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How to Use Instagram for Real Estate Marketing
Instagram is a natural fit for real estate. Here’s what you need to know about using Instagram for real estate marketing.
Highlights:
- Instagram content needs to be consistent in tone and timing, visually appealing and engaging.
- Instagram Stories and Highlights are ideal ways for real estate marketers to give users a look into their brand.
- Hashtags promote engagement and raise brand awareness.
With its highly visual platform, robust Stories feature, and growing user base, Instagram is a natural fit for real estate marketing. The platform boasts over 500 million users and 4.2 billion likes per month. Used strategically, it’s an ideal place to showcase your properties and brand.
Real estate marketers should be aware that Instagram requires a different content and posting strategy from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social media platforms. For example, engagement on Instagram is ten times higher than it is for Facebook, and the demographic is substantially more affluent — making it a no-brainer for luxury real estate.
In general, marketers have been relatively slow to adopt Instagram for real estate marketing, a puzzling reality given its overall popularity and natural fit for the visual nature of real estate. But savvy marketers, like these five real estate accounts for example, have figured out how to use this platform to great success.
Instagram for real estate marketing — the right kind of content
Instagram is a fantastic platform for engaging users. But to get the most out of it, it’s important for real estate marketers to post the right kind of content. Obviously, Instagram is a highly visual medium. It lends itself to beautiful, arresting images, and pitchy hashtags.
Keep your content and visual style consistent. Your profile is your calling card on the platform and should reflect the overall tone you want to set for your brand. This also means posting content at a consistent rate, ideally 2-3 times a day.
Chances are, you’ve had fun playing with Instagram filters. But you may not know that certain lighting and color presets perform better than others. According to Iconosquare, the most popular filters currently on Instagram include Clarendon, Juno, Lark, and Ludwig — and they really do have an impact on engagement.
In order to determine the best types of content to engage your target audience, keep an eye on your competitor and peer brands’ presence on the platform. You can also make use of Instagram analytics tools to track, analyze, and benchmark your Instagram content.
Instagram Stories and Highlights
When the feature was first introduced, Instagram Stories was a gamechanger for the ways in which users interact on social media. Stories are sequences of content that users post to their Instagram accounts over a 24-hour period. Besides photos, Stories can include videos, live and prerecorded, as well as Boomerangs, seconds-long motion clips that play forward and backward.
Stories can also be customized with various design tools, including stickers and filters. Notably for real estate marketers, these tools include location tags, as well as time, weather, or holiday greetings. Audiences can view the Stories of the users they follow within the 24-hour window after they are posted. They can find users with active Stories by scrolling the user icons at the top of the app. Or users can tell their followers that they’ve posted a story by tagging them, which notifies them through a direct message.
For brands, Stories offer the invaluable feature of having metrics wrapped into the experience. The feature allows you to track not only how many views your story has received, but exactly which users have viewed it, and how they interacted with it.
In addition to its Stories feature, Instagram now lets users create a featured group of “Highlights” in various categories on their profile. Stories have only a 24-hour lifespan, so featuring your most effective Stories clips in Highlights gives them a second life, and a chance to engage future followers.
Hashtags
One of the most effective ways to grow your Instagram following is to use hashtags effectively. Since Instagram gives users the ability to follow hashtags that interest them, and they function as links to other relevant content, choosing the right hashtags is the ideal way to reach and engage your target audience.
Keep an eye on accounts of peer brands, to stay up to date with the best hashtags to be using. The most effective hashtags are short, memorable, and easy to read. You can also use a free online tool like InconoSquare or Websta to find relevant hashtags for the real estate industry. For much more, check out our guide to using hashtags for real estate marketing.
If you want engagement, engage
It’s easy to forget that the fundamental benefit of social media is that it’s social. Users want to be part of a conversation. Encourage your followers to interact with you on all your social media platforms, including Instagram. This means responding to comments and brand mentions, as well as engaging with your followers’ content.
