Lead Generation for Real Estate Investors – Create your list

By: Frank DePino | September 3, 2020

In real estate investment, lead generation equates to growth in profits. Putting in the initial effort to develop a lead generating plan will keep you on track no matter the changing atmosphere of the real estate industry. 

Building a plan around growing brand awareness and trust, connecting with your target audience, creating specific offers, and monetizing ads ensures a better chance at securing worth-while listings for a higher return on investment. 

The following best practices takes you through the steps of lead generation for real estate investors:

• Brand Awareness Build Brand Trust
• Finding Your Target Demographic
• Opt in Offers to Convert Website Users
• Utilizing Paid Advertisements to Drive Conversions

Brand Awareness Builds Brand Trust

In today’s world, no matter the industry, brand awareness and trust goes a long way. Having a digital identity keeps your audience informed, grows connections, and keeps your firm at the forefront of the industry. 

Building an online brand awareness helps establish real life word of mouth referrals, which in return, positions your business as trustworthy. 

As most people value their friends’ opinions and feedback, an online presence that highlights the qualities of your work ensures a higher likeliness for your company to be referred by clients and colleagues over other companies. 

The best ways to grow your digital identity:

• Creating and maintaining a website
• Setting up a social media presence
• Informing your audience through blog posts and other educational content. 

In addition to the above, finding other ways to boost your brand is equally important. According to The Muse article 4 Easy Ways to Boost Your Brand, hosting focus groups, delivering new and fresh content, practicing public relations, and participating in industry events and outreach supplements your brand’s recognition.  

Creating and maintaining a website starts with designing a straightforward and clean layout that draws a consumer’s attention but makes it easy for them to navigate. 

A clean, sophisticated look will grab the customer’s attention, but the content and easy navigation will make them more willing to look at your website longer. As with any successful lead generation for real estate investors, you need to understand what your clients want.

Utilizing additional social media platforms gives your brand the personality behind the business. This allows you to connect and respond, making your firm more personable and efficient. Social media marketing is equal in allowing your firm to seek out business as well as customers seeking you out in return.

The four major social media platforms vital for a company to use are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. 

use each social media platform for a different purpose:

• Facebook – is where you can share your long-form content and videos to target your consumer. The more engagement you get through shares, likes, and comments, the more you will appear on your consumer’s timeline ensuring that you are being seen and connected with. 
• Instagram should be used to reinforce your brand and connect with other brands. This platform creates your overall look and feel while simultaneously engaging with your target audience. 
• Twitter –  is for shorter form content and can be quicker fact bytes. This can be anything from polls to statistics. Twitter’s algorithm incorporates the hashtag, which makes it easier for you to find customers and for customers to find you. 
• LinkedIn – is the Facebook for businesses and networking. While Facebook allows you to connect with a wider variety of people, LinkedIn is beneficial because those on LinkedIn are already looking for companies for a specific purpose. With LinkedIn you can find customers, employees, and industry allies. 

What you should know about social media platforms

Within each platform, you can drive traffic back to your website by always including a link to your website in your bio. While you will use each platform in different ways, there should still be a seamlessness involved that connects back to your main goal: generating leads. 

Another useful aspect incorporated within having a digital presence is sharing informational material about your company and industry, whether this be through a blog or Youtube videos. Having industry leaders and employees share their knowledge shows the caliber and quality of your firm – which is essential in lead generation for real estate investors.

People will want to listen to you, and people will want your help because your company becomes a resource. 

While you blend the strategies of creating a website, social media presence, and informative material, maintaining a steady brand across all platforms is key. Having a logo, motto, and overall theme for your company is essential for your brand to be remembered. 

Start increasing you lead generation by continually connecting to your digital audience. Your online presence establishes your brand as a leader in the industry pushing buyers and sellers to trust and engage your firm for business. 

Finding Your Target Demographic

As a real estate investor, there are many markets you can choose to enter: commercial, residential, fix and flips, vacation rentals, etc. With each, comes a different clientele, which is why you need to research your target audience and tailor towards them. 

A good method to do this is by building personas; create 4-5 “people” who would be your client and list out their characteristics, personality traits, and demographics. This way you can take your personas into real life since you will know the general kind of person to target.

It is important to tailor each of your social platforms to your clientele as well. 

For example, if you are searching for leads in a city versus a more rural town, you can input certain parameters to reach those audiences. Within a city, your look might feel more upscale, but in a town, your look might feel more community oriented. This is the same as differentiating between commercial real estate versus fix and flips. 

After defining your ideal client, it will be easier to generate leads for your real estate firm because the language and strategies are tailored surrounding who will be most likely to need your investment.

