Think about the most important factors for online marketing success in real estate. You want plenty of traffic for your real estate website, powerful search engine optimization (SEO) to help your audience find you, informative content that builds trust, shareable, clickable content to boost your social media marketing, and easy, natural ways to integrate calls-to-action in order to turn prospects into qualified leads.
It's no exaggeration to state that your real estate blog can be a dependable tool for helping you accomplish all of those goals and more. Here's why you shouldn't underestimate the power of the real estate blog and how to create a blog that will benefit your business for years to come.
The Power of the Real Estate Blog
Ultimately, your real estate blog is a tool for informing your audience, and all of the other benefits stem from accomplishing that key goal. You have plenty of real estate and market expertise to offer. Your blog is the perfect place to share that expertise with your audience and give your digital marketing a major boost.
New to Real Estate Blogging? Getting Started Is Easier than You Think
Hopefully, we've convinced you of the value of a real estate blog, but that still leaves one key question. How do you get started? While you can build a blog yourself from the ground up, there's an easier, more efficient way. Our custom content creation services make it easy to get all of the benefits of blogging without the time investment. We'll create content that's relevant to your audience, market, and preferences, leaving you with more time to pursue the leads that your blog creates.
In luxury real estate, building a sphere of influence can set the course of your career — but first, you have to put the work in.
In luxury real estate, your sphere of influence is critical to your long-term success as an agent. Establishing relationships and connections are some of the best ways to help your career take off. Still, building your luxury sphere of influence can feel like an intimidating task when you're new to the industry or starting fresh in a new market. But you don't have to do it alone. The agents who came before you have laid out a path for building your sphere of influence, and there are so many modern tools available to help you achieve your goals. Invest your effort wisely, and you can build a string of luxury-based connections that will serve you well for many years to come.
Steps to Building Your Luxury Sphere of Influence
Work With an Experienced Mentor
No matter how well you prepare for your career in real estate, there's still plenty to learn as a new agent. That's why it can be so beneficial to work with a mentor who can help you overcome the early challenges and show you exactly how someone with experience in luxury real estate operates on a day-to-day basis. Your mentor can provide insights into how they built their personal sphere of influence and how they've continued to grow it throughout their career. Building your own network will still require effort, but it's much easier to achieve your career goals when you know exactly where and how to invest that effort.
Leverage Your Existing Personal and Professional Networks
You're likely to hear this tip often as a new agent, and for good reason. When you're just getting started, your existing network of friends, family, colleagues and other connections can be your best source of potential leads. These are people who are already within your personal sphere of influence. You know them, and they know you, so it's important to make them part of your luxury sphere of influence, as well.
Make sure that everyone within your existing networks is aware of your real estate career and how you can help them with luxury real estate. Ensure that they have your contact information so that they can easily recommend you to the people within their own networks. Remember that maintaining relationships with the people in your personal network over time is critical. You want them to think of you first when they or someone they know has luxury real estate needs.
Know Your Market and Your Audience
Who are you trying to reach? As a luxury real estate agent, your target audience will be different from an agent working with buyers who have a smaller budget, sellers with non-luxury homes, or people who are buying a home for the first time. Planning your marketing strategy requires knowledge of who you're trying to reach within your market and what they're looking for from their real estate agent.
One of the things that every client will be looking for is in-depth knowledge of the markets where you do business. So getting to know your neighborhoods is one of the most important things that you can do as a new luxury real estate agent. Buyers want to know that you have the knowledge to help them find the right home in the right location, and sellers want to know that you'll be able to effectively promote the neighborhood where they're selling a home. That means knowing all about the latest up-and-coming real estate trends and what types of homes are available. It also requires extensive knowledge of the amenities, attractions, and services available in a given neighborhood.
Develop Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Much of the work that you put into building your sphere of influence will involve reaching out to potential clients, but it's also vital to make sure that prospects can easily find you. Since most people start their real estate search online, your digital marketing strategy should be a central element of your lead generation strategy. In order to appeal to a luxury clientele, an attractive, appealing, information-rich website is a necessity. Delta Media Group® can help you with that, too. Our top-ranked search engine optimization (SEO) works to help leads find you, effectively turning your website into the hub for your online marketing efforts.
Social media should be another key element of your digital marketing strategy. Building your social presence is a powerful way to expand your sphere of influence beyond your connections, develop relationships with prospects, share your content, and show your real estate expertise. Social Connector, another feature of the DeltaNET®, makes it easier than ever to keep your clients updated with automated postings across all your social platforms.
