Creating a marketing plan and need some new real estate marketing ideas? We put together the ultimate list of great marketing advice from top-producing agents from all around the country. From virtual open houses to marketing for millennials, you’ll find everything you need here to kick start your marketing campaign.
Here are 52 of the best real estate marketing ideas that the pros use.
1. Market Yourself on Zillow
The National Association of REALTORS (NAR) states that 92 percent of buyers house hunt online. As the largest real estate website with more than 160 million visitors per month, Zillow is the first place you need to be.
Zillow Premier Agent is Zillow’s platform that lets you advertise on local Zillow and Trulia listings. We estimate that for every $1 you spend, you’ll earn $2.60 in commissions. Click here to find rates in your area.
2. Choose Words That Sell
If you’re working as a listing agent, it’s important to create descriptions that will jump off the page and grab the buyer. A good tactic is to appeal to the buyer’s emotions. Use keywords that paint a picture. It’s not just about telling facts, but also about selling stories.
This tip is brought to you by Market Leader. Market Leader lets you buy actual buyer and seller leads who want to be contacted by an agent. Click here to learn more.
3. Host Local Neighborhood Tours
When it comes to great marketing, nothing beats the personal engagement that comes from hosting a fun event for your sphere. Even better, why not host an event that shows off your own love and expert knowledge about your farm area?
Luxury Manhattan Real Estate Agent Jeff Goodman does just that. Goodman organizes regular walking tours of historic Manhattan neighborhoods for his sphere. Since he hires a professional tour guide for the events, he generally gets 70 or more people attending each tour.
Here’s Goodman on his tours and the mutual benefit they give his sphere and his bottom line:
4. Master Your Elevator Pitch
Imagine you were given $5 million to advertise your business with a 30-second ad during the Super Bowl. What would you say?
If this question is leaving you scratching your head, you need to work on your elevator pitch. A 30-second-or-less speech that shows off your unique skills and experience offers value and can end up producing more leads.
Want to learn how to come up with a killer elevator pitch? Check out this quick video from Tom Ferry:
5. Create a New Logo
Believe it or not, your logo (or lack of a logo) is one of the most important elements of your personal brand. A great logo can help propel your brand forward while a bad logo… well, let’s just say it’s not going to help you attract more leads.
According to Patrick Sanders, creative director for real estate marketing powerhouse 1000watt, a great logo should:
“… signal something exciting and new — a message to the greater world that your organization is always changing and getting better. The work should reflect that energy.”
Need some inspiration? Check out our list of the top 33 real estate logos for 2018 here.
6. Livestream Your Day-to-Day
Let’s face it — when scrolling through a social media feed, a “Live Now” tag is pretty much irresistibly clickable. People are just naturally curious.
Seeing a new listing for the first time? Why not show your audience via livestream? They’ll feel like they’re getting the inside scoop, and you’ll be able to build your audience and get more leads. That’s a win-win situation.
In this edition of Beverly Hills superstar broker Peter Lorimer’s (amazing) Magic Minute series, he walks you through the process.
7. Learn Facebook Messenger Marketing
One of the most exciting new developments in real estate marketing for 2018 is leveraging Facebook Messenger. Using Facebook messenger and a free app like ManyChat you can build real estate chatbots to engage your site visitors 24/7 and even send content to your Facebook audience as direct messages, getting open rates that are 242 percent higher than email!
8. Learn Lead Generation From the Pros
We interviewed dozens of top real estate marketing experts and asked them for their best tip on how REALTORS can generate the most leads for their business. Read what they told us.
9. Write a Killer Real Estate Newsletter
So, now that you understand the need for a drip email campaign, check out Travis Balinas’s article on how to create killer email newsletters. Having a strong subject line for your email is definitely a can’t-miss step. Another one is to include a call-to-action that prompts engagement.
10. Optimize Your Facebook Page
With millions of daily users, you’d be remiss not to utilize Facebook as a marketing tool these days. Download this free e-book from Matterport to learn about some of the biggest improvements you can make to your business Facebook page, how to set up paid campaigns and many other helpful tips. It also discusses how to convert these leads to actual sales. Get started today.
11. Find the Best Keywords to Build Traffic to Your Website
Check out the in-depth guide on the best 150 real estate keywords to drive traffic to your site. We also cover keyword research on a shoestring budget and insightful general SEO tips from the pros. Still looking for more keywords? Check out Marketing Artfully’s Tara Jacobsen’s list of the best SEO keywords to use on your website.
