Agent Listing Marketing

Congratulations, you have a new listing. Now what? What is the best way to market that listing online to generate a fist full of business? After all, a listing's greatest value is the number of buyer leads that it generates. You can turn those leads in to significant business volume. By the way, before we get started – don't forget that even if you do not have a listing, you may be able to borrow one from another agent if you commit to a solid marketing program.

One of the leading companies in online marketing automation is a company called Listings-to-Leads. They do online marketing automation for agents and teams that have numerous listings. Their product is designed to hit all of the marketing hot spots for leads and automate the process. As you can see from the ListHub Report, they generate about 293 leads to every one from Zillow. Here is the online marketing mix recommended by Listings-to-Leads. Follow this plan, and you are sure to see a lot of success.

Top 10 Ways to Market Your Listing

1. Enhance Your Listing – One of the great rules about IDX is that an agent or broker may enhance their own listing. That means you can add more text and photos or other media than you are allowed to put into the MLS. Be sure to take advantage of that capability.

2. Listing Syndication – Publish the listing to Realtor.com, Trulia, Zillow, Homes.com and other local sites that get a lot of traffic. Be sure that you set up your profile on these sites manually by creating a free agent account. This will allow you to enhance your profile, replace the grey skull with your photo, add a nice profile description and more. All of this is free, and it enhances lead generation.

3. Single Property Website – Build a website for the property. Buy the domain name.

4. Virtual Tour – When you build your virtual tour, it is very important that you publish the branded link to your tour on your websites, broker site, franchise portal, listing syndication portals, etc. It is just as important to put the unbranded version in the MLS so that it is distributed to every other agent or broker IDX site through that program.

5. YouTube Video – When you select your virtual tour vendor, it is a good idea to ask them if they publish your tour to YouTube as a video. If not, create a video for your tour and publish it to YouTube. Your YouTube tours will usually show up on the first page of a Google Search when consumers search by address – search a few listing addresses to see this in action.

6. Flyers – Build a flyer and use a flyer box. Consumers will stop curbside and pick them up. Moreover, send the flyer electronically to top producing agents and your online sphere. Dropping the flyer off at neighborhood homes is also a great way to generate leads and referrals. Clearly, if someone is looking to live in that neighborhood, there may be other homes that fit their needs.

7. QR Code – For those consumers geeky enough to use QR codes, there is no harm in putting one on all of your marketing. It not only drives leads, but it also allows you to capture the phone number of the lead.

8. Blog Post – Don't worry if you are not a great blogger. Just do your best. Use the free services from Active Rain, Real Town, WordPress, and Blogger to publish a post about the listing. The key is to publish the address in the title. Use this convention: City name, real estate address, state, zip, your name, firm name. That will give you the best results on search engines.

9. Social Media Marketing – Post your listing to your social media pages like Facebook and Twitter. Try to tell a short story about the listing. Another solid trick is to use Pinterest. Create a board and post all of the photos.

10. Craigslist – We all know that Craigslist has its issues and scams. However, the majority of consumers on that site are honest people that do not know about the sordid underbelly. Don't forget to market your property there. It works, even though you need to sort through the rubbish that comes along with the good stuff.

As you can see, online marketing is a lot of work. But if you are only dealing with one listing, you can manage it. It is also obvious why a service like Listing-to-Leads is valuable to agents or teams with multiple listings. Keeping up the pace of online marketing can easily drown you if you do not have automation. They do it for you.

If there are any marketing ideas that we may have missed, please add them as a comment below. For more information on lead generation tools, click here to see a list of companies that support agents. For more information on Listing-topLeads – view their profile and user rating here on RE Technology.