RealBird Listing Marketing Channels and Tips
1) Lead Generation Channels:
Potential clients for you have many online options to choose from when they start the process of buying or selling a home. This initial period is the time when you need to connect with them, before they start a serious conversation with another agent. In order to increase your chances to connect with as many qualified buyers and sellers as possible, your marketing strategy will need to be such that you create an ever wider footprint for your online presence using these channels:
• Automatic Syndication: RealBird syndicates listings to the major destination sites that accept listing feeds.
• Social Media: Every listing is integrated with the major Social Media sites’ promotion mechanisms. This makes it easy for consumers to promote the listings to their own networks.
• Classifieds: For each listing there is an optimized and customized posting code for Craigslist, eBay Classifieds and Ning networks.
• Search Engines: RealBird property websites are exceptionally well indexed, and you can track and optimize activity using Google Analytics.
• Mobile Media: RealBird property websites are mobile friendly, and have SMS marketing and QR codes to make it easy for consumers to access them using their mobile devices.
• Your Website, Blog, Youtube, Email: Use your property search and listing widgets to add to your website and blog or create videos for Youtube or other video sharing sites. Listings and property searches can be emailed to potential clients.
2) Lead Generation Tips and Good Practices:
• Do not syndicate your listings through the MLS or your broker, or post the listing yourself directly on the portal! There are several reasons for that:
a) the syndication sites have priority rules as to which feed they use for posting a listing. MLS and broker feeds take priority over third party feeds or your own posting. Therefore, the listing from your RealBird feed will be ignored and that is not in your interest!
b) agents rarely think of how effective the content that they add to the MLS will be for online lead generation purposes - keywords, brand, neighborhood context, etc.
c) The MLS sends the same information to portals and through idx to all your competitors. If you add the same content to your own website, facebook page, etc you will not get much attention from the search engines, since they see that content on all these other sites.
d) If you syndicate through the MLS or broker, once you sold the listing you don't have a listing website for the sold listing that is useful for further lead generation.
• Automatic syndication: it can take 24-48 hours for the listing to appear at a destination site. If it does not, email to support and send us the listing’s web link and where it is not published and we’ll investigate.
• Listings become stale after 1 month of being "untouched", so you need make some meaningful content change and republish the listing for them to be picked up by the portals again. A "meaningful change" means adding/changing description, price, status or photos.
• Make sure that the address of the listing is correct. Listings without complete addresses will be mis-mapped or not displayed at all by the portals
• Sell yourself with every listing: add an "About me" tab (you can do that globally, in “Settings”). Best to add a text page and a short video as to why consumers should work with you.
• Add your social media links to your RealBird profile. If you have a blog, add the blog's RSS feed to the profile, this will make your blog posts stream into the footers of every property website.
• Add your photo and logo to your RealBird profile. Consumers will connect more readily and relate better to agents who have a photo.
• Add the Features tab with a bullet list of property features - this makes the listing more informative, easier to read, and better indexed by search engines.
• Don't just rely on syndication, use posting to Craigslist, eBay classifieds, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging and all of the social media available to you. It only takes a few minutes per listing and diligence makes the difference.
• Use an keyword tool such as Google’s to make a list of what words to use in your listings for better SEO.
• Do not syndicate your listings through other channels (MLS, broker, etc) as these will generate a conflict and it is in your interest that the RealBird property site is picked up.
• Keep the “Sold” or “Rented” property websites and use them to market your services for example posting on Craigslist services.
• Add your own content in the Neighborhood information tab so buyers and sellers see that you specialize in the neighborhood they are looking to buy or sell.
• Use the SMS marketing and advertise your SMS number and codes to get more sellers and buyers; now for both your featured listings and for any other links, like your open homes. With texting you always get a lead, and in listing presentation you have something that may set you apart from other agents.
• Create listing videos from the photo gallery for YouTube and put the video back in the listing.
• Facebook is a great way for generating real estate leads with targeted ads. Please see this tutorial on how to use it with your RealBird landing pages: https://realbird.wiki.zoho.com/Using-Landing-Squeeze.html
3) Important Notes about Rentals:
• There is a lot of fraud going on with rentals. For that reason, we will not syndicate rental listings without your photo and brokerage name in the profile.
• In "free rental market" areas, where all agents are allowed to advertise any free market rentals, the destination portals will only pick up one submission, the one they consider as most accurate and reliable. This is usually the property manager's feed. However, you can still generate leads with the other lead channels: classifieds, social media, especially using the RealBird texting feature may work well.
• It is recommended that you use a full address for rentals, because many of the portals have map based search interfaces and a listing without a full address can of course not be posted correctly on a map.
• Please
keep in mind that not all leads generated via your RealBird service will show
up in the LEADS section of your RealBird account. This is because some of
the listing syndication sites where we send your listings allow consumers to
directly email you, without reference to RealBird, and also because
consumers my email you or call you directly, and may not mention that they
found you through a RealBird listing or widget that they found online.
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