12. Create a Video Tour of Your Neighborhood
A video tour of the neighborhood gives prospective buyers a much better feel for what a neighborhood is like to live in. Unless you live in a major city or tourist area, chances are there are very few videos showing highlights of your neighborhood on YouTube.
Stepping in to fill that void can mean a nice boost to your online presence and can help generate leads
13. Use This Handy SEO Checklist for Your Website
One of the best ways to market your business is through your real estate website. However, in order to get your website seen, it has to show up when local home buyers search Google, Bing and other online search engines. Follow this 25-step checklist to ensure your site is up to speed.
14. Perfect Your Drip Marketing Emails
Drip marketing emails are prewritten messages that get sent automatically to your leads. They help you foster a relationship and nurture leads through the sales funnel. In this guide, Bushery provides many examples of drip marketing emails that can be used in a variety of situations.
Because mailing lists are a necessary part of your campaign, it’s important to truly weigh your options. Should you rent or should you buy? This article looks at the benefits and drawbacks of renting a mail list.
15. Start a Direct-to-Door Marketing Campaign With Door Hangers
Joshua Smith famously built his business from scratch to closing more than 100 homes per year partly by using door hangers. Direct mailers can get lost in a pile of bills but leads need to remove your door hanger to get inside their homes, guaranteeing that they see it.
ProspectsPLUS!® offers a variety of one-sided and two-sided door hangers specifically for real estate agents. Choose from one of their beautiful professionally designed templates or upload your own design.
16. Use Instagram Stories
Los Angeles luxury brokerage Partners Trust has a great write-up of how you can use Instagram Stories to market your listings or personal brand. The key is to use Instagram Stories to give your audience a look at your day to day life as an agent as well as focusing on your listings. Believe it or not, many people are curious about what the heck real estate agents do all day!
17. Learn the Art of Real Estate Postcards
Sending out real estate marketing postcards on a regular basis is a great way to inspire interest in your business and raise brand awareness. You can showcase just listed or sold properties or announce your next open house.
ProspectsPLUS!® offers a variety of postcards specifically for real estate agents. Choose from one of their professionally designed templates or upload your own design and start your postcard marketing campaign today.
18. Learn How to Overcome the Objection of Being a New or Young REALTOR
Branding yourself as a REALTOR is hard enough. If you’re a new or younger REALTOR, the job is 10 times harder. Without the experience and knowledge of seasoned agents, how can you brand yourself to get buyers and sellers?
Luckily, Kevin Ward has you covered. He has six actionable strategies for new agents to actually compete with the most experienced agents in your farm area.
Check out this quick video below to learn Ward’s six strategies:
19. Use Snapchat to Build an Audience
Like all great social media platforms, it was only a matter of time until clever REALTORs started using them to close more deals. Silicon Valley-based REALTOR Alex Wang and New York City agent Michael Meier are both using Snapchat and Instagram in innovative ways to market their listings and their personal brands.
20. Make a Personal Connection With Video Emails
It’s an indisputable fact — in 2018, video is king. Agents who are using video to market their business are crushing it while those who don’t are getting left in the dust.
When you look at the numbers, it’s easy to see why. Jacksonville, Florida-based Keller Williams agent Josh Rogers saw a 75 percent bump in replies and a 500 percent increase in conversions by sending short, informative video emails using BombBomb.
Even better, BombBomb is offering our readers a free two-week trial to get you started connecting to more leads with video email.
21. Learn How to Get 10,000 Views of Your Listing
If viral content has taught us anything, it’s that there’s no predicting what an audience will find fascinating. Sometimes, a home’s price or its location in a hot market draws the views and, sometimes, it’s just been on the market for a long time. In this guide, Nancy Robbers looks at many different Zillow listings that have 10,000 views or more and compares what they all have in common.
22. Learn the Do’s and Don’ts of Instagram for Real Estate
Matthew Bushery shows you how to create a winning Instagram real estate marketing strategy in this comprehensive guide to the do’s and don’ts of Instagram for real estate.
This tip is brought to you by Placester. Chosen as the best real estate website builder for new REALTORs by Fit Small Business, Placester offers a combination of affordable pricing, beautiful templates and lead-capturing features. Click here to request a demo.
23. Use Strategic PR to Stay Relevant and Build Authority
While many agents think PR is something that only celebrities and titans of industry can afford, very few realize they can do it themselves — for free.
