By Marie Barnes:
According to statistics, most of all home buyers, as well as residential real estate investors, at some point use the Internet to search for relevant offers. Even realtors themselves most often begin searches with online ads.
If you are engaged in the sale or rental of real estate, it is extremely important to do promotion on the Internet and not save on online marketing and contextual advertising. This will help increase brand awareness, attract new customers and maintain interaction with existing ones. In this article, we will talk about the basic, but most effective ways to sell or rent real estate over the Internet.
Social Networks
Social networks offer a wide selection of promotion methods:
● ad units with a picture and a link to your site (usually located on the side of the news feed);
● advertising posts in the news feed that look like regular posts by users, but they are marked with ads;
● paid posts that you, by agreement with the administrators of different groups, post in their communities.
At the same time, for the first two advertising options, you can choose a specific narrow audience, for this purpose targeting and retargeting are used.
When targeting, you set filters to whom exactly to show ads: women or men, age, city, subscription to certain groups, etc. And with retargeting, you upload to the social network a list of IDs of certain users (for example, those who visited your site). To get an ID, you need to use special services.
However, promoting real estate on social networks is not easy for two reasons.
The specificity of the topic. Agree, few people, seeing an apartment advertisement in the news feed, are eager to buy real estate and leave their contacts. Therefore, leads are usually reluctant and expensive.
The target audience is very difficult to determine since completely different people can buy apartments: young families, people with several children, couples with older children, single people and so on. Because of this, it seems that the apartment could potentially be needed at the same time for everyone and nobody.
Therefore, real estate advertising campaigns are painstaking work: a lot of settings and creatives are tested, while there are few leads. In order to promote real estate through social networks, you will have to create several narrowly targeted advertising companies, very carefully correlate the property with the target group, which may be potentially interested in it, experiment with headlines, and time of display. But if you can find the right approaches, you will see the result.
Your Website
Your site is your main tool for selling real estate. No matter what advertising companies you will create, all the paths of potential buyers or tenants should lead here. And then it’s your task to create such a website so that it convinces you to pay attention to your offer and accept it. Below we list the basic requirements for a good site with which it will be possible to make transactions.
Photos
The most important point in real estate advertising will be the availability of quality photographs. Photos must have a good resolution, and fully give an idea of which apartment is in front of a person. Better if you provide photos of all the premises. You can also photograph the view from the window, the presence of a playground, and even the plan of the apartment itself in the drawing. The authenticity and relevance of the photos are important here so that the buyer is not ultimately disappointed.
Video or 3D Tours
Be sure to shoot a video of the object, and even better is to create a virtual tour of the apartment. All buyers are well aware that it is possible to photograph only the advantages, skillfully hiding the flaws, but the video shows only the truth. Give your potential customers the opportunity to see everything at once, and you will facilitate the process of making such a difficult decision.
Content
In real estate advertising, the most important is the headline. It should be bright, interesting and concise. Consumers should want to read more about advertised housing. If the title is made up correctly and attracted a potential buyer, then the text should be interesting and useful as well.
Specialists in this field of advertising advise writing large and detailed texts in which you describe all the advantages of real estate. If a person was not initially interested, then he simply would not read.
But if a person is ready to learn more, it is very important to answer with your text all the questions that he may have.
You should describe in detail the condition of the apartment, the advantages of the layout, the condition of the plumbing, the advantages of an excellent location, proximity to public transport, clinics, shops, schools and kindergartens, the possibility of a mortgage. In the description, tell in detail everything that may be interesting to a potential buyer.
SEO
Anyone who buys real estate is looking for information:
● how to do it profitably (an example of the target keyword: "how to buy a house in a suburb of London inexpensively");
● how to choose an area for buying real estate (for example, "where to buy an apartment in London");
● how to do it in practice (for example, "buy an apartment in London with a mortgage").
Your site should provide answers to these questions and give the impression of an expert in this field who can be trusted. For the purpose of promotion, you can create separate pages for 1 keyword with step-by-step purchase instructions.
If you have analyzed keywords, developed pages for the most important of them, and written useful content, now your task is to give users the opportunity to find you as quickly as possible, and preferably, for free. In the next paragraph, we describe what needs to be done.
Backlinks
In order for the pages of your site to rise to the top of the list as quickly as possible, Google should evaluate them as useful and authoritative. One of the criteria for such an assessment is backlinks.
This means that somewhere on the Internet there should be other sites that contain links to yours. To get such links, you need to post your articles on third-party resources. It is important that these resources are selected correctly. Look for them using special services such as The Adsy. By the way, this approach will also allow you to reach another part of the target audience.
Design
And a few last words about your site. Do not forget that in most cases, you are not just selling a house or apartment - you are selling a dream! The site design should be consistent with this idea, it should be beautiful and professional.
Search Engine Contextual Advertising
Why limit yourself to one advertising platform, when it is possible to use everything? Be sure to use the advertising features of Google Ads. These campaigns will be more targeted and accordingly effective.
Use low-frequency queries and geographic data. If people are looking for housing, then they are not interested in general offers. They are more likely to choose an ad for "buying a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles" than just "buy property in Los Angeles"
A low-frequency query indicating a street or district will increase conversion and reduce the cost of a click. High-frequency queries will lead to a large number of non-target customers to the site, which will increase the cost of the advertising campaign.
Real Estate Sites
This is one of the most effective methods of promoting real estate, not only for the end consumer but also for realtors who select objects for their clients. The main thing in this business is to correctly compose an announcement and take good photos.
There is only one problem: there are many real estate sites, and there is not enough time for posting ads. Therefore, experienced realtors automate the process. For this, CRM systems are used that are integrated with dozens of real estate sites and automatically upload your ads there with a full description of the property and its photos.
Conclusion
The promotion of a property is a difficult task, requiring an individual approach each time. However, the combination of standard advertising media with creative placement options will make any audience pay attention to you. Even with a small budget, you can make a really successful advertising campaign. Understanding the audience and choosing the appropriate advertising points, you will provide your real estate a lot of attention.