Starting and fostering a conversation with your followers and peer brands on Instagram is a key to getting the most out of this platform. Encouraging interaction helps drive brand awareness, and lead generation for your properties. Now, the time has come for you to master Instagram for real estate marketing.
Related Posts
- How to Use Social Media Hashtags in Real Estate Marketing
- Real Estate Instagram Accounts You Should be Following
- Social Media Trends for 2018 Real Estate Marketers Need to Know
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Top Real Estate Marketing Trends 2019
Here are the top real estate marketing trends for 2019, including video, personalized content, and authenticity.
Highlights:
- The popularity of video is still on the rise. Part of what makes video such an appealing form of content is its shareability, which drives organic traffic.
- Marketers should use social media platforms to engage with followers through compelling content.
- Foster creativity in your content through benchmarking and researching competitors.
It’s the start of a new year, and that means savvy marketers are looking to stay ahead of the curve. These top real estate marketing trends are what we see coming for 2019.
1) It’s all about the video
We can’t stress it enough: video is here to stay, and it’s time your business starts embracing it.
Part of what makes video such an appealing form of content is its shareability, which drives organic traffic. Creating appealing, engaging video is an ideal way to make your target audience material to share with their network, with the potential to expand your reach exponentially.
2) Social media users are craving authenticity
Let your social media platforms be places where you engage your followers through compelling content that says something about the culture of your business and your passion for real estate.
3) Keep it personal
Much as users are seeking authenticity from marketing on social media, your potential clients will respond all the better to personalized content and relationship-building. Whenever you can, add a personal touch to your communication with your audience.
4) Get creative
One thing we can say for certain about the new year, and the future of real estate marketing going forward, is that creativity is going to be key. Being aware of trends, benchmarking your marketing efforts against those of your competitors, reading industry blogs, and listening to your client-base are just a few key ways to foster creativity.
To learn more, visit us at froneticsrealestate.com
Related posts:
- Infographic: Real Estate Marketing Trends 2018
- 6 Signs It’s Time to Consider Outsourcing Your Real Estate Marketing
- A Visual Guide to Social Media Posting Frequency for Real Estate
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6 Tips for Creating Mobile-Friendly Marketing Emails
The majority of your prospective buyers and tenants are reading emails on their phones, so you’d better be sending mobile-friendly marketing emails.
My mornings are probably much like most of yours: As soon as my sleepy fingers can silence my alarm on my cell phone, I open up my email, before my feet even hit the floor. I will check my email again while I’m eating breakfast — and possibly a third time while I’m in line waiting for my coffee.
With the explosion of smartphones, more and more people are taking to their phones over their desktop computers to check email. It’s not hard to understand why; our phones are with us all day long. In fact, 54% of emails are now being read on a mobile device, a 40% increase in the last five years.
When a majority of your audience is reading your marketing emails on their mobile devices, it’s imperative that you’re creating emails that are optimized for mobile viewing.
Here are 6 essential tips for creating mobile-friendly marketing email campaigns.
1) Keep them short and sweet.
When writing copy or email, your content should be to the point. But this is especially true for mobile-friendly emails. Small screen size and increased likelihood the user is multi-tasking are just two reasons why efficiency is key.
Create messages that are easy for the eye to scan. Use bullet points or short paragraphs to keep the reader engaged. Strip out anything that’s not totally necessary, and drive recipients to landing pages for more information.
2) Less is more.
Not all mobile devices include your images. Android users, for example, will find their email images are off by default unless they change their settings. It’s also important to remember that large image files take longer to download. And nothing drives people away like slow load times.
What does this mean for mobile-friendly emails? Your content needs to be front and center, with less reliance on images. This can be tricky for real estate marketing, where the visual is key. But if your content is snappy and intriguing, readers will follow their curiosity and peruse images you link to.
3) Get to the point.
A typical desktop inbox displays about 60 characters of a subject line, while mobile devices show just 25-30 characters. Mobile-friendly emails place the offer or call-to-action at the beginning of the subject line where it’s more likely to be seen.
