and generate organic traffic that can be converted into leads on your website. Instead of posting all of this at once, it can be added to a Content Calendar and scheduled to be published over time.

Don’t forget to be visual while developing pillar and supplementary content! Video marketing is quickly becoming the number one form of digital content as it drives some of the highest online engagement. Don’t be intimated by creating a video, even a 30-second video can be enough to capture the attention of your audience.

Some other content ideas you can use to attract your leads include:

• Blog posts
• E-books
• Guides
• Research
• Infographics
• Photos
• Virtual Tours

4. Use SEO to Increase Local Search Visibility

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a fantastic long-term strategy for generating real estate leads online. The purpose of using SEO is to increase the organic search traffic that reaches your website. If your website has been designed with lead conversion in mind then you can convert some of this traffic into leads and then into customers. For most people SEO can feel like a very complex field to learn, so without diving too deep, let’s have a look at how realtors can use SEO in order to support their lead generation strategy.

SEO Foundations and On-Site SEO for Realtors

Since search engines like Google will be indexing your website and all of the pages and posts associated with it, it makes a lot of sense to optimize this content to show up when people in your area search-relevant keywords associated with your business. This is what we mean when we refer to On-Site SEO, it is optimizing your page content to receive the most relevant traffic possible.

“No website can stand without a strong backbone. And that backbone is technical SEO.” — Neil Patel

Giving your website a strong foundation of technical SEO will ensure it can be easily found by search engines and also improves the overall site experience for a visitor. On-site SEO often refers to the following types of optimizations:

• URL Structure
• Headings, Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
• Website Content & Keywords
• Internal Link Building
• Page Speed Optimization

Again, the first thing your leads will do is do their research on your online, which is why incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) will help make your business appear on the top of local search results. Doing so can increase the chances of people visiting your website and doing business with you. There are a few ways you can incorporate SEO to take your website and digital presence to the next level.

Off-Site SEO & Link Building

Since SEO is all about generating more relevant traffic to your website, one of the most powerful tactics is to get links to your website from domains with high authority. This method is often referred to as Off-Site SEO and links that point back to your website are called Backlinks. To put it simply, the more backlinks you can get from high authority websites the more traffic your webpage will get. This happens for two reasons; firstly people will click those links and view your webpage, secondly because search engines will favour websites that have backlinks from reputable sites.

Facebook and Google Business pages will also help improve your Off-Site SEO because they are both very high authority websites. For example, setting up your Facebook and Google My Business will greatly increase your search visibility, help you appear on Google Maps, and place critical information about your business in an easy-to-find location for your potential customers.

Finally, another great yet simple method of improving your Off-Site SEO is to submit your website to local directories. For realtors, this could mean adding yourself to realtor.ca, RECO, NAR or any other local directory of realtors. Other directories include Yelp, Yahoo, Yellow Pages, Chamber of Commerce and many more.

Powerful SEO Tools for Realtors

An SEO specialist is only as good as the tools they have, thats why we have carefully vetted some of the best SEO tool in the industry to discover our favourites. The following tools have provided us in an incredible amount of insights, data, and actionable steps that have made a huge different for us and our clients.

• SEMrush
• ScreamingFrog
• Bright Local
• UberSuggest
• Moz

5. Run Paid Ad Campaigns to Target Real Estate Leads

There are various types of online advertising that can give you and your real estate services more exposure. If you have never run an ad campaign before, you’re going to need to do a lot of testing and experimentation before you start to see results. One of the most common mistakes business owners make when trying advertising for the first time, is assuming that ads won’t work for them because the first few times they tried it did not result in any lead conversions.

The best advertisers in the world cannot accurately predict which ads will perform well, and which will not. So how do you create an ad campaign that will generate leads for your business? Through a process of experimenting, testing and refining. Only through testing different ad copy, creatives and target audiences will you start to discover the perfect combinations that will lead people from click to purchase. However, before you begin testing ads, it’s important first to understand deeply who you are advertising to. Because of this, we highly recommend you spend a bit of time creating a Customer Avatar for each of your target audiences.

“Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time.” – Henry Ford

Customer Avatars and Buyer Personas

A Customer Avatar or Buyer Persona is a somewhat fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on real-world information. Remember, each of your services might have more than one target audience, for example, Home Buyers could be young professionals buying their first home or immigrants who are new to the country, either way, you’re going to want to cater each ad to a very specific persona.

