What is the best way for Real Estate Agents to market themselves in 2020?
2020 is starting out to be a very unique year. This even applies to the real estate industry nationwide. In many larger real estate markets like California, Q4 of 2019 and Q1 of 2020 are sellers markets.

This is driving the real estate prices up. And people are starting to pay more than the listing price. Definitely a good market to be in as a real estate agent.

So how do you market yourself as a real estate agent to actually find the buyers or sellers who want you to help them with one of the most important transactions they will make in their lifetime?

First step is you need to think of your real estate gig as a business. What does every thriving business from the local franchises to the mid-sized corporations, to the Fortune 500 behemoths have in common?

They realise the value of marketing. It takes money to make money, and if you don't have a steady stream of goods being sold, it's tough as a business to do more than just survive year after year.

As a real estate agent, you need targeted marketing. Both in the market you serve, but also to qualified buyers and sellers in that market.

One solution for real estate marketing, is Zillow, or a similar real estate platform. Of course you know when you pay money to be a featured real estate agent on their website, your getting people who are looking to buy or sell a home, in your market.

Zillow works, it's just expensive for what you get. You have to spend enough money to buy enough leads a month, so the math works out. And luke warm leads, are still considered a lead.

In California, the number we hear agents throwing around is a monthly spend of $2500, and you are still competing with other agents. Zillow is a great avenue to be on, but if this is your first marketing avenue, then you may want to look at other options.

We have found good success in running online ads for real estate agents. Facebook is a great for that, because the level of targeting it allows on the Facebook Ad platform. Now just running ads for a large and complex transaction like real estate in its own will not work.

Facebook runs on the impression to engagement to interest to take action customer journey. Think of a sales funnel, where everyone starts at the top of the funnel going down.

You need to first make the right amount of impressions to the right target audience(s). Then, from those impressions, you will get engagement, or people that will click on your ad, or comment on it, or watch your video.

From there, you will then take the people who have already engaged and move them down the funnel, not just with more facebook ads, but compile that with a working qualification system through chatbots and eventually qualify the people that have made it this far down the funnell, with a phone call. You can't replace a human touch at the end of this process. 

Now real estate is a relationship game, if your an agent that does well, you already know this. Building a relationship with anyone takes a little bit of time.

But with this type of a system, you are creating relationships with people on a regular basis every month, who will be buying or selling a home soon.

This is also how Zillow leads work, you still have to make the relationship with the potential lead. Now the real beauty of having your own lead generation system is far more than just rivaling what you get through Zillow.

First, you have your own system in place that cannot be effected by big changes that Zillow is making to their platform. The only degree of change you can notice will be on the cost of targeting customers go up or down based on demand, but that happens everywhere, even Zillow.

People are also not going anywhere from Facebook, everyone is on there. So that marketplace is a safe place to target your audience.

In addition, you can qualify your leads more than they would be qualified with Zillow through the different qualification steps you setup in your own lead generation system.

The end result is a better, more qualified prospect. You may get fewer leads, but they will be more vetted. Or you can have less qualifiers and get more leads and work them. That is up to you, it's your system.

Then there is the fact that once you've built that pipeline of potential clients your in contact with month after month, after a few months, you have a rolling pipeline of actual sales trickling in month after month, because you have a consistent system in place, attracting and filtering potential clients from looky loos on a daily basis.

This is what makes the top 20% of real estate agents make 80% of the commissions, nationwide. They get it.

We aren't saying that you shouldn't use Zillow. But from a return on investment standpoint, or how much money you really make on the money you spend on leads, Zillow isn't the best option.

If you are already marketing on Zillow and need another platform to spend money on to hit different targeting and real that a different platform provides, try real estate lead generation through Facebook.

If you are thinking of spending money on Zillow, and this would be your first real estate marketing platform that you are on, think of Facebook. With the right setup, you will get a much better bang for your marketing bucks.

This is what works for the real estate agents our experts help at razwerks. It's a good long-term strategy, understanding that investing money in something you own and can control, is always valued more than a system that you pay money into, but get diminishing returns.

If you need help, you can always visit www.razwerks.com or reach out to us at 949-627-4771.

razwerks is a Digital Marketing Agency located in Orange County, with a global reach. Our headquarters is at 1968 S. Coast Hwy #479, Laguna Beach, CA 92651