Mike Fabbri, a New York City agent at Corcoran, uses sites like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to pitch his expertise in real estate to journalists looking for sources. In return, he gets his name in the press as well as the chance to get a link back to his website, which is great for SEO.
Full disclosure, we met Fabbri on HARO!
24. Offer Home Valuations to Capture Seller Leads
One of the most difficult marketing challenges for realtors is capturing seller leads. Real Geeks offers a home valuation tool that you can put right on your website. By inputting a few details, sellers can create a valuation report for their property and receive monthly updates. You benefit from collecting these seller email addresses that are added to your list of leads. Click here for a home valuation tool demo.
25. School Yourself on the Best Ways to Engage on Social Media
Many agents make the mistake of carpet bombing social media with listings, market updates and tips and never really engaging with their audience. Instead, you need to focus your efforts on discovering what content works best for each social media channel you use.
For example, contests can work great on Facebook while behind-the-scenes videos might work better on Instagram stories. Check out this guide for more tips.
26. Learn Video Marketing From the Pros
We discussed earlier how video marketing is so effective to successful conversion. This article discusses the five best types of videos to use in your marketing campaign.
27. Use Opendoor to Get All-cash Offers, Buyer’s Commissions and Referral Fees
Venture capital-funded startup Opendoor will offer your listing clients an instant, all-cash offer for their home that can close in as few as three days with full commission. You can also refer properties you’re not currently listing and still collect 25 percent of the gross commission. For buyer’s agents, it offers instant-access showings to any of its listings and will pay full commissions even if you send the buyers to view the property on their own.
Opendoor is currently working with REALTORs in Phoenix and the Dallas-Fort Worth area and will open soon in Las Vegas.
28. Go Big! Check Out These 15 Crazy Real Estate Marketing Ideas That Actually Worked
In an industry as fiercely competitive as real estate, many agents struggle to differentiate themselves. If you don’t have seniority or an endless marketing budget, you often have to rely on a strong personality to get the word-of-mouth going. Well, these REALTORs took that about 10 steps further by dabbling in the absurd or turning themselves into some completely outlandish characters. The most outrageous part of it, however, is how they actually worked.
29. Make a Viral Real Estate Video
Viral videos are still all the rage. If you can capture someone’s attention with a funny or insightful clip, you can reach a wider audience through the power of social shares. Everyone loves sharing entertaining videos on Twitter and with family. Even if the audience isn’t your target, they may send the video to someone who is.
30. Create a Client Testimonial Packet
“When it comes to landing more deals than my competition, one of the aces up my sleeve is effectively using testimonials to help earn the trust of my potential clients. Nothing is more positive than a third-party account of your performance from someone who has done business with you previously. Sometimes, this is all it takes to push someone over the edge to work with you and sign the contract.”
31. Create Viral Infographics to Share on Social Media
Infographics take useful data and present them in an attractive and easy to read format. If you’re on any Pinterest or Facebook real estate groups, you’ve likely seen (and shared) dozens of infographics already. At Fit Small Business, we use a tool called Venngage to create great looking infographics.
32. Choose the Right Farm Area
Choosing the right farm area can mean the difference between becoming a local expert and closing a ton of deals and struggling. To help you get started, we put together this highly detailed guide to choosing and dominating the right farm area.
33. Learn How to Market to Millennials
According to NAR statistics, 35 percent of all buyers in 2016 were millennials. This is up from 32 percent in 2014 and will only continue to grow. The market is so important that Zillow recently launched a real estate portal just for millennials. That means learning how to market to millennials is crucial if you want to grow your business exponentially.
34. Invest in Your Community to Generate Strong, Top-of-Mind Referrals
Annemarie du LeBohn, Community Engagement Strategist, TNG Real Estate
My favorite marketing advice is to embrace community engagement. For example, in May and June, we host two free community paper shred events, one in Los Alamitos, California, and the other in Brea. The event reduces paper in the landfill, and it helps people reduce identity theft. To help spread the word, our agents farm various neighborhoods with flyers and door hangers. People can shred up to five boxes of paper for free, which is about a $100 savings.
35. Rank Your Featured Listings on Google and Bing
What have you Googled today? Every second, there are more than 40,000 search queries on Google, which is about 3.5 billion a day. A relative portion of these searches involves real estate — people typing in “homes for sale.” Now, when’s the last time you thought about making your featured listings Google-friendly or, better yet, SEO-friendly? This guide covers all the key basic SEO elements, which will help you generate more free traffic from search engines.
