With more than 1.6 million realtors in the US housing market, you have to put extra efforts into your marketing plan and come up with extraordinary strategies to stand out from the competition.
This article offers 33 proven realtor marketing ideas that cover everything from the latest digital trends for real estate agents and brokers, all the way to traditional, conventional, offline strategies.
Table of Contents
- Real Estate Website Marketing Ideas
- SEO Strategies for Realtors
- Social Media Ideas for Realtor Marketing
- Paid Real Estate Advertising Ideas
- Networking and Referrals in Real Estate
- Local Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents
- Offline Marketing Ideas for Realtors
- Growing Your Business with the Best Realtor Marketing Ideas
Real Estate Website Marketing Ideas
Apply these realtor website marketing ideas to boost your online presence
Building a real estate website must be the first step in the marketing strategy of any realtor who wants to be competitive in the coming years. With the accelerated growth of the online space, having your own IDX website is a must for every real estate agent and broker.
In case you have any doubts about the importance of your online presence, keep in mind that based on data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 41% of home buyers search for homes for sale on the internet as the first step in their home buying journey.
1. Launch an IDX Website
While starting your own website is obligatory, this doesn’t have to take too much time and financial resources. Until recently, realtors had to hire a team of software developers in order to help them build their dedicated real estate website, optimize it for search engines, and make it work on both desktop and mobile devices.
Now, agents and brokers can easily, quickly, and efficiently launch their website with the Mashvisor real estate website builder. This is an online tool that allows realtors to build an IDX website to show their MLS listings to an online audience with zero coding skills and no software experience.
All that’s required is to follow these steps:
- Enter your website domain name.
- Select a real estate website template.
- Add the necessary information and details for the chosen design template.
- Integrate with the IDX by entering your IDX feed into the Mashvisor system to import your MLS listings into your website.
- Create and customize additional content, such as an About page or a blog.
- Preview your website and test functionality.
- Update the DNS records on your existing domain (if you already have a website).
- Launch your brand new real estate website.
As soon as you launch your website, you can start driving traffic to your MLS listings and attracting new clients.
To get your website up and running in no time, sign up for Mashvisor now.
2. Start a Real Estate Blog
Having a website as a realtor is a must, but it’s not usually enough to generate leads and convert them into customers. With so many agents and brokers in your local market, you need to do everything possible to attract more traffic to your website and showcase your expertise to more people.
One super efficient way to prove your knowledge and solidify your online reputation is to launch a blog. A real estate blog serves as a virtual platform for realtors to demonstrate both their expertise in the process of buying and selling real estate properties and also their knowledge of the local market.
You can publish a wide range of articles where you provide homeowners and real estate investors with actionable tips on how to choose the best property, navigate the financing process, get qualified for a mortgage, obtain the best price, and buy a new home without the typical stress associated with the process. Moreover, you can highlight the benefits of the local housing market and introduce them to any peculiarities they need to be aware of before making your area their new home.
The knowledge that you share on your blog will build trust in potential home buyers and home sellers and make them choose you over other agents in the area.
3. Build an Online Real Estate Forum
In addition to a blog, another realtor marketing idea that has proven successful over the years is starting a forum. This is a dedicated space on your IDX website where you help homeowners and real estate investors find answers to the most pressing questions they face when buying or selling properties.
A real estate forum allows home buyers and home sellers to post their questions so that other homeowners, real estate professionals, or you – as the website owner – provide answers and guidance.
Hosting a forum helps agents and brokers in two main ways. First of all, it helps with search engine optimization (to be discussed in detail below) by providing additional unique, ongoing, user-generated, free-of-cost content. Second, it can quickly turn your website into the go-to place for all individuals buying or selling a house or an investment property to get answers to their questions.
4. Keep Your Website Up to Date
For your website to play its role in your real estate marketing strategy, you have to continuously add new content and update existing content. First of all, search engines pay close attention to the relevance and timeliness of your content when ranking your website, so up-to-date content assures that you rank higher in user searches. Second, potential qualified clients need to know that the information and data that you have on your real estate website are current.
