Capturing Real Estate Leads From Your Content Marketing
Many real estate agents are using online marketing to attract potential clients. Online marketing can mean a lot of different things but, here I am talking about content marketing. This would include blogs, articles or online newsletters. Content marketing can be a great way for real estate agents to market themselves and their real estate services. It can result in higher listing results when people use popular search engines for real estate information, help an agent establish themselves as an expert buyers and sellers can look to for information, and help to build trusting relationships before ever talking to them. However, one problem that agents often run into is that they have a difficult time capturing the leads from all the visitors their content is generating.
In order to take advantage of a lead, an agent needs to have at least one of these things: an email address, a physical address, or a phone number. Also helpful to an agent is knowing if the lead is interested in buying or selling a home. So ideally that is what the agent's content should be doing - capturing contact information of potential clients and gathering information on what the person is interested in doing.
Blogs are one form on content marketing. Blogs are good because they have a constant stream of new content that will one, get indexed (read and stored) by the search engines and two, get people coming back again and again. When using article marketing it is good to post your articles on your blog as well. Then you will have 2 different kinds of content. One will be the shorter blog posts and the other being articles that offer more in depth information. Another difference in the two besides their length is that you should be submitting your articles to article directories for further distribution and links back to your blog. So how do you generate leads using this content? When visitors come to your blog and read your posts and articles you need to be offering them additional information than what they can read on your blog site.
- Let your blog readers know that you also have a newsletter they can subscribe to. Have one for buyers and one for sellers. This is an opportunity for you to collect information. If you have an online and print version of the newsletter, you can be sure to have something for everyone. With this you will be able to gather either a physical address or an email address. For your email newsletter make sure that it is double opt in. That means they request to be put on the newsletter email list on the site and then are sent an email that confirms their request. This will lessen the chances that you get reported as a spammer.
- Offer a free report for your readers. In order for the visitors to get the free report require that they call in to get it. The toll free number that you will use will be a call capture hotline. Let your visitors know that the toll free hotline is a 24 hour free recorded message. With that you can lower any barriers they might have about calling. It is a free call that they can make at any time of day without the fear of having to talk to someone. When using a toll free number call capture line you can capture their phone number, possibly a name and physical address and based on report they request, you will know if they are a buyer or seller.
- Have a link to your listings from your content site. When visitors go to your listing site and are viewing properties, offer them further information about that listing by calling into your toll free number call capture hotline. Make sure to use a different extension for each property and make a recording of additional features about the neighborhood or the house in the extension. When they call in to get more information, you will again capture their phone number, possibly name and address, and the exact property they were looking at. Tip: Make sure you are also using your call capture extensions on your sign riders to capture drive by shoppers.
If you are spending the time and energy creating a blog and writing articles, make sure you are generating leads from them. If you are not then you are wasting your time. The tactics used to capture those leads are easy and inexpensive to implement and well worth the effort.