36. Try Sending Handwritten Notes to Stand out From the Competition
Danielle Procopio, CSC | Real Estate Broker & Certified Home Staging Consultant, Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage
I would say that my favorite marketing advice is to write thank you notes. I thought going the high-tech route when contacting people would be the way to go. I was wrong. People are very receptive to receiving handwritten letters and thank you notes. It sounds silly and simple but this old-school technique seems to set me apart from my competition. Not many people are doing this anymore. In real estate, you need any advantage you can get!
If you’re like me and your handwriting is as bad as your doctor, check out services like Bond.co who create fonts from your handwriting and automate the process.
37. Build Your Personal Brand by Mastering These 26 Real Estate Branding Tips
Are you paying enough attention to your personal brand? The hard truth is, when you don’t work on your personal brand, which becomes your personal brand. Instead of leaving it up to chance, every top producing agent I’ve interviewed (in the hundreds) recommends taking a more active role in building your brand. This quick, actionable and social media-friendly infographic will teach you the ropes.
38. Build Hype for Your Listing Before It Hits the Market
Nicholle Gulcur, Copywriter
To enterprise on the market trends, we’re putting out Coming Soon signs and brochures about the properties weeks before they hit the market. This builds anticipation and interest because Buyers are out looking for any new home they can find in key areas. Once we list the home, we hold off on allowing showings for a few more days in order to continue to build excitement.
39. Craft a Personalized Message for Your Buyers
Chris Haddon, Founder, REI 360
I have found the best results come from a personal message in my own voice. When you write your message, remember the following points:
- Make the message about them. They don’t care about you. So, tell them how you can help them as quickly as possible.
- Be clear. If a seller is not sure what you want them to do, they’ll never call you.
- Match your message to your seller.
- Make your message short and sweet. In our fast-paced world, people rarely read all their email. Unsolicited mail often hits the trash can. If you want your message to be heard, do it quickly.
40. Set Up Local Community Pages
Ryan Fitzgerald, Owner, Raleigh Realty
One way we are able to generate five or more new leads daily is with our local community pages. What makes this such an effective marketing idea is the fact you are reverse-engineering attention to generate real estate leads. Once you put the work in up front, these leads are continuous.
41. Make Your House Memorable With One Standout Item That Buyers Can’t Forget
Heather W. Leikin, REALTOR, The House Agents/Partners Trust
Have one really quirky item in the house. This way, when a buyer is talking about it, they can say, “the house with the giant Buddha or the orange rug house.” Have something that stays in their mind about the style or design.
Sometimes, a perfectly nice normal house can be forgotten about if it is the middle house of six houses seen in the same day.
42. Showcase Your Charitable Side
Priscilla Vega, PR Vega
I think the best way to be successful at real estate is to give the prospective clients something to remember you by. Real estate professionals need to differentiate themselves and the way to do that is through Giveback Homes. This organization is creating social change through the act of buying or selling a home, giving real estate professionals a social good platform and a way to differentiate themselves from the competition.
43. Send Postcards That are ‘Fridge-worthy’
Karen Wachtel, PorchLight Real Estate Group
When you send out a batch of postcards, you never know if a recipient is interested right now or six months down the line. In order to give your postcards staying power, Wachtel recommends using “fridge-worthy” subjects “like best metro area hikes, a great go-to recipe for guacamole, a guide to what the NFL referee signals mean or a table for timing your Thanksgiving meal perfectly.” As she explains, “we regularly hear from clients — and even prospective agents — who end up calling us or their agent directly based on a postcard that had been hanging on their refrigerator or memo board for months on end.”
44. Create a Blog That Answers Client’s Questions
Ameet Khabra, Search Engine Strategist
My advice would be to create quality content around the questions of my potential clients. Am I experienced with new home buyers? If so, what questions do they usually have that I can answer through content on my site or blog? The same goes for clients who buy homes often or are looking for a bigger home for their growing family. There will always be a question and, the sooner you answer those questions, the quicker the client will trust you, which will lead to a sale down the line.
45. Master the Subject Line (for Email Marketing)
Sacha Ferrandi, Source Capital Funding
With emails, the most important aspect is the email subject line. They are key to get the recipient to open and read the email. Now, this means crafting a subject that is essentially a call-to-action but doesn’t give away too much information about the email and shows that you are not a spammer. It is sort of a “Goldilocks scenario” where you have to convince the reader that the information is good enough without being too specific.
