Quick Takeaways:
- Homesnap charted the growth of Homesnap Pro+ Members’ digital presences over 18 months
- Our goal was to give agents a transparent, honest look at the process
- We found that, on average:
- After three months, agents appear in up to 5X the number of Google searches
- After six months, that rises to up to 20X
- After a year, search result appearances jump to 40X, and the number of consumers viewing an agent’s Google business profile, visiting their website, or reaching out to them directly increases by as much as 5X
- After eighteen months, agents see up to a 7.5X increase in the number of consumers viewing their listings and reaching out to them directly
- We published our findings in a whitepaper, which you can read here
Let’s be honest: Digital marketing—or more accurately, successful digital marketing—can be more than a little opaque.
To start, there’s the issue of tactics. There’s no standardized strategy for building a wide-reaching and credible digital presence, and for every how-to guide you can find online, there’s a contradictory one a search result away. Some recommend a heavy emphasis on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Others claim SEO is an approach for a bygone era, and less-organic Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is the only surefire way to make a dent in an overcrowded marketplace. A few champion tough-to-define strategies like “becoming a respected thought leader in your space,” while another handful are confident in their declarations that content creation is all but dead and buried.
Then, as if that weren’t frustrating enough, there’s the time factor. Conflicting tactical advice is generally solvable, as trial and error will eventually lead to the discovery of a winning methodology. But when none of these “experts” can agree upon when one can expect to see noticeable results—estimates range anywhere from a few weeks to upwards of a year for the very same strategy—digital marketing starts to look a lot more like a shot in the dark rather than a viable, repeatable way towards growing a business.
It’s all these discrepancies—from source to source, expert to expert— that leave even the most digitally savvy agents in a difficult spot. Not only can they never be truly sure of the efficacy of their digital marketing, but even if the techniques they choose do happen to work, they have no definitive way of knowing when they’ll see appreciable returns.
How many agents have thrown up their hands at the concept of digital marketing? Wasted time and money on dead-end tactics, believing they were investing in something worthwhile? Or worse yet, abandoned effective digital marketing strategies early, when, if they had only been more patient, they would’ve seen their efforts pay off?
At Homesnap, we understand this lack of an absolute timeline and definable strategy can be confusing and frustrating for agents. It can be difficult to spend your hard-earned dollars on marketing solutions that promise to build a reputable, lead-generating online presence for your business without knowing if or when you’ll get a worthy return on your investment. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been burned before.
That’s why we wanted to be transparent about our claims that Homesnap Pro+ helps agents build a wide-reaching and lead-generating online presence.
Dominate Your Market with Homesnap Pro+
At Homesnap, we’ve found that the most effective digital marketing strategy is one that prioritizes Google. Google is the world’s preeminent search engine. Eighty percent of homebuyers and sellers use it to begin their home-buying journey, and they continue to rely on it throughout the process—right up to finding and choosing an agent. In fact, prospective homebuyers trust Google so much that even when they see an agent’s traditional marketing materials or social media profiles, they still turn to the search engine to conduct their own research. When it’s all said and done, Google connects users to home-buying information more than 20 million times per month. Ranking high on Google search results is without a doubt the single best way for an agent to grow their business and win more clients.
As an established Google Premier Partner, Homesnap Pro+ takes all the guesswork, technical know-how, and general head-scratchers out of growing your presence on Google. We’ll help you claim your Google business profile and continuously optimize and maintain it with an ever-evolving number of photos, listings, contact information, and thought leadership content so you can dramatically boost your appearance in search results and generate more organic leads.
Recently, our data scientists dug deep into Homesnap Pro+ historical data to verify these claims. We charted the growth of every single one (tens of thousands) of our Homesnap Pro+ Members’ online presences across several key performance metrics—things like appearances in Google search results, and views and clicks on websites and Google my business profiles, to name a few—over the course of a year and a half.
This whitepaper is a summary of those findings. In it, we examine agent progress at various intervals—three, six, nine, twelve, fifteen, and eighteen months. In doing so, our aim is to provide you with benchmarks you can use to track and grade your own performance against as you grow.
You’ll have full transparency into our process. You’ll understand the strategies Homesnap Pro+ uses to build our agents’ online presences, and you’ll have an inside look at the successes of your peers who’ve used the Homesnap product. You’ll also see testimonials from real, practicing agents from across the country, as well as expected results broken down according to your professional experience level when beginning a Homesnap Pro+ membership—from beginner agent, to intermediate and top-performing.
We hope this whitepaper gives you a clearer understanding of the path toward accomplishing your goals of building a reputable, far-reaching, and lead-capturing online presence—and makes digital marketing just a little bit less opaque.