“But I want to offer my services to everyone.” is a common objection we hear from Realtors, and although it’s okay to sell to everyone, generic marketing simply won’t work. Instead, with each campaign you create, you’re going to want to focus on one very specific group and design your offer, design and ad copy in a way that speaks to that group specifically. For example;

Poor Ad Copy: “We offer premium real estate services to buyers, sellers and real estate investors!”
Great Ad Copy: “Learn how we helped Lisa sell her Scarborough home for $150,000 over asking.”

We have put together a Customer Avatar and Buyer Persona Worksheet to help walk you through the process of creating your very first avatars which you can use to generate some very effective ads.

Mapping Your Realty Customer’s Journey

It is often stated that you need an average of 7 touch points or impressions in order to turn a cold lead into a customer, however, in advertising, it can often take a lot more. For this reason, we don’t want you to think of advertising in terms of ads, but customer journeys. Once you understand your ideal customer, you can begin to understand the journey that person will take from first hearing about your services to becoming a satisfied customer.

Perhaps the first time they have heard about you is through an ad campaign promoting a free download of a Home Buyers Checklist or some other offer of value. They might not download your content until they have seen that initial ad 3-5 times. Next, you can use a retargeting campaign to advertise a free home buyer consultation where you can schedule a time to meet with them virtually. Finally, after that initial meeting, you can begin the process of helping them find a home they can afford while “peppering” them with valuable content such as tips for closing, interesting properties you have listed and testimonials from happy clients. This method of advertising along the customer journey will help to increase your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) which will make scaling and growing your ad campaigns much more efficient.

Here are a few of the most popular types of ad campaigns for realtors

• Google Ads for Highly Relevant Realtor Keywords
• Facebook Ads for New Property Listings and Recently Sold Properties
• Re-Targeting Website Visitors with a Unique Selling Proposition
• Free Download of a Guide to Capture Lead Contact
• Sponsored Quiz With a Lead Capture

6. Use Social Media Marketing (SMM) to Find Customers

With billions of people connected through a single platform, Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter LinkedIn & TikTok are an ideal place for finding your target audience and experimenting with the best methods for engaging with them. However, most realtors today are struggling to keep up with the demand of creating content, posting to a variety of platforms and continuously engaging with users to create a buzz. That’s why we recommend focusing your efforts on only 1 or 2 platforms until you can establish SMM systems that allow you to get some of that work off of your plate.

The Best Social Media Platforms for Realtors

The most effective platforms for realtors are typically Facebook and Instagram as they have the largest community and effective marketing features. LinkedIn and Twitter can also provide great results and are typically more professional than social, which could be leveraged to your advantage. However, if going viral is one of your goals than you are going to want to target the current most popular network, which today would be TikTok. Whichever platform(s) you choose, you’ll want to buckle down and prepare for a slow and steady grind. 

“Content is fire and social media is gasoline.” — Jay Baer

How Realtors can Use Facebook and Instagram to Grow

If you don’t already have a Facebook Business account, be sure to set one up and fill it with as much information about your business as possible, including your services, description, and contact information. Link it to your Instagram Business account and whenever you have new content to post you can post it to both platforms with minor variances. You’ll want to set up Instagram Story Highlights with your most valuable content and get as many recommendations (reviews) on your Facebook Business Page as possible.

Once you have your SMM foundation established, you can begin posting content and running ads on a regular basis to test what type of content will work the best. Posting new content and visuals with short descriptions is always a good place to start. Need inspiration? Check out what some of your favourite social media accounts are doing and see how you might be able to transform that type of content into something valuable for your followers.

How Realtors can Use LinkedIn and Twitter to Grow

A simple yet effective strategy for LinkedIn and Twitter is to post small samples of your blog content with links back to your main blog posts. By doing this you can generate SEO Backlinks as well as traffic from the social platforms back to your website, all of which will help to generate leads. Running targeted ad campaigns on LinkedIn and Twitter can also yield great results, but we typically recommend doing this after you have your Facebook and Instagram Strategy dialed in.

How Realtors can use TikTok to Grow

Viral Growth platforms such as TikTok create an opportunity for you to be seen by millions of people. Although these views seldom convert to leads, creating viral content on a platform such as this will greatly enhance the value of your brand and make closing leads much easier. By leveraging trends and creating fun but valuable content you can quickly build up a large fanbase and use that to position yourself as an industry expert.

