How to Build a Real Estate Marketing Campaign Step-by-Step

Understand Your Audience

Step #3: Create a “Lead Magnet”

Identify a Content Topic

Figure Out the Best Way to Present Your Content

Step #4: Build a Marketing List

Choose Your Amplification Platform

Create Compelling Ads That Drive Action

Build a Lead Gen Landing Page

Step #5: Nurture Your Leads

Wrapping it Up

How to Build a Real Estate Marketing Campaign Step-by-Step

Real estate is a competitive market.

Since 2012, there’s been a steady increase in membership of the National Association of Realtors, with 1.4 million people signed up by the end of 2019.

That means you have to be smart to make money as a realtor. You need to be amazing at what you do; you need to provide exceptional customer service; you need to be a fantastic salesperson. And you need to develop a real estate marketing campaign that brings in a consistent stream of leads so you can grow your business.

I’m not here to tell you how to be a better real estate agent. But I can definitely give you some expert guidance on how to run more effective marketing campaigns.

Step #1: Set Your Goals

The term “marketing campaign” is pretty nebulous.

It could mean something pretty broad, like raising awareness of your brand. Or it could be super focused, like directing a certain type of customer to a specific page on your website via techniques like search engine optimization (SEO).

Both of those things could be potential marketing goals. But the campaigns you’d need to run to achieve those goals would look very different.

There’s nothing wrong with running a brand awareness campaign – there can be a lot of benefits to getting your name out there, especially in a people-driven industry like real estate.

However, for the purpose of this article, I’m going to focus on something a little more actionable and results-driven. Specifically, I’ll be discussing how you can bring in leads for your real estate business.

Why? Because according to real estate agents, generating more leads is comfortably the top metric for assessing the success of their marketing activity.

Step #2: Define Your Audience

You wouldn’t show a family of four around a one-bed, city center penthouse apartment.

Why? Because they’re the wrong audience for that property.

In the same way, you need to define your own ideal audience before you can build a successful real estate marketing campaign and then speak to them directly.

This practice applies across all industries. For example, a personal injury law firm like Hollander Law Firm in South Florida won’t be speaking to the same audience as Rosenbaum & Rosenbaum, a personal injury firm in New York.

Even though they’re both in the legal industry (and even have the same specialization: personal injury law), they market themselves to two different demographics.

But how do you define your target audience?

Here are the steps you need to take:

Define Your Target Market

Unless you’re a nationwide organization, you probably have a tightly focused geographic market. That’s a good thing, because your local knowledge is likely one of the biggest reasons customers come to you in the first place.

Generally speaking, the tighter you can “niche down”, the better. You can do that by specializing in:

A certain type of property
A certain value of property
A specific city, neighborhood, or zip code

There’s no right or wrong answer here. Just choose a niche that best fits your skill set and experience, and focus all your marketing efforts on that specific area.

Once again, this can be applied to all industries.

Take LawRank, for example. There are countless digital marketing and SEO agencies out there nowadays, but LawRank differentiates themselves by only specializing in SEO for lawyers. In this case, “lawyers” are their target audience and market.

Understand Your Audience

Obvious as it sounds, understanding your audience is a crucial step in developing your real estate marketing campaign. Your audience affects everything from the tone of voice you adopt in person and in your marketing collateral, to the marketing channels you use.

The better you know your audience, the more effectively you can personalize your marketing. That’s important, because 90% of leading marketers say personalization significantly contributes to business profitability, while 61% of people expect brands to tailor experiences based on their preferences.

A prime example of a company who understands their audience and speaks to them in their copy is Aura, an Amazon repricing and revenue analytics tool.

Just by reading the copy of their hero section, you can instantly tell who their target audience is: Amazon FBA sellers looking to increase their revenue and their time in the buy box.

To define your audience, ask yourself questions like:

What’s their occupation?
Where do they live at the moment?
What’s their education level?
How would you describe their lifestyle?
What age range do they occupy?

Ideally, this won’t all be based on educated guesswork. Identify the “ideal” clients you’ve worked with – either in the past, or right now – and figure out what attributes they have in common. Use that to build a profile to inform your marketing messaging.

Step #3: Create a “Lead Magnet”

By this point, you understand your goals and audience. Now, it’s time to put all that theory into action by creating a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is exactly what it sounds like – a piece of content, related to the services you provide and expertise you offer, that you’ll give away in exchange for a lead’s name and contact details.

Here’s what you need to know to create yours:

Identify a Content Topic

Creating effective real estate content is all about identifying a topic that appeals to your audience, then presenting it in the most engaging format.

Let’s start with the first part of that puzzle. How do you pick out a topic that both aligns with your audience’s interests, and showcases your expertise as a realtor?

Tools like Answer the Public – which uses search engine autocomplete data to identify the questions people are asking around any keyword or phrase – can do the legwork for you. Here’s how it looks for the term “real estate”:

Now, let’s dig into some of those questions.

