Are you struggling with your Real Estate Business because of the COVID-19 Pandemic? With the slowdown in purchasing and selling activities, even top real estate agents are having trouble in advertising their listings to attract and close the deals with their new clients.
The global pandemic is proving to be the ultimate push for real estate agents to embrace the alternative marketing methods which are to take their real estate digital marketing strategies to the next level.
For those who don’t know where to start, we’ve put together 15 top ideas from industry leaders on how to navigate along the COVID-19 pandemic during and even long after it finishes.
It is a fact that COVID-19 has made many of our traditional marketing strategies difficult to execute and so for the next coming months, we will need to pivot.
Let’s dive right into the new normal and get creative with our business processes and strategies shall we?
Real Estate Digital Marketing Strategies to Survive and Thrive COVID-19 Pandemic
Here are the Real Estate Digital Marketing Strategies that you should employ now:
Optimize Your Social Media Accounts
As you start to create your social media accounts to publish your contents and videos, optimizing these platforms is bound to be your next step.
As the coronavirus has forced people to spend more and more time on the internet. These include those home buyers, homeowners and investors.
So what better time to capture their attention than now?
Chances are they might still be hesitant about forking out their money. However, this is still the best time to get your name out there and share your listings of homes for sales, your virtual tours, videos and other types of content of which your leads will find interesting and valuable.
Make sure to include in your social media strategy to find out and use the most relevant hashtags. As these will greatly add more traffic to your social media posts and generate more leads.
READ ALSO: Real Estate Digital Marketing Trends That You Should Consider for 2020
Create and Nurture Relationships via Social Media
Although health officials are encouraging social distancing, this doesn’t apply to social media.
Don’t forget to leverage on how you can nurture relationships, attract new clients, keep and maintain your reputation and relationships with existing ones.
Use your social media pages to keep your followers updated with the latest news and supply them with tips on how to survive financially during this pandemic.
Make the necessary preparations to use digital marketing to differentiate your brand from competitors.
Optimize Your Linkedin Profile
Your LinkedIn profile deserves attention. And we are emphasizing it here. Don’t underestimate the importance of LinkedIn as a lead source for your real estate business.
It is a professional platform that demonstrates credibility, and trustworthiness as a real estate agent. And trust is a crucial characteristic during the current coronavirus pandemic.
Successfully setup your LinkedIn profile by filling in the necessary information. Use a professional logo and your brokerage logo and list out specific skills and contacts that you know who may have worked with you.
Get active in LinkedIn by sharing your content, videos and blogs that you’ve made. Link your website and social media platforms and interact with the people that are reaching out to you as they are usually quality leads.
Improve Your Real Estate Website
No list of the top digital marketing strategies for real estate will be complete without including your website.
Your website is the best distinguisher you can have to separate yourself from the rest of your competition.
But which elements should you focus on for your website?
- Make sure that it is enhanced for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Make sure that your website structure and content follows SEO guidelines along with your content. As it is the best way to drive organic traffic to your site.
Read more about SEO with our Ultimate Guide to Seach Engine Optimization (SEO).
- Mobile-friendly
Data from National Association of Realtors (NARS) reports that home buyers and real estate investors are finding properties on their mobile devices. So you must optimize a mobile friendly website.
Of course, you will still need to include your name, contact info, areas covered and expertise in your website. Post all of your listings, market properties, and other specialties to generate more leads.
As for your content, write about the local housing market, and real estate trends with blogs to help you reach more clients during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Switch To Virtual Tours
When it comes to digital marketing strategy for real estate, one of the first things which agents can use to promote a property for sale is to create virtual tours.
However, virtual tours aren’t actually new to the real estate industry. But that’s actually a good thing!
Why? Well it means that your clients are open to this experience especially now with the coronavirus preventing people from walking out of their house.
And best of yet, realtors don’t need to have a high technical skills to set this up. There are plenty of software and websites which will assist you to make professional virtual tours of your property listings.
Of course, you can’t just upload this and expect to gain traction. You still need to attract clients with social media ads or google ads and make it part of any other digital real estate marketing strategies which you decide to implement.