Growing your social presence and the organic SEO on your website will take time, however, even with a wealth of tools at your disposal. Paid advertising is a great supplement to your other online marketing efforts and can pay immediate dividends in terms of new leads. There's plenty more that you can do with online marketing, but a great website, strong social media presence, and targeted advertising strategy are perfect places to start as you build your sphere of influence.
Create a Real Estate Content Plan
Creating informative real estate content is another effective way to stand out online, establish your personal brand, build your social media presence, and show people why you're the right choice for their luxury real estate needs. Depending on what you're comfortable with, there are a variety of ways to create valuable content.
The blog on your real estate website is the perfect place for posts with luxury real estate advice and posts that showcase the neighborhoods where you do business. Delta's custom content creation can help here as well. Our corps of specialists and professional writers research, write, optimize, post, and share content specific to your business to keep users coming back for me. If you're more comfortable behind a camera, then video content is also an excellent tool for growing your sphere of influence. Video content is incredibly popular, and you can break down longer videos into bite-sized pieces that are ideal for sharing on social media.
Get Involved With the Community
There's still plenty of room for traditional networking when building your luxury sphere of influence, as well. Building personal relationships within the community can lead directly to new leads and can also lead to referrals down the line. The best way to build those relationships is to go out, get involved with the community, and create connections.
If you have a passion for a particular cause or hobby, look for local organizations that share that enthusiasm. Volunteer to help out with a local non-profit, get involved with community events, visit local businesses, dine at local restaurants, and be an active participant in the communities where you do business. The more relationships that you build, the larger your luxury sphere of influence becomes.
Building Your Luxury Sphere of Influence Starts With You
Always remember that you are at the center of your luxury sphere of influence and that your sphere grows from that central point. The effort you invest, the relationships you build, the people you meet, and the marketing strategy you develop will ultimately help your sphere of influence grow. Over time, the clients that you serve also become part of your sphere, and their referrals help to expand it even further. While growing your sphere of influence doesn't happen overnight, the work that you put in now can lay the foundation for a prosperous future in luxury real estate.
Virtual showings took the world by storm in the wake of the pandemic. Buyers and sellers alike needed to shift their perspective on virtual technology quickly to adapt to a new world. Agents and brokers had a challenge ahead of them: To learn and implement the new technology.
As the public health situation improves, virtual showings are still going strong.
However, more and more buyers want opportunities to return to the traditional way of seeing a home. In the past, open house events have stood out among the best ways for agents to meet new leads. It is sometimes possible to get an offer from a qualified buyer on a home in just minutes, too.
Although there will always be some people who are just curious, most people who go to a conventional home showing are interested in buying in the very near future. Although these events take planning and foresight, they help the agent connect with the local community in a powerful way.
Unfortunately, many agents had mixed results with their showings in the past. This might leave some under the impression that there's no space for open houses or showings in their marketing mix.
It's understandable showings seem like a tall order, especially at a time like this! But there is a solution: A property showing manager that lets you quickly and efficiently schedule, plan, and scale showings — whether you're doing one a month or several every week.
Enhance Your Showings with a Unique, Independent Local Showing Manager
On paper, the idea of a showing seems simple: Prepare the home, invite guests, and follow through. A quick tour, some questions and answers, and you may be well on your way to fielding qualified offers. In practice, though, there's always a little bit more to it than that!
You want to make the process quick and painless for yourself, your seller, and visitors to the property. At the same time, you also need to make sure the time you invest produces real business value — that means getting information for follow-up from every participant, including the "no shows."
For the first time, you can do it all with Local Showings — an independent solution designed just for you.
Local Showings is Delta Media Group's response to an overwhelming desire among agents and brokers to have a fully integrated solution that works with their technology rather than requiring them to start over with something new. It operates as a standalone product and within your DeltaNET®6 real estate all-in-one solution.
Here's what you can expect when you try it for yourself:
Don't settle for partnering with the competition — use a modern solution from a leading property technology firm. Contact us to learn more or schedule a demo to see how Local Showings will work at your practice.
Email marketing continues to rank near the top of the charts for real estate agents who want to quickly, consistently and effectively reach a large pool of prospects with targeted, relevant content that converts. Whether you're new to email marketing or want to modernize your existing strategy, success starts with having a clear, detailed plan for reaching your goals. Here's how to unlock your email marketing potential, improve conversion rates and save tons of time in the process.
