Real Estate Internet Marketing - 5 Laws of Lead Generation
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by Brandon Cornett
Here's an observation about real estate Internet marketing that may surprise you. The average real estate website gets enough traffic to support the real estate agent's marketing and business goals, but her or she is not capitalizing on that traffic.
In the past, many of my real estate clients have sworn they weren't getting enough website traffic. They usually based this assumption on the fact that they were getting very few leads from their website. But after reviewing their website logs or analytics program, I would often discover they had consistent (and decent) volumes of web traffic, day after day.
In other words, these real estate agents wrongfully assumed that website traffic equals website leads. This is a common misconception in real estate Internet marketing. Traffic equals traffic -- that's all. You don't convert traffic into leads until you put an effective lead-generation system in place. Here's how we might express this same idea in mathematical terms.
- False: Web traffic = web leads
- True: Web traffic + lead generation = web leads
In my opinion, website lead generation is the most important aspect of real estate Internet marketing. To put it in mathematical terms again ... you could own three different websites, blog twice a day, and get 2,000 visitors per week. But without a lead generation system in place, all of that online activity and traffic will do you little good.
To help drive this point home, I've devised a handful of "laws" related to real estate Internet marketing. Apply these laws to your Internet marketing efforts, and you will likely generate more leads and more business for your efforts.
Law #1 - Traffic is only an opportunity.
The first law of real estate Internet marketing states that website traffic is only that ... traffic. Until something is done to convert it, traffic will remain traffic. If you want your website traffic to be of value, you need to convert it into something else. Hence the term, "website conversions."
Picture this. You've set up a lemonade stand beside a busy highway. But your stand sits on a narrow shoulder of the highway, where there's no room for cards to pull over. All day, the cars drive by you at 55 miles per hour, but nobody stops. In this scenario, you've got an endless supply of traffic, but your lemonade stand will fail because nobody pulls over. Opportunity only favors those who capitalize on it.
Now let's get back to real estate Internet marketing. If your real estate website has plenty of traffic but no lead generation system in place, then most of your traffic will pass right by ... like those cars passing the lemonade stand.
So before worrying about your website traffic levels, ask yourself this: "What am I doing to capitalize on the traffic I already have? How am I actively converting traffic into leads, and leads into clients?"
Law #2 - Value and response are directly proportional.
In Law #1, we discussed the importance of lead generation. But equally important is the value behind your lead generation system. Your real estate website visitors will remain anonymous until you offer something valuable and useful in exchange for their action.
When it comes to real estate Interne marketing, "value" does not necessarily mean costly. Property listing updates can be very valuable to home shoppers, and many will sign up to get them. But they don't necessarily cost you anything to produce. In this case, value is conveyed through timely information that's beneficial to the audience (home buyers).
That's just one example of adding value to an offer. However you choose to go about it on your own website, just remember this ... response goes up in proportion to the value of your offer. On the contrary, response goes down with a weaker offer.
Law #3 - Attrition is your perpetual enemy.
In your online program, attrition follows you every step of the way. Attrition refers to people who "drop off" along the way, in between first contact and client acquisition.
There are usually multiples points of attrition within a real estate marketing process. Fortunately, each point of attrition can be improved upon. That is, you can minimize the number of losses at each step along marketing path.
Here are some examples of online attrition points, and what you can do to reduce them.
- Attrition Point #1 - A lot of qualified prospective clients may never even find your website or blog. But you can counter this by focusing on online PR and search engine optimization (SEO).
- Attrition Point #2 - Of those people who do find your website, many will leave if they don't find anything of value. But you can counter this by constantly adding useful content and resources to your website.
- Attrition Point #3 - Of those people who (A) find your website and (B) find it useful, some will leave without making contact with you in any way. But you can counter this by using lead-generation techniques on all key pages of your website.
From this example, you can see how attrition overshadows every part of your Internet marketing program. But you can also see that for every point of attrition, there are things you can do to increase the number of people who continue along in the process.
Law #4 - Successful techniques are not successful for everyone.
An Internet marketing tactic that succeeds for another real estate agent may not work for you. On the flip side, it may work even better for you than it did for the other agent. You never know what techniques will bring success until you try them.
With any online marketing strategy, you will encounter variables that affect your results in different ways. These variables include your timing, the makeup of your audience, the manner in which you carry out your plan, etc. You never know what will or won't work for you until you try it. There is experimentation, and there is speculation. Only the former will reveal the truth.
Law #5 - Technology does not change psychology.
The Internet is a dynamic environment that changes constantly. But while the way we communicate online may change, the communication itself remains the same.
No matter how you talk to people, they are still people. You just have more ways to communicate with them than before. Sure, you have to adjust your message delivery to account for new technologies, but the message itself does not have to change.
No matter how you communicate with people, the following truths still apply:
- People want what's best for them ... online and off
- People will respond to well-presented offer of value ... online and off
- People will ignore a weak message with no value ... online and off
Technology changes the way marketers communicate with consumers. But it does not change the fundamental psychology that leads consumers to take action.
Conclusion
Web traffic is only traffic until you act upon it. If you want your website visitors to act in some way, you must create a lead-generation program based on valuable incentives. Good luck with your online real estate marketing!
