Real estate growth hacking offers aspiring agents an exciting avenue of generating more business. While traditional marketing methods may still be part of the equation, brokerages of all sizes can benefit and thrive with some of the most effective growth hacks. In this post, we’ll take a look at how growth hacking ideas apply to the real estate industry.
Before taking a closer look, though, let’s outline what growth hacking is. Basically, it’s an idea of experimenting across various marketing channels in order to find the best way to speed up lead generation and conversion. Typically, you can achieve this with a laser-targeted campaign via less traditional channels like mobile apps, email or social media. In other words, brokerages get many more ways to engage with their audiences than ever before.
Not every digital strategy will work for your brokerage so be prepared to trial and error. However, the ones outlined below are successfully used by agents from all over the world and so can be very good benchmark data for you to consider.
1) A compelling website designed to sell
Google searches related to real estate have grown 253% over the past 4 years. Marketing your properties without your own website is extremely difficult as you simply can’t get enough exposure online. Besides, given the fact that 98% of people start their home search online, a dedicated website is no longer a matter of choice.
There are many things prospective homebuyers expect your website to provide. From latest property listings to community insights, your site must be informative and fascinate people the moment they land on it. Update your online listings and their headlines, offer lots of photos, ensure easy navigation, optimize for SEO and mobile – these are just a few things to keep in mind.
2) Property portal software
Broader exposure equals more people joining your SOI. Feeding your listings to major real estate portals is a powerful boost for SEO and a lucrative lead source.
Another great real estate growth hacking technique is to start using property portal software. This way you can build unlimited feeds to any portal in the world and manage them all from one central platform. Some CRMs like AgentDrive, created a framework for doing this right inside the CRM. This also means that tracking the lead source is now easier than ever.
3) Neighborhood landing pages
How do you let your website visitors know that your local area is a great place to live and buy properties in? How exactly do you market that unique lifestyle? Just listings are not enough, of course. People want interesting and unbiased information on everything about the locale: facilities, job opportunities, schools, Medicare, crime rates and nature spots. So you need a way to tell people about these things via your website.
A neighborhood landing page does all of that and even more. Yet it’s surprising that many agents still don’t use this powerful lead generation tool.
Craft compelling copy featuring the best the local area has to offer. Make as many neighborhood pages as you need. The more hyperlocal they are, the better. Provide valuable information, include lots of images and a video if you can. Lastly, link your property pages in this area to your landing pages and don’t forget to place them in the menu for easier navigation.
If you want to be seen as a local expert and your site as a valuable source of information rather than a brochure-like outlet, neighborhood landing pages will get you through.
4) CRM automation
An average ROI of a CRM solution is $8.71 per $1 spent! Moreover, real estate is showing the biggest demand for an industry-specific CRM that will finally help reach organization and efficiency.
A real estate CRM helps perform usual tasks easier and faster. In particular, it simplifies managing:
- contacts;
- properties;
- projects;
- property proposals;
- referrals;
- transactions;
- emails and email drip campaigns;
- documentation;
- commissions.
The bottom line? Brokerages using CRMs see a 41% increase of sales productivity per agent. So if you’re set to ramp up your sales metrics this quarter, this real estate growth hacking idea might be worth implementing.
5) Retargeting
What’s great about digital marketing is you can reach huge amounts of people from anywhere in the world, not just in your area. Real estate marketing has become both easier and harder as new opportunities create new challenges.
Even if you secured yourself a good deal of website traffic, only 2% of those people convert on a first visit. The rest bounces off and what’s really sad, they might never remember to come back to your site, even if they liked it.
One way to reverse the situation is retargeting. Take a look at this scheme that explains what retargeting is all about:
A great concept, right? It’s a powerful real estate growth hacking technique, especially because not that many agents use it. If you want to learn more about setting up retargeting campaigns, this post will be very helpful: Retargeting for Real Estate: Complete Guide to Bringing People Back to Your Site.
6) Real estate franchise software
When a successful brokerage expands, the team faces both opportunities and challenges along the way. One of the most pressing questions is how to dedicate enough time to every branch and stay tuned on what’s going on everywhere.
Good news is it doesn’t have to be complicated. Use dedicated franchise software to manage all offices under one umbrella. Here are just a few examples of what else you can do:
- bring all of your offices together onto one central platform;
- run multiple websites via one single, integrated platform;
- exclusively own your own property portal;
- automatically generate franchise reporting and more.
Empowering your growing brokerage with a strong, reliable system to back up their everyday needs is a great idea to help everyone on a team work better.
6) Strategic partnerships
Real estate is all about personal connections, of course. Partnering up the real estate industry in the form of fellow agents, building developers, mortgage brokers, and reno contractors is a great way to grow your value-add and offer potential clients a complete service list. For example, working with a partner mortgage broker will let you offer lower interest rates and better financial terms which is vital for your clients. By the same token, cooperation with a reno contractor helps you maximize the sales value of the property.
These partnerships will generate business for all parties and you wouldn’t like to leave this channel unnoticed.
8) Know your competition
If you’re in tune with what’s going on in digital marketing, you’ll be quick to grasp that there are plenty of tools you can use to better understand your competition. What is their strategy online? Which sites are they mentioned on? Which portals they feed their listings to? Which social media do they use?
All of this is good to know and compare with your own results. Such industry benchmarks will give you a glimpse of what is likely to work best and exclude things you’re not sure about. Alternatively, it also helps to unlock the marketing channels your competition isn’t using yet and be the first to benefit.
9) Social media
Social media is a powerful lead generation tool and a great platform to engage with potential clients. Whatever media you use most of all is up to you, as you know best where your audience is. But chances are big that you center your efforts upon Facebook in particular.
A great way to add powerful functionality to your Facebook business page is with the custom tabs. From creating a library of your content to a dedicated email signup widget, you can do about anything you want. More on this here: 14 Ways to Use Custom Facebook Tabs to Win More Leads
10) Email & SMS marketing campaigns
We’ve recently written a post highlighting the huge benefits email marketing carries for realtors despite the common notion that it’s dead in a marketing sense. Email ROI is $38 per $1 spent! It’s also 40 times more effective in generating new leads than social media. In other words, sometimes growth hacking in real estate means maximizing older methods.
Same goes for SMS marketing for realtors. It’s interesting that customers are 4 times more likely to open an SMS than an email. In conjunction with email, website and social media, SMS campaigns help you create stronger multichannel communications with your leads.
