In a sector as competitive as real estate, it is necessary to adopt a strong digital marketing strategy in order to establish a lasting brand image in your market. This will help you convert leads into clients and establish your leadership position.
To adopt a clear digital approach that has a real impact on your real estate agency’s business, Franck Gonzalez, real estate specialist and Head of Sales at Conseiller Influent, believes there is one key aspect to differentiating yourself: personal branding. One that is too often mistakenly neglected or even ignored.
Use personal branding to strengthen your brand image
First of all, let's define personal branding: It is a concept that applies corporate marketing techniques to individual people. The objective is to promote such people, to give them a positive and strong image, as well as to better communicate their history, their skills and the services they offer.
Franck Gonzalez sums up personal branding as follows: “You are your own product. You must communicate yourself and your brand through a strong image and a differentiating factor.” Differentiation is an important component of personal branding. It allows you to create a strong image and make it a trademark for your community and clients.
Some examples of differentiating factors: the way you communicate, the way you dress, your visual identity, your speciality, etc.
Here is a specific example: a real estate agent in Calgary, Canada, calls himself “the purple realtor”, going so far as to have his car painted in this colour. Thanks to this differentiating factor and by communicating intelligently on social media, he manages to build a strong and positive brand image. Once you have identified this differentiating factor, you will need to communicate it in order to stand out from the crowd.
Video content is at the heart of your real estate agency’s digital strategy
To communicate effectively, you should go beyond simply posting on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. Video content is now at the heart of a successful strategy. It is the medium that generates the most engagement with a community, with 30% more interactions than a photo, and twice as many shares. Mark Zuckerberg himself considers video to be a “mega-trend”. Today, video is a way to demonstrate your authenticity, show your uniqueness and stand out. It is a tool for initiating a relationship and helps create a meaningful connection with your audience.
While Google is now the most popular search engine, YouTube is a close second. For this reason, Google highlights the results that match a given search and displays relevant videos. For that reason, high rankings on YouTube can help you appear in top Google results, providing a superb opportunity as it is difficult to achieve these results through SEO.
One of the members of the Conseiller Influent private club describes his experience of using video as a real estate agent as follows: “People trust me, because they have already seen me on video, they have already heard me speak. It facilitates business.”
Posting videos will help potential clients find you, get to know you and your values, and assess your suitability based on your publications. When they decide to trust you with selling their property or choose to buy their new home through you, they will do so because they want to work with you. Video content also helps to “defuse” fears and anticipate the discovery phase with prospective clients, improving the level of trust they place in you early on. Video content can really create emotion, a connection and therefore a relationship with your audience, something that would not be possible if you only used a photo format.
Build a strong sales funnel to generate leads
Digital communication, through content creation (preferably video), is critical to an effective digital marketing strategy. However, creating content alone is not enough to attract potential clients. Franck Gonzalez explains the advantages of implementing a lead generation strategy using a sales funnel. Such funnel marketing consists of four steps:
- Generating traffic: You create highly valuable content, which you then choose to promote via Instagram or Facebook ads. It can be a video or an ebook. The content must be interesting, eye-catching and 'irresistible' enough to push potential clients to go for it. It has to be powerful to make prospective clients take action and click it.
- Capturing leads from that traffic: Potential clients are taken to a landing page upon clicking the ad. They now have to fill out a form and thus give their personal information in exchange for accessing the valuable piece of content. The purpose of this page is to convert and not to distract, which means it should be simple and effective. Once they've given you their personal information, it is time for you to start building the relationship, you can e.g. include a welcome video, or a personalised thank you message.
- Following up and (re)engaging your leads: You keep working on the relationship with your potential client by creating trust through relevant communication channels. Keep in mind that a website visitor who has given their information is not a client yet, they are probably not ready for a sales pitch. Instead, think of what type of content they would be most interested in, and what their questions and pain points might be.
- Converting your leads into customers: Make sure to give your potential customers enough opportunities to book a meeting with you if they wish to do so. The more (and the more intelligently) you will have worked on the relationship with those leads in the previous steps, the easier the conversion will be.
Digital drives your real estate marketing, but it cannot replace the human element
According to Franck Gonzalez, 95% of real estate professionals neglect certain steps after generating leads. A potential client is not yet a client, and it takes between 7 and 13 contact points to convert leads. This is why it is important to follow up with them effectively and rigorously.
Digital marketing is a powerful tool to build your reputation, demonstrate your expertise, and make yourself known to your community in a differentiating and effective way.
Do not forget that digital channels offer great opportunities but do not eliminate the need for human relationships. What it does, rather, is complement your actions on the ground. You must keep the human element at the centre of the relationship to create a strong bond and thus turn your leads into exclusive listings.