While there are many effective real estate marketing channels, few can boast the wide user base and nearly universal integration of email. No matter the demographic you wish to reach, chances are that they have an email account and check it every day. With the right tactics, you can turn email marketing into a consistent, reliable source of leads and a powerful tool to convert those leads into clients.
Start with a Consistent Schedule for Email Marketing
Email marketing works best when you choose a schedule and send emails regularly. When a new contact joins your email list, that schedule typically starts with a welcome sequence, during which you send a series of automated emails over the course of a few days to introduce yourself. These emails often have some of the highest open rates and are critical to establishing yourself with each contact.
Over time, the emails may become less frequent but should still adhere to a regular schedule. Basically, you don't want to overwhelm your audience, but you don't want them to forget about you, either. Most agents find that scheduling a few emails a week per contact is the best way to strike the right balance.
Segment Your Email List
Unlocking your email marketing potential requires sending the right messages, to the right people, at the right time. That's why it's so important to segment your email list based on the needs of your audience. This might mean segmenting based on whether a prospect is a buyer or seller, as well as whether this is their first time buying/selling a home. You can also segment based on the location where they're shopping, the type of real estate they're searching for, or any other key factor that helps you differentiate your target audience.
Be Informative and Personable
In order to keep your open rates high and have the best chance of converting, you need to provide email content that your audience wants to see. The good news is that if someone has opted into your email marketing, they're clearly seeking information on real estate. Your job is to make your email marketing as informative as possible, based on the needs of each segment of your audience.
Just as importantly, you want your email marketing to be personable and avoid the hard sale. While the ultimate goal of email marketing is to generate new business, your audience wants to be informed rather than pitched. Including a call-to-action at the end of your email is a good thing, but turning the whole email into a call-to-action is a mistake to avoid.
Leverage the Power and Time-Saving Benefits of Automation
We've stressed the importance of keeping a regular email marketing schedule and sending the right content at just the right time. Email drip campaigns make it easy to accomplish both goals while saving time with automation. Set up automated, informative campaigns that help nurture leads over time, tailored to buyers, sellers, first-time buyers, and prospects at every stage of their journey.
Integrate Social Proof
Integrating social proof into your email marketing is a great way to boost conversion rates and show prospects what your current clients have to say about your real estate services. For email, including testimonials is usually the best way to integrate social proof. Ideally, the testimonials that you include will be relevant to the segment of your audience that you're trying to reach.
Don't Forget About Your Clients
Speaking of those current clients, you don't want to forget about them when it comes to email marketing. Following up after a purchase or sale is simply good business and shows clients that you're still there for them after closing day. It's also a great way to generate referrals, as well as social proof that you can integrate into your real estate website, email marketing, and social media marketing.
Take Your Marketing to the Next Level with DeltaNET®6
The right real estate CRM makes it easy to boost your marketing, generate more leads, and save time by automating marketing tasks without sacrificing quality. DeltaNET®6 simplifies email marketing with email drip campaigns, AI-driven email newsletters, bulk email blasts, customizable eCards, and email templates that make it easy to send personalized messages for any occasion.
On this episode of Tech Tuesday, Harley demonstrates how DeltaNET® 6 users can interact with the new DeltaNET® Academy. The episode covers viewing assigned courses, taking any courses available to them, as well as taking, retaking, and reviewing quizzes on courses where applicable.
As a real estate agent, building long-term client relationships is essential to growth. There are two times when having a deep relationship is especially vital.
First comes the initial decision to choose a real estate agent. By sharing helpful, informative content on your real estate website, you can build credibility as a trusted expert. This is important because it might take weeks or even months before someone actually decides to dive into the market.
If you've built a foundation with a potential client, you are more likely to be chosen in the end.
The second time strong relationships come into play is after the initial transaction. No matter whether you work with buyers or sellers, you can expect that they will take 4-7 years on average before needing your services again. But, all the while, they can be providing you with referral business.
In the first year of any agent's career, it's normal to spend most time "chasing down leads." You need to learn the ropes, decide what works for you, and define your ideal customer. Beyond this point, however, it's crucial to start generating leads in a less effort-intensive way, and referral business is a big piece.
Some of the most successful real estate agents in the United States today get the majority of their work from qualified leads through their website, combined with referral business from satisfied customers.
That starts by focusing your attention on long-term customer relationships. And the process is much easier when you have the right technology in hand.
