6 Myths Surrounding Generating Real Estate Leads on the Web
If you’re like most real estate agents, generating leads is something you spend a lot of time thinking about. Without leads, you have no sales and, without sales, you have no money. This is something that absolutely must be solved. And yet, these insidious myths keep you from doing that.
Organic Traffic Is King
When you set up a website for lead generation, the lure of “free” is often too much to withstand. You’re going to be told (if you haven’t already), that organic website traffic beats paid traffic – both in terms of price and conversion.
photo TaxRebate.org.uk via Flickr
This is a lie. The most targeted, motivated, traffic in the real estate industry is paid traffic. There’s a simple reason why. Paid traffic comes from ads – ads that look like ads, not content (not really). When you get traffic from organic search results, you get a grab-bag. If that traffic comes from users typing in “buying keywords,” then yes, it can be better (or at least equal) to paid traffic.
But, you can’t control where Google, or any other search engine, puts you in the search results. With paid traffic, you have a lot of control over what you ad says, where it’s placed, and how far your message spreads. All things being equal, if you want clients, opt for paid traffic when you can.
You Don’t Need a CMS
Another myth is that you don’t need a CMS. CMS systems are how you wrangle all of the information and data about your client. It’s like a rolodex (remember those?) or appointment book, but digitized. Businesses have used these for years to help organize customer data, so it makes sense that they would still use them.
A real estate contact management software program helps you set appointments with your prospects, gives you an easy way to key in critical prospect and client data, a simple search feature for finding contact information, an integrated calendar, email followup options, and a sales process flowchart of sorts to automate the sequencing of those followups.
Only Bother Will People Who Are Ready To Buy Right Now
Real estate is a relationship business. You can’t just call on people who are ready to buy right now. Sure, you have to have those immediate sales, but you also need long-term prospects to keep your sales “funnel” full. If you only approach people who are ready to do business now, you’ll starve in 6 months.
Lead Generation Is Easy
Lead generation is actually the hardest part of the business, and yet it’s one of the more important aspects of being successful. Get good at direct marketing. This is probably your only hope of survival.
It’s About Lead Generation
Despite what you may have read or heard, it’s not all about lead gen. Yes, it is important, but managing leads is far more important. Getting people to meet with you gives you potential sales. Managing those leads maximizes your income. Again, this is why a good CMS is so important. It helps you manage leads.
Automation Is Always Better
Some things can’t, and shouldn’t be, automated. While it’s fine to use autoresponders, for example, to follow up with prospects over time, nothing replaces a personal phone call after a sale.
Guest Author :
Alice Gibbons has spent her life involved in real estate. Now retired, she still likes to keep up with the real estate market. You can find her helpful posts on a variety of blogs and websites.
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