Ways To Increase Online Presence & Brand Awareness for Real Estate During COVID-19
Empty opens, scarce showings – Where did all the clients go?
Here’s what’s happening
What Does This Mean For Real Estate?
This is a great opportunity for real estate professionals to connect with their audiences online while keeping everybody as safe as possible. Things will eventually go back to normal. What we do during downturns is what distinguishes those who are successful later. Being proactive in your online presence is important for traffic flow, activity, and recognition of your brand and your website for future opportunities.
Ways to increase your website engagement
#1 – Use photography & video editing tools
Did you know that 92% marketers consider video as an important part of their marketing strategy? Keep ahead of your competitors by creating engaging cover videos and other engaging video content on your social media. Try InShot app and make your video just in a few minutes – all for free!
Instead of just screen-capturing something and posting it, try tailored posts to provide updates on the market, policy changes by the government & banks, or discuss specific listings in detail. Use Canva – one of the best apps to design and edit your listing imagery or virtual house tours.
#2 – Post links back to your listing detail pages on your website
Posting photos of the listing is great. Reposting from Instagram is great too. But we often observe that many of these posts do NOT contain any links back to the agents’ website pages with the full details. This is a huge mistake that happens too often. See how you can easily share the listing page itself on all channels (Social Media, iMessages, WhatsApp Chats, emails & more).
Pushing out the right quality/quantity of deep links will have an immediate impact on your site’s traffic. Need help with creating the meaningful deep linking content for SEO.? The Brixwork Team is here to help!
#3 – Set the Virtual Tour field on MLS® (Paragon, etc.)
Embed your Matterport, Youtube tours etc. into your listing detail pages, then set the Virtual Tour field on any MLS® system that supports it to the listing detail page on your website. This not only will boost your own domain’s ranking but why give away traffic directly to Youtube or Matterport, when you can direct them to your own website for further brand awareness?
#4 – Add a Facebook Business Page chat widget
Looking for a better way to connect with your potential clients? Let any customer contact you in real-time directly through Facebook (not only emails!). The Facebook chat widget effectively replaces all previous generations of chat widgets that can be embedded on your websites. Best of all it’s a free tool provided by Facebook Business Pages, and all Brixwork websites support it at no extra charge!
Don’t miss out on additional leads. Enabling the Facebook chat widget on your Brixwork website is easy (you need to set up your Facebook Business Page first, of course).
#5 – Post your listings & market updates regularly
Showing your audience a sense of activity as well as passion for your industry is critical for building brand awareness. You want to be “The Realtor®” in the minds of as many people as possible, AND you can build this up easily on Instagram. Check out @erikabishop.ca’ s new listing updates, as well as @amin.shahbaz.homes’s market update posts for how they keep their audience engaged. You can also change your profile URL to a specific listing you want to feature, rather than defaulting to your homepage.
View this post on Instagram
View this post on Instagram
#6 – Check on your website traffic stats
Knowing where your traffic comes from, which pages are performing well (and not), and how much activity you are getting on your website pages is the first step to creating a strategy. Once you know which pages need more work to perform better, you can improve your website content on your own by following our Do-It-Yourself SEO Tips & Steps.
Too busy to spend hours a week on SEO? We can help you with our dedicated SEO programs that significantly improve your site performance, and consequently get you more leads.
#7 – Consider running display ads & retargeting ads
Building brand awareness is easier than ever through social & Google ads. A well-planned ad campaign with the right landing pages is a great way to get quality leads for a great price. They also give you a great opportunity to re-engage with your past website visitors, and pull them back to your website through retargeting. Running display ads and re-targeting ads are especially useful for the presale projects to reach a larger audience as quickly as possible.
We help you emerge stronger than ever
Smart businesses prepare for the next great season at all times, not just in good times – but especially in dire times. There’s no doubt we are in a recession, but this too shall pass – we hope that you can be best prepared to perform well when things go back to “normal” by maximizing your efforts during this period. Keep calm and grind away! We help you to stand out as a Realtor® during this challenging time.
We hope you are staying safe, healthy & positive during these difficult times. The Brixwork team has fully moved to work from home to keep normal operations running while minimizing health risks to our team and the public, and we are here to help.
