In the dynamic world of real estate, where opportunities are abundant yet highly competitive, having a good website and posting regularly on social media is essential, yet not enough to generate good opportunities for your business. What I’m trying to say is that one needs a strategy to capture web visitors and turn them into clients, that is implementing a real estate marketing funnel that converts leads into customers.
A sales or marketing funnel is a game-changer for improving your business. It not only captures potential clients’ attention but also transforms them into lucrative leads and successful deals.
In this article, you will learn what is necessary to build an effective real estate marketing funnel that will elevate the online strategy of your agency.
What is a real estate marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is a strategic framework businesses use to guide potential customers through the buying process.
It consists of four stages (AIDA):
- Awareness: At the top of the funnel, the goal is to create awareness about your product or service. This stage is about reaching a broad audience through various marketing channels like social media, content marketing, and advertising. It’s the first point of contact where potential customers become aware of your brand.
- Interest: In this stage, you pique the interest of the prospects who became aware of your brand. You provide valuable content, engage with them through email marketing, and offer something of value, such as e-books or webinars, to keep them interested.
- Consideration: As potential customers move further down the funnel, they are actively considering their options. At this stage, they may be comparing your product or service with competitors. You provide them with detailed information, case studies, reviews, and personalized content to help them make informed decisions.
- Action: At the bottom of the funnel, the prospect becomes a customer by making a purchase. This stage involves finalizing the sale, providing an excellent buying experience, and ensuring a seamless transition from prospect to customer.
At each stage, tailored content and incentives are offered to move prospects from initial awareness to making a purchase decision.
How can a marketing funnel help your real estate business?
The funnel helps businesses capture, nurture, and convert leads into paying customers, effectively maximizing their marketing efforts.
A real estate marketing funnel progresses from creating awareness among potential homebuyers, sellers and investors to engaging their interest, addressing their considerations, and ultimately motivating them to take action by connecting with a real estate agent.
Each stage offers valuable content and personalized incentives, gradually nurturing leads toward a successful real estate transaction.
Basically, it streamlines the lead generation and conversion process. No wonder a well-defined sales funnel can lead to a 16% higher win rate on deals, according to ZipDo report.
What a real estate marketing funnel looks like
A simple funnel consists of an offer, let’s say a free ebook, a form to capture visitor’s data, and an email automation to nurture the leads.
Take a look at this funnel example:
Offer: “Navigating the Real Estate Market: A Comprehensive Guide for Buyers.”
Form: Aks visitor’s email, phone, name, location, budget, and other relevant data.
Email automation:
- Blog article “10 tips for first-time homebuyers”
- Blog article “How to choose the right realtor”
- Past customer testimonial
- One-to-one consultation with an agent
Remember, this is just an example of a funnel, each business has a different goal and strategy to capture leads.
In the next section, we will dive deeper into the strategies to build a functional marketing funnel for your business.
Building an efficient marketing funnel for a real estate business
Generating leads and turning them into customers for your business goes beyond having a lead magnet on a landing page.
How will you attract visitors to your page? How do you know these visitors are potential customers? Which pages should you add on your web for that? Which content to use in each stage of the funnel?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions don’t worry, we will address them now.
Define your audience and offer
Before building your marketing funnel, the first thing you need is to have a clear idea about who your targets are and what you are offering them.
If you are selling homes to first-time buyers, probably you are targeting young couples. Or maybe your agency is focused on river homes, so you should target buyers, sellers and investors who are looking for this type of offering.
For each type of offer, you have different people interested in it. By identifying who they are you can create an efficient real estate marketing funnel that will not only generate new leads to your business, but quality leads with potential to convert into customers to your business.
Here are a few questions you need answers to in order to define your audience:
- Who are my ideal customers? Are they male, female or doesn’t matter?
- Are they homebuyers, sellers or investors?
- What is their age?
- Where do they live?
- What are they looking for?
- What are their challenges?
- How can my offer address these pain points?
The more niche is your market, the easier and more efficient will be your marketing campaigns.
Set up the pages of your funnel
Once you have a clear idea about who you are targeting and what you are offering them, the next step is to build the structure to convert your web visitors into leads to your business.
You should start by thinking of an offer that will attract their attention and that is worth their valuable data.
Your goal here is to build an email list that you can use to nurture cold leads into warm leads, and lastly convert them into customers.
But remember, visitors to your web are in different stages of their buying journey, and each stage of the funnel asks for a different offer. Here are a few examples:
- Awareness: A list of tips for first-time homebuyers.
- Interest: A downloadable e-book, “Navigating the Real Estate Market: A Comprehensive Guide for Buyers.”
- Consideration: A free webinar, “Homebuying 101: Expert Insights and Q&A Session.”
- Action: Customized home listings and a one-on-one consultation with an agent.
After defining your offer, you need to build a landing page with a form connected to your CRM. This way their data will be automatically stored as they download the free materials or subscribe to one of your webinars or free consultations.
Visitors who leave their data are ready for the next step, which is lead nurturing.
Nurture your leads
All these contacts that you generated from your landing pages need to be nurtured in order to move down your real estate marketing funnel.
Usually, this is done via email, as you can send them valuable information directly to their inbox. The idea is to educate your contacts so they can advance to the next stages of their buying journey.
For this purpose, you need a CMS that allows you to automate emails and create workflows.
Your funnels should work this way:
- Awareness → Interest: Send content in their email addressing your potential customer’s pain points and how they can be solved by your offer.
- Interest → Consideration: Content that shows your authority in the market and that you are the best option in your region for buyers, sellers, or investors looking to do business.
- Consideration → Action: Give an incentive that will turn into a deal, for example, a free one-to-one consultation with one of your agents.
The leads that reach the end of the funnel are one step closer to choosing you as their real estate agent. But there is still one important step missing, how to attract visitors to your pages?
Drive traffic to your funnel
In order to generate leads, first you need to feed your landing pages with visitors. And unless you are at top positions on search engines to drive relevant organic traffic, you will need to invest in paid ads.
The most popular platforms for this are Facebook and Google Ads. The first one is used to attract visitors who are in the top stages of the real estate marketing funnel. On the other hand, Google Ads is known for reaching people who are at the bottom of the sales funnel.
You can also drive traffic from your social media pages, but this strategy usually takes longer to pay off.
A good ad should address what your offer is about and to whom. It also must have a call to action at the end. That is a phrase asking for people to visit your website, contact one of your agents, submit a form, or send you an email.
Facebook Ads is great for segmenting the audience that will see your ads. You should set it up based on your ideal customer profile.
For Google, you can target search phrases like “Sell my house fast for cash in [YOUR CITY]”, “Find real estate agent in [YOUR CITY]”, or whatever else your target market is already typing into Google.
Conclusion
Nowadays, in a competitive market like real estate, having a strong online presence is not enough to generate great sales opportunities.
Along with a website and an updated social media page, agents should also invest in strategies to generate leads for their business.
At this point, they need a real estate marketing funnel that is optimized for their ideal customer and that covers the four stages of the buying journey:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Consideration
- Action
For each stage, create a lead magnet, a landing page, a nurturing campaign and a strategy to drive relevant traffic that will convert into leads.
If you are struggling to grow your online presence, or if you need a solution to increase the number of leads and customers for your business, you should check out our website and learn how ViagemIT has been elevating the game for businesses in the real estate market through disruptive digital solutions.