4) Get responsive.
We’ve all opened an email or webpage on a mobile device and had to squint to read it. Web content designed for desktop screens are barely legible when shrunk down to this size.
Try using a responsive template to ensure that readers are viewing your email the way you intended. Responsive emails use fluid tables and images to make content flow across different screen sizes.
5) Button it up.
I know it’s not just me and my fat fingers: Links are difficult to click on mobile devices! Instead try using buttons for your calls-to-action.
Make sure any CTA buttons are toward the top of your email, so readers know what you want them to do right away. Also, buttons should be large in size and surrounded by plenty of white space so readers don’t accidentally click on something else.
6) Test your work.
After making your emails as mobile-friendly as possible, don’t forget the most important step: testing. Send out test emails to your coworkers that use different devices to ensure that your emails look exactly like you want. With 98.4% of users reading email on Android and iOS, those operating systems should be your main focus.
Don’t lose readers before they’ve had a chance to open, read, and engage with your emails. Use these 6 tips for more mobile-friendly emails to help improve engagement rates, lead conversion, and profitable investor action.
Related posts:
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Paid Digital Advertising: A Beginner’s Guide for Real Estate Marketers
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4 Steps to Building a Successful DIY Content Marketing Strategy for Real Estate
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This Is the First Thing You Should Do in Real Estate Marketing
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Real Estate Marketing Leads: 4 Myths (and How to Disprove Them)
Don’t let these four myths get in the way of creating an effective strategy for capturing real estate leads.
Highlights:
- As you start to develop your lead-capture strategy, don’t let certain myths and misunderstandings derail your efforts.
- If you confine yourself to one or even two methods of finding leads, you’re unnecessarily limiting your potential.
- The better you understand your prospects, the more you’ll be able to meet their needs and turn them into customers.
One of the most pressing challenges for all real estate professionals is to get a steady supply of real estate leads. But as you start to develop your lead-capture strategy, don’t let certain myths and misunderstandings derail your efforts.
Let’s look at four of the top myths when it comes to real estate leads.
Myth #1: Real estate leads that don’t buy immediately are worthless
It can be tempting to fall into black-and-white thinking when it comes to leads. When prospects don’t show an immediate interest in making a purchase, you might dismiss them as dead leads. That’s a mistake in any field, but especially in the realm of real estate. The only leads that are truly dead or worthless are ones where you have no accurate contact information, or they have specifically told you not to contact them again.
Just because a lead doesn’t require your services right now doesn’t mean he or she never will. Real estate purchasing is closely tied to people’s circumstances, which can change over time. That’s why it makes sense to look at every promising lead as a long-term prospect with whom you should periodically follow up.
Myth #2: There’s only one way to find leads
Real estate marketers have a wide selection of lead generating strategies to choose from. These include:
- Advertising (online and offline)
- Social media
- Billboards
- Blogging: A real estate blog is a powerful way to build your credibility as well as SEO.
- Direct mail
You may develop certain preferences for finding leads. However, if you confine yourself to one or even two methods, you’re unnecessarily limiting your potential. An omnichannel lead generating strategy is your best approach.
It’s good to combine high-tech and old-school methods, for example. You certainly need to take advantage of digital marketing, which includes an up-to-date website and social media presence. At the same time, offline strategies are still effective as well. The more ways you have to engage with prospects, the more qualified leads you’ll attract.
Myth #3: It’s more important to acquire leads than to nurture them
Lead generation is only the first step in the real estate marketing process. If you’re too caught up in the lead generation process, you may only make a brief effort with each lead before putting it aside and looking at the next one. Instead, you need to think in terms of lead management and nurturing. This includes:
- Segmenting leads so you know what type of offers to put in front of each prospect. This is fairly easy to do with web leads. You can, for example, set up separate SEO, social media, and email marketing campaigns based on different keywords and topics.
- Learning the best ways to contact each lead. Some people prefer to be contacted by phone, email, or social media, for example.
