Hey, Realtors – how was your 2016? Hopefully, you sold more homes than ever before and had a hugely profitable campaign last year. If that’s the case, you probably utilized online marketing, including social media, to reach and engage clients. But if you didn’t have the best sales year of your life– or just want to do even it even better in 2017, we have some online marketing statistics, tips and strategies for you to implement or just fine-tune in 2017.
Today, we cover Internet searches and SEO, social media, and custom images and visual marketing. Look for part two of this blog for more stats, strategies, and tips on setting up your website, blogging, email marketing, and using videos to sell more homes.
Internet searches and SEO:
Stats:
94% of consumers have started their buying process by searching online for information, most often on a major search engine.
80% of all home buyers are searching online.
83% of all home buyers want to see pictures of the property online.
Agents expect 49% of their leads will come from referrals in 2017 – and a good part of that is building your presence and exposure via social media to get referrals.
However, only 9% of Realtors use social media to market their listings.
42% of buyers’ first step was looking online for a home.
73% of Americans now use search engines, compared with only 52% in 2005.
Tips:
52% of all home buyers used an iPhone in their home search!
So get mobile and make sure your website and blog are set up to be viewed correctly on smartphones and mobile devices.
75% of Google users never scroll past the first page when getting information for products or services,
And 60% click on one of the top three websites listed.
Strategies:
Having a great website with a blog page that you regularly update with valuable content.
Make sure you use lots of relevant keywords and tags to improve Search Engine Optimization.
Add social sharing buttons to make it easy for others to spread your content over their social media accounts, which will increase your SEO as well.
Social Media
Stats:
91% of Realtors use social media to some extent.
52% of marketers say that the difficulty of measuring ROI for their social media campaigns is their biggest frustration.
64% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more weekly.
70% of agents who use social media for business use it mostly to build relationships and network.
After email, Facebook is cited as the second most effective digital marketing strategy used by real estate agents.
Tips:
Which social media account is best for you? There is no one right social media platform for your marketing, as a good campaign includes multiple social media accounts, each to reach, engage, and engage in a conversation with your audience in different ways.
Facebook is by far the largest social media platform on the planet, with so many users (1.39 billion) that it would be the largest nation on earth if all its users formed a country. Photos account for 75 percent of all content on Facebook.
Twitter has the best chance of a post going viral and reaching huge numbers in the world outside your immediate circle of friends and clients, as the reach its is exponential. Twitter does take some time to manage, but once you master the use of # and @, your messages can reach far and wide.
Facebook posts on the weekend achieve 16% higher engagement rates than weekday posts. However, only 15% of business’ posts go out on the weekend.
Two of the most popular social media sharing applications are Buffer.com and Hootsuite.com, allowing you to schedule a whole week, month or even year’s worth of content with text, links, and images, and scheduling it to go out over all your social media platforms.
Strategies:
Don’t over-commit to just one social media platform. A balance of marketing messages with different types of content that go out over multiple social media platforms is best.
In fact, the vast majority of real estate agents that sell more than 30 homes per year say they use multiple marketing resources consistently.
In fact, more than 69% of real estate marketers use multiple social media channels, and over 56% of agents say it’s an integral part of their marketing mix.
Consistency is key – not intensity or frequency – of messages.
Consumers who receive both email and Facebook ads are 22% more likely to buy through you or refer you than if they just received emails alone.
Custom images and visual marketing
Stats:
Creating and sharing visual content is an extremely effective way to brand yourself and create awareness.
In fact, scientists claim that visual content is processed 60,000 times faster than text by our brains. And with 40 percent of the population responding better to images than text alone, visuals are a part of marketing you can’t ignore.
Images can also humanize your brand like no text ever can, establishing warmth, trust, familiarity, and even credibility – the pillars of client engagement and precursors to any sale.
Participants in research studies remembered only about 10% of the information 72 hours later when it was given to them audibly (spoken), but had astounding 65% retention levels when the information was originally presented with an image, too.
Called the “Pictorial Superiority Effect,” neuroscience shows that our brains prioritize visual input, and this kind of information is far more likely to be recognized and recalled.
Tips:
Anyone can choose not to read a paragraph of text, but one of the most powerful benefits of image marketing is that they can’t NOT see it as they’re browsing through their social media feeds or opening emails.
Combine your images with smart and relevant written messages and you’ll get a 94% higher rate of opens, reads, likes, shares, etc. than if you just had text alone.
You don’t have to spend a lot of time or money on creating custom images. There are scores of easy apps and websites that help you create great custom images and visual content on your phone or desktop computer.
Strategies:
Real estate agents that produce custom images, graphics, infographics, etc. for marketing to clients see phenomenal results. People LOVE smart, funny, interesting, helpful, and visually appealing images.
You can use and share your images over just about any social media platform, but Instagram was made for images, and images made for Instagram. The image-centric social app now has more than 77.6 million member in the U.S. alone – 27.6% of our population. Users share more than 70 million photos and videos each day, and Instagram boasts a 4.21 percent engagement rate, 58 times higher than Facebook and 120 times more than Twitter.
Instagram is also the social media of choice for most Millennials and a great way to reach and connect with a demographic under 30.
Pinterest is a social media platform that solely entails ‘pinning’ or collecting and curating images. While sometimes forgotten in the social media marketing conversation, Pinterest is incredibly useful.
In fact, Pinterest, with 72.5 million users, is now the 4th largest driver of internet traffic worldwide! 71 percent of Pinterest’s users are women, and the typical demographic is also educated, has a good job, and dictates consumer purchasing decisions for their household, with 93 percent of Pinterest users shopping or searching for goods and services online.
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Look for part two of this blog where we cover the basics of setting up your website, blogging, email marketing, and using videos to sell more homes!