The Building Blocks of a Solid Listing Strategy: Knowing your Audience
In today’s real estate market, identifying and marketing to the right audience is critical to your success. Without a clear understanding of who your potential clients are and how to interact with them, you risk wasting valuable resources targeting people who are unlikely to transact with you.
This article explores how to identify your optimal audience, along with tools and tactics that will help strengthen your listing strategy through social media.
Finding your ideal audience
As a real estate agent, it may be tempting to market your services to anyone and everyone in your community. But in reality, targeting “everyone” can waste time, money, and other important resources.
So unless you have unlimited funds to post your face on every billboard, bench, and television in your market – you need to narrow your audience to the people who are most likely to transact with you in the next 12 months. Luckily, REDX has been helping agents find this ideal audience for 20 years, with simple tools to help you connect with and nurture these “transaction-ready” homeowners.
Prioritizing “transaction-ready” homeowners
While there are over 140 million households in the United States, we know that roughly 4% sell each year. So if you want to spend less time and money finding listings, you should focus your efforts on the bottom 4% of the funnel known as “transaction-ready” homeowners.
Transaction-ready homeowners are people who are actively looking to buy or sell their homes. These are people in your market who are raising their hand screaming, “I want to sell my home right now!”
The most common transaction-ready homeowners are expired and for-sale-by-owner listings. Since expireds have already tried (and failed) to sell their home, and FSBOs think they can manage the process on their own, both of these types of homeowners are primed and ready to do business with a qualified agent.
While not every Expired or FSBO will choose you as their agent, prioritizing them as part of your audience will ensure you’re engaging with people who want to transact immediately.
Getting your audience’s attention
Now that you’ve identified your foundational audience, it’s time to get their attention. You can accomplish this by tailoring your marketing efforts (or “pillars”) to the specific needs and preferences of those most likely to sell in the next 12 months.
Your marketing pillars should include paid advertising, organic social media, cold calling, and working your sphere of influence.
Tending to each of these marketing pillars will help solidify your listing strategy and lead to more connections, listings, and commissions. If done effectively, each pillar will strengthen the others, creating a positive feedback loop of lasting success.
Let’s dive into each pillar to see how it’s done…
1. Organic Social
There are billions of people on social media… including your future listings. So the more you post on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, the more people will recognize you when you interact with them in person.
Keep in mind that social platforms prioritize content creators who share authentic, engaging content. If you only post about real estate, you’ll lose followers and get buried by platform algorithms. So make sure you find a good balance between personal and real estate content—about 80% fun/personal content and 20% real estate content.
2. Paid Advertising
Social platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow you to target your exact audience by running unique ads to specific people in your database. This means you can put relevant messages right in front of homeowners who are most likely to sell in the next 12 months.
Tools like REDX’s Ad Builder let you advertise to your leads and contacts by directly targeting your Expired Leads, FSBO Leads, GeoLeads™, SOI and more! And Ad Builder does all the hard work by automatically updating your lists with the newest leads every day – which means you only advertise to the exact people you want.
3. Cold Calling
When it comes to lead generation, cold calling is one of the most effective ways to connect with qualified homeowners. The only problem is, cold calling can be tedious and discouraging, especially for newer prospecting agents.
So try this instead:
Pair your cold calling strategy with organic social content and paid advertising to warm up your prospects before you call. This way, when you do call, homeowners will know your name, face, and what you do from social media. It’s a great way to break the ice before you jump on the phone.
4. Sphere of Influence
Don’t forget to include your own sphere of influence and past customers. Too many agents work hard for a single transaction, but forget about their past clients as they look for their next deal. Staying top-of-mind with your past clients and your personal sphere of influence will yield the highest results over time through repeat and referral business.
Closing the deal
It’s time to build a solid listring strategy and stand out to transaction-ready homeowners. Knowing your audience and how you should market to them will open the door to more conversations, and ultimately lead to new business.
Use the building blocks in this blog to increase your chances of success and establish yourself as a trusted agent in your area.
Looking for more ways to build and engage your audience over social media?
Download the full REDX E-book, Listing Strategies for 2023: Prospecting with Social Media.
About REDX
REDX offers real estate professionals a complete all-in-one prospecting platform for generating listing appointments. The platform includes seller leads, a dialer with up to three lines, and a lead management tool for simple follow-up.
No start-up fee when you sign up using the link below!
THE LCA BLOG
Weekly articles that cover every aspect of the real estate industry, growing your business, personal development & so much more.
Real estate brokerages are already dealing with razor thin margins and in the wake of the NAR settlement wondering how to make their profitability goals a reality. The folks at real estate research and consulting firm, T3 Sixty have identified seven key factors that impact profitability. We break them down below and outline how you can take […]
Social media has become an essential tool in real estate marketing, with 48% of agents considering it the most effective form of advertising. However, many agents still face challenges in generating high-quality leads and converting them into clients through traditional Facebook and Instagram ads. If you’re among those struggling to make social media ads work […]