What is the best way to generate real estate leads?

Qualified Sales Leads form the foundation for any real estate company because without consistent, high-quality leads, your brokerage is essentially non-existent. Of course, you can generate some form of revenue by optimising your marketing efforts and customer retention, however, you will only be scratching the surface and not achieving your company's true revenue potential.  In order for your real estate business to stand the test of time, you need to ensure a consistent and healthy pipeline of leads, and your leads are only as good as they are managed.

In this article we take a deep dive into the importance of lead generation, lead nurturing and lead management for the real estate industry. 

Before we dive into how you can successfully nurture and manage your leads, let’s take a look at what a lead is, and how you can attract leads through your real estate digital marketing efforts. 

Defining a Real Estate Lead

To put it simply, a lead can be defined as an organisation or individual that has shown interest in purchasing what your business is selling. In the context of real estate, a lead is someone who has shown interest in what your real estate business is offering, this could be an individual homebuyer, investor, or interested organisation - and more.

Real estate leads are sourced from a variety of channels including:

• Word-of-mouth & referrals from past clients
• Networking and open houses
• Social Media Marketing
• Search Engine Optimised (SEO) content
• Search Engine Optimised (SEO) websites
• Listings

However, it is important that you put together a strong digital marketing strategy to ensure you reach high quality leads. You don’t want to spread your net too wide - you want to find individuals who fit your target audience and are likely to convert into loyal customers. 

Generating Real Estate Leads with Digital Marketing

Real estate lead generation consists of identifying your target audience and buyer persona, finding high quality leads through digital marketing and nurturing leads with inbound marketing (including email campaigns, content creation and remarketing strategies.) 

Below, we take a deeper look at how you can use digital marketing and digital marketing tools to better your real estate lead generation efforts.

• Audience Expansion: Audience expansion helps your marketing team reach your target audience in a goal-based and simple way. This is done by creating online ads that reach your target audience. Through audience expansion, you are able to reach more high quality prospects and achieve your marketing goals. For example, if your real estate campaign is targeting successful CEOs or business owners, you are able to expand your audience members to individuals who list their job title as “CEO” or “Business Owner” on their social media profiles.  You are also able to apply audience expansion to Google Ads by reaching individuals who are actively searching for what your real estate business is offering online. Through this tactic you are able to reach high quality prospects and drive them through your marketing funnel.
   
• Develop a User Friendly and Optimised Website: It is vital that you create a website for your real estate business that is easy to navigate and easy to use. With so many links and images, a real estate website can quickly become a user's nightmare. However, by working with a professional website designer and developer, you can create a responsive website that is well optimised for search engines and user experience. Make sure that your website is made up of content that will guide the user through the entire real estate buying process and implement a live chat feature on your website to ensure the user is able to get the answers they require quickly and easily - this also allows them to set up appointments with your agents without having to take any extra steps such as making a call or sending through an email.
    
• Social Media Marketing: Social Media is one of the most effective ways for real estate agents to connect with potential buyers as well as investors. However, it is important that your marketing team use social media strategically. In order to create a successful social media marketing campaign, your team needs to understand your buyer persona, define your goals, identify the right social media channels for your audience, distribute relevant and helpful content across these channels, and analyse and measure campaign performance. Social media also allows you to create campaigns targeted to specific audiences based on location, income, likes and dislikes, online behaviour etc. It is these highly targeted social media campaigns that ensure you attract only the highest quality leads - saving your sales team time and resources.
   
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Also known as PPC, Pay-Per-Click advertising is a powerful strategy for real estate agents or organisations looking to generate high quality leads. This tactic ensures that your website or landing pages attract individuals who are genuinely seeking your services through search engines such as Google. Essentially, PPC ads are aimed at individuals who are actively searching for keywords associated with your business and offering. This means you are able to reach the right audience, at the right time.
   
• Search Engine Optimisation: Search Engine Optimisation is vital in driving leads to your website. When implemented correctly, your SEO efforts will drive your website and related website pages up higher in the search engine results. This means that a user who is actively seeking your offering will find your website with ease. SEO is made up of a number of elements, from off-page optimisation to on-page optimisation and this is why it is important that you work with a SEO specialist to ensure a successful result.
   

