Overview
Real estate has never stopped being hot. The grind to find property sellers and especially buyers in the industry is tremendous. Most realtors and companies invest tons of money into advertising and marketing.
However, soft skills in general, or persuasion skills, in particular, are some of the most important and usually forgotten skills to close real estate deals effectively.
Understand that realtors need to hone their soft skills a lot more, many companies out there are offering affordable soft skills courses to help them grow professionally.
Finding realtors that have an interest in such training isn’t a simple task, in fact, many soft skill training providers are struggling to stay afloat and grow bigger. It isn’t just running ads to generate realtor leads, it can get so much more complicated than that.
Realtor lead generation definition
Leads are your potential clients who already showed interest in what you’re offering. The process of generating realtor leads is called realtor lead generation. Although it’s a new term to a lot of people, it’s already a booming industry that is worth millions of dollars.
The most common strategy for realtor lead generation is advertising. Most businesses rely on paid ads to find more realtor leads. However, there are several more strategies that may work out as well.
Strategies such as cold emailing or SEO & lead magnets may become cash cows for your realtor lead generation if done properly.
Realtor lead generation strategies pros and cons
There are several realtor lead gen strategies that have been proven to be effective, more or less depending on many factors such as how you set up your campaigns, your niche, audience, etc.
Marketers are getting creative to find untouched areas in realtor lead gen to avoid competition and thus, generate realtor leads more effectively.
Going on a new path certainly comes with opportunities and risks. If you’re a beginner in lead generation, there’s a lot more to learn before trying a new and creative strategy.
1. Paid ads
Paid ads like Google search ads seem to be more suitable for businesses to generate sales rather than leads. Google ads like many other ads will direct people to your landing page where they will convert into clients or leads.
The landing page should always aim at generating sales, however, you should also make it suitable for visitors that want to become leads to learn more about your business before making a purchase decision.
Other ads such as Linkedin lead gen forms or Facebook lead generation ads are specifically designed to help you get as many leads as possible by making it easy for users to leave their contact information to be contacted later.
Ads aren’t perfect, they have their own pros and cons, more or less also depending on how you operate your ads campaigns, what you’re selling and your niches.
Paid ads pros
- Generate leads very fast
- Relatively easy to start and operate
- Mostly automatic
Paid ads cons
- Can be very expensive
- When you stop running ads, you’ll probably stop receiving leads & sales.
2. Prospect generation & cold emailing.
Cold emailing is the process of sending emails to highly targeted prospects to turn them into potential clients.
Highly targeted prospects are the people who haven’t known about your business, however, have shown some interest in things or areas related to your niche and what you’re selling.
There are a few ways to generate targeted prospects for your cold emailing campaigns.
Build a scraper to collect prospects
Hiring a programmer or service to build a data scraper is something you can consider. The advantages of having a scraper are that you have full control of what types of data you’re going to collect, and it’s usually a one-off purchase.
The disadvantage of this method is the cost of building an effective scraper. Also, if you change your targeting often, it means that you will need to pay to adjust your scraper for the change.
Use a combination of digital marketing tools to generate prospects
Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush and Hunter will help you generate prospects. However, you won’t have as much control over what types of data you can collect compared to having a scraper.
The advantage of this method is its low cost. In order to use these tools, you will need to pay a monthly fee, and at the moment, they are still affordable.
Use a Chrome extension to collect prospects
Unlike the above 2 strategies that enable you to collect a large batch of data, using a Chrome extension only gives you a much smaller batch.
Also, you will need to manually search for pages that you can scrape data from and collect data on each page. Then, you will need to clean the lists and put the prospects into one place for cold emailing.
This method doesn’t cost you anything, however, you will need to spend quite a lot of time and effort to gather a sizeable list of prospects.
Use a reliable B2B lead database to generate excellent prospects
Using a reliable B2B leads database is probably the simplest, fastest and most affordable way to generate excellent & highly targeted prospects in no time.
A good data provider like Limeleads provides users with advanced filters to help them get very specific prospects quickly, down to where they live, their companies, contact info and social media profiles.
There are only a few good lead providers on the Internet, if you’re needing one, never pay until you’re given some free trials.
At Limeleeads, we make sure to provide our users with a risk-free experience by offering the following:
- Free trials
- No credit card is required
- Excellent support
- Refund policies
- Deep discounts for first-time clients
- More
Simply sign up for an account and get your free trials with us here.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected] or via our live chat support, we’re happy to help you with anything.
Cold emailing pros and cons
Cold emailing is currently one of the most popular ways to generate leads. There are many advantages of using cold emailing compared to other strategies such as cold calling or paid ads.
Cold emailing pros
- Can reach thousands of prospects quickly
- Much less annoying compared to cold calling
- Affordable
- Relatively simple to run on a small scale.
- Email automation is extremely helpful
Cold emailing cons
- If you do it wrong, there’s a chance it will tarnish your domain
- On a large scale, it can be complicated to maintain its effectiveness.
3. SEO & lead magnets
When it comes to the most sustainable ways to generate leads and income, SEO must be mentioned in the list.
Right now, there are niches that are almost SEO-saturated, meaning if you’ve just started an Internet business, you won’t be able to get good organic traffic in the next 2 or 3 years. These niches include lead generation, digital marketing, etc.
However, it’s not that bad for the real estate niche. If you’re getting better at doing SEO at a high level, there’s a good chance that you will be successful with SEO for your real-estate-focused site.
However, you will have to be willing to invest at least a year of consistent SEO work in order for your site to take off. That’s a lot of investment, be ready for the grind.
When you already gain good traction, generating realtor leads will be easier. You can simply direct your organic traffic to a landing page where they can turn into leads. The easiest way is to design a form on your landing page for people to sign up and be contacted later.
However, the lead gen form is already outdated, to step up your lead gen game, you will need to invest some time and effort into creating a great lead magnet.
A lead magnet can be anything from a useful checklist to an eBook for your visitors to download for free in exchange for their contact information such as email addresses or phone numbers.
Advantages of SEO & lead magnets for lead gen
- It’s a sustainable way to get new leads and sales
- Requires low operation cost once your site has good traction.
- The conversion rate is high
- Can become easier as it goes
Disadvantages of SEO & lead magnets for lead gen
- Very challenging at the beginning
- Can be expensive at the beginning
- There’s no guarantee of success.
- SEO can be complicated