Most importantly, the MLS listings that you offer have to always be up-to-date. This is achieved with IDX integration. No home buyer or real estate investor wants to fall in love with a property for sale only to realize that it’s already been purchased by someone else. Moreover, additional data like real estate analysis and trends have also to be current in order to solidify your online reputation.
5. Incorporate Investment Analysis Into Your Listings
One of the unique realtor marketing ideas that not many agents and brokers apply but that has a high ROI potential is to include investment property analysis with the MLS listings on your website. In this way, you can attract investor clients – instead of homeowners – and working with investors is a surefire way to get repeat customers and grow your real estate business.
Unlike homeowners who spend a few decades in the same home, rental property investors can buy multiple properties per year, as long as they see profitable opportunities. And integrating rental property analysis into your pages will help draw potential investor clients attention to your listings.
While adding analysis to every single listing might sound like a lot of work, the Mashvisor real estate website builder does this automatically. We will provide short term and long term rental property analysis for every MLS listing on your website so that investors can see what rental income, rental expenses, occupancy rate, and cap rate they can expect. The analysis is based on the performance of rental comps in the area, which makes it highly reliable.
6. Make Your Real Estate Website Mobile-Responsive
Last but not least, when building your real estate website, keep in mind that the design and functionalities need to work equally well on desktop and mobile devices. Based on NAR data, 76% of home buyers search for homes for sale on mobile devices like phones and tablets, and the percentage is likely to be similar for real estate investors.
The good news is that the websites built with the help of Mashvisor are fully mobile-responsive, so you don’t have to worry about this aspect of your realtor marketing strategy.
SEO Strategies for Realtors
Another major group of realtor marketing ideas related to your website is capitalizing on the benefits of SEO for realtors. SEO, short for search engine optimization, refers to the strategies and practices you apply to get your website to show as high as possible when potential qualified clients search for related topics on the internet.
7. Make Your Website SEO-Friendly
There are certain technical issues that you need to take care of when building your real estate agent website to make sure it meets the requirements for real estate SEO optimization. For example, you have to choose a relevant website title, url, and web page titles in addition to achieving high speed.
When you use the Mashvisor Real Estate Website Builder, the majority of these technical requirements are provided for. Moreover, our Customer Success team is always available to help you with any questions or concerns you have while launching or maintaining your website.
8. Find the Right Keywords
A key part of the Google search optimization is locating and using the appropriate keywords. As there are many different types of real estate websites, the selection of keywords should be dictated by your niche, your real estate market, and your target clients.
To find the right keywords for your website, you can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and even ChatGPT. Once you’ve identified the best keywords, you need to start using them strategically throughout your content. That’s at the core of content marketing for realtors.
9. Create High-Quality, Educational Content for Your Clients
To further boost the ranking of your IDX website, you should work on some additional content to go along with and support your MLS listings. While having MLS listings is a must for the best real estate agent websites, it does not suffice to drive enough traffic, which translates into attracting qualified leads.
The most straightforward way to publish high-quality content on your website is to start a blog. This will give you a chance to add more content, use the keywords you’ve identified, and show your knowledge of the local market and the real estate business as a whole.
10. Publish Content Regularly
Search engines like Google give priority to realtor websites that have up-to-date content and that continue growing. In the language of digital marketing for real estate agents and brokers, this translates into continuously posting new content on your website.
The IDX integration will take care of updating your MLS listings. Meanwhile, you have to work on regular blog posts that show your expertise in the real estate industry and your experience in the area.
11. Build Backlinks to Your Website
Finally, a major part of SEO for realtors is getting links from other relevant websites to your own website. These are known as backlinks.
Some ideas to get backlinks include building partnerships with other businesses in the property industry, claiming your profile on real estate agent directories, and using specialized services. Getting at least a couple of high-quality backlinks per month should be your goal for your website to really take off.
Social Media Ideas for Realtor Marketing
Social media is an indispensable part of the digital marketing plan of all real estate agents. Here are some social media strategies for realtors that you should implement for maximum results.
