5 Ways to Emulating Your Competitor’s Real Estate Marketing Strategies

If you want to learn about real estate marketing strategies, your competitors could be your best teacher.

At the beginning of your journey as a real estate marketer, you can save a great deal of time and money by knowing which real estate marketing strategies are working for other agents and brokers in your area and which are not.

Instead of testing and trying mindless strategies on your own, it makes sense that you try to learn from your competitors who have already spent hundreds of hours on honing their marketing skills and are now successfully generating leads through their innovative digital presence.

You need to study their strategies inside-out, primarily to know three things

• How they are generating leads
• How they are nurturing these leads
• And how they are turning these leads or prospects into clients

All the three steps require different types of strategies. You need to pay attention to each type that your competitor is using to achieve any of the above-mentioned goals.

After “decoding” what these strategies are, you can then easily emulate them in your own business.

The best part is, you don’t need to be a detective or a spy in order to dig out what strategies your competitors are using. Nor did you have to request them to reveal all of their secrets to you in a phone call or email. All you need is a little snooping around.

Check out their website to know their real estate marketing strategies

Your competitors may be spending lots of money for advertising flashy profiles on Zillow, Realtor.com or any other such website to generate leads, but in all likelihood, they must be driving these leads to their website to nurture them and turn them into clients.

So your first step should be to examine their website.  Here are some questions for you to consider:

 

A great ‘call-to-action’.

 

• What type of ‘call to action’ they have on the top of the home page. Is it an IDX for property search? Or are they prominently displaying some kind of unique offer?
• Number of pages
• The subject of their blogs
• Opt-ins and pop-ups
• Blogging frequency
• The branding message on their website
• What kind of company info they provide
• User experience (UX) and User Interface (UI)

 

A great example of home page call-to-action on a real estate website

 

Know your competitor’s real estate marketing strategies through SEO analysis

When it comes to real estate marketing, how your website ranks in search engines can make or break your business. If you’ve a competitor whose website ranks really well in search engines, you can use free SEO tools to know what strategies he or she is using to achieve this.

Some of these tools include Alexa, Majestic, Open Site Explorer, and SEMrush. Here are a few things you can know by using these tools or having their website examined by an SEO expert:

• Number of backlinks
• Keywords they are ranking for
• Title tags
• Mata data
• Traffic

Their brand’s presence on the web

Google the name of your competitor or/and their brand to find out where they are mentioned across the web.

• Platforms on the web (forums, article directories etc) where they are sharing their content.
• Special strategies like guest blogging, viral video marketing etc that they are using.
• Strategies they are using to get links to their website.
• Strategies they are using to get found by their prospects.

This information can provide you with invaluable insight into your competitor’s ‘off-the-scene’ or secrete strategies to boost their presence on the web and connect with their prospects.

Examine their social media accounts

You probably already know that social media is an integral part of any successful agent’s real estate marketing strategy today.

Everybody shares new listings on their social media profiles including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, but successful agents promote their brand and themselves on social media using innovating strategies. Some of these strategies are:

• Creating user-generated content through online competitions
• Scheduled Q&As with fans and followers
• Live streaming of property showings

Make a list of such creative ideas and try to include them in your social media marketing campaigns.

Email marketing

Ask any online marketer, and he or she would tell you – ‘money is in your email list’. Successful real estate agent build email lists that help them turn prospects into clients.

You can use an email address with a fake name to sign up for your competitor’s newsletter or listing digest emails, but this can give you insights into their drip marketing strategies and the types of info they share with their audience.

• Try to find out what type of email templates they are using.
• What type of content they are using i.e. top-10 listings, featuring details for fun local events
• Frequently of emails

You can emulate their strategy with your own email campaigns.

The Bottom Line

Your competitor’s real estate marketing strategies can teach you a lot. All you need to emulate them sincerely and after a lot of preparation. Pick only those strategies which suit your audience and budget. As you gain experience in real estate marketing, you can come up with your own strategies and stay ahead of the competition if you once emulated.