In today's fiercely competitive online mediums, there's no shortage of potential ways to market real estate. However, like any other online marketing discipline, getting in front of the right customers is posing more and more difficult. As real estate agents and homeowners realize the steep uphill battle needed to be climbed, they turn to professionals to assist them in this highly complex and convoluted field of online marketing.

The truth? Unless you're an agent, investor or owner of a large platform online, getting in front of the right audience takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. Yet, as lucrative as the real estate market is for potential fixer-uppers and agencies looking to move homes quickly, there are some proven methods and so-called secrets to success in business, that allow them to sell a home faster and more efficiently than before by using the right real estate marketing strategies.

What are you waiting for? Let’s get it on with the most sought-after real estate marketing ideas:

It’s Not about More Marketing; it’s About More EFFECTIVE Marketing

As a high-end real estate marketer, your primary responsibility is to create a perception of luxury for a home that becomes the reality and expectation of the potential home buyer. Creating that luxury perception becomes the key. It requires effective marketing strategies that draw the affluent home buyer. That means every potential customer contact – from online listing, advertisements, listing flyers, brochures, direct mail contact – must communicate the luxury story aimed to entice the potential luxury buyer.

To sell a million-dollar house in a slow market, you don’t necessarily need more marketing or advertising, but you need more EFFECTIVE marketing and advertising. Here are some research-based ideas to help real estate marketers sell more million-dollar homes in a luxury housing market that have suddenly gone cold.

Brand Name Drop

In today’s marketplace, luxury brands are cultural currency. They talk about the quality and value of a million-dollar home. Real estate marketers should take a full inventory of the brands reflected in the home, not just the appliances, but the fixtures, local name-brand architects, designers, and contractors that are reflected in the home. Luxury brands in the home testify to the luxury price tag, Use them.

Use Toll-Free Numbers

Many involved in real estate investing have built successful businesses and launched good marketing campaigns using local telephone numbers alone. However, toll-free numbers do provide a wide range of benefits for real estate investing that simply cannot be ignored.

It is even more crucial than ever these days for investors to maximize every marketing dollar they have, if not simply to realize higher returns and more income at least to stay ahead of the competition. Toll-free numbers offer so many advantages for real estate investing it is hard to ignore them.

Besides the clear branding benefits for real estate investment companies, toll-free vanity numbers have proven to consistently provide double-digit increases in direct marketing response rates and even higher improvements in closing ratios. What person in the real estate investing game wouldn’t want better results, more inquiries and more deals from the same campaign?

Beyond these immediate benefits toll-free numbers also provide one of the best ways to test your real estate investing direct mail campaigns so that you can tweak your demographics, mail packaging, sales copy and even your phone script and pitch once they call you.

Tell Stories About the Home, Don’t Just Describe Its Features

Real estate listings are just that: fact-based objective listings of the home’s features. But such listings – square footage, lot size, number of bedrooms, baths, etc. – tell the prospective buyer nothing about the experience of living in the home. Story-based listings that weave the home’s facts and figures into the story romance the listing and make it come alive. Don’t just write a listing, tell a story about the home.

Hire A Writer

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in today’s Internet-powered, social-media driven, content-marketing world, a thousand words need to go along with that picture. Those thousand words must tell stories engaging enough to make the prospective home buyer curious enough to call the agent and set up an appointment to experience the home for themselves.

Real estate agents think nothing of hiring professionals to do their photography and videography, yet they write the listing themselves. This is a huge mistake! Writers can take that fact-based listing description, including the extensive brand-name inventory, and tell a story about the home that will romance the listing and make it pop! Plus, writers are fairly inexpensive to hire. Put one on the payroll and see the difference it makes to the listings and your sales.

Blog

This is a low cost, the organic route to lead generation.   Beyond blogging, you can share your content in Groups on Social Media, use your posts as material for a Drip Marketing campaign and even share Client Testimonials on your Blog.

Interact with Social Media

Interact on social platforms, especially in Groups. Specifically, in local FB groups where real people gather. Try sharing your listing, but remember, don’t pitch in right away. Interact when someone asks a question, and try to engage people to talk to you about the property/

Utilize Video

Publish quick post-closing client testimonials. Have your clients thank you by name and share how excited they are to be in their new home. Ask them to mention the things you did well – the marketing, the communication, the strong negotiation skills. Afterwards, post the video to my Blog, share on Social Media and tag everyone involved when sharing — the closer, the other agent, the client, the title company, the mortgage lender. These videos get great exposure.

Building and Maintaining Relationships Online

A key activity to building relationships is an email newsletter. Through platforms like Emma or Mailchimp, it has never been easier to handle create and distribute your own email newsletter. Letting past, current and potential clients know your activities including listings, speaking opportunities, closings, open houses, even personal events like weddings, births, and graduations are a great way to keep clients engaged. This contributes to increased trust, referral opportunity, and relationship building. Newsletters are a more direct method of communication compared to social media or blogging, two other strategies commonly used to build connections.

Retargeting

Most consumers considering purchasing real estate deliberate for months (or even years) before finally deciding on a property, and they’ll often spend significant time using the Internet to look at the various options available to them. This means it’s likely that they’ve visited your website several times to take a look at any available properties, which presents the perfect opportunity for retargeting.

For real estate, email retargeting is probably the most effective marketing method to use. The emails can be kept in the inbox and referred to when the customer feels ready to purchase the real estate.

Price It Right

The best marketing strategy ever invented is called “price it right.” The thought of pricing it high and expecting a buyer to “make an offer” is a myth. Pricing it high is a barrier to the prospective buyer seeing the property at all.

Set Up the Property Appropriately

Furnish rooms for their intended use. In other words, a dining room should showcase dining room furniture. Not a weight bench or pool table. These items should be removed and placed in storage off-site. An empty room is better than one not set for its designed function.

Be Prepared

Whether there is a showing appointment scheduled for that day or not, whenever leaving the house be sure that it is in show-ready condition.

Think something is missing? Comment below and let us know your best real estate marketing ideas!