How to Create a Real Estate Lead Generation Plan: 7 Steps

If you want to succeed in real estate, you can’t wait for leads to find you online. You need to develop a solid marketing plan with specific steps and detailed strategies that will attract qualified real estate leads. If this sounds like an overwhelming task, you can stop worrying: we’ve got you covered. It takes just seven steps to create a real estate lead generation plan that will attract traffic and convert them into qualified leads for your real estate business:

Start with a branded real estate website

A branded website serves as the heart of your real estate lead generation plan. Make sure your website includes these several key elements in order to generate leads:

• Attractive, branding design – featuring logo, recognizable style and color
• Responsive, mobile friendly design elements
• Fully integrated IDX solution
• Neighborhood sections for local SEO

Gain high visibility through a real estate SEO strategy

To compete with Zillow, Homes.com, and the other real estate directories, realtors need a powerful SEO strategy that will help drive traffic to their website from home buyers and sellers. Your real estate SEO strategy will help generate leads using:

• Keyword research to find the words and phrases used in real estate searches
• Mobile optimization using long-tail phrases used in verbal searches
• Optimize for local and hyper-local search terms
• Perform SEO audit to ensure entire website and content is optimized for best performance
• Carry SEO strategies to all content and social strategies

Use content marketing to drive traffic to your site

Interesting, relevant content is the best way to attract home buyers and sellers to your website. Use SEO-copywriting to make sure your content ranks high in search results to attract more traffic to your website. Develop a real estate content editorial calendar that includes:

• Real estate blogging, with one or two posts each week that address the latest real estate trends and topics to interest home buyers and sellers
• “How To” lists, checklists, neighborhood comparisons, and other info to use for gated content
• Video marketing in the form of walk-throughs of local neighborhood tours, agent introductions, and real estate “how to” videos
• Information on school districts, demographics, and insights into local neighborhoods

Nurture leads through social media marketing

Establishing a lively presence on social media networks will help you keep contacts engaged so you can nurture them into qualified real estate leads. This is critical for any real estate lead generation plan, since leads typically take as long as eight weeks from initial contact to purchase. Your social media marketing plan should include:

• Several posts to each of your social networks every day
• Links from posts to your blogs and other content to drive traffic to your website
• Use video clips, photos, and hashtags to increase engagement
• Use a social media management service to post at optimum times throughout the day

Implement an email marketing strategy to generate referrals

Email should play a feature role in any lead generation plan for real estate, because it gives you a friendly, non-invasive way to stay in touch with your clients. Remaining top of mind with clients after the home sale helps generate referrals, which remain the top way that most people find a real estate agent.

• Send a monthly or bi-weekly email newsletter, with two or three versions sent to a segmented subscriber list
• Emails should be mobile optimized and easily sharable, so subscribers can forward the emails to others, generating more leads for you
• Each email should include a powerful headline and forceful CTA (call to action)

Use dedicated landing pages and dynamic lead generation forms to convert traffic to leads

Potential real estate leads are often lost when lead generation strategies take them to a generic home page. These contacts don’t want to go hunting through your site to find the info that they were expecting. They certainly don’t want to waste their time filling out forms with unnecessary questions. In order to successfully turn traffic into leads, every realtors lead gen plan should include:

• Specially designed landing pages linked to each email
• Dynamic lead generation forms that get just the info you need
• Powerful CTAs that help to generate more leads
• Expert form placement to increase engagement

Use analytics to measure results and refine strategies

Analytics is the final step in your real estate lead generation plan. Using a variety of real time analytic tools, assess your real estate marketing strategies’ effectiveness. Look at:

• Check page bounce rate
• Exit information
• What drives traffic to your website and other traffic info
• Refine your real estate generation strategies to make them more effective 
  

If you would like help developing a real estate lead generation plan, you can always turn to For Sale Marketing. We can provide you with everything you need to make your real estate marketing strategies more effective at generating leads, including a responsive real estate web design that includes dynamic lead generating real estate forms, SEO-copywriting and content creation services, email and social media marketing packages, email newsletters with landing pages, and more.

Contact us at For Sale Marketing today at 954-866-1115 for complete real estate lead generation services designed to help realtors drive more traffic and convert more leads!