The Real Estate Agents Guide to Effective Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Real estate is a highly competitive industry, and with the advent of technology, the competition has only intensified. Effective marketing is essential for real estate agents to stay relevant, attract potential clients, and close deals in today's market. 

While numerous marketing strategies exist, inbound and outbound marketing has proven to be some of the most effective techniques. 

Inbound marketing involves creating content that attracts potential buyers to your business, while outbound marketing entails reaching out to clients directly. Real estate agents who understand how to use these two marketing techniques effectively can increase their chances of success in the industry.

This guide compares the key differences between inbound vs outbound leads for real estate and how they can help you stand out in a crowded market and grow your real estate business. Read to the end!

What Is Outbound Marketing?

To understand inbound leads vs outbound leads, you need to learn what outbound and inbound marketing entails.

Outbound marketing uses strategies like TV commercials, paid ads, cold calls, and direct mail to connect with potential customers. On the other hand, inbound marketing occurs when a potential client visits your website, downloads a whitepaper, or reads an ebook. 

The key difference between inbound vs outbound leads for real estate is that outbound marketing seeks to actively build relationships through targeted communication and engagement. 

While inbound marketing has become more popular due to its tremendous result, outbound marketing still takes about 90 percent of most real estate brands' marketing budget due to its high cost per outreach. 

To improve your outbound marketing ROI and generate more outbound leads, you need to allocate the budget to outbound lead generation techniques that work for your agency.

Top Outbound Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents

To succeed as a real estate agent, you need to combine different marketing strategies to reach your target audience. The following are seven outbound campaigns to incorporate into your marketing plan.

1. Cold Mail

While email has been around for decades, marketers still enjoy high ROI through the tool. Cold emails are unsolicited emails sent to prospects. Since the real estate agent initiates the interaction, it falls under outbound lead generation.  

While everyone hates receiving unsolicited emails because they feel like spam, you can create your cold mail to be more personalized, deliver value beyond the product offering, and respect the customer's time. 

Outbound marketing through cold mail doesn't have to be sales-based spam, impersonal, or pushy. You can incorporate digital outbound marketing techniques to make it better and more creative by utilizing your understanding of the target audience to create cold emails that generate responses and create more leads.

The following are areas to concentrate on in your cold emails: 

• Ensure you reach live email addresses
• Use an engaging subject line
• Personalize each mail
• Offer something in return. Don't just focus on the sale
• Optimize the text and add call-to-actions (CTAs)

33% of internet users open emails after viewing the subject line. Therefore, it's best to optimize your outbound marketing texts.

2. Print Marketing

Print marketing is one outbound lead generation strategy most sales and marketing professionals still use, even in this internet age. This type of marketing uses printed publications like magazines and newspapers to advertise services and products. 

Since magazines and newspapers publish content periodically, you can reach audiences in multiple publications. Most magazines and newspapers offer cheap advert slots, which can be ideal for real estate agents looking to keep their marketing expenses low.

One of the benefits of placing magazine ads is that magazines focus on specific topics, catering to a certain demographic. Therefore, if you run a luxury real estate website, you can advertise in a magazine catering to the wealthy elites. 

Your ad can be in the form of a photo, an article, or a combination of both. Ensure it captures the readers' attention enough to want to know more about your real estate agency and what you offer. 

You can even use print advertising to get potential prospects to visit your online store or website by adding a CTA directing them to your site or store at the end of the advert. 

3. Television Marketing

Companies can also promote their products and services through traditional advertising options like television marketing. These ads can be product placement in film or television projects, segments on a news broadcast, or commercial breaks during films or television shows.

Some real estate agents prefer television marketing due to its extensive reach. Since many people watch TV, television advertisement helps real estate agents reach more people that might require their services. You can use the visual elements to showcase your listings and put your brand on the face of prospective clients.

4. Radio Marketing

Another outbound strategy to help you attract potential customers is radio marketing. This form of marketing shares adverts over the radio. The number of radio stations across the country and in different genres helps ensure you reach a broader target market by placing ads on multiple stations. 

Marketing professionals looking to save costs can utilize radio marketing due to its low cost and broader audience reach.

5. Direct Mail

While the world has moved online, there's still life outside the internet. Most people enjoy seeing mail in their mailboxes. So, if you're looking for a low outbound marketing strategy, consider direct mail. 

According to research, there's a 70% increase in brand recall amongst participants that received direct mail than those exposed to online ads. Direct mail is a great way to gain traction for your real estate brand while still being relevant to your voice, ethos, and brand presentation.

6. Referral Marketing

Another strategy for increasing your outbound marketing efforts is referral marketing. Some marketers use referral marketing to promote their services or products and encourage passionate customers to refer their friends and families to your business. 

