The real estate digital marketing landscape has changed significantly in the last few years.

Skyrocketing costs across all paid-ad platforms have pushed many agencies to rethink whether this is the soundest investment for their marketing budget.

Other online marketing strategies, like content marketing and social media advertising, can be quite effective, but require a significant investment of both time and money.

Any marketing strategy will require budget to be successful, but real estate agencies need to be certain they’re getting the most ROI from their efforts.

The only way to effectively measure ROI is to set up detailed tracking across all of marketing channels, and then adjust your real estate digital marketing strategy accordingly.

Here’s guidance on how to achieve the leanest, most effective marketing strategy for your real estate business in 2023 and beyond.

Understanding Your Local Social Media Landscape

Many businesses use social media to cast a wide net and reach as large of an audience as possible. But when it comes to real estate digital marketing, social media provides the opportunity to build deep connections with your localized audience.

Researching Popular Social Channels Used By Your Community

The first step is to find out where your intended audience is spending most of their time on social media. This can vary greatly depending on the area you service and audience you target, so you’ll need to analyze market trends and potentially survey your local community to find out more.

Certain platforms allow you to interact on a local level without any investment required. The platform NextDoor is a great place to start, or you can join and become active in local Facebook groups. Try using the Instagram Explore feature or searching local hashtags to learn more about active users in your area.

Building Relationships

Once you’ve gotten a good idea of where potential property buyers/sellers in your area are congregating online, it’s time to start building connections and boosting your brand recognition.

This can only be achieved if you have already established a consistent brand image and tone of voice—if you haven’t, you may want to invest some of your marketing spend to finalize these details.

From there, you can work with local businesses to grow your brand footprint, and begin engaging with your target audience on social media through comments and direct messaging.

The Tailored Content Marketing Approach

Content marketing has long been one of the most effective marketing strategies for real estate companies—when it’s done correctly.Your focus must be finding ways to stand out to your local audience, and show them you are an expert and trusted resource for your area.

Creating Localized Content

When generating content concepts, research what’s going on in your area and what might appeal to your audience. You can publish blog articles about local attractions in the region or produce quarterly reports about the housing market, for example.

Think about who your audience is and what they want. If you’re targeting young parents, for example, you could create content around the schools in your local area. If you’re selling property to young adults in a big city, you may instead focus on creating content around local restaurants and conveniences.

Utilizing Different Content Formats

To truly succeed with content marketing, you need to test different types of content to see what resonates most with your audience. Long-form, informative blog posts can help reach customers using Google to perform research, while other folks in your target audience may prefer to watch videos showcasing properties and neighborhoods.

Test out various delivery methods as well. Promote your content on social media, and repurpose it for email marketing. Track the results of all these campaigns and see what works best for your audience.

Establishing Yourself as a Local Online Resource

The cornerstone of any good real estate digital marketing plan can be summed up in one word: Trust. Your audience wants to know that you are truly an expert in their neighborhood, and that you have their best interests in mind when working with them.

Establishing Expertise

Trust and expertise are inextricably linked. By demonstrating that you are the true experts in your region, potential leads will come to see you as a trusted resource. You can do this by making sure your website is always up to date, and frequently sharing local property news and insights on your blog and social media channels.

Offline, you can attend local events and greet attendees, or partner with various businesses or community initiatives to expand your reach and visibility within your locality.

Providing Valuable Resources

One of the best ways to become known as an expert in your area is to provide your community with valuable resources that they’ll need again and again. This could be property reports that you publish on a regular basis, or updates about community goings-on.

Your website can also become a place that people return to frequently to explore properties for sale in the area—but for this to work, you must consistently be updating your website.

Virtual Home Tours

There’s no doubt that virtual home tours are some of the most powerful lead generation tactics for real estate agents. They’re particularly useful for people who live outside of the area but are considering moving, or when folks are simply too busy to make it to an in-person showing.

User-Friendly Website

If you want to make the most of virtual home tours, then you should devote some of your resources to ensure your website is able to provide a smooth user experience.

Virtual tours should be easy to find on your site, browse through, and share. Be sure you have clear calls-to-action for customers, so they can quickly and easily apply for more information.

Lead Generation and Conversion

When using virtual home tours to generate and convert leads, be sure you have form tracking set up. This will give you insights into which of your virtual tours are the most compelling for your audience, so you can adjust all your tours to meet the highest standard, maximizing conversions across the board.

Effectively Tracking Your Marketing Campaigns

Before you decide on your real estate marketing strategy, it’s vital that you have everything in place to track your marketing campaigns in detail.

A tool like CallRail can help you get a deep understanding of how effective the channels you use are, whether you’re an independent agent or managing a national real estate enterprise. Here’s how:

Call Tracking

One of the key metrics real estate companies measure is inbound calls. With call tracking software, agencies can assign different phone numbers to their various marketing campaigns, making it easy to see which strategies are driving inbound leads.

Beyond that, CallRail automatically records and transcribes calls, then analyzes the different sales tactics representatives use to convert callers into clients so you can maximize performance across the team.

Form Tracking

Real estate agencies also rely on their website to bring in new leads, and CallRail can help assess which of your digital campaigns are pulling in leads through form tracking.

Within a single dashboard, CallRail users can see which forms on their landing pages or virtual tour pages are responsible for the most inquiries, making it easy to optimize conversions throughout the site.

Measuring Campaign Success with CallRail

If you want the most comprehensive insights on your real estate agent marketing strategy, then CallRail is the right tool for you.

CallRail’s tracking software is so easy to set up, it can typically be done in just a few minutes. And as soon as it’s live, it will begin tracking the volume and source of phone calls and forms as they come in, giving your marketing team valuable information about which strategies are working best, and which ones need to be optimized.

The software helps you optimize your campaigns as well, by analyzing call data (including transcripts of actual calls) to find easy to improve your conversion funnel. You’ll easily be able to refine your campaigns for improved performance and ROI.

Ready to find out what insights CallRail can unlock for your real estate agency? Try CallRail for free.