Digital Marketing for Real Estate Agents In 2021
Building a community and expanding your reach
According to Statista, Singapore has the second-highest rate of internet penetration as of mid-2020, with approximately 4.8 million internet users. These numbers will continue to grow, with more and more Singaporeans turning to the internet and social media platforms to source for information. Marketing as we know it has fundamentally shifted, and will constantly evolve, adapting to a digital landscape will become crucial for businesses to thrive.
The property market is no different
With digital marketing, you can promote the different property options available to a larger audience at a cheaper price. You can also create personalised content for the specific audience you would like to target. Your customers are online, your competitors are online. Word of mouth marketing works great for referrals, but how do we expand that reach to a target audience that is increasingly digitally savvy?
Simply put, you need to have a digital marketing strategy.
1. Have a Social Media Strategy
You might already have a Facebook or Instagram account in which you post your real estate-related content every once in a while, but having a well-elaborated content calendar and marketing strategy could help to get the results you are looking for. Engagement is extremely important when it comes to social media management because it helps to boost brand awareness and they offer social proof of your business. Hence, your posts should be done more regularly!
But let's not forget about TikTok. TikTok. Is predicted to attract over one billion users over the course of the year, and could potentially attract 1.2 billion.
How do you create great TikTok content?
An attention-grabbing video: featuring a person on your feed is the most engaging, and content which sparks engagement from your community such as reactions, collaborations, duets, and challenges tend to perform best on TikTok.
The song: Using a new, trending or popular track on TikTok can really help to promote your video further in the algorithm as well as help it to become trending.
The caption: You should use a short caption, with digestible and complimentary information. Users don’t want to read a lot of information.
The hashtags: Hashtags should relate directly to what is featured in your video and help to categorize your content, making it easier to discover.
Videos which have a high completion rate do better within the TikTok algorithm: so keeping your video under 15 seconds can help to generate more views, as users will typically watch it to the end or even multiple times.
Some ideas of useful content to post on your social media channels – featuring new or existing property listings; successful case studies; tips and tricks when looking out for the next property deals. It can be challenging to generate new ideas at times, so keep a lookout on what people are doing, what is trending, and think of how you can weave property related content in. Don’t forget hashtags too, it’ll be good if you can come up with exclusive hashtags – it helps to make your content more identifiable!
2. Have an Email Campaign
Creating a strong email marketing strategy helps you to reach out and connect with existing and potential target audiences in a more personalised way. The email can be as simple as: “Hey, check out some of the newly launched properties!” – the purpose of it is to let your audience have a feeling that you are thinking of them. Ideally, a well-rounded campaign will have a story flow, from introducing yourself to onboarding these leads to weekly/monthly updates to keep them in the loop of the property market.
There are various email marketing platforms like Drip or AWeber that you can utilise to make your job simpler. With just a small fee, you can track your delivery rates, unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, etc for every email you send out. This gives you a better understanding of how your email campaigns are working and what are the necessary modifications to be made to improve the click rates.
3. Build a Community
Let me tell you this straight up: this is gonna be a little tough, but the results are definitely rewarding. Building a community helps to bring together a group of like-minded individuals to share their experience and work together to achieve common goals – in this case, to purchase a property! You bring customers together over a topic that is related to your brand in an engaging and non-intrusive way.
Having a Facebook Page, forum or even a Telegram group chat could be some ways to get about building your community. You could even pose questions for the members to discuss and share their thoughts about a particular topic. Frequent discussions and engagement help to build your brand and secure greater follow-ups. Their thoughts and insights could even be useful for you to better position yourself in the industry.
4. Host Virtual Tours
Purchasing a home can be mentally and physically exhausting for the consumer, and as a real estate agent, your job is to simplify the journey for your clients. They not only want the personal touch but also at their own convenience. Virtual tours are useful pieces of content, allowing your clients to see the new listings at the comfort of their homes. There are many examples you can find on youtube to get started.
This list is not exhaustive. Digital marketing is extremely broad, and many other tools and technologies can help you establish an online presence. But for starters, these are good. It is not guaranteed that all these methods will help to bring in more business for you, but they surely can increase your brand awareness in the market!
How does BCD help our agents grow?
BCD begins by customizing a career path for. As everyone is different, something working for someone might not work for others and Benson understands this to a great deal.
BCD had opportunities for agents to shadow experienced agents, allowing them to witness how viewings are conducted and how deals are closed. Agents also get opportunities to manage Benson’s listings, which allows agents to observe and put into practice what they’ve learnt helping them grow at an exponential rate.
BCD focuses on achieving the skill of constant closing before spending on marketing and advertising, so by the time you have to engage in digital marketing or spend more on advertisements, you can be sure that you will have the means to. But, for agents that do want to invest in marketing, BCD is able to offer subsidised rates on certain digital services like video production due to our in-house capacity.
At BCD, our focus is on you. Feel free to drop us a line to find out more on our programs that aim to equip agents with the right skills to achieve their goals.
