Buying real estate leads from third-party sites seems like an easy way to find new clients. You receive a number of supposed interested buyers or sellers who—you think—are just waiting for your call. The reality is that most of these cold prospects will not be ready to talk to an agent. Even if you’re prepared to play the long game with them, purchased leads don’t know anything about you or your business, making them more difficult to nurture and turn into worthwhile prospects.
So, if you don’t buy real estate leads, how can you find leads to fill the top of your funnel? This is where your digital marketing strategy comes in. The two most important things to focus on are building a strong presence online and using advertising platforms like Facebook to nurture leads. The first helps buyers and sellers find you, instead of the other way around. Then you need to reinforce your value and build trust, which you can accomplish with ad campaigns on widely used sites like Facebook.
Let’s break down each tactic to see how you should use them in practice.
Make it Easy for Leads to Find You
A strong presence online is the cornerstone of a passive lead generation strategy. It allows buyers and sellers to discover you, learn about your services and develop trust by reading reviews. Then when they reach out to you, you don’t need to spend time qualifying them. They’ve already done the legwork and are ready to talk.
This method of online discovery and research has become the norm. Just think about the last time you searched for a service or even a restaurant. You likely compared a few, reading about each online and combing through photos and reviews on their Google business profile. This is also how people are finding and learning about real estate agents today. Even when given a referral, buyers and sellers turn to Google to learn more so they can make an informed decision.
The first step to building an online presence is to claim and create your Google business profile. It’s essentially a snapshot of your resume and the first stop in a buyer’s or seller’s journey to learning about you. Flesh out your agent bio, upload photos, publish helpful posts and ask colleagues and former clients to leave a review. A thorough profile will make it easy for people to get to know you and add you to their shortlist.
Google now allows real estate agents to go a step further with Google’s Local Services Ads. This new placement at the top of search results puts a spotlight on select local agents and pairs their profile with a Google Screened badge and green check mark. This endorsement from Google goes a long way in helping to instill confidence in those searching for a real estate agent.
When a buyer or seller is ready to talk, they can call or email an agent directly from the Google Local Services ad or their Google business profile. Not only do these online tools make it easy for buyers and sellers to find you, but they also convert people from cold to warm leads, saving you an enormous amount of time (and money!).
Develop Relationships with Your Leads
It would be ideal if everyone simply found you on Google and was immediately ready to start working with you. Of course, that rosy picture is not reality. Even when you do receive a warm(er) lead, you may still need to develop and maintain that relationship over many months before that person is truly serious about buying or selling. Then when they are ready to make their move, you will be top of mind.
The best way to accomplish this is to target your sphere—everyone from leads and prospects to friends and family—with custom audience ads on the networks they frequent the most, like Facebook, Instagram and Google. Use these ads to highlight your successes, like a new listing you won or a deal you just closed, or demonstrate your market expertise with real estate stats or insider content. Showing your sphere that you are a successful, knowledgeable agent will help build confidence in your services. Not only is this a passive approach to nurture relationships, but it’s also scalable, so you can continue to add new leads and prospects to your custom audience list.
You can also use retargeting ads to start new relationships with people who have visited your website or saw one of your ads but didn’t convert. These ads “follow” people around the internet to nudge them back to your website. They do double duty as brand recognition boosters, too.
Take a different approach
Homesnap doesn’t sell real estate leads because we know that’s not the way successful agents build their business. Our services combine all the tactics we outlined in this article—a fully managed Google Business Profile, top placement with a Google Screened check mark, continuously running custom audience and retargeting ads—along with lead qualification services that will connect you with warm leads on a live call.
Homesnap Pro+
As an established Google Premier Partner, Homesnap Pro+ can help get your business to the top of Google so interested consumers can find you before your competition.
We’ll instantly verify, manage, and optimize your Google business profile for you, so Google has all the information it needs to recommend your business. We’ll help you claim your profile and load it with your photos, listings, contact information, and more so that you can boost your appearance in searches. Then, we’ll send you regular performance reports so you can monitor your progress towards becoming a top, sought-after agent in your area.
Just ask the more than 45,000 agents agent we’ve helped. With Homesnap Pro+, they’ve increased their appearance in search results by up to 22X and the number of leads generated by 7X.
Homesnap Concierge
Homesnap’s experienced Concierge marketing team will take a hands-on approach to optimizing and running agent advertising campaigns for an unlimited number of listings on major networks like Google, Facebook, and Instagram. We’ll target the most-likely-to-transact leads on these platforms with hyper-targeted and personalized ads and qualify them for you. Then, we’ll send you the qualified, hot leads right away, and continue to nurture the rest until they are ready to convert.
You’ll have full transparency into this process. We’ll update you with key metrics daily — where advertisements are appearing, number of leads processed, lead contact information, qualification details, all leads acquired, and more — so you can follow your campaigns every step of the way. And you’ll receive a dedicated account manager, whom you can contact at any time with questions or to make changes to your campaigns.
Are you ready to propel your business forward? Start getting qualified leads with Concierge or schedule a call with our Concierge team to learn more.