Opt-In Offers to Convert Website Users

How you advise your client directly relates to a higher lead generation for your firm; therefore, another technique is preparing informational materials that can supply your customer with what you have to offer.

The informational material given to the customers will help them realize the worth of your expertise. The client then understands your firm’s commitment to their needs and will want to engage in business with you. 

Specific free tools and resources you can provide range from whitepapers to guide books on how to start the listing process and finding the right investor for your property. 

You can also offer counseling as a way to start the initial conversation with a client to show them that they will benefit from your services and create a partnership to gain the best outcome.

These offers can be tangible pamphlets or flyers in addition to digital sign-ups to get materials straight to a consumer’ email inbox, reinforcing you are the resource they need. 

The whole goal of opt-in offers is to market your brand as a resource to gain business for your firm.  Offering guides and materials for transforming your websites into tangible sales is an example of how you can provide for your customer ensuring they turn to you for direction, recommendations, and real estate investment assistance. 

Specific resources you can provide to your client include home selling counseling, budget navigation, or funding approval tips. All in all, it’s about connecting with your client and asking the right questions to find out their needs.

Once they trust that your main goal is to build a hands-on relationship with them, it paves the way to move business into a steadfast direction that will bring the best deal for both you and your client. 

Utilizing Paid Advertisements to Drive Conversions

One of the most important strategies to consider when looking to improve lead generation for real estate investors is paid advertisements. Once you have your website, social media platforms, target audience, and opt-in offers laid out, the next step is promotion of your assets. The best way to promote in today’s business world is through digital advertising. 

Digital advertising can take the form of:

• Social Ads
• Google Ads and Google Display Ads
• Remarketing Ads

Social Ads: 

With most social media platforms, you can create posts and boost them for an affordable price, and the return on investment goes a lot further since you are able to tailor the audience who sees your posts. 

Platforms have built in marketing techniques to narrow down your target audiences based upon certain characteristics and demographics. That way, when someone you want to reach, is scrolling through their Instagram or Facebook, your ad will be incorporated seamlessly into their feed. 

If you research the benefits of paid advertising, you will find that you can get much more business and generate many more leads. Medium’s article 7 Reasons to Consider Paid Social Media Advertising state the biggest takeaways of using paid advertising are:

1. Amplify your reach
2. Fit your budget
3. Enhance your targeting
4. Boost brand awareness
5. Maximize your content marketing
6. Gain access to mobile users
7. Gather market insights

Google Ads:

The most effective digital advertising method to promote lead generation for real estate investors is using Google ads and display ads. Preparing the right combination of ad spending with keywords can help make sure your ad appears at the top of the list when someone searches for specific words related to your business. 

You get to choose the keywords when you design your campaign. So, you need to choose the most relatable words within your ad that you think will match up with what your target audience is searching. 

In terms of cost, you are only charged per click on your ad since Google Ads is run on an auction basis. How much you are willing to spend factors into the ad auction and where your ad will rank on a google search page. 

Google ads best practice list highlights how picking relevant choice of words for your ad, creating an ad that is high quality, setting an adequate maximum bid, and adjusting your spending based on analysis of ad performance and goal tracking is the best recipe for digital advertising campaigns. 

Google Display allows your ad to be shown in other places such as YouTube or similar, related websites. You can factor in your target audience, so that your ad will appear where your audience uses the internet the most. 

Remarketing:

Remarketing is helpful for continual brand awareness and marketing of your website. If someone has previously visited your site, you can strategically target this person by placing ads on their Google pages and partner websites. Remarketing is beneficial because it is easy to use, reaches a larger scale, and is focused advertising.

A few methods for remarketing are:

• Show ads to past website visitors as they browse other sites
• Display ads to visitors if they search for a related sites, keywords after they leave your website
• Show ads to visitors if they are watching your or similar YouTube videos
• Display ads to past customers based on certain info the customers have provided you. 

Overall, there are many techniques that effectively help you with your digital advertising needs. Digital advertising initiates a direct-to-consumer outcome since utilizing a combination of the above strategies helps your firm analyze which type of ads and platforms work best for your business. 

You’re ready to find leads!

Now that you have the best methods for lead generation for real estate investors, you can put them into practice. It all starts with curating a brand that speaks to the goals and methodology of your company. Building the brand through a digital and online presence via websites, social media, and informational material demonstrates your forward thinking and leadership driven qualities to build the trust and relationship dynamic between you and your client. 

Contact now Mediaboom to boost your lead generation for real estate investors.

By: Frank DePino

Frank DePino is Principal and Founder of Mediaboom. Since 2002, Frank has led Mediaboom’s award-winning staff of creative and technical professionals, building the most effective marketing and advertising solutions for its clients.