Estate agent marketing techniques are more vast and varied than ever. While it may feel overwhelming at times, the good news is that never before have you had so many tools at your disposal to help your clients find you.
Marketing activities can be split into two categories: active or passive. Today, we’re going to look at some passive estate agent marketing techniques that can help your business grow.
What is passive marketing?
Passive marketing techniques are those that continue to generate leads without you having to actively push them. Once you’ve invested the initial time and effort to put them in place, your work is essentially done. Certain passive marketing techniques have the potential to generate leads for months or even years to come.
Most traditional marketing strategies are active, for example making sales calls, attending networking events or running open houses.
What are the benefits of passive marketing?
The best marketing strategies combine both passive and active techniques. However, passive marketing has several benefits. For example, generally speaking, it:
- is low cost, or sometimes even free
- generates leads in the long-term instead of just the immediate future
- often takes less time than active marketing
- helps improve your SEO over time (more on this below)
Passive marketing techniques for estate agents
There are a number of examples of passive marketing that you’ll likely already have in place without realising, like your estate agency website. Here, we’ll look at some other forms of passive marketing that you might not have considered.
An opt-in
An opt-in is essentially something you offer in exchange for someone’s email address, and is one of the most effective ways of growing your email list. Subscribers to your list are ‘warm leads’ and by signing up, they’ve shown an active interest in your services.
An opt-in is usually a PDF guide, checklist or other resource that helps to answer any pain points that your ideal client might have. So for estate agent’s looking to attract new vendors, this could be something like:
- The complete guide to preparing your home for sale
- Selling your house in [your area]
- The ultimate house selling checklist
You can design your opt-in with a website like Canva or you could outsource it to a designer. When it’s complete, mention it on your website (see our footer for an example) or even set up a pop-up box nudging people to sign up. Then, you just need to set up an automated sequence on your email provider to send it to anyone who hands over their address.
An email nurture sequence
Once you have people signed up to your list, an email nurture sequence is a great way to help drive them to take action. It may sound complicated, but it’s really just an automated series of emails. Most email providers will have an option to set this up, but you may need to invest in a paid plan to do so.
The key to crafting an effective nurture sequence is to have a clear goal in mind. Once you have that, you can use your emails to develop the relationship between you and the recipient. You can educate them on your services, position yourself as an expert and potentially convert them into a client.
Want to read more about email marketing for estate agents? Take a look at our blog posts below:
- Why Every Estate Agent Should Be Using Email Marketing
- Email Marketing For Estate Agents: What Should I Write About?
Content marketing
Content creation as a marketing tool can be done in the form of videos, blog posts or even a podcast. Though all of these take time and effort to produce on a consistent basis, they will generate leads for as long as they are online.
When it comes to blog posts, these can also do wonders for your SEO, which is hugely beneficial in driving traffic to your website for free. If you’re not familiar with SEO, here is a quick overview.
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is all about how your website shows up on Google. Your goal is to be on the first page, if not the first result, on Google when people search for terms related to your business. For example, if you are an estate agent who focuses on property in Oxfordshire, you want to be high up on the results when someone Googles ‘estate agents in Oxfordshire’.
By creating consistent content that targets your keywords, you can improve your SEO over time, allowing more people to find your website organically.
If you’re not making the most of your blog and would like to learn more, here are a couple of resources:
Google ads
If you would like a helping hand getting seen online, then Google ads are also a great place to start. Google ads work by you bidding money on certain keywords. As with the example above, you might bid on ‘estate agents in Oxfordshire’ along with related keywords like ‘selling house Oxfordshire’ or ‘property in Oxfordshire’.
Then, when people search for those terms, Google will show them an ad that you have made for your website at the very top of the results page. You then pay every time that someone clicks on your ad. Once you’ve set it up, you can let it run as long as you want.
It’s important to learn the ins and outs of Google ads before you do this so you don’t waste money on clicks that stem from irrelevant keywords. However, you can set a daily budget to make sure you don’t spend too much.
Facebook ads
You can boost Facebook posts to target specific groups of people, like those within a certain age range or within a certain radius of an area. Unlike Google ads, you see the price you will pay when you set them up, along with an estimation from Facebook about how many people will see your ads.
Again, this is something you should look into before you do. Facebook has a fairly strict set of rules when it comes to ads, and if you break them you risk having your business account deactivated.
Once it’s up and running, you can then see how many impressions your ad has got compared to its engagement. In other words, how many people who saw your ad actually clicked on it. It’s best to set Facebook ads for 2 weeks maximum so as not to over saturate your target audience.
Conclusion
We hope that we have given you some food for thought when it comes to introducing more passive marketing into your business. When done correctly, these strategies can work together to help build awareness of your brand, provide you with a dependable source of traffic, and eventually, generate leads.
If you have any questions about any of the estate agent marketing techniques detailed above, please feel free to get in touch over on Facebook or Instagram.
