Real Estate Marketing: Being a Community Resource

There are many different opinions on the best method for marketing a real estate website. Approaches like social media, link building, email marketing, optimization, blogging and others all have their advantages, but industry experts differ on the potential each can bring. Although all these schools of thought have merit to their procedures, there’s no better way to bring in new prospects then to have them find your site when they’re using the search engines. Timing is everything, and if we can capture a prospect when they’re looking for information, and that prospect is coming to us for that information, we can build trust and credibility, ensuring we’ll have a client for the long haul. In my over 10 years in internet marketing, I’ve worked with many websites and many marketing campaigns. I’ve found the most consistent results come from strategies that enable the user to find what they’re looking for, at the right time, through a trusted source like Google; those campaigns yielded better conversions, were more affordable, and lasted longer. It’s the perfect formula for success.

Planning is Everything in Real Estate Marketing

The steps needed to capture these kind of leads are not simple. They involve good web design and development, a great user experience, and superb marketing. They often are very expensive, and very time-consuming. But in the end, results matter, and if the work pays off, it’s always worth it. Let’s focus on one of the most important pieces to this formula, being a community resource. This really serves two purposes: First, providing community information and material to your users is giving them something they need, for free. Second, with search engines, content is king. Provide comprehensive community information, and you’ll be rewarded. This is of course assuming we have the other pieces to the puzzle in place, but if we do, it’s the best thing we can do to garner more exposure, credibility, and eventually, leads. It’s not an immediate process, but the best marketing rarely happens overnight.

Researching Your Market is Also Key

How do we become a community resource? The first step is research. Use the search engines to your advantage, and conduct searches on the community you’d like to target. Keep notes on all the different websites you find, and bookmark those you might want to feature that may be of use to your users. Studies and statistics are always great for providing community overviews, so find sources of those and again, make notes. Other pieces of information that will help your research are maps, recent news, articles, and events. Keep all the data you find together, and prepare it for publishing.

The second step is to publish your research. There’s no better place to put everything you’ve found right onto your website. Create a community page or section, and build sub-pages off of that main page with different geographic areas or categories. Organize your information according to what a user would look for; it’s always better to keep the user in mind because they’re our most important visitor. Although engines are valuable, they’re not going to buy or sell a home with us. This step will involve some writing, so don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty; the more information the better. I prefer to summarize my community information on the main page, then have several paragraphs of writing and links to those researched websites on my sub-pages. Don’t forget to link the keywords in your content to relevant areas of your website and form a logical pathway for users to follow.

Stop Reading and Start Marketing

Lastly, it’s time to market yourself. Now that you have a real estate website filled with valuable community information, links, events, news, etc., you need to get it out to those who are looking for it. Thankfully, if you’ve setup your site correctly, the engines should find this information automatically. However, beyond those engines we need to get into directories, networks, forums and other places that will provide another place on the web for us to showcase ourselves. The easiest method for finding these places is again, the engines. Perform keyword searches for these places and follow each procedure to get your site listed. This can be a very long process, as each place has their own steps for getting listed, but the payoff is worth the work. When I’m performing this kind of marketing, I set a goal for myself. I’ll try to get into at least three different directories, forums, networks or similar each day, for a whole month. It can take 30 or so minutes, but at the end of 30 days I’ve manufactured almost 100 different areas to showcase my site, my community information, and what services I have to offer. From there, most of the exposure in the search engines takes care of itself.

Although this is just one step in the bigger picture of marketing, being a community resource can really pay dividends. Having the valuable content will be rewarded with better rankings and exposure in the engines, and users will thank you for putting everything they might need in one place.