Your December 2023 Burning Real Estate Marketing Questions, Answered

What Kind of Real Estate Marketing Should I Be Doing Over the Holidays?

Whether or not you’re taking some time off during this holiday season (if that sounds far-fetched, here are some tips for how to take a vacation as a real estate agent), business is all but guaranteed to quiet down for a week or two.

But that doesn’t mean your marketing efforts should go silent.

When it comes to real estate marketing over the holidays, we recommend a three-step approach:

• Publish a holiday message. Let your real estate website visitors and social media followers know that you’ll be off for a period of time while also wishing them a happy holiday. Your messaging could read something like “The holidays are here! The Smith Team will be taking time to be with loved ones from December 24 to 27. We wish you the joys of the season and look forward to connecting with you soon.”
  
• Schedule social media posts. Work in advance this month to create and schedule Instagram posts that can run over the holidays. This keeps your business in view of your followers (even if they’re not engaging as much as usual). Use these posts to promote current listings over the holidays or push to your most effective website content.
• Prep content for January. Real estate email marketing and real estate pay-per-click ads can wait until the new year. Opens, clicks and conversions will likely be lower during the week between Christmas and New Years, so it makes sense to hold off. Instead, work ahead on your January newsletter(s) and start prepping ads. 

How Do I Create a New Real Estate Marketing Strategy for 2024?

A new year calls for a new marketing strategy, one that reflects new goals and new tactics. 

To create your new real estate marketing strategy, start by identifying specific goals. These are the foundation of your strategy. Make sure they’re S.M.A.R.T goals — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound — such as “Increase pay-per-click ad conversion by 10% by June 1.”

Next, think about who your target clients are and create personas for them. This practice helps you develop a deep understanding of who your target clients are, what they want and need, and how your marketing tactics can best reach them so that you hook and then convert them into clients.

The rest of your marketing strategy should entail how you’ll go about reaching your target clients and achieving your goals:

• What tools and platforms you’ll be using (e.g., your website, email marketing, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook Ads, pay-per-click-ads, real estate postcards, analytics, and so on)
  
• The budget you have to work with
  
• The frequency of your marketing activities (e.g., how many blog posts will you publish in a month, how many times will you post on Instagram each week, how often will you run search engine ads)
  
• The support you’ll need (such as a social media assistant)

Is There a Way to Automate Some of My Instagram Marketing Efforts?

Finding ways to be more hands-off when it comes to marketing is a great way to free up time in your busy schedule while making sure your efforts don’t lag.

Automation — taking advantage of technology to do more of the hands-on work — is key to doing just that. And yes, there are ways to apply automation to Instagram marketing.

There are two key ways to make use of Instagram automation in your real estate business.

Number one is the most straightforward: use a social media scheduling tool such as Later or Buffer to schedule your Instagram content to auto-publish at a predetermined date and time. You’ll still have to create the content, but at least you don’t have to worry about making the content live.

The second Instagram automation tactic we recommend is fairly new, and highly effective: automating your lead generation and conversion efforts. How? By using a tool that automatically responds to DMs and comments so you don’t have to. 

Here’s one example of how it works.

Let’s say you want to offer your Instagram followers a free downloadable guide about how to strategically prepare their house for listing. An automation tool can help you drive those downloads. 

Instead of telling followers to check out the link in your bio for the guide, you can ask them to comment on your post with a specific keyword. For every person who comments with that keyword, the automation tool will send them an Instagram direct message with a link to download. It makes the process easier for you, easier for your followers and more effective at actually getting your content downloaded.

There are several tools offering this kind of Instagram automation; ManyChat is one of the most popular.