Real estate agents are often their own marketers, too. With a continuously evolving industry, it’s sometimes challenging to keep up with impactful marketing trends. Fortunately, most real estate marketing ideas stem from essential foundations. These include direct mail and email, social media, listing websites, and visual marketing.
We compiled a list of ten real estate marketing ideas to help you boost your real estate business:
1. Reach out through multiple mediums
With so much marketing noise, it’s essential to stay top of mind with your prospects, clients, and sphere of influence. Instead of only sending marketing emails to your audience, set up a campaign series. Through the campaign, you send an email, a direct mail piece, and targeted posts on social media. This way, you create brand awareness with your network, and they will easily recall your business across all mediums.
If you need to beef up your email marketing strategy, take a look at this article.
2. Engage with your audience through Instagram Stories
Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform, which means you should use it as one of your primary marketing tools for real estate. It seems like every month, Instagram rolls out a new feature update, from extensive updates like Instagram Reels to subtle enhancements like adding music to stories. While you should continue posting your listing images to your Instagram feed, utilizing Stories can drive significant engagement with active users. That’s why we love this real estate marketing idea.
With Instagram Stories, you can engage with active users (up to 24 hours) through questions and polls stickers, video shares, giveaways, and more. On our Instagram, we post “this or that” questions. Viewers can vote on their favorite rooms, decor style, and more.
3. Promote your property on a single listing website
A single listing website is a fantastic way to promote your listing online. This real estate marketing idea is multi-faceted because a listing website helps your seller generate traffic to their home and helps you generate more leads. It’s easy to share a single listing website to all of your social media channels and through email marketing campaigns. Additionally, you can add single listing website examples to your listing presentations.
There are so many benefits to using single listing websites to highlight your listing. Some real estate marketing vendors may charge you to create a website. Others, like Virtuance, include a free single listing website with every real estate photography image package.
To learn more about the benefits of single listing websites, take a look at this article.
4. Create social media listing flyers
Instead of posting a link to your listing on social media, highlight the property with a digital listing flyer. With this real estate marketing idea, followers can view the listing as an image (flyer) without leaving the platform. A single image post may receive more engagement than a linked post. This is because Facebook and other channels want their users to stay on the platform.
You can experiment with how you post a digital listing flyer and a link to your single listing website. For example, instead of posting the URL with the flyer, try posting just the graphic and then comment the link within the post. That way, Facebook won’t limit your reach based on your post type.
To use Virtuance’s social media listing templates, click this link.
5. Blog about your community
A blog allows you to connect with your audience while highlighting your business through providing insights, knowledge, and engaging posts. Blogging is a great real estate marketing idea because it can also significantly increase your search visibility. The more value-based content you provide, the better your site will rank among your competitors on Google and Bing.
As a real estate agent, there are plenty of topics to write about, including local neighborhoods, best restaurants, real estate trends, your favorite parks, and more. When people search for the best restaurants in your city, your article may be the one they click. From there, they can see listings in the area. If they’re looking to move, they may then consider you as their real estate agent.
6. Capture leads with a free home valuation
Offering a free home valuation via a form to prospective sellers may be one of the best real estate marketing ideas for an agent. You have a unique opportunity to capture new leads while providing critical information to home sellers. A free home valuation is a fantastic way to flex your real estate market knowledge while connecting with prospects.
Additionally, with a free home valuation form on your website, you know that the leads you generate from the pop-up are people ready to sell sooner than later.
7. Hire a professional real estate photographer
Professional real estate photography is essential for successful real estate agents. When you hire a professional photographer to market your listings, you’re not only showing your clients that you know how to sell their homes faster and for more money, but you’re elevating your brand image, too.
With 96% of home buyers looking at houses online, the way you visually market your listings is critical to stand out from the crowd. The best way to differentiate yourself and get more showings is with professional real estate photography.
To learn more about real estate photography, read this article.
8. Offer an immersive walkthrough with a 3D tour
In 2020, virtual tours became an essential part of the real estate industry. It felt like a requirement to have a 3D tour for every listing as open houses and showings were nearly non-existent during the 2020-21 pandemic.
And today, 3D tours continue to be an important part of any listing online. Some third-party listing sites, like Zillow feature listings that have 3D tours first on their search results. This is because they know that most buyers want to see a virtual walkthrough before seeing a listing in person.
To learn more about virtual tours, check out this article.
9. Host a virtual open house
Similar to 3D tours, virtual open houses became a popular real estate marketing idea over the last year. Hosting an open house in person runs the risk of only seeing a few people trickle in at a time. With a virtual open house, you can host anyone, anywhere, with the click of a button on your phone. A virtual open house saves you time, and you may reach more people/boost your engagement on social media.
Try hosting your next open house as a Facebook live or Instagram live event. You can create an event page on Facebook and invite your followers while encouraging them to ask buyers they know to attend as well.
During the open house, take your phone on a walkthrough of the home a couple of times, showing off the different features that make your listing sellable. After you finish up your 20ish minute open house, you can continue to share the video on your channels.
10. Create a strong referral program
Referrals are the fire that fuels any real estate business. If you want success, you want a strong referral program. Ensure you have an online platform in place that allows you to organize, manage, and reach out to your referrals easily by phone or email.
A number of your referrals will come from your sphere of influence, which includes your friends, your partner’s friends and family, your neighbors, your old colleagues, and any of your professional relationships.
Another referral source is previous clients. You want to encourage happy clients to leave online reviews, which carry a lot of weight.
To learn more about referrals, check out this article.