How Your CRM Can Boost Your Long-Term Client Relationships
To cultivate deep relationships, real estate agents need to make the best use of their time. That means cutting down on repetitive tasks and focusing on what moves you forward. Now, more than ever, that's achieved by implementing customer relationship management software for real estate.
Customer relationship management, or CRM, gives you complete visibility into all your relationships, so you never lose track of the people who matter to your business. You can easily see where your leads, prospects, current customers, and past customers stand in relation to their transactions.
An AI-driven CRM becomes a "center of excellence" that connects the dots between thousands of data points to keep you informed. It will clue you in on exactly when and how to follow up to maximize the positive impact you can make on those in your network.
Plus, it means spending less of your energy on time-intensive marketing tasks — those things you know you should do but that often slip down the priority list. Your CRM is a powerful machine learning multi-tool that helps you prioritize and execute in a fraction of the time.
Let's take a closer look at how technology can enhance your relationship-building efforts:
Contact us to find out more about digital marketing for real estate agents.
The real estate industry is always innovating, and new technology often alters the way that agents serve clients. Today's real estate clients are typically much better informed than they would have been in years past, but that doesn't change the fact that they still rely heavily on their agent throughout the process. So while your role may have changed due to technology, that same technology also holds the key to putting people first and generating a steady pipeline of referrals from satisfied clients.
Putting people first starts with providing easy access to the information they need to make informed decisions when they're buying or selling a home. This is one of the key ways that the role of an agent has evolved due to technology. In the past, the agent was the primary, direct source of information for clients. Today, you can provide much of that data through your real estate website and other online resources, which frees up more time to put your clients first in other ways.
Leverage Technology to Be Responsive and Share Your Expertise
Providing all of that data, information and market analysis, up front leads to more informed clients, but that doesn't mean that they won't still rely on your expertise. Technology also makes it much easier to communicate with modern real estate clients who expect speed and responsiveness from their agents. Whether you're communicating through SMS text messaging, instant messaging apps, social media, email, or video calls, being available to clients is still a key part of the job description. Clients have questions, you have answers, and technology makes it easier to handle those communications in a quick, convenient manner.
Technology Unlocks Time to Be the Trusted Advisor Your Clients Need
While technology has changed the real estate industry, it doesn't change the fact that buying or selling a home is a monumental, potentially life-changing experience for your clients. They don't just want an agent who will provide them with the facts and then get out of the way. They want someone who understands where they're coming from, values their time, and advocates for them at every step of the process.
By taking advantage of the time-saving benefits of real estate technology, you have more time to be the trusted advisor that clients need in order to buy or sell a home with full confidence that they're making informed choices. They count on you to help them negotiate, navigate the closing process, and handle the key details from the start of the process to the day that they sign the paperwork. Technology makes it easier to focus on providing the best possible experience for your clients, and that's truly what it means to put people first.
Does Your Real Estate Tech Make It Easy to Put People First?
If you're still devoting too much time to tedious tasks that could easily be handled by the latest real estate technology, there's a better way. DeltaNET®6, our all-in-one real estate solution, puts at your fingertips all of the tools you need so you can put people first. Make life easier for everyone by choosing the best real estate tech for the job.
This week, Harley goes over My Customer for Life in the DeltaNET.
Artificial intelligence is no longer just a sci-fi fantasy, a dream of data scientists, or a catchy buzzword. The technology for AI has developed so much in recent years that it's quickly making an impact on — and potentially reshaping — nearly every major industry. Real estate is certainly no exception, with AI already making its presence felt in both subtle and obvious ways.
Does that mean that agents will soon be largely replaced by AI, with little work left for humans to do? Fortunately, you can take a deep breath, exhale, and know that your job is not in danger from AI. The truth is that AI in real estate can save you tremendous time on monotonous, repetitive tasks, allowing you to spend more of your working hours on the things that matter most.
Let's start with the basics. When we talk about AI in the present day, we're not talking about an all-seeing, all-knowing computer like you've seen in movies or read about in novels. Today's AI is designed to handle specific tasks in a fast, reliable, consistent way. Here are some of the ways that AI can lighten your workload on repetitive tasks and create more time for you to serve your clients:
How Will You Invest the Time Saved by AI?
The examples above are just a few of the ways that AI can make life easier for real estate agents and dramatically speed up tasks that once took up far too much time. That means less work on the tasks that you probably didn't want to be doing anyway, but not less work overall.
Ultimately, the promise of AI in real estate is that you'll have more time to focus on the work that really matters. Think about every day that you've wished that there were just a few more hours to get done everything you needed to do. AI helps make that dream a reality without compromising on productivity or sacrificing your free time. All you have to decide is how to invest those hours that once went to tasks that can now be handled by AI.
