Are you trying to update your real estate marketing for the new year? It’s a good idea. Many standard practices have changed recently, and you need to make sure that you’re using the most up-to-date methods for reaching highly motivated sellers.
You shouldn’t consider your 2021 real estate marketing plan complete until it includes the following elements:
- You’ve assessed your current traffic and made adjustments
- You’ve completed a new round of keyword targeting
- You’ve updated your content strategy to cover recent trends and topics
- You’ve updated your advertising to include new platforms and tools
- You’ve updated your capture page to appeal to today’s motivated home sellers
You’ve assessed your current traffic and made adjustments
A new year is a perfect time to assess what kind of traffic you’re already attracting to your various online properties. This will give you the opportunity to find out how accurately you’re targeting the audience you really want and how much more work it will take to reach them.
Most of the following popular platforms allow you to check who is visiting:
- Your website: Use free tools like Google Analytics to find out what kind of traffic your website is attracting. This tool will tell you how much traffic you have, where it’s coming from, and what they’re interacting with when they arrive.
- Your social media profiles: Business accounts for major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn all allow you to access analytics on people who are interacting with your pages. Instagram Insights, for example, lets you see statistics on your followers and how well each post performs.
- Your ad placement platform: Nearly every major ad platform provides analytics for the performance of your ads. Google Ads will provide you with a lot of information, so will the platforms for YouTube, Apple, or any major website ad placement platform.
When you’ve reviewed this information, you should look for ways that you can optimize the performance of your online properties and ads for the coming year. Determine the answer to questions like:
- What demographic is responding best to what I’m doing already?
- Am I investing in the audience that offers the best ROI?
- Are there any surprises, such as high interest from people I’m not targeting?
When you have your answers, update your marketing strategy to ensure that the best targets for your marketing don’t get ignored. One great way to make sure you do that is to complete a fresh round of keyword targeting.
You’ve completed a new round of keyword targeting
If your online marketing strategy depends on search in any way, it is essential that you have a list of keywords to build from.
You shouldn’t be spamming these keywords in your content, but the most popular keywords should serve as the foundation of your search marketing. They should inform the terms that you use, the kind of content you create, and the calls to action that you use on contact pages.
It’s important that you update your keyword research regularly because the most effective terms can shift for a variety of reasons. For example, if a certain term becomes used widely in popular media, it may overshadow all other terms that are used to describe the same thing.
There are free tools available that you can use to complete keyword research. One of the most popular is Google Keyword Planner. Google is the most trafficked search engine by far, so if you’re going to learn to use one keyword planning tool, it should be this one.
That said, effective keyword research is not easy work for a beginner. You can easily fall into traps such as choosing keywords you can’t rank for competitively or keywords that—while massively popular—are not close enough to your services to attract the right audience.
You should let SEO professionals handle the work of completing keyword research. This is a small one-time expense for work that can be used to guide all of your marketing efforts for the next year.
When your keyword research is ready, you should take the next logical step in updating your marketing strategy—applying your new keywords to your content.
You’ve updated your content strategy to cover new trends and topics
Content is key to any modern marketing strategy. You’re likely to reach more people with blogs, videos, and social media posts than you ever will with targeted ads. Of course, there is a right and a wrong way to create content.
If you want to compete with all the people who are making content in your niche, you need to do better than them. You need to create interesting pieces that can get people to visit your website and consider coming back for more.
To do that, you need to stay current with the biggest trends and topics in the industry. You need to offer something that makes them want to click. Your keyword research will give you some clues into what’s trending, but you should also consider reviewing:
- The topics that are being covered in real estate news sites and trade journals
- The topics being covered by the most successful voices in real estate
- The controversies that are provoking the most conversations in your circle
Having a comprehensive plan in place will help you pace your content and cover all of the best topics over the next year. If you don’t have a content strategy in place yet, you should create one as soon as possible.
When you have a content strategy in place, you should move on to your advertising. One of the most important changes you can make is making sure you’re on top of the latest platforms and tools.
You’ve updated your advertising to include new platforms and tools
Paid advertising can deliver a lot of value, but that value depends on putting those ads in front of the right people or having enough insight into what they want to hear. That’s why it’s important that you’re doing your advertising on the most up-to-date platforms and tools.
Several years ago, Google was one of the most important advertising platforms to anyone working online. In recent years, however, that has changed. Social media advertising platforms have scooped up a massive and growing amount of the ad market.
Video ads, which do not appear on search engine results pages, are behind a lot of the growth on social media sites. Facebook now accounts for 25.2% of the digital ad market, nearly beating out Google’s 28% on its own. Amazon has quietly topped 10% of that same market since 2020.
With competition heating up, ad platforms have released a slew of new tools designed to give their advertisers a competitive advantage. For example, Google’s recent updates this year gave advertisers significantly more control over where their ads run.
You should take advantage of this advertiser arms race to make sure that you’re using the platform that offers you the most value. Accounts are free on the major ad platforms, so take some time to limited testing. You may find that your returns are better on another platform than the one you’re using now.
Of course, advertising on any platform only has limited value if those ads aren’t delivering your targets to leave their contact information. Make sure that you update your capture page to get the most conversions possible.
You’ve updated your capture page to appeal to today’s motivated home sellers
Your capture page is the page that you send people to when you want them to convert. If you have a sales funnel, this page is at the end. It is often referred to as a landing page or lead magnet page.
Creating your capture page is one of the smallest jobs in your marketing plan. However, it serves a crucial role when it comes to closing with your targets. None of your marketing matters until you have that crucial appointment or request for more information.
You should assess your capture page and calls to action every year. Compare the language you’re using to what’s being used by your biggest competitors.
Complete your real estate marketing checklist to ensure future growth
If you want to run a successful real estate marketing campaign, you need to make sure that your plan is updated every year. The last year was a particularly tumultuous one for all kinds of marketing, and there are some changes you need to make to stay current.
Start by looking at your current traffic. Follow up by updating your keywords and content marketing strategies. Confirm that your advertising is still on the right platform to reach the most people and that your capture page is a good place for them to land.
Do all that, and you’re ready to make the most of 2021.
