Marketing Tips for Real Estate Success, Part 2

In the second part of our recap of our webinar with Gordon Platt of Gotham Media Strategies, we cover how to use online advertising to drive interest in your listings.

QuantumListing recently conducted a webinar on Marketing Tips for Real Estate Success with Gordon Platt, the founder and CEO of Gotham Media, a marketing and content production company. Gordon started his career as a lawyer, and then went on to become a television producer at ABC news before starting his own production company, Gotham Media, which has evolved into an events company mostly centered on technology and media, where they specialize in marketing and advertising. To learn more about marketing and mass e-mail tips, read part one in this two-part blog series, click here.

Where to Advertise Your Real Estate on Social Media

With today’s ever-growing presence of technology, many may ask if we should continue with our traditional forms of advertising.

Gordon says that real estate brokers should still use signs, email blasts,and brochures, but the greatest and most underexplored opportunity is social media, both organic (free) and paid advertising. He advises though, that when you find an online marketing strategy that works, don’t forget to continue with what has worked in the past too. Many people make the mistake of choosing one method over the other, but we need both old and new strategies in order to give ourselves an edge in the industry.

So how do we choose what social media to try? Play around with different social media platforms for commercial real estate marketing. LinkedIn is extremely effective for CRE because it’s a commercial market place and is a great way to reach people through a professional capacity. You can combine traditional email marketing with LinkedIn research in order to create a database for email blasts. LinkedIn also allows you to publish direct blog posts on the platform. The advantage of LinkedIn is there is more business-focused traffic and a larger variety of people within your target audience.

The greater your presence on social media platforms, the higher up your presence on Google searches. The second page of a Google search is like the graveyard, no one will look at it.

REMINDER: You can share your profile and listings easily from QuantumListing to all your social media

Remember, it’s called social for a reason. Social media platforms are meant to engage so it’s important to interact with colleagues, peers, and potential customers by liking, commenting, or direct messaging.. If someone signs up for your event, connect with them on LinkedIn with a brief message. Or put polls up; even if it’s not related to real estate, you are still engaging!

Social Media 2.0: You can start to aggregate email addresses by adding a premium if people sign up, and then send them a certificate or swag. It’s ALL ABOUT DATA. Who’s responding to your emails, clicking the links, etc? Great resources to get someone’s email address are GetEmail.io and RocketReach

ADVERTISING

Advertising is important because when you advertise your listings, your entries can come up on the front page, regardless of whether you are organically located. It could take a year to start moving to the top of Google searches, so you should start with advertising.

Research is based on keywords, which are the specific words people are typing to find businesses like yours. Finding these keywords and budgeting is time consuming so you may want to hire for this; otherwise, the efforts could take away from your core business.

You can also purchase ads on LinkedIn and increasingly target your audience. When you do this, you are paying for clicks not views, which means there’s a pretty good chance someone is very serious if they click on a link. It is cost-effective to generate leads through social media advertising. Facebook and LinkedIn are a little easier since they walk you through the process, but you can target ads better on Facebook than LinkedIn.

Budgeting?$?$

It can be difficult to figure out how to budget for these ads. Platt advises that once you start appearing in searches organically, you can begin taking dollars away.

In general, budgets vary market to market, but, best to start relatively low and experiment. You can get out anytime if you change your mind.

COMING SOON: QuantumListing Lead Capture and Ad features - stay tuned next week!

Final Words of Wisdom on Websites:

Your website is how people judge you: “you don’t have a second chance to make a first impression.” Even if you aren’t selling anything on your website, it’s still the first thing people check out about your business.
Keep things up to date: This is true for everyone, but especially if you have a blog. It’s better not to have a blog than to have an outdated one.
Treat LinkedIn like a website: Even if you don’t have a website, you should treat LinkedIn like one. Have a professional picture, different than your Facebook photo. It is, after all, the largest commercial real estate network.