- Bad: Learn About an Amazing Property (Address) in the Bay Park Area
- Good: Updated Information Regarding Your Neighborhood Property Values
46. If They Can’t Come to the Open House, Bring the Open House to Them
Reba Miller, Founder, RP Miller Realty Group
Using a proprietary technology, I hosted a virtual open house that used proprietary technology to offer 360-degree immersive panoramic photography. The result? A person attending the open house could feel like he or she was in the apartment doing an in-person walkthrough. To make it more attractive, I also attached a contest to the virtual open house. Anyone who walked through five of the seven rooms was automatically entered into a raffle for the chance to win an iPad. The unit sold in a matter of days.
47. Follow These 10 Real Estate Banner Advertising Do’s and Don’ts
Of course, billboards aren’t illegal (at least, not that we know of). This article from Trulia shares 10 do’s and don’ts for your banner campaign.
48. Grow Your Network With Regular Get-togethers
Nicholas Lee, Licensed Real Estate Agent, Sierra Residential
Besides advertising exclusives on StreetEasy, Trulia and Zillow and sending out monthly newsletters, my top strategy remains the personal touch. I host a monthly happy hour open bar in New York City and invite my top clients and their friends and families. It’s a great way to grow your network organically, and I’ve gotten some of my best sales clients this way. I highly recommend it.
49. Use Retargeting Campaigns to Drive Traffic Back to Your Site
Ira Chopovska, Marketing Manager, Agent Drive
A powerful way to enhance your marketing is to set up retargeting campaigns. The idea is to craft a great ad copy that directs people to a dedicated landing page or a single-property website with the listing you’re marketing.
The ad follows your site visitors across the Internet and social media helping you redirect the traffic back to your site when they’re more ready to reach out.
Want to learn more about retargeting? Check out our Facebook advertising guide.
50. Use Professional Photography to Win More Listings and Sell Them Faster
Jeff Corn, Virtuance
Buyers are increasingly turning to online photography as the first step in the process of purchasing a property. It’s not enough anymore to simply put a sign in the front yard or raw data into the Multiple Listing Service. To compete with even an average listing agent, you have to create a story that compels buyers to take the next step. That story most often begins with a picture.
51. Create Micro-neighborhood & Subdivision Pages on Your Website
Anita Clark, Warner Robins Real Estate
While you may not be able to compete with Zillow for search terms like “houses for sale in _______”, you might be able to rank on Google for more niche search terms for micro-neighborhoods, pretty streets or subdivisions. With photos, video, a market snapshot, school districts and pertinent information about the subdivision or area, they are a great way to build organic traffic to your website.
Bonus: Utilize the Latest in Social Media
Dustin Brohm, Search Salt Lake
Facebook is great and should continue to be a big part of your online presence, but it’s old news. Snapchat is the social network of the future. Everyone who is using Snapchat for real estate right now are just the early adopters. Soon, it will be just as common to use Snapchat for real estate as it is for REALTORs to have a Facebook page.
graha grand
Thanks for sharing
Sudhir Mane
Great articles. Each idea is unique and give lots of knowledge in business strategy.. Thanks a lot…
Roger & Nella Colby
Emile, great article! So many new ideas we can implement into our real estate marketing strategy.
Hey Roger and Nella,
Glad you liked the article and best of luck with the busy season!
Sara Ruhl
Excellent content, and some great ideas. I had a lightbulb moment with Tip No.53 – creating pages for the micro areas, and perhaps even popular streets. You are so right, most of the time it’s too difficult to compete with the big guns for keyword phrases surrounding your main location. Another advantage, I believe, of using micro areas is the fact that clients that find their way to these pages should potentially be a lot more serious buyers. For example, here in Spain, homes for sale Spain < homes for sale Alicante < homes for sale Calpe Alicante < homes for sale La cometa Calpe. I know I would much rather prefer a lead generated from the keyword phrase "homes for sale La cometa Calpe" than "homes for sale Spain". The time you need to spend educating the clients (generated from the various search terms) will vastly differ as the search phrase becomes more targeted. Surely the narrower the focus the better the client 'quality'? Yes, you won't get as many leads as the main area search term, but that low hanging fruit looks good 🙂
Matthew Trim
Thanks for advice.
Hey Matthew,
Glad you found the article useful and thanks for stopping by.