The Future Is Bright for AI in Real Estate
One of the exciting things about AI is that despite the significant progress that's been made, we're still only scratching the surface of what the technology can do. The future is bright for AI integration in real estate, and we'll be sure to continue bringing you the best, most modern tech to help you thrive as a real estate agent.
This week Harley goes over the Custom Page Image Gallery in the DeltaNET.
Successful real estate agents build trust as experts in their local area. To attract the right customers to your practice, your marketing needs to make a human connection before you meet for the first time.
That may seem like a challenge — and it does take some getting used to — but it is the key to lasting real estate success. When you master it, you make the shift from "chasing down leads" to enjoying a steady flow of lead generation through your marketing.
Many real estate agents and brokers find marketing a challenge.
There are three big difficulties real estate pros can have with marketing:
These are understandable worries to have. Often, an agent or broker never says, "I don't want to do marketing and won't do it." Instead, they find other priorities to occupy their day. Weeks and even months go by without ever getting around to those marketing tasks they find intimidating.
Getting through this starts with busting a big myth about real estate marketing.
Your marketing CAN be approachable — and it can reflect your values and personality.
Step into the Age of Real Estate Digital Marketing
Real estate thrives on relationships. Throughout those relationships, there'll be plenty of times when you need to influence the other person to take the right step – whether that means signing up as a customer or doing what they need to do to move their transaction forward.
Nobody wants to be "that guy," the pushy salesman only out to make a sale.
Luckily, you don't have to be. There's been a big pivot in marketing — not only in real estate but in many other spheres — to make it more friendly and accommodating to the potential customer. It starts with sincere respect for the other person's time, attention, and intelligence.
It wasn't long ago when businesses of all kinds were making hundreds of calls a day to look for potential clients. Those days are over. Customers now have all the information they need at their fingertips, and they're less likely to take unsolicited calls.
As a result, real estate experts are shifting their focus to digital marketing.
The heart of good digital marketing is to solve problems and respond to questions your ideal customer already has. Marketing technology doesn't replace the human element but enhances it, ensuring you can consistently deliver valuable communications to clients and leads based on their own interests.
That fosters the all-important trust that enables leads to become customers. And only digital marketing ensures you're there every step of the way, even if takes weeks or months for the customer to dive in.
Let's look at some great ways to make your marketing more humane and approachable:
Contact us to learn more about digital marketing in real estate.
This September, Delta Media Group® will launch DeltaNET 7, a new technology leveraging automation and artificial intelligence. DeltaNET 7 will be "the most customizable, most automated all-in-one platform in the marketplace."
"We will be launching the easiest-to-use, most automated CRM solution — and more importantly the deepest customization available — to give brokerages their own all-in-one platform that they control, making it completely unique from what their competitors are using," says CEO and owner of Delta Media Group, Michael Minard.
With DeltaNET 7, real estate brokerage customers will be able to create their own platform with individually customized branding and feature options, allowing them to have complete control over design and navigation.
One special feature that will be available with DeltaNET 7 is a way that brokerages can design specific "roles" to deliver a personalized experience for each agent, based on the specific tools they use. DeltaNET 7 also offers a mobile-centric and customizable workflow, eliminating "endless scrolling." And it allows you to create specific training courses for your platform through Delta Academy.
In addition, DeltaNET 7 is completely integrated with Delta Websites, which features patent-pending SEO, the Delta Academy training system, and a full catalog of digital marketing tools — including Ad Wizard, Local Showings, Properties in Motion, and Open House Connector.
"With DeltaNET 7, our highly successful integrations, automation, and artificial intelligence will be enabled by default. So instead of asking real estate brokerages what tech tools they want to feature, we will be coming to them with a data-driven success model giving them the ability to choose what they want to customize," says Minard. "This will help firms do more business in less time, utilizing data analytics that only the largest technology firms can provide."
The customizable technology will also introduce Delta Pitch, a new "two-click" Comparative Market Analysis tool. With this tool, when an agent enters a property address, the system automatically pulls all the data it needs to create a digital CMA, offering a "flip book" for agents to share with their clients. Delta Pitch then allows agents to automatically launch a Zoom video call to share and review the CMA with their client, making marketing presentations a very simple process for agents.
To learn more about how DeltaNET 7 will streamline your workflow and boost productivity, contact our team today.