12. Focus on a Couple of Social Media Platforms
Many realtors make the rookie mistake of spreading their resources too thin by trying to establish a presence on all social media websites. Instead, it’s much more efficient to focus on 2-3 channels that have the highest potential to generate results.
While you should choose the social media platforms to work on based on your specific niche and capabilities, Instagram and LinkedIn tend to be good choices, generally speaking. Instagram is highly visual, which allows agents to showcase their listings through both photos and videos. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a more professional social media network, which makes it a top choice for realtors who want to work with real estate investors rather than homeowners.
Recently, TikTok has also been gaining popularity in the real estate business, so you can consider this platform too if you are able to make short videos that highlight your expertise and your listings.
13. Master the Art of Making Short Videos
Short videos with a duration of less than one minute have become the norm in social media marketing, and this idea is easily applicable to the real estate industry where visuals are crucial. You can post such videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn and also embed them in content on your website.
The good thing is that short videos are much easier and cheaper to make than videos that last longer. With the help of innovative real estate marketing tools based on AI, you can make your own real estate videos in no time.
14. Use Ready Social Media Templates
Another of the best realtor marketing ideas pertinent to social media is to take advantage of readily available social media post templates. Many websites sell bundles of dozens of ready social media templates where you just need to customize the text and the photo, and you can publish them on your channels. This can facilitate the implementation of your social media marketing strategy while boosting the quality as well.
15. Share Customer Success Stories
For realtors to attract new clients, it’s crucial to highlight the positive experiences of previous customers. And social media is the perfect place to do that. All you have to do is to build a social media post template (or use a readily available one) and continuously share the success stories of your past clients. All you have to do is to ask them for a 2-3 sentence testimonial that discusses their positive experience working with you.
16. Post Regularly
Similar to your realtor website, you need to publish new content on a regular basis for your social media presence to take off. You can share your MLS listings, blog posts, and customer testimonials as well as recent trends in the local real estate market for diverse content that never ends. Content repurposing is key for optimizing your realtor marketing strategy.
Email Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Marketing
With the advancement of technology, email marketing for real estate agents has largely replaced the more traditional mail strategies. You can take advantage of this trend by following these tips:
17. Use Your Website to Build an Email List
When launching your website, add a field where users can enter their name and email address to receive updates from you. This will help you build a solid email list with qualified prospects over time. After all, for your email marketing strategy to work, you need qualified leads to send campaigns to.
18. Share Content from Your Realtor Website
You can use a lot of the content available on your website in your email marketing campaigns. For example, you can email new listings to leads interested in the corresponding area and property type. You can also send new blog posts via email to clients who have opted in for this type of update.
19. Start an Email Newsletter
Another realtor marketing idea related to email marketing is to build an email newsletter. You can use one of the templates that comes with most email marketing tools and simply customize to your brand. In terms of content, you can use the articles that you publish on your website, add a short introduction that covers the current state of the local real estate market, and you are good to go.
20. Time Your Email Marketing Campaigns Right
With email marketing for realtors, it’s important to send out campaigns at the right time. You need to figure out the days of the week and the times of the day when your target customers are available and email them then. Many email marketing platforms suggest the best times to send campaigns using AI, so this should not take much time and effort to figure out.
Paid Real Estate Advertising Ideas
Another group of ideas for real estate digital marketing focuses on paid advertising. Here are a couple of the most effective strategies for realtors:
21. Try Google Ads
Google Ads is the most popular choice for real estate professionals with respect to paid digital marketing. This can be an effective way to boost the performance of the content on your website and attract qualified leads. However, keep in mind that real estate Google Ads tend to be expensive due to the high competition in the industry.
22. Give Social Media Ads a Try
Another one of the proven realtor marketing ideas is promoting your business on social media. If you see that your organic posts are getting traction on any of your selected social media channels, you can give them a further boost with paid ads.