• Content Creation and Distribution: Websites that come complete with informative blogs not only help in your Search Engine Optimisation efforts (allowing your website to rank higher in the Google search results), they establish your business as an industry thought leader and build trust between your business and potential clients. Essentially, if you are unable to provide your target audience with the information they require - why should they trust you and your offerings? Through strong and valuable content you nurture relationships which drives leads through the buying cycle, helping convert them into clients.

The above digital marketing tactics will help your marketing team source relevant leads and store their information in a database, allowing for remarketing campaigns and personalised email messaging. However, these leads are only as good as they are managed and this is why it is important that real estate companies invest in digital transformation technology that allows for easy lead management, lead nurturing and conversion. 

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool forms the foundation of digital transformation for any business, including those in the real estate space. Essentially, a CRM allows businesses to create more meaningful and profitable relationships with leads, current customers, colleagues, partners and suppliers and this is vital for real estate success.

Introducing HubSpot CRM

HubSpot is an advanced inbound marketing software that has helped businesses in a variety of industries across the globe, but what can HubSpot do for your real estate company?

Above we outlined what digital marketing tactics work best for lead generation in the real estate industry and below we will outline why HubSpot CRM is the ideal platform to help you with your inbound marketing, lead nurturing and lead management needs. 

HubSpot for Lead Generation:

• Marketing Integration: HubSpot integrates with all your marketing efforts, from social media campaigns and blogging to website creation and content distribution. As your marketing team is able to run, manage, and analyse all your digital marketing campaigns through the software, they have all the tools they need to attract and engage potential and current customers.

• Lead Tracking: HubSpot is able to collect and organise all the contact information of your leads and your current customers in order to track their online behavior and communication with your business in real-time. This is a feature that allows you to fully customise your marketing campaigns to specific leads and clients. An example of this is that with HubSpot you are able to view what website pages a prospective lead has visited and through this you are able to determine what it is they are looking for which in turn, allows you to customise your inbound marketing communication with a specific lead. This kind of tracking allows you to see how far along they are in the buying cycle - which allows you to tailor your messaging accordingly and drive them further through the buying process.

• Customer & Lead Database Management: As stated previously, the HubSpot CRM will collect and organise your prospect and client data including their personal details as well as their interactions with your business. With this information your sales team and marketing team can easily access any information they require, even at a moment's notice and this is particularly helpful for your sales team as having this information on hand at all times makes it easier to nurture and convert leads.
   
• Email Automation: Through HubSpot you are able to customise and automate emails. This means you are able to segment your prospects and your clients to ensure they receive only the most relevant emails, suited to what they are looking for and where they are in the buyer’s journey. Not only can you automate these emails, you can automate personalised responses to common inquiries.
   
• Sales and Marketing Alignment: As stated previously, HubSpot CRM collects and organises your prospective and current client data including their personal details as well as their interaction and engagement with your business and online platforms. With this information, your marketing and sales teams can easily access any information they require - at a moments notice. Your sales agents will benefit from this as they have all the information they require on individual leads - making it easier to nurture individual relationships and convert leads into customers. 

Generate Quality Leads through HubSpot CRM

Today, inbound and integrated digital marketing is a vital part of real estate business success and HubSpot provides all the tools needed for this. Through this platform you will improve your ability to generate and convert leads, nurture relationships with prospects and clients, give your sales team a structured industry-friendly platform to manage their sales activity.

Nexa is proud to be a Diamond-tiered HubSpot Partner and this places us in the top 2% of HubSpot Partners globally.

Also check out this specialist Real Estate and HubSpot website for more information and case studies of how HubSpot has helped Real Estate businesses to efficiently generate more qualified leads and close more deals.

If you are interested in implementing HubSpot for your real estate business, our HubSpot development team has experience integrating HubSpot's CRM with a number of platforms that can increase the efficiency and data access for your business.  In fact HubSpot integrates with over 500 other software titles to help your team streamline activities and in doing so increase efficiency and productivity. Contact us today for more information and to learn more about our offerings.