Sometimes called word-of-mouth advertising, you can use referral marketing to encourage past clients to patronize your brand again and tell people about you.

7. Cold Calling

This form of outbound marketing involves soliciting sales and generating leads through phone calls. While it's phone-based, cold calling covers door-to-door, in-person interactions too.

Most marketers use cold calling, but sadly the marketing strategy has been abused, with scammers capitalizing on it to scam unsuspecting victims. Therefore, real estate agents are beginning to adopt warm calling from a list of potential leads.

Warm calling doesn't necessarily mean the prospective customer is expecting the call. The sales representative will first initiate contact with the prospect through a referral, prior LinkedIn request, or other means of connection. That way, the caller is sure the prospective buyer won't hang up the phone immediately.

What Is Inbound Marketing 

If you've been asking what is inbound marketing vs outbound marketing, you need to understand what both terms entail. Inbound lead generation strategies help companies to influence and connect with customers to foster long-term relationships and build trust. 

This marketing strategy helps agents create customer experiences attracting prospective customers to increase visibility in ways that the prospect won't feel sold to. One vital inbound lead generation element is content. 

Marketers should prioritize quality in their inbound lead generation strategies. However, there's more to inbound lead generation than creating great content. 

Top Inbound Marketing Channels for Real Estate Agents

When comparing outbound vs inbound leads, the focus should be on reaching an audience already interested in buying properties. 

Besides helping generate leads and nurture them, inbound marketing makes reporting and setting marketing budgets easier. The following are some inbound strategies for generating high-quality leads:

• Email Marketing

Besides being a lead generation strategy, email marketing serves as a lead nurturing tool when used effectively. Reports show that this type of marketing offers about 3800% ROI.

However, for this marketing to generate leads, you must ensure that your marketing plan is well thought out and combines automation and curated newsletters to nurture your contacts. 

Make your contacts engage your mail through landing pages, surveys, and forms. Then track the interactions to gain more insights and lead information.

• Social Media

Social media marketing can include content marketing and paid advertising. Ensure your content schedule is aimed to keep your followers engaged and build more awareness for your real estate business. 

Create content that showcases your expertise to help you attract leads. Your social media posts should focus on building trust with your followers across popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

Set your social media profiles to encourage your audience to reach you easily. You can use social media ads for lead generation, engagement, and reach. If you want to generate valuable leads from sellers and buyers, set up your lead form beforehand. 

You can even use paid social media advertising as part of your inbound lead generation campaigns, as the target audience will only see the advert once they're engaged in similar or the same listings.

• User-Friendly Website

A responsive or user-friendly website is the best inbound strategy to adopt as a savvy real estate agent. Ask your website designer to make your real estate website responsive and optimized for mobile browsing. 

Statistics show that most website visitors use mobile devices. Therefore, if your site isn't user-friendly and responsive, potential customers might struggle to browse it comfortably. 

Consider adding a live chat feature to your site. Since a real estate business is people-centric, it's necessary to be available when potential leads need to ask vital questions. 

Adding live chat software helps people reach your sales team 24/7 to schedule appointments without speaking to you directly.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an effective inbound strategy to drive leads and organic traffic to your website. When implemented correctly, local real estate SEO will help your web pages and website rank higher on the search engine result pages when relevant keywords are searched on Google.

Since search engines like Google often change their algorithm, it's best to focus on your SEO, especially keyword optimization. The keywords you add to your SEO strategies, such as your industry and location, must rank high. Remember to use them throughout your website and blog content.

Some other elements of a good SEO strategy include:

• Online directories
• Backlinks
• Social media pages
• Meta titles and descriptions

Remember to update your blog regularly, seeing as content is a valuable part of a great SEO strategy. You can also incorporate search engine marketing (SEM) to generate more inbound leads. 

• Virtual Tours

Virtual tours are a vital part of a successful real estate marketing strategy. Besides sharing video content, generating more revenue for sales teams than non-video users, potential leads can get a reasonable view of the property before deciding to make an offer for it.

Some crucial qualities real estate agents should incorporate in successful virtual tours include:

• Responsive and interactive video that can be easily accessible both on desktop and mobile devices
• User-friendly 3D virtual tour
• Real home footage instead of digital illustrations

Conclusion

Agents who want to succeed in today's competitive market must find ways to generate both inbound and outbound leads for real estate through organic channels. One way to attract and retain customers is by creating valuable content and building strong relationships with potential clients. 

Additionally, by utilizing outbound marketing methods such as direct mail and print advertising, you can proactively reach potential clients and increase your chances of success. 

The key to success in real estate marketing is to stay up to date with the latest trends and constantly refine your strategies to match the needs and preferences of your target audiences. 

By following the digital marketing inbound/outbound best practices outlined in this guide, real estate agents can stay ahead of the competition, build their brands, and ultimately grow their businesses.