Real Estate Marketing Basics for Independent Realtors

Buying real estate is a big deal. Whether your clients are looking for houses, studios, vacation homes, or commercial property, they’re ready to spend thousands of dollars on a down payment alone—which means they want the realtor who can help them find the perfect match. Real estate marketing is your opportunity to show that you’re the best person for the job.

Here are eight key marketing tips that any real estate entrepreneur can easily run with today.

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6 Best Real Estate Marketing Ideas for the Web

If there’s one thing you need to know about consumers, it’s that their big-ticket purchases are rarely spontaneous. Before they even begin to look at homes, they’re going online to find the realtor that’s the best fit. They’re doing their research on the web, so you need to show up there, too. Here are six ways you can do so—no fancy real estate marketing tools needed.

1. Expand Your Reach With Facebook Ads

Facebook is the most-used social media platform in the world. If that isn’t enough to impress you, the power of Facebook ads surely will.

Facebook ads help you accelerate your real estate marketing with advanced targeting tools. We’re talking the ability to narrow down your target audience based on age, occupation, interests, and so much more. This means you’ll only need to spend money to reach the people who matter most, giving you a strong chance to compete with more established real estate professionals.

When you run an ad through your Facebook business page, make sure to pair it with a strong visual. Facebook users are used to scrolling fast, so if you want to stop their scroll, you need to choose high-quality photos, graphics, and videos that catch their eyes within seconds.

Use Adobe Spark’s Facebook ad maker to create tap-worthy visuals for your first ad campaign. Tap the template below to make it your own. Real estate marketing: House with swimming pool

2. Create Connections With LinkedIn

When you’re taking the solo route in the real estate industry, it can feel like the larger companies have the advantage. While it’s true that they can funnel more dollars into ads than you, relationships are the real currency of real estate marketing success—and relationships are best built by people.

LinkedIn is the social media platform where personal brands shine. It may be best built for B2B connections (which is great news for any commercial realtors), but it’s also a great place to establish yourself as an industry leader that any shoppers can reach out to. Not to mention, it could help you build a great referral network, too.

To get started, build a profile equipped with a LinkedIn headline and banner that tells clients why you’re the best real estate agent for the job. (These free customizable LinkedIn cover photos can help.)

Once you’ve established your brand, reinforce it by posting valuable, relevant content—for example, tips that help consumers navigate the buying process—in the form of real estate photos, graphics, videos, and more.

Tap the template below to remix it for your LinkedIn posts!

Real estate marketing: House, living room and kitchen

All the while, make sure to engage with local community members, both publicly and through direct messages.

3. Captivate with Video Marketing

Video marketing is huge in the 21st century. In just two years, real estate tours on YouTube garnered over 7,300 years of watch time. New clients no longer just want a couple preview photos. What really persuades them to act are video-based real estate listings that let them preview the living experience, too.

With video, you’re not just limited to house tours either. On both YouTube and Facebook—two top video destinations—you can also captivate your audience with your brand and expertise through videos that:

Make sure to use Adobe Spark templates for your YouTube video thumbnails to capture clicks and create a memorable brand. Get started by tapping the one below!

Real estate marketing: How to zone your home thumbnail

Don’t have time for a full-length video? You can still give your real estate marketing a pop of movement by animating your text on Adobe Spark.

4. Generate Real Estate Leads With Lead Magnets

Ongoing lead generation is crucial when you’re running a real estate business, and you don’t have to spend thousands on lead lists to get them. Instead, you can offer lead magnets, which are simple incentives that get your target audience to give you their contact information. For example, you can offer any of the following for new email subscribers:

Once you’ve created one lead magnet, it can keep on giving over and over again—as long as you’re making sure it’s seen. Make your lead magnet accessible via search engines by adding it to a landing page that’s built with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind.

Alternatively, share it on Pinterest, where 56 million users are already engaging with home-related content. This social media platform is prime for conversions, allowing you to link straight to a contact form, email subscription page, or elsewhere from your visual. Plus, each post is bookmarked on Google, so adding keywords to your Pinterest titles, descriptions, and hashtags can further help home buyers discover your lead magnet.

Adobe Spark can help you create visually appealing Pinterest graphics to share in the matter of minutes, so you maximize your lead generation. Tap the one below to try it out.

Real estate marketing: Interior color pallets

5. Tap Into Your Email List

Once you have great leads, there are endless ways you can engage them through email marketing campaigns. Depending on where they’re at in the home-buying process, you can:

This type of real estate marketing can generally help customers keep you at the top of mind when they’re ready to seek out a realtor.

6. Leverage Your Real Estate Website

Finally, make sure your real estate website is ready for business. Translation for the modern world: Make it mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, well-designed, and SEO-friendly. When your website meets this criteria, it’ll provide a great user experience for site visitors—encouraging them to scroll through and convert—while also helping you rank higher on Google search, even without paid ads.

Your website speaks volumes about your brand and is central to your online marketing efforts. You definitely don’t want frustrated customers who can’t access the info they need on a mobile device or can’t sort through your listings easily.

Need some help making the best first impression? Use Adobe Spark templates—equipped with free-to-use images—to create professional web pages for your site with no design experience needed.

2 Tips for Extending Your Real Estate Marketing Offline

Every realtor needs a digital marketing strategy these days, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to toss your offline marketing efforts aside. Home buyers are shopping for physical homes, after all, and at some point, their customer journey will lead them off the web and into the community.

Here’s two ways you can effectively extend your real estate marketing plan beyond the internet.

1. Network in Your Community

Modern networking doesn’t just happen on LinkedIn. Meeting people face-to-face—which helps you better communicate with body language and context—can actually help you leave a stronger impression than virtual networking. The people you connect with will really get to see your true personality shine!

Start seeking out networking events or more casual meetups where you may be able to network with potential clients—but don’t stop there. In-person networking events also give you the chance to expand your referral network and start nurturing connections who aren’t looking into home-buying, but may in the next few years.

Regardless of where you’re networking, bring along a business card that makes you stand out from the crowd. Adobe Spark’s business card templates can help you create a clean, memorable card design—customized with your name and contact information—in a matter of minutes.

This design is the perfect place to start—just tap to remix. Real estate marketing: Andrew Samson calling card

2. Create High-Quality Flyers

Have an open house coming up? Use Adobe Spark to design unique flyers that catch the eyes of home buyers in your community! Any designs you create with our free real estate flyer templates can then be posted at your office, at local businesses, and on community bulletin boards, or mailed straight to your leads. And when you want to repurpose flyers for the web, you can simply tap “Resize” to update your design.

708 Beech street flyer template

6201 State street flyer

Just like they would online, great visuals make a big difference on printed flyers. Choose high-quality photos that give potential buyers a reason to stop by your open house, then provide the information they need to attend.

For your open house attendees, you create informational flyers so they can take home everything they need to know—all in one simple, visually appealing sheet.

Learn more about the anatomy of great flyer designs to amp up your design prowess and get the most out of your real estate marketing strategy!