TikTok also give users the ability to run paid ads on their platform, which you can use to target specific demographics with helpful content. Although their advertising capabilities are still very basic, we believe that TikTok Ads could quickly become one of the most valuable and cost effective forms of advertising.

7. Become an Industry Expert in your Local Community

As more and more business is being done online, establishing yourself as a local industry expert has never been more imperative. Fortunately for Realtors, it’s also become much easier to position yourself as an expert simply by regularly providing value to your local community. From local events to community groups, there are many options for you to build a local fanbase and give you a major edge over your competitors by becoming someone your community really trusts.

Tap into grassroots community Facebook groups

From neighbourhood groups to motherhood communities, there are endless opportunities for you to meet new potential customers by becoming active in a local community Facebook group. The key here is not to promote yourself directly in these groups, but to offer help by answering questions and making posts that help out the other group members. It only takes a few weeks of providing value in a group until you are seen as a positive addition to the community and from there you can slowly build up and establish your credibility.

“You can never go wrong by investing in communities and the human beings within them.” — Pam Moore

A great strategy might be to post information about the housing market that is relative to your local community, about updates to your community like a new park being opened or a commercial plot that is being developed and how that might impact the group. Finding elegant ways to connect your posts to your business is important, but remember not to do it too often, and when you do, ensure it is value additive and not self promotional.

It is important to be selective in the groups you join, and remember that many members of a community might be in more than one of the same groups. Because of this, you’ll want to carefully avoid doing things that might hurt your reputation as removal from these groups can often be permanent. The last thing people want to engage within a group is someone who joins the community and immediately proceeds to spam the group with promotional posts or comments.

Host or get involved in local events

Actual face-to-face time with local community members is critical to becoming a local industry expert. Whether you are hosting a workshop at a community centre, speaking at a school, or organizing a fundraiser, investing your time in community events can pay off dividends. Think of it as indirect networking, if you’re an enthusiastic ambassador supporting your local community, you’re likely to receive support in return from locals. Just remember that this is a very long term strategy, and can sometimes take years to pay-off.

Don’t have the time for in-person events? Consider sponsoring a local event or making a monetary, product or service donation to an organization in need. Plus, you’ll likely have great content you can share on your digital platforms and can generate earned media coverage through this approach!

Free virtual events, mentorship sessions or community partnerships can be helpful resources for your local community, Getting involved in a local in at least one event every 6 months, whether it is in person or not is a great way to keep engaged and aware.

Optimizing your digital platforms to attract local traffic

Adding local keywords to your website content can be a great way to help you earn a higher search engine ranking in your target communities. For example, if you are selling to first-time homebuyers using geographic identifiers such as “top-rated real estate agent helping first-time home buyers find the perfect home in Downtown Calgary” in your website copy, digital ads and social media can enhance your discoverability in local markets.

Another great tactic is to add a page to your website for each of the regions you serve, with relevant and unique content on each page. Especially if your product availability and services vary between locations or countries or if you have more than one brick and mortar location. Don’t forget to add or tag your business address prominently across your website and social media!

Here are a few other ways that Realtors can develop their local presence!

• Sponsoring Park Events or Local Fairs
• Volunteering at local events
• Local advertisements or signage (Flyers, Radio, Posters, Etc.).
• Releasing Podcasts in the community
• Social Media Posts or Ads Regarding Community-Related Topics
• Pitch local media outlets

8. A Few BONUS Methods of Generating Real Estate Leads

Use Quizzes, Polls and Other Viral Content

Quizzes and polls are convenient, engaging and fun. Social media quizzes are a great way to get to know your followers and to get feedback from them. Polls and quizzes can be engaging and entertaining in their own way, so people tend to be more willing to do them vs. commenting on a listing. You can make quizzes regarding frequently asked questions, or you can have polls to find out when people are going to want to purchase or refinance their homes.

Chat Bots & Live Chats

Potential customers may want to know about your services immediately instead of waiting for you to return an email, respond to a direct message on social media, or call them. Creating an automated chatbot or a live chat option on your webpage can help give them the answer they need right when they need it.

Live bots can also buy you some time by engaging leads without them having to commit to your services. They will keep talking to them about their query and try to satisfy them as much as they can. Potential customers can also leave their contact details with the bot so that you can contact them if they have more questions. Live chats are especially useful if you have customer service representatives who are able to answer queries more effectively than bots and with a quick and personal response.