Real estate marketing can be overwhelming if you don’t know how to do it effectively. Whether you’re selling your own home or working to drum up interest in other properties, retargeting helps you attract the right audience and convert more of your leads into clients.
Retargeted ads are personalized advertisement messages sent to prospects who previously visited your real estate marketing website. Since the potential client has shown interest in your business, you can target them using specially crafted messages.
Retargeting for real estate
Retargeting is a real estate marketing strategy allowing real estate agents to serve personalized advertisements on internet properties. It also enables agents to serve ads on search engines, social media sites, and email platforms.
From a consumer standpoint, a retargeted real estate ad might look like any other advertisement. However, clicking on it or viewing it for an extended period will take you directly to the advertiser’s website. This acts as a valuable reminder of the consumer’s online interaction with the advertiser’s brand.
How retargeting works for real estate agents
While you might focus on real estate agent ads as lead generation tools, retargeting ads help keep your brand at the top of a client’s mind after they are aware of your business. Retargeting ads involves inserting a retargeting script on your website.
When a prospect visits your website and views a certain page, the retargeting script incorporates a cookie into their browsing device. The cookie — a legal and standard advertising technique — then tracks the prospect’s internet browsing.
For example, let’s say someone visits your real estate website and spends time interacting with properties with front porches but doesn’t convert. You can use retargeted ads to show them ads weeks or months later based on their browsing activity or behavior.
Retargeting ads of real estate properties with front porches can convince the would-be client to convert if they have a positive response when they see the ad again after some time or on a different website.
Prospects are likely to remember relevant retargeting ads. Seeing those ads over time increases their likelihood of conversion in a meaningful way.
While it may seem counterintuitive, real estate agents want their leads to forget about them when they’re not ready. Retargeting ads work better than sending unrelated email blasts about your services to potential clients.
Advantages of retargeting for real estate agents
One of the many benefits of using retargeting for real estate agents is the ability to build a custom audience based on the potential customers who visited your website but didn’t convert. You can then market those same services and products to them via social media or email.
Unlike banner ads and Google AdWords, you don’t necessarily have to pay extra every time someone clicks on your ad. Instead, you can also set up payments as cost per time you ad shows or cost-per-acquisition. You and your ad provider can determine which way is best for you.
Ways to use retargeting to revamp your real estate marketing strategy
Here are ten actionable ways to use retargeting for maximum real estate marketing effectiveness.
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Create follow-up emails
Retarget using digital ads to reach potential clients who have visited your website but didn’t purchase anything is a solid real estate marketing strategy. Make sure your automated follow-up emails address customers’ needs in a relevant yet non-intrusive way.
Don’t miss out on opportunities because you weren’t around when someone wanted what you were selling.
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Track your results, not just open rates
Online marketing can be a tricky beast, especially when retargeting. It’s easy for your efforts to be ghost traffic and for no one else to know whether you’re getting real, useful results.
Instead of obsessing over open rates, work with a social media management platform that helps you see exactly how many people have seen your ad — and if they converted into leads or sales.
When it’s time to review your social media efforts, make sure you also look at conversions. High click-through rates don’t mean anything if your conversion rate is too low.
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Set up A/B testing
The best way to start retargeting is by incorporating A/B testing, which allows you to test two versions of an ad and see which gets more clicks. In A/B testing, one version of your ad shows up 100% of the time. Specific characteristics (headlines, images, or URLs) change in another version.
With a program like Google’s Ads, setting up an A/B test campaign is easy and free. You’ll see how many clicks each version gets and its cost. When done effectively, retargeting helps you get more leads without paying for them again.
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Use conversion tracking
The more you know about your prospects, leads, customers, and what they’re doing online (what they like and don’t like and and everything in between), the better you can supercharge your real estate marketing strategy with retargeting. This may sound complex, but it’s pretty simple.
