Effective Real Estate Marketing Strategies to Quickly Sell or Rent Your Property

Every realtor follows the same patterns.

Buying magazine and newspaper ads. Hosting a weekend open house. Making sure Zillow is updated. Adding properties to listing sites and social media pages. Putting a sign in front of the property. Maybe laying out some flyers or business cards around town.

There’s nothing wrong with a realtor doing these things, don’t get me wrong.

They do them because they work and generate a profit.

The problem comes when realtors use these strategies as their crutch and depend on them to be their life blood.

Especially in a tough market or with unique properties, such as a church.

They continue using these strategies… which are the exact same strategies their competition is using… but they somehow hope for or expect better results.

And while we’d all like to think that wanting or hoping for something bad enough means it will manifest itself in our lives, we all know that it logically isn’t true.

So if you’ve got a property that you’d like to sell or get rented out ASAP… even if that property’s been sitting on the market for ages, you can whip these tactics out of your back pocket and just watch closing after closing after closing start to happen.

Come up with some new ideas.

These real estate marketing strategies will help you stand out, get attention, get remembered, and more importantly… close any deal as quickly as possible.

(And better yet? Most of them work for both residential and commercial properties.)

1. Target Life Events on Facebook

We all love bragging about our life events on Facebook.

Almost as soon as they happen, we’re broadcasting them to the world.

It’s to the point that for “proof” we now say things like “Pics or it didn’t happen” or “It’s not official until it’s Facebook official.”

We joke about it, but we do mean it.

But people openly and willingly announcing their major life events on a social platform that gives advertisers access to this data is pure gold for someone a realtor working in residential real estate.

Think about it.

Because the vast majority of these major life events mean that people will need to make sure they’ve got the right space to accommodate these new life changes.

Life events like:

• Engagements
• Marriages
• Moving to a new city
• Announcing a pregnancy or a birth

And if you sign up for Facebook as an advertiser, you have access to target all of these life events within the geographic area you serve with your real estate business.

So if you specialize in inexpensive apartment rentals?

You can target a campaign towards young, single professionals under the age of 30 who’ve just moved to the city. (Probably because a job brought them there.)

If you specialize in starter-level homes for new families?

Engagements, marriages, and pregnancy announcements are going to be your thing.

And yes, you can have different ads show to the different life events: one set of ads for engagements, one set of ads for marriages, and another for pregnancy or baby announcements.

Here, WordStream shows us how to find these life events when setting up your targeting for a Facebook ad.

 

2. Invest in an Emotion-Invoking Copywriter

I just pulled this description for a $529k home off realtor.com:

“Location, Location, Location! North Asheville ranch! 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, hardwood floors, built-ins & private, landscaped back yard. New roof, HVAC, & electrical. Charming, slated porch off family room!”

In this particular location and neighborhood, the price is higher than average, and the pictures of the living room with old, ugly, outdated wood paneling certainly aren’t doing anything to get prospective buyers in touch with the realtor about this house.

Sure, the location is nice, but if you can get a more or less equal home for over $100k less in the same neighborhood… what gives?

If you want people to even consider this house, which is obviously going to be a pretty tough sell at that price point, you’re going to have to hook potential buyers with more than just a list of features, photos, and that description.

Since the features won’t change and that wood paneling in the living room is also probably there to stay, you’re going to have to dig really deep to find some emotionally-hooking phrases to get the attention of someone who’s clicked through. You want them to really look at the house and make sure that they remember that house over the 10 others they explored in that one online shopping session.

So what if the description read something like this instead?

“Less than a 10-minute drive from all the funkiness of downtown, this ranch-style home in North Asheville sits near the center of the Grove Park area of the city… directly in between the two major country clubs, next to some of the best up-and-coming restaurants. The quiet neighborhood is a retreat, but you’re only ever a few minutes away from the best Asheville has to offer.

The home itself has 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, and the most charming little porch that acts as an extension for the rustic, truly ranch-style family room. It’s country-meets-city in all the best ways.

The back yard that extends from the porch has been carefully landscaped to showcase some beautiful flower bushes and to accommodate all kind of fun outdoor activities: spring barbecues, summer water balloon fights, or peacefully soaking in the sun while you drink your coffee on a crisp fall morning.

Plus, with hard wood floors, and a new roof, new electrical, and a new HVAC system, you’ll be set in not having to worry about repairs for a long, long time.”

You see how that makes a difference, don’t you?

Suddenly the reader goes from ticking things off a somewhat existent list in their brains to see if the house is a fit for their family… to actually imagining and getting emotionally attached to the idea of their family in THAT particular space.

Suddenly, they’re way more interested and you start getting more and more calls for showings.

Coming up with this kind of description may not be your cup of tea, but hiring a copywriter that specializes in emotion-invoking phrasing like this (especially for a property you think will be a harder sell) will pay for itself way more quickly than you’d imagine.

Pssst…. I know I gave a residential example here, but this works equally well for commercial listings. Business people are NOT just cold-blooded creatures in suits. They’re humans and have emotions too.

 

3. Retarget Web Viewers with Property Images & Emotional Ad Copy

Alright, so someone looked at your website page for a specific property but didn’t fill out your form to get in touch with you?

No problem. Not all is lost.

When people are shopping for a new home or a new office space, it’s really common that they check the market for all different kinds of options before they start getting in touch with realtors about a showing.

It’s a normal behavior that you can capitalize on to make sure your listings get sold or rented out quickly…. via retargeting.

I’ll keep the technical explanation of how this works really brief:

If you have a listing you want to sell or rent fast, you can rig that listing with what’s called a retargeting pixel.

This pixel gets attached to visitors who spend time on that page checking out the listing.

When the people who’ve seen that listing are browsing the web—reading other websites or scrolling through their Facebook feed, for example—they’ll see ads for the property they’ve already checked out because they’ve been pixeled.

And beyond the visual recognition and reminder of what the property actually looks like, you can use this retargeting to evoke the same emotions you evoked with your description copy on your listing’s page.

In a case study done by Think With Google, one luxury watch company saw a 1300% ROI with their remarketing strategies within just six months.

If this sounds

What are some of your favorite ideas?

Frequently Asked Questions