by Doing lead generation online gives you the opportunity to get the type of business that you really want. Yes, you can have a pool of buyers to work with, in the neighborhoods you know best, all year long. Keep in mind there are many companies out there that will sell you “real estate leads” and even some that break it down into buyer leads and seller leads, but shouldn’t you be able to do it on your own as well?
Absolutely!
The nice part about the many different tools and systems available online is that it allows anyone to do their own marketing for their real estate business. With a few simple steps, an understanding of what the market needs, and some motivation you can be on your way to generating the leads you have always wanted.
Let’s look at how you can start generating your own real estate buyer leads:
- Content that buyers crave – Home buyers are searching every minute of the day for information on real estate in specific neighborhoods. Write up information on the neighborhoods that you operate in every day and let them know what it’s like to live there. Don’t borrow canned information; write up your own perspective of the neighborhoods and streets. When you take the time to share information about your area from your perspective your readers will feel your passion and feel compelled to contact you. You will want to attack your real estate content with the aspect that when someone starts to go through your content they will be thinking “wow, this person knows EVERYTHING about the area”. Create a balanced set of content from written content, videos and even audio (i.e. maybe a podcast) that speaks to the unique offerings of your market. Think about all the conversations you have had with buyers over the years in your car and start documenting your expertise.
- Buyer tools – As buyers are enjoying your niche neighborhood content, they will want to be able to learn even more. Their need for more information will lead them to need a way to search for listings and to find out how much their new home will cost. Provide an MLS search tool on your website so they can easily find the real estate in the neighborhood that they have fallen in love with. Let them see what their mortgage would cost by providing them with mortgage calculator tools. Even as you provide these tools on your website, we all know that the multitude of apps (i.e. Zillow, Redfin, Realtor) make it incredibly easy to see what is available on the market which means your content needs to be so robust that they know there is far more to buying a home than just a simple listing.
- Buyer focused ads – Getting targeted buyer leads means having ads focused on their needs. Create pay per click ads (on Google, Facebook, and MSN) that gives the buyers an opportunity to discover more about the neighborhoods and search for properties. You can keep the cost of your ads down by focusing on smaller neighborhoods, rather than bigger cities (and this is a great way to bring people deeper into your website). The big benefit here is you will also get buyers who are looking in a small area and generally purchase much faster.
Generating real estate buyer leads does take an investment in time and a small amount of money. When you consider that after you create a page about a neighborhood that the page will live on for as long as you have your website, it’s really not too much time at all.
If you want to generate 100’s of buyer leads each and every month, you can simply keep creating more content and creating more pay per click ads while keeping track of which lead sources are leading to the greatest volume of appointments and transactions. Taking this approach will prevent you from ever having to purchase real estate leads from a service, because now you know how to do it yourself!