You can easily set up conversion tracking if you’re using Google AdWords as your primary platform for paid advertising, meaning most of your business is through pay-per-click ads. You can do this by adding a piece of code to each page on your website that sends an AdWords tag when someone clicks on one of your ads. The system will follow users who click on these ads and promote other products from within AdWords based on their behavior.
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Ask for more information on landing pages
On-site retargeting ads do wonders at getting people to return, but they’re also a cheap and easy way to generate leads and request more information. Use on-site retargeting alongside your best real estate agent ads.
You don’t even need tracking software. You can create landing pages that allow visitors to submit their information directly from their browser using a form. Try it out by offering a free eBook or guide in exchange for contact info. It’s quick, cheap, and effective.
If you want even more of a significant boost from your landing page, include some social proof — like social media followers or reviews — to help convince potential clients they can trust you.
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Optimize your first website visit
Potential clients who visit your website for the first time can get overwhelmed by your services and offerings. It’s essential you make them feel comfortable. A well designed website, strong user experience, and a strong call-to-action (CTA) on your homepage provide a clear direction for action.
Use words like “Book an Appointment,” “Contact Us Today,” or “30% Off First Month’s Rent.” To optimize every website visit, make sure you don’t leave a potential client guessing about what to do next.
A strong call-to-action, in conjunction with good calls from prospective clients, will skyrocket results from website visits. But then, make sure you don’t overdo it by stuffing the website with hyperlinks and links. Have only one clear CTA per page.
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Drive traffic to a single landing page
Retargeting helps you tackle one of the biggest challenges in real estate marketing: getting leads. You can make a landing page with a single lead-generation form and drive enormous traffic to it by retargeting potential customers.
The idea behind retargeting is simple: As users browse around online, they receive relevant ads based on their browsing history. The most common retargeted ads appear on websites (for example, when you visit Zillow). They also appear in social media feeds and Facebook and Google search results.
Since retargeted ads are hyper-targeted, they work best when you have a large budget and pay per click. Even if you don’t, you can still find value in using them for lead generation.
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Try using dynamic retargeting ads
Dynamic retargeting is a type of retargeting displaying ads based on past activities. This dynamic element is helpful because it allows you to customize when and what’s shown based on which ads you’ve seen be most influential during each step of the real estate transaction process.
For instance, if someone has already looked at specific properties on your site but then leaves and comes back at a later date or time, they could see different yet relevant ads. This may mean seeing something more appropriate for their current stage in their home-buying journey (under contract versus for sale ads).
It also means those who’ve been looking at places with low prices can see different ads than those who’ve been looking at high-end homes. Both possibilities improve your chances of providing relevant information, leading to higher conversions.
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Customize the display URL
You should customize your display URL first. Many people often overlook (or don’t know) that having a custom name here can improve their ability to track conversions and avoid duplicate traffic in Google Analytics.
It may not seem like much, but even using your name instead of realestate123 will go a long way. The more descriptive you can be, the better. The most important thing when choosing a name is picking one that makes sense and will help you (and others) stay organized later on.
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Don’t let people leave without taking action
Supercharge your strategy with retargeting ads, which you can place on Facebook, Google AdWords, and LinkedIn. Think about it: When someone visits a real estate listing that you manage but doesn’t take action you would want that person to see a follow-up ad when they visit another site.
That’s precisely what retargeting does. It lets you re-purchase ads for those who didn’t buy or contact you after visiting your website. To retarget effectively, make sure to customize each ad link based on what someone did or didn’t do.
Bottomline
You’re an exceptional real estate agent with lots of experience, but it’s time for a refresher course on effective marketing strategies. Homebuying has changed significantly over the past decade, which means an old-school approach won’t cut it in 2022. It’s time to introduce retargeting into your real estate marketing strategy. Focusing on these actions during your retargeting efforts will help you positively reach a broad audience of home shoppers across social media channels.
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Luxury Presence is one of the fastest-growing digital platforms for real estate professionals. To learn more about how to build your brand, close more deals, and expand your network, get in touch with us today!