Think about your website as your digital hub. That is, the place you can send all potential clients for the most up-to-date information available—not only for your listings but also your blog. Make your online space a one-stop, all-inclusive guide to buying and selling homes (from the buyers’ and sellers’ perspectives), and you can become the go-to agent in your community.
Don’t Rest on Your Brokerage’s Website
If you’re working for a broker, you’ll likely be handed the keys to a generic website. But to enjoy a successful real estate career, you’ll need to build yourself as a brand. In other words, the most important feature on your website isn’t the IDX search functionality. It’s what you can offer your clients. Buying or selling a home makes people feel vulnerable, and your prospects are looking for agents with whom they connect—whom they feel they can trust.
Real estate marketing expert Jason Fox points out that most people are about “what’s in it for me?” when they hit a website. Take the time to create a buyer persona or target market before you start building your site. He also recommends that you build trust by providing your unique perspective in the form of helpful information and filling your website with social proof such as testimonials, and a solid “about” page, and helpful information on how to buy and sell homes.
Plus, there are plenty of easy-to-use and affordable website platforms that make creating and maintaining a professional-looking website easy and fun.
Capturing Leads Through Your Real Estate Website
The purpose of content marketing is to establish credibility, which generates leads, which become sales. Google Analytics can provide fantastic data about who’s visiting your website and why, but only in a broad sense. To learn anything specific about website leads, you’ll need to give people an opportunity to provide their name and contact information.
Here’s how:
– Put an eNewsletter sign-up link in a prominent place on the site
– Allow people to subscribe to your blog
– Offer gated content—that is, make a useful article available only to those who share their email address. If you’re not a web guru, you’ll want to check out a service like JustUno to help with this.
Helpful Content Is King
From opening Facebook to downloading emails, we are bombarded by marketing messages all day, every day. The result is a culture that simply fast-forwards through the commercials, scrolls past ads and hits “unsubscribe” without even glancing at your brilliant opening sentence.
So, how do real estate agents break through all the noise and attract clients? By providing meaningful, compelling, useful content people want to see—blog posts, videos, infographics and so on. By entertaining and educating your prospects through your website, you’ll become the sought-after, trusted expert in your community.
McKissock Learning is the nation’s premier online real estate school, providing continuing education courses and professional development to hundreds of thousands of real estate agents across the country. As part of the Colibri Real Estate family of premier education brands, McKissock Learning, along with its sister schools Real Estate Express, Superior School of Real Estate, Allied Schools, The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing, Gold Coast Schools, The Rockwell Institute and Hondros Education Group, helps real estate professionals achieve sustainable success throughout each stage of their real estate career. Learn more at mckissock.com/real-estate.
