Online Leads
The age of technology has brought about online real estate portals like Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Homes.com, etc. etc. etc. If there’s a portal with any website traffic, there’s sure to be an advertising opportunity!
So, before you go postal on the portals – realize that we’re talking about less than 10% of buyers and only 4% of sellers. AND, these statistics also don’t specify which website was used. So, the same 10% and 4% of the audiences could have used a national brokerage site, or even your website. Overall, it’s a pretty small piece of the total pie.
The great thing about online leads is that you don’t have to work super hard to generate the lead. But, they do cost a lot! You’re investing up front and there’s no real guarantee that you’ll get any leads. Then, when you do get leads, it’s up to you to convert them. So, think about the upfront investment as less than 50% of your total investment. Because once you get the lead it’s up to you to invest your time in converting them.
Best Practice
When you get an online lead, you want to respond as fast as you can. Within 5 minutes if possible. As you can see from this chart, the longer you wait to connect with the lead, the lower your chance of converting to a client. Speed to lead.
There's more than just the portals...
If you’re not a fan of the portals, that’s cool. There are lots of other ways to generate leads online. If you’ve got some money in your budget you might like Pay Per Click (PPC) leads.
Two of the most common PPC lead sources are Google Adwords and social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc).
Google PPC
Let’s pretend you’re looking for real estate in Chicago. As a consumer, what would you search for in google? Perhaps "real estate for sale in Chicago"? Here’s a screen shot of the google results when I searched that term. The top spots on that page are bid on (paid) by advertisers and have the little Ad box next to them.
Note
What’s interesting is that of the 4 paid search results – only 1 of them is to look at homes for sale. The other 3 are about getting more real estate leads. There’s a lot of work that goes into keyword research (more on that in the member's area) and maybe this keyword term “real estate for sale in Chicago” is googled a lot by agents.
There are lots of services you can use to setup your AdWords campaign. Most services will take a portion of your budget as an administrative fee which pays for the reporting, research, setup, etc. In my experience, they take a BIG portion of your budget. While setting up a campaign is a little advanced, you can save a big chunk of money by doing it yourself. Stay tuned - we'll add a tutorial on how to do this in the Members Area.
Social media PPC is all the rage.
Especially Facebook. For example, have you seen or done any home value leads on Facebook?
Typically, you would set this ad up in your Ad Manager or as a dark post in Power Editor (don’t panic if you’re not familiar with these terms – we’ve got you covered in upcoming Facebook courses!). Then, when someone clicks on the ad they go to your home value site and ideally enter their address:
For the end user to be able to immediately see what their home is worth, they need to enter their email address or contact info. That contact info is what you really want – which is why you pay Facebook for that click.
Some people have good luck on LinkedIn with pay per click advertising. It really boils down to who your target audience is and where they’re likely to be found online.