- Following up regularly. You don’t want to bombard prospects with messages. However, you do want to be proactive and reach out to leads every so often.
Lead nurturing and management really come down to building relationships with prospects.
Myth #4: Once you’ve closed, you can neglect the lead
Closing a sale is always exhilarating. You shouldn’t, however, think of a successful closing as the end of the process. Think of it, rather, as the start of a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship. It’s important to show clients that you care about them, even after the sale.
- Ask clients to complete a survey. This provides insight into areas where you can improve.
- Send holiday and birthday greetings.
- Send occasional emails or make calls asking if there’s anything you can do for them.
- Request referrals. Your past clients are often one of your best sources for finding future clients.
Avoid These Myths
Make sure you recognize these myths for real estate leads so you don’t fall prey to them. It’s important to remember that each lead is a unique individual with specific characteristics and preferences. Many mistakes occur when business owners and investors generalize too much about their leads. The better you understand your prospects, the more you’ll be able to meet their needs and turn them into customers.
Related posts:
- How Inbound Marketing for Real Estate Works to Improve Sales
- How to Explain Content Marketing ROI to Win (or Keep) Buy-In
- 6 Signs It’s Time to Consider Outsourcing Your Real Estate Marketing
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How to Use Social Media Hashtags in Real Estate Marketing
Strategic use of social media hashtags can help increase your property’s visibility and grow organic reach on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
You’re likely to be vaguely aware of hashtags, at least in your personal social media life. But perhaps you’re not intimately familiar with how they can play into your real estate marketing strategy. Whether you #lol at it or not, using social media hashtags wisely can actually be a major boon to your social media marketing efforts.
What is a social media hashtag?
Before we dive into too much detail, let’s take a moment to establish what exactly a hashtag is.
While you may remember it as a pound sign (or “sharp” sign, or number sign), this symbol’s meaning has radically changed in the past 15 years. In fact, its new definition has even been added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
A hashtag, according to the OED’s American counterpart, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is “a word or phrase preceded by the symbol # that classifies or categorizes the accompanying text (such as a tweet).”
Essentially, the hashtag has two concurrent functions: It places content within a specific area of interest or keyword, and it facilitates a search for it.
How to use hashtags in social media marketing
You may already see how using hashtags can help your social media content’s visibility.
Hashtags automatically function as links. For example, if a user interested in San Diego real estate clicks on #sdhomesforsale, all public posts labeled with that hashtag will show up. This is true of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Using hashtags in your social media content allows you to:
- Categorize your content
- Draw attention quickly and easily
- Drive conversions
- Harness the power of topics on social media
- Increase visibility
- Grow organic reach
Hashtag dos and don’ts
As you start experimenting with adding hashtags to your social media posts, here are a few dos and don’ts to think about:
Do:
- Use relevant terms
- Research trending topics as you chose your content
- Create your own hashtags to match your brand
- Make sure the audience setting on your posts is “public”
Don’t:
- Use too many hashtags per post. Too many hashtags make your post look unpleasant and difficult for your followers to read.
- Repeat your hashtag multiple times in the same post
- Use hashtags that are too long or confusing to for readers (Tip: if you have a long hashtag, try capitalizing the first letter of each word)
- Put spaces in between words within a single hashtag
To help get you started, here are a few hashtags that real estate marketers might want to use. These are just a jumping off point! Getting creative can be fun.
- #photooftheday
- #realestate
- #properties
- #househunting
- #homesearch
- #justlisted
- #broker
- #realtor
- #igers (short for Instagrammers)
- #throwbackthursday and/or #TBT
- #transformationtuesday
- #behindthescenes
- #photoshoot
- #videogram
- #videooftheday
- #interiordesigns
Which social media hashtags are you using in your real estate marketing?
Related posts:
- Social Media Can Be a Strategic Weapon in Real Estate Marketing
- 4 Real Estate Marketing Trends 2018
- Why You Should Always Respond to User Reviews
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