Launch Properties 360 Images
However, don’t forget to make use of your 360 photos and content to launch a virtual open house.
What fun is it to simply look at images, right? Accompany your visitors, answer their queries and help them understand the value of the property along with an extra perspective that they might miss out.
However, don’t forget to use actual footage of the house and not a digital recreation.
You must have options to explore any room at any time for backtracks or the like.
Remember that most of these viewers will use mobile instead of a pc, so make sure that your tour is mobile friendly.
Use images that have clear lighting and resolutions that won’t take too much time to load.
Overall, it must duplicate the experience of visiting the house in person.
If you want a perspective or an idea, check out these virtual real estate companies listed here.
Create Real Estate Videos
Another digital marketing trend in real estate that you should include in your plans to grow your business, is to create real estate videos.
Video marketing has always been the way to go. It is entertaining, it captures more attention and can be used to create educational videos.
In addition, video marketing opens up endless opportunities for you. To begin, your property listings will attract more attention. As it will help you reach the eyes of those interested individuals who are outside of your demographics.
And in terms of distributing these videos, YouTube and other social media platforms can guarantee a maximum exposure.
However, don’t be a robot or act like you are reading a script. Act natural, understand who it is you are talking to by creating a buyer persona and go from there. All you need to watch out for is the stability of your camera and lighting and angles.
Build Your LIst via Email Marketing
Emails are a must for your real estate digital marketing strategies during COVID-19, and beyond. It is still essential to send your email campaigns to your past clients to express your concern perhaps about their health and check if they are doing well.
Your clients will appreciate the time you’ve taken to get in touch during these tough times and they will definitely remember you when they decide to buy and sell real estate properties.
In addition, you can automate these email campaigns. Don’t forget to leverage on the best email automation software tools available on the web as they will help serve you for years to come.
Real Estate Webinars
Another great way to optimize your real estate digital marketing services is to launch a webinar. A webinar is an excellent opportunity for you to showcase your knowledge and expertise in the real estate business.
Stand out from your competition by positioning yourself as a leader in this industry. Check among your leads on what topics they are most interested in.
Check other websites for FAQs and prepare answers to possible questions during your webinar as well and discuss these issues.
Don’t underestimate webinars as even if your viewers aren’t buying or selling properties at the moment, they will join your webinar and learn and remember you when they are ready to invest in a property.
Host a Real Estate Podcast
Another real estate digital marketing strategy during COVID-19 that you should consider is hosting your own real estate podcast.
A podcast requires little technical preparation but it can bring you a lot of fame and reputation in the real estate industry.
Compared to making videos, podcasts will only ask you to have a good mic and a quality recording of your voice. However, it will require you to make a long-term commitment.
As most podcasts run at least once a week and you can’t just provide one episode and expect that to as you’ll more of them create a following and a community in order to succeed with your online real estate digital marketing plan.
Publish A Real Estate Blog
As content marketing still remains as one of the best digital marketing strategies, it just shows why running your own blog during this pandemic can help you showcase your experience and expertise.
Moreover, you can partner your blogs with your digital content to attract more leads. But take note that in order to succeed with a blog, you will need to diligently research the right keywords in your niche and location.
It is important that you use relevant keywords and check on the search volume on each online search engine. You might also want to publish new content a couple times per week.
Writing blogs are easy, and their language must be relaxed and easily digestible. If you do need help in writing, you might want to consider hiring a part-time content writer with a background in real estate digital marketing services to ease some of your burdens.
Make sure however, that your content is natural, and comes off as well-written by a real estate agent and not a content marketer.
READ ALSO: Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Industry
Design Helpul and Informative Real Estate Infographics
While blogs are important to gain you organic traffic, sometimes people are looking for a much more easily digestible content.
Other than videos, you can offer another visual content to your readers such as a real estate infographic.
Infographics are an integral part of your real estate digital marketing strategy during COVID-19 as your content points can come from your blogs.
