How to Connect, Reach, and Engage Your Target Audience Online
As a modern real estate with a modern digital strategy, your primary marketing goal is to connect with as many people as you can, that are within your target audience, so that they know you exist, and hopefully, will want to work with you for their next real estate transaction.
And the way you’re going to do that successfully is through your overall marketing strategy.
Your marketing strategy is made up of 2 parts: your marketing destination/platform (your website), and your marketing plan (how you get people to your website).
That means that once your website is online, you can’t just kick back and wait for the leads to roll in; to be successful, it means that you need move onto the second stage and begin your marketing plan so you can get your website in front of the right people (your target audience) at the right time (when they’re thinking about making a real estate decision).
โ The first (and most important) step in a successful marketing plan is to identify and understand your target audience. If you want to learn more about that, have a look at these posts:
- Finding Your Target Audience, and Why You Should
- Why Your Target Audience Shouldnโt Be Anyone and Everyone
- Understanding Your Competition as a Real Estate Agent
- Determining What a Real Estate Lead Actually Is
Here are a few ways, through your marketing plan, that you can reach, connect, and build a relationship with your target audience online:
Through Your SEO Strategy
There’s no better for someone to discover you then by them doing a Google search for the answer to a real estate question, your content showing up, and them reading it and getting their questions answered.
It builds an instant level of trust between them and your brand that’s hard to replicate in other aspects of your marketing.
That’s where your SEO strategy comes in.
Your SEO strategy helps you get your content, in front of the right people, at the right time, for the right reasons, to build trust.
When set up correctly, it’s a powerful component of your marketing strategy that has the ability to run in the background, 24 hours a day, and attract and build trust with your target audience over and over.
โ Want to learn more about SEO and building a search strategy? Have a look at these posts and resources:
- Writing Content for SEO as a Real Estate Agent
- Building a Well-Rounded SEO Search Strategy for Your Real Estate Website
- How to Start Building a Solid Real Estate Local SEO Strategy
- Download Our SEO Strategy Building Guide for Real Estate Agents
Through Your Content Strategy
A major component of a solid SEO strategy is a solid content strategy; the 2 go hand-in-hand completely.
Your content strategy helps you further build trust with your audience by continually proving your expertise and authority to your target audience.
A well-planned content strategy also gives you a lot of opportunity. For example, if you wrote 200 blog posts in a year, that’s 200 opportunities you have for your target audience to discover you online. It’s also 200 opportunities for you to provide something of value to your target audience, providing that the content you’re writing is high-quality content.
When it comes to building a solid content strategy, you should always be thinkingย qualityย over quantity. Just because you write a lot of content, it doesn’t mean you have a great content strategy in place. To be effective, connect with your audience, and provide value, you have to produce high-quality content.
What is high-quality content?
Itโs well-written, well-constructed, well-organized content that brings value to the person that’s reading it. Itโs content that helps the person and answers whatever question brought them to your piece of content in the first place. Itโs content thatโs well-formatted and stylized so that itโs pleasurable to look at and read.
In short, itโs value-based content that someone actually wants to read, absorb, and would even enjoy.
โ Want to learn more about building a successful content strategy? Have a look at these posts:
- Writing Successful Real Estate Content that Converts
- Optimizing Your Content for Humans (And Not Just for Search Engines)
- How to Plan Content that Attracts and Engages
- Metrics to Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing Strategy
Through Your Personalization Strategy
To truly connect with your target audience, your marketing strategy needs to feel personalized. The more someone feels like a piece of marketing is speaking directly to them, and addressing them and their needs personally, the more likely they are to connect with it (and ultimately, take the action you want).
In real estate marketing, there are a lot of different ways to make your marketing efforts feel more personal and targeted. For example, you could do it:
- Through your email marketing strategy: by sending informative, personalized emails to buyers about a shift in the market that might create an opportunity for them to purchase a home, when perhaps before, it may have been more difficult.
- Through your retargeting advertising strategy: by creating a series of social media ads, that address the current concerns home sellers have, and ensuring that those specific sellers see them through demographic targeting.
- Through your marketing automation strategy: by triggering popups, sending SMS messages, or sending emails that further build on whatever that person has engaged with on your website the most.
The above can be mixed in many different ways, but the key is to make sure that the marketing campaigns that you’re doing aren’t just about your real estate services in general, but rather, speaking directly to a specific need or situation a person might be in. When done the right way at the right time, you’re sure to build a connection with them that feels a lot more personal than generic marketing ever could.
โ Want to learn more about personalization? Have a look at these posts:
- Why Personal, Targeted Marketing Means Better Real Estate Leads
- Using Personalized Marketing to Get Better Engagement (and Leads)
Through Your Stickiness Strategy
In a lot of cases, just because someone finds you online, and you solve a problem for them, and they like you, it doesn’t mean they’ll work with you right at the moment, simply because they might not be ready to transact right then and there; and that’s perfectly normal.
But the key here is to understand that most people will transact at some point; you just have to make sure that when they’re ready to, they remember you and your business; and the best way to do that is through your marketing stickiness strategy.
Your marketing stickiness strategy is both how and how often often those people are reminded that you exist.
You can be sticky in a number of different ways:
- Through your retargeting advertising strategy, where people continually see your ads on various websites after they’ve visited yours.
- Through your email marketing strategy, where people regularly receive value-based emails from you.
- Through your content strategy, where people consistently return to your website to read the interesting and engaging content you write.
- Through your social strategy, where people steadily see and engage with your posts, videos, and stories on various platforms.
- Through your automation strategy, where people are automatically sent the right information at the right time.
- Or a lot more, or any of the above.
If you don’t consistently remind your audience that you exist, it’s human nature that they’ll forget, and they’ll probably end up working with someone else for their next real estate transaction.
โ Want to improve your overall lead generation and client nurturing plan? Download our Lead Management Workbook. Itโs a self-guided, interactive workbook where you answer questions about your current lead generation plan, outline whatโs working and what isnโt working, and put together a plan to improve it. You can download it right now, right here.
Most Importantly, Through Your Value Strategy
No matter what approach you take, or what individual components make up your larger marketing strategy, the most important thing you should be doing is providing value.
By providing value, you’ll be solving problems for people and building trust, as well proving you expertise, value, and authority as a real estate agent.
Want to get better, more qualified leads and build your authority? Our Inbound Marketing Guide is a walkthrough of the overall philosophy of inbound marketing, why itโs effective, and how you can build it into your own real estate marketing strategy to get better marketing results.
