Social media is a powerful tool for targeting motivated sellers. However, when most real estate investors think about leveraging social media, they don’t consider the powerful potential of LinkedIn.
While LinkedIn is different from many other major social platforms, it still serves nearly 800 million people. You can easily target motivated sellers on this network. While you’re at it, you can use its tools to expand and develop your professional reputation.
In this short guide, you’ll learn how you can use LinkedIn real estate marketing to:
Create and populate your profiles
Use posts and commentary to build your brand
Add frequent sellers to your network
Use your profile data to improve your marketing targeting across the board
Expand your reach further with sponsored content
Before we discuss the best strategies, let’s take a moment to consider what LinkedIn is and the role it can play in a broad marketing strategy.
What is LinkedIn & what role can it play?
LinkedIn is a social network that emphasizes professional connections. The profiles you create feature information about your career achievements and goals.
You can follow other professionals, review their career information, and make connections that may lead to deals and collaborations.
That can work powerfully for your marketing in several ways.
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- It gives you space where you can take your brand seriously: Most social media networks are for socializing. People can get annoyed when you use them for commercial promotion. On LinkedIn, everyone is building a brand, and they embrace commercial content.
- It encourages business-focused relationships: It’s easy to build connections that are founded on business deals on LinkedIn. The businesses that people are involved in are listed in their profile information.
- It gives you deeper insight into the people you’re targeting: People share information on LinkedIn that they don’t share elsewhere. You can get a much better idea of their income levels and how they earn and spend income.
Let’s start by looking at how to get started with LinkedIn: creating your profile and showcase pages that show off your company.
Create and populate your profiles
You can build several different types of LinkedIn profiles, and all of them can help you market yourself more effectively.
To take advantage of LinkedIn as a marketing platform, you should create all of the following profiles:
A personal profile page
A LinkedIn page
A showcase page
Your personal profile page is (also known as a member profile) is where you’ll list your experience, skills, and endorsements. It’s important to fill this page out because potential leads may review it to learn more about you.
Your LinkedIn page is the hub for your organization. If you buy homes through a business, the information for it will go here. This page is essential for your marketing because it’s where you’ll define your brand itself, including its voice, purpose, and capabilities.
A showcase page is an extension of your LinkedIn page. This page is for “showcasing” special initiatives or brands. You can associate several showcase pages from your main LinkedIn page.
All of these pages will provide you with opportunities to promote yourself as a homebuyer. Additionally, each of them will also allow you to collect metrics on visitors and how they interact with the page.
When you have your profiles in place, it’s time to start using them to build up your brand. Let’s look at some of the ways you can do that on LinkedIn.
Use posts and commentary to build your brand
Like most social media platforms, the best way to make an impression on LinkedIn is to communicate. Fortunately, this platform gives you a lot of ways to do that.
You can share interact with the LinkedIn community in several ways—
- By creating posts on your business’ LinkedIn page
- By responding to the posts that others make
- By messaging other users directly
You can use all of these options to strengthen your brand. You’ll want to do it by engaging in content marketing.
Content marketing refers to creating online materials that are designed to draw interest or leave an impression more than to advertise directly. More specifically, you need to look for opportunities to create content that establishes your experience,
Here are some examples of how you can do that:
Create posts that provide actionable advice to other people who deal in properties
Example: How to assess the value of properties
Example: Why ______ properties may be more valuable in 2021+
Example: How property sellers can make more in a sale by only changing the property description
Offer advice to people who publish questions about real estate
Contribute to interesting conversations and debates that are happening that involve real estate
Using these practices, you can develop your brand as a real estate investor over time. You’ll show off your
expertise and cement your name in people’s minds as someone who has worthwhile opinions on properties.
However, not all of your marketing on LinkedIn needs to be indirect. While you’re working on developing your
brand, you can also attract direct leads by networking with professionals (who may also be motivated sellers).
Add frequent sellers to your network
LinkedIn is possibly the best social media network available to develop relationships with professionals. Many different professionals are directly involved in the purchase and sale of properties.
If you build relationships with them, they may turn to you first when they need to sell a property on short notice. That’s how you can turn socializing on LinkedIn into direct leads.
You should make an attempt to network with:
Other property investors
Real estate agents
Real estate lawyers
Real estate brokers
Property managers
Auction houses
Developers
Appraisers
Property inspectors
Home stagers
You don’t need to pester these people for leads directly. You can make it clear in your public posts that you are always on the lookout for motivated sellers.
As long as you continue developing your posts and making new connections, your network is more likely to approach you with offers.
This tip can help you, but don’t underestimate how much marketing on LinkedIn can tell you about your marketing efforts everywhere. Use your profile data to improve your marketing targeting across the board
As long as you’re developing a presence on LinkedIn, you should consider how you can use its tools to empower the rest of your marketing efforts. LinkedIn gives you access to an impressive array of analytics data, and you could be taking advantage of it.
Begin by going to your LinkedIn page (the one focused on your company rather than your person) or one of your showcase pages. From there, access your admin view. You’ll be able to review your:
Update analytics
This set of data covers the numbers of likes, comments, shares, and other engagements that your page has received in the last 30 days. These metrics will also tell you how the numbers have increased or decreased over the same period.
Follower analytics
This set of data covers the number of followers you have and how it has changed over time. You can set a custom timeframe (for example, around content releases) to find out when you’ve attracted the most followers.
You can also see aggregated data of your followers’
Location
Job function
Seniority
Industry
Company size
Visitor analytics
This set of data covers all visitors to your page, including those who follow you and those who do not. You’ll be able to review how many of the views were unique and how many came from users or other company pages.
Review all this data occasionally to draw out insights about your audience and the kind of content that appeals to them. You may be able to use what you learn to fine-tune all of your marketing.
Expand your reach further with sponsored content
You don’t have to spend anything to use LinkedIn for marketing. However, you can take advantage of the platform’s paid marketing options for faster or more powerful results.
One of those options is sponsored content. When you pay for content to be sponsored, posts you choose will be displayed on the homepage feeds of the audiences you target.
It can be a great way to get everything started when you first join. You can also use promoted posts to amplify successful strategies.
Find more motivated sellers with LinkedIn real estate marketing
You know some LinkedIn real estate marketing strategies you can use to reach more motivated sellers on the LinkedIn social media platform.
Many of the strategies that work on this network are designed to uplift your entire brand. That’s why you must create company pages and then use them to create lasting impressions.
However, it’s still possible to leverage it for direct leads. You can do that by networking directly with frequent sellers and using the data you gather from all LinkedIn sources to enhance your targeting.
Don’t forget that you can also use site tools to create sponsored posts and advertise directly to users in your target income market.