It is the best way to repurpose your existing content without feeling burned out. You can showcase infographics each month and continue to update them on the number of listings, average days on the market and many more.
- Plan the goal of your infographic will be– is to explain a process? To motivate your peers and clients? Or to compare prices?
- Create a simple outline
- Pick a template that fits the type of information you want to provide.
- Adjust the charts, pictograms and icons to fit your information.
- Customize the style such as your color scheme, fonts, and visuals to fit your branding.
Lastly, include them on your next blog posts, share them as they are or even send them in your email campaigns. It’s not just about creating new contents but repurposing the resources on which you already have.
And if they want to learn more, redirect them to your blog or sources for a 360 marketing direction.
Master Social Media Marketing
Beyond optimizing your social media account for your real estate business, why should real estate agents learn social media marketing?
Well, as people are spending more time on the internet specifically on different social media platforms, this will force realtors to pay attention to their real estate social media marketing techniques.
For one, with SMM, realtors are able to ensure that they are present and are able to manage different social media channels in order to generate and attract more leads.
Second, they need to learn the best type of format for their content as they create unique and tailored posts.
While repurposing your digital content can help you lessen the burden of creating new content, publishing the same content can’t help you succeed in the long run.
This is why realtors need to include social media marketing into their special skills as it can help expand their reach and achieve great exposure to the properties they are selling to interested buyers and investors.
To summarize, here is a helpful list of social media do’s and don’ts for real estate agents.
- Promote the town, the neighborhood, the people and not just the house.
- Be yourself or rather be authentic and trustworthy.
- Educate your buyers, they’ll appreciate it.
- Chat with your followers and engage with them.
- Respond to comments both the good and the bad.
- Avoid simply shouting about your home listings.
- Don’t forget about the video.
- Remember, you’re not only connecting with first-time buyers.
- Don’t always talk about yourself.
- Never ignore your existing clients.
Below is an infographic and a quick run-down of what you can do with your social media accounts:
Claim Your Online Agent Profile
Another real estate digital marketing strategy that you should apply is that you should expand and present yourself on numerous trustworthy websites as it can give you exposure, credibility and more leads.
If you want to connect with influencers, and improve your outreach and connect with authority bloggers, you can check the top Top 15 Philippines Real Estate Blogs & Websites To Follow in 2020 here.
Use AI and other Automation Tools Like Bots
Artificial intelligence is changing real estate. It can help solve various challenges you have that are related to analytics report, customer experience and quick response to FAQs.
Thus simplifying your customer care. No one likes waiting in line or a response in an unknowable length of time.
For smaller real estate agents, a fully staffed response team can be difficult and isn’t economically viable.
However, chatbots can handle most of the customer care for you until you are able to take over for much more complicated queries.
A.I can also provide recommendations to customers by creating a tailor made listing of properties based on a client’s preference and previous viewings.It can also be used to profile your customers during their first visit.
Lastly, A.I. offers an exciting feature that helps to predict the future. In real estate where the stakes are high, the ability to anticipate the market fluctuations is very crucial.
With A.I. you can reduce risks and maximize your ROI, it is able to predict future rent and sales prices plus identifying the latest market trends while pinpointing new business opportunities.
ALL OF THESE WILL EVENTUALLY PASS
COVID-19 is an easily transmitted virus and with public health measures like quarantines and lockdown orders in place, social distancing is necessary to flatten the curve.
However, as we are in a digital age. Use this time to up your effort during this situation and try to adopt and conduct your business online.
Stay focused on your social media pages and websites, learn how to understand your analytics and apply the various 15 Actionable Real Estate Digital Marketing Strategies During COVID-19 we’ve provided.
WHAT TO DO NEXT?
Always remain vigilant. Don’t stop learning and keep yourself and your prospect updated on the latest news on finance, the pandemic and local health guidance and tips.
As realtors, always plan ahead, be flexible and help your clients explore the options available to them in the best way you know how.
How has the coronavirus affected your business as a realtor? Do you have other tips that you can share to your fellow realtors? Tell us your COVID-19 story below.
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