The word lead is used everywhere these days. But what does it really mean, and what is the best way to generate real estate leads? You will find this, as well as some real estate lead generation ideas, in our article.
What Is a Lead?
A lead is a person who is interested in your product but is not yet ready to buy it. In other words, these are your potential customers. Just like with real-life acquaintances, to get more real estate leads you to need to establish contact first.
Do not forget about the etiquette. Imagine if a stranger comes up to you on the street and says: here is a cool TV set, pay now and get a discount! But you don’t need a TV, you don’t even watch it. Such pushiness, inappropriateness, and bad manners will only serve to annoy the client.
Therefore, you need to first introduce yourself, your company, and your services. Gather information about the lead: interests, age, gender, occupation, geolocation. And only then, when the lead knows something about you, then you can offer them something, but in no case impose.
Types of Leads
Your future customers, i.e. leads, can be divided into three categories, and depending on this you can conduct appropriate online and offline communication with them. You must know what it is exactly that your client wants, and the stage of this wish. Perhaps the desire to buy is absent right now – in this case you need to work to ensure that this desire arises.
Lead classification
- Cold leads. It is likely that the client does not yet know about the existence of your company or the product that you are selling, or is only at the stage of getting acquainted with the product. You should not immediately try to sell something to these people. It will only frighten them away, most likely forever, and you will lose three things at once: money, your time and your potential client! A cold lead is a person who might have subscribed to your newsletter, visited your website. But this does not mean that they are ready to buy your product.
- Warm leads. This is a person who already knows about your company, visits the website, blog, social networks. You see that they are actively studying the pages, returning to your site or blog again. These are people who are in search, studying a product or company. They can leave a request in order to get additional advice.
- Hot leads. The client is already conducting a dialogue with the manager and discussing a future purchase. One of the signs that a person is thinking of or ready to make a purchase is asking questions: about the terms of payment, documents needed, and so on.
How to Get Real Estate Leads?
You can get leads through various channels. One of the most popular lead generation tools for real estate today is through social networks.
Ways to Generate Real Estate Leads on Social Networks:
- Entertaining and useful content. Your content should be both useful and interesting. Your followers should have a reason to read or watch you. This could be a blog about how best to handle the real estate that you sell: how to build a house, make repairs, communicate with neighbors, etc. It can be anything potentially interesting to your client. Knowing a little something about everything is a current trend. You need to know a little IT, a little philosophy, a little psychology, a little technology, a little art, and so on. Today, admitting that you don’t read the list of ingredients before buying is bound to earn you some odd looks. People are very curious and love to study everything before buying. Therefore, offer all the information and professional advice your future buyer may need. Useful and important information will inspire confidence in your company.
- One of the more creative ways to generate real estate leads is gated content. This is content that is not available until the user performs certain actions. Similar mechanics can be used to collect data, attract attention, gain subscribers, and so on.
- Another real estate lead generation idea is using opinion leaders. Bloggers and influencers can help your promotion. This works just like word of mouth, only in this case, the advice will be paid. A person is always interested in the experience of others, especially if it is a friend or someone they trust.
- How to increase real estate leads if you can’t sell yourself? If you do not tell anyone that you are a real estate agent, no one is going to know. There is a chance that one of your friends on Facebook or Twitter needs your services, and it’s more likely that your friends’ friends need them. Post something useful on your social page. For example, interesting facts about your work, or advice for buyers. Be helpful before you are contacted.
Benefits of choosing to generate real estate leads online through social media:
- Inexpensive contact.
- More accurate targeting to your target audience.
- The response is faster than SEO. You immediately see the users’ reactions to the post or video.
Following the Funnel of Sales Steps to Get More Real Estate Leads
You need to properly build a sales funnel and determine KPIs for each of its levels.
1. Building awareness. This step is the entry point of your future customer. First, the buyer should simply see you or your product, then find out about its benefits.
Tips for generating real estate leads:
- OLV (video ads);
- display advertising + RTB;
- targeted advertising in social networks;
- native advertising;
- news articles.
- The manifestation of interest. At this step, the buyer is already consciously searching for the best options: comparing prices, locations, quality and advantages of real estate options.
- Conversion. The most important thing in marketing is how well you can transfer a customer from one step of a sales funnel to another.
- Identifying lead quality. Generating more real estate leads is the goal, but it is also important to know whether or not it is a target lead. Why is it important? Because your lead may turn out to be a reseller, investor, etc. The best way to determine the quality of the lead is during a real estate tour.
- Closing the deal. The last step in the sales funnel is the sale of the property, the closing of the transaction. You can also divide the stage of closing the transaction into sub-stages to analyze the performance of each stage.
How Do Real Estate Agents Get Leads?
Experienced real estate agents know that working manually is stressful and inefficient. Real estate CRM solutions have long existed for collecting data, sending letters, compiling reports.
Main advantages of a CRM:
- You save your time, which can be spent on the implementation of new lead generation strategies or direct communication with customers.
- All clients are recorded in one database. In case one of the employees leaves, all the data will remain in the system and another manager will be able to continue working with the client from the place where the previous manager stopped.
- In the CRM, you can save the history of all clients, as well as the history of the sources the clients come from.
Conclusion
Generating leads as a new real estate agent or as an experienced one is not much different. The main thing to remember is not to pressure the clients, especially those in the cold lead category. Do not forget that you are selling not only real estate but also yourself. And do not neglect using CRM as a useful tool for automating your work.
Try Nimble CRM now to see how your real estate lead generation becomes faster.