Networking and Referrals in Real Estate
In spite of the exponential growth of digital marketing in real estate, this remains a largely people’s business. Thus, some of the best realtor marketing ideas remain associated with networking and referrals. Following are some top networking tips for real estate brokers:
23. Claim Online Real Estate Agent Profiles
To combine the power of networking in real estate and digital marketing, it’s a smart move to claim and fill in your agent profile on available real estate agent directories. This helps in many different ways, like obtaining backlinks to your website, getting your name out there, generating positive reviews by satisfied customers, and expanding your online presence.
24. Partner with Other Real Estate Professionals
Another step in this part of your real estate agent marketing strategy is establishing partnerships and collaborations with others within the industry. For instance, you can get in touch with residential property management companies so that they refer to you existing clients who want to buy more investment properties and you send to them investors who need property management services. It’s a win-win situation.
25. Reward Clients Who Refer You
Additionally, you can establish a real estate referral program where you reward your existing and past clients for referrals. If they are repeat customers, you can give them a discount on your real estate commission rate. Otherwise, you can reward them with gift vouchers for relevant businesses or a small gift for their new home that they have purchased with your help.
Local Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents
Most realtors focus on a specific market, and it’s important that their real estate marketing ideas reflect this. Localization is a key aspect of marketing for real estate agents as most clients look for listings for sale within a certain area.
26. Be a Part of the Local Community
To make your realtor marketing ideas more local, you should work towards becoming a part of the community in your area. You should network and cooperate with local businesses such as property managers, contractors, handymen, interior designers, furniture stores, and others so that you can refer business to one another.
27. Attend Local Social Events
You should make it your goal to show up at local events, both professional (conferences, real estate meetups, etc.) and social (holiday gatherings, charity events, etc.). You can also consider sponsoring local events. This will give additional exposure to your real estate business and also help you network with the local community.
28. Become an Expert on the Local Real Estate Market
As a realtor, you have to know anything and everything there is to know about the local housing market. Furthermore, as part of your marketing strategy, you have to show to qualified buyers that you are an expert through the content you publish on your website, post on social media, and share via emails.
29. Work on Local SEO for Your Real Estate Agent Website
Lastly, you need to focus your efforts on local SEO for your IDX website. You can do that by choosing keywords that incorporate the names of the states, cities, neighborhoods, and areas where your services are available. For example, instead of using “homes for sale”, it’s significantly more efficient to use “Miami homes for sale” in your SEO-optimized content.
Offline Marketing Ideas for Realtors
Use these offline realtor marketing ideas to generate more leads
The final group of realtor marketing ideas to bring in more qualified clients and grow your business exponentially concentrates on offline strategies. While the majority of home buyers and real estate investors use the internet to search for available properties for sale, there are some that still prefer more traditional methods, and you need to make sure to grab their attention too.
30. Create Unique Business Cards
Having professional, yet standing out business cards is a proven way to generate leads in the real estate business. You can use online tools like Canva or hire a professional graphic designer to design business cards that highlight your expertise and specialization. Once you have them ready, make sure to distribute your business cards in local businesses with high traffic for potential property buyers to see them.
31. Distribute Flyers and Brochures
Well-designed real estate flyers and brochures also remain an effective strategy to attract new customers. These give you more space than business cards to highlight your experience and knowledge in order to generate qualified leads.
32. Hold In-Person Open Houses and Property Showings
As a real estate agent, you should not be tempted by new technologies to switch to an entirely online presence. While virtual tours are becoming more popular among home buyers and investors, it’s still important to organize in-person property showings and open houses. Many qualified clients want to see their future home or investment property in person. Moreover, these events give you an opportunity to network with leads and convert them into customers.
33. Use Yard Signs
Last but not least, you should continue posting attractive yard signs in your listings for sale to grab the attention of passing by individuals as well as investors applying the driving for dollars method. This remains a valid marketing strategy for agents and brokers.
Growing Your Business with the Best Realtor Marketing Ideas
These are 33 proven and actionable realtor marketing ideas that you can try to give your real estate business the boost that it deserves. The best approach is to use a combination of digital marketing strategies and offline marketing ideas to attract the wider possible audience. With these strategies, you are guaranteed to bring in more qualified clients than ever before.
To launch your own real estate website in the easiest way possible, sign up for Mashvisor now.