In any business, such as real estate, leads are often as valuable as gold. A majority of real estate companies invest heavily to generate leads. This helps them get information about both individuals and businesses that may eventually become customers.
How can you generate more reliable and high-quality leads? It is one of the main challenges that all real estate professionals face and one that sadly does not have an easy or simple answer. If you are reading this, it is likely that your lead generation strategy is not working as well as you would like it to. Maybe you are not generating enough real estate leads, or perhaps you are just not generating ones that are high-quality.
We will discuss some reasons why your real estate lead generation strategy is not working like a charm anymore so that you can take suitable steps to get more leads and grow your real estate enterprise.
1. You are not Targeting the Right Audience
Do you actually know who your target audience is or what their buyer-personas are? Do you truly know and understand what your audience’s pinch points are? Are you sending promotional materials to people who have no need for them? Your product is not for everyone, and this applies to the real estate industry as well.
Revisit your buyer personas, making sure that they are up-to-date and detailed. When creating your real estate buyer personas, you should take into account not just the demographics of your potential customers and leads, but their needs, wants, and motivations as well.
You should ask these questions when creating or updating your buyer personas:
- Who is your target audience? (Lifestyle upgraders, first-home buyers, and millennials, etc.)
- What data do past sales offer about your target customer base? (Demographic, age, and target area, etc.)
- Where does your target audience spend most of their time online? (Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Whatsapp, etc.)
So, figure out who will buy your product and why and after that, create marketing campaigns that cater to that audience’s specific wants and needs.
2. You have a Bland Landing Page
The landing page of your real estate business also called your home page, is usually the resource that can help people in determining whether they will or will not be interested in learning a little more about your real estate company. Your landing page can sum up your entire real estate brand in the first few seconds. It is worth mentioning that successful real estate agents effectively use call to actions and video marketing in order to instantly build trust while conveying their message to the audience.
Without a personalized video and call to action on your landing page, your audience does not have a good reason to remember you. As many as 70% of small business sites lack a call to action, which is shocking. This is not only unfortunate with respect to sales and overall website bounce rates, but it could be problematic for anybody trying to generate more real estate leads
In addition to call to action and videos, your landing page must convey security. This will make sure that users know that their contact information and other sensitive details will not be shared with various third parties or inadvertently leaked because of poor security.
Your landing page must also be constructed well and simple to navigate. You should make every effort to make it easy and quick for prospective homebuyers to spot the lead-in form and even simpler to fill out basic information.
3. Poor Communication and Follow Up
Do all the elements of your real estate marketing strategy properly link together, like your online sign-up form, blogs, emails, and website content? Are your homebuyers guided along an intuitive, logical path, with all of the next steps in the process clearly mapped out?
You have to fully optimize each stage of the sales process, so things happen when they have to. Keep in mind that there’s usually a short window within which you have to act in order to effectively hook a real estate lead. You have to grab their interest and then follow up in a timely manner.
Keep in mind that it does not take long for a contact in the real estate industry to forget you and move on, which means all your hard work and effort will be wasted. Lack of follow up or ineffective follow up is one of the biggest reasons your leads are not calling you back.
You may be waiting too long just to reach out to them. Actually, an MIT study revealed that your odds of reaching your lead decrease more than a hundred times after just half an hour.
4. Failure to Make a Personal Connection
When you are working in a CRM and handling heaps of data, it is very easy to forget or overlook that those names, addresses, and emails are connected to real people. And people have emotions; they are much more than just a collection of hard data—people can be skeptical, busy, or overwhelmed; they have good days as well as bad days; some people have a better sense of humor compared to others.
Keep in mind that all of these qualities will factor into the way these people will respond or react to your real estate lead generation tactics.
The idea that real estate business is a relationship business is such a cliché now that it hardly bears repeating. Unfortunately, many new agents, and some old ones, still do not get the message. They often work hard at “selling” and do not try to forge an actual relationship with the client built on selfless work and reciprocity. So, you should know your potential homebuyers. Have a meaningful conversation with them, and really listen to them. Try to focus on building a strong relationship first, and the transaction will follow.
Final Thoughts
Any or all of these pitfalls may be contributing to the unsatisfactory performance of your real estate lead generation strategy. The key trick is to determine the weakest link and start improving from there.