Clearly, there’s a lot of locational interest. People want to understand where to find good real estate investment opportunities, and where prices are rising and falling.

Can you turn any of these questions into something relevant to your own geographic market? If not, keep digging around. There are 382 results just for the term “real estate”, so you’re sure to find something that’ll resonate with your audience.

One tip on this: unless you’re happy to adapt your lead magnet over time, pick out a topic that’s evergreen – something that’ll always be relevant, and won’t require updating. For instance:

Evergreen: How to Sell Your House for the Best Price
Not evergreen: 5 Tips for Selling Your House During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Figure Out the Best Way to Present Your Content

Having chosen a topic, it’s time to pick out the most effective format for your lead magnet.

Some topics are best explored through visual content, such as:

Short round-ups of interesting statistics
Maps that compare different geographic areas
Timelines that visualize a process or event

Does this apply to your chosen subject matter? Create an infographic, either by hiring a graphic designer or doing it yourself with a tool like Canva.

Alternatively, if you’ve picked a “meatier” topic that requires a more in-depth approach, you’ll likely find it easier to get your points across in words.

However, that’s not to say you should just write a 5,000-word blog post. A lead magnet needs to feel valuable – after all, you’re asking people to hand over their contact details in return.

A blog just won’t cut the mustard. Instead, package your content up as a pdf, taking the time to highlight key information, quotes, and data in pullout sections.

You could also create a mini course in the form of an email sequence, which is when a lead signs up for your mailing list to receive daily emails that cover a specific topic. This strategy is also known as email marketing, and it’s one of the easiest forms of generating leads thanks to marketing automation software.

Now, choose your lead magnet and go create it!

Step #4: Build a Marketing List

This is the real meat and drink of your real estate marketing campaign – promoting your content and using it to bring in a regular stream of quality leads. Here’s how to do it:

Choose Your Amplification Platform

Amplifying your content is about getting it in front of the right people. That means you need to find the platform where your audience are most likely to hang out.

There are lots of ways to amplify your content – you could run paid search ads, or get other websites to link to it, or just rely on organic traffic to bring in enough numbers over time. But in my experience, social ads are best for generating a high volume of leads, fast.

Each social platform has a different demographic. For instance, let’s compare Facebook to LinkedIn:

Facebook

LinkedIn

On a basic level, we can see Facebook has a lot more users than LinkedIn. Whoever they are, your audience is almost certainly on Facebook.

But we can also see the average LinkedIn user is more likely to have an income of over $75k than the average Facebook user.

Look into the demographic breakdowns of each social platform, then choose the one that best aligns with your audience.

Create Compelling Ads That Drive Action

Now it’s time to advertise your lead magnet.

Firstly, you need to choose an eye-catching image that’s relevant to your content and appealing to your audience. Don’t have a bank of high-quality imagery? No worries. Just use one of these free image libraries:

Next, write your ad copy. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes – what would make them most likely to download your content? What piece of information would they find most interesting?

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to ad copy. Here, we can see Coca-Cola has gone for a detailed caption that emphasizes a key statistic about its sugar-reduction efforts:

Whereas SEMrush, a digital marketing tool, takes a different approach, getting straight to the point with a caption that’s just nine words long:

Build a Lead Gen Landing Page

You’ve done your audience research, created your lead magnet, and built your ads. Don’t put all that hard work to waste with a terrible lead capture page!

As the name suggests, a lead gen landing page is the place you direct people to after they’ve clicked your ad. It’s where they hand over their contact details in return for your content.

Unfortunately, as an industry, real estate tends to see lower landing page conversion rates than most.

Image Source

In part, that’s because real estate conversions often require a high level of commitment. A lot of calls to action are around selling a property – that’s a major life decision.

But this low conversion rate could also be because realtors are simply asking for too much commitment upfront.

At this stage of the marketing funnel, you don’t need to know everything about a lead. You’re asking them to download a piece of content, not immediately list their property with you.

With that in mind, your lead gen landing page shouldn’t be too complex – don’t ask for more information than you need. Here’s a simple example from LFA Capsule Fillers that asks for nothing more than the prospect’s first name, email address, and industry:

The more information you ask for, the lower your conversion rate will be. On the flip side, if you do ask for a ton of information, those people who convert are likely to be “warmer” leads.

Step #5: Nurture Your Leads

Now it’s time to make money from all your hard work.

You’ve got a captive audience of leads, so you can focus on warming them up until they’re ready to convert. Do this via email marketing.

Send regular content to your email list that demonstrates your expertise. For instance, create case studies highlighting challenging or noteworthy properties you’ve sold – ideally focusing on examples that will be particularly interesting and relevant to your target audience. This is a tactic San Francisco realtor Ruth Krishnan uses to good effect: