Five Ways To Generate Interest In Your Home Online

Want to stand out on the digital stage?

There’s getting your listing online, and then there’s getting your listing everywhere online. Most searches for the perfect home now begin in the digital world. It may once have been enough to simply post a listing on a forum and hope for the best, but times have changed. There are now numerous free or affordable tools to get your listing in front of thousands of people using innovative and creative ways.

Here are just five of them:

1. Set Yourself Up For Social

When it comes to selling your property, it’s all about being visible. Consider the type of buyer who might be interested in your home and be present on the social platforms they are likely to use. For example, if you’re looking for a young professional couple consider setting yourself up on Instagram and Pinterest.

It is very likely that house hunters will want to share images of potential properties with friends and relatives before (or after) a viewing. You need to make it simple for buyers to do this. Having easy to follow room-to-room pictures with tons of natural light will go a long way on social media.

If you have time it is definitely worth creating a buyer persona for your home. This is a short description of the typical person who will be interested in buying. Using this as a guide you will have a clear idea how and where to communicate online to attract the most interest.

Bonus tip: Add an email signature to your personal emails with brief details about your listing. Consider how many emails might be forwarded to people both inside and outside your network and the benefit soon becomes clear. Speaking of email…

2. Create a targeted email campaign

Despite the seemingly unstoppable growth of social media usage, nothing seems to beat a traditional email campaign when it comes to reaching your audience. You can collect email addresses (leads) through open house events, neighborhood meetings, face-to-face meetings or via a sign-up form via your property website (see tip number 4).

If you have a large amount of leads collected from various points of interaction, it is definitely worth splitting them into segmented lists and personalizing the updates they receive about your property.

For example, if you collected 25 leads at a local community meeting be sure to mention where you met them and provide updates about your property relevant to that situation. Another 20 leads from an open house event would be considered ‘warm leads’ and require a more direct message on how to set up a second viewing or even make an offer.

Important: You should always get the recipient’s permission to include them in an email campaign. Make it clear and easy to unsubscribe from your updates.

Benchmark your performance: The average open rate of emails for real estate is around 27% with a click-through rate of 3%. (Source: Smart Insights)

3. Broadcast on Facebook and Instagram Live

Make viewing your property the most barrier-free experience it can be. Some people may not be able to make the date of an open house or may be abroad at the time your house goes to market.

Schedule regular Facebook or Instagram Live tours of the property and don’t forget to give them a taste of who you are too! Remember, video is a great way to build trust between you and potential buyers. Let them see you and know more about why you’re selling, what you will miss about the house and what local characters or conveniences there are.

Schedule regular Facebook or Instagram Live tours of the property and don’t forget to give them a taste of who you are too! Remember, video is a great way to build trust between you and potential buyers. Let them see you and know more about why you’re selling, what you will miss about the house and what local characters or conveniences there are.

4. Create a User-Friendly Website

A house is probably the most expensive item you will sell in your lifetime. With that in mind, doesn’t it make sense to provide it with its own website? This would provide a bespoke area where visitors can view each room virtually at their leisure, get to know the seller, see an interactive map of the local area and most importantly sign-up for further email or social updates.

Before you begin it is important to have a good an idea of what content will be featured on which page and a clear plan of how visitors should click around your website. Once you know what will go where, you can use a website builder like WIX or Squarespace to create a desktop and mobile friendly webpage in a matter of hours

5. Consider running some targeted social media advertising.

Social media ads are a great way to reach a totally new audience outside your social or professional network. Use targeted campaigns to focus in on those who are most likely to take an interest in your property. Two recommended tools in the Facebook Ad Manager are Demographic Targeting and Behavioral Targeting.

With Demographic Targeting you can make sure your ad only appears to people who do (or do not) own their own home, earn over a certain amount or are over/under a certain age. To make use of this feature navigate within your campaign to Detailed Targeting > Demographics > Home > Home Ownership.

Using a mix of Behavioral and Location Targeting you can place your advert in front of people who are considering buying a property in your area. In order to take advantage of this feature navigate within your campaign to Detailed Targeting > Behaviors > Residential profiles.

Bonus tip: Hire a professional to handle the marketing of your home for you!

Your local RE/MAX Agent is not only highly trained and highly knowledgeable about the real estate market in your area, but also a professional who is attune with the marketing needs of your property. Hire a name both buyer and seller can trust, a realtor connected with over 25,000 other agents and access to the greatest real estate network in Europe.