Boosting Online Engagement for Real Estate Professionals
Creating a real estate business nowadays requires more than just the basic level knowledge in real estate itself – you need to be in the know about the internet and how you can get people to connect with you.
While this was a thing before as well, it is a much more competitive market with everyone having a stake in the matter, and you need to create a good outlook for your business in order to drive your company’s business up.
Engaging with your audience is therefore a massive part of real estate nowadays, and managing that will help you drive business forward.
Strategies to Boost Engagement
Real estate agent websites need to be aesthetic so that people enjoy how they look, but they also need to have content to rank up on Google’s search engine. However, good content is based upon having the correct information that people want, but also information that engages their attention.
It’s important to get into the know about some strategies that will help you boost this engagement.
Contact and Lead Forms
Forms have now become a fundamental part of any website that wants people to drop their information and contact the business – however, the process needs to be seamless.
Here are some ways to make the forms seamless:
- Make sure forms are placed in contextually after certain events, such as right after someone has viewed a property or looked through a buyer or seller guide
- Create menus so that people can use dropdowns to easily fill in information for items such as area, region, state, etc
- Allow people to register through their social profiles such as Google accounts, so that it takes less time, and people are more inclined to do it
- Let pre-fill data be active, so that placing in information is easier
- Make sure to place in contextually appropriate calls to action within the forms
- Make sure your buttons for submission are easily visible and placed appropriately so that website visitors aren’t stuck looking for them
Photos and Videos
All listings have photos and videos, but making them just one-dimensional won’t give people the full idea of the property and won’t engage them entirely.
Just like your website ought to have internal blog linking, make sure your pictures have links next to them as well, in the form of embeds.
Making sure pictures have the feature to be zoomed into and having embeds like YouTube videos about the properties will help you gain more interaction.
Here are some ways to make the pictures and videos more interactive:
- Include slideshows, galleries, zooming and ability to share
- Showcase interactive floor plans with room labels, dimensions and furnishings if they are included
- Include GIFs to showcase a motion shot of different areas of the property
Virtual Tours
Virtual tours allow people to sit in the comfort of their home and look through a property as if they were there – well, almost. However, this feature is helpful for people to understand the point of view of being in the property, and overall helps solidify the deal if they are interested.
Here are some ways to include virtual tours to help engagement:
- Use social media posts to garner interest in virtual tours
- Host live streams for your audience (ex: through your newsletter) to do live tours of properties
- Add spots within the properties during tours to highlight important features of the properties
- Embed virtual tours next to the picture galleries of properties
Neighborhood Maps
Other than the property you’re looking for, what else is the biggest factor you look into before moving somewhere new? The neighborhood. You want to know if the shops you like are in the area, how clean the neighborhood is, where the parks are and if it’s safe for you and your kids if you have any.
Make sure to add pictures of the surrounding neighborhood to give people an idea of what it looks like, add pictures of convenience stores nearby and other important destinations within the area.
Also, make sure to place in a Google maps embed of the local area so that people can go around for themselves, and look for whatever they might need.
Live Chat Feature
Having live chat features are very important for any website these days, especially ones that deal with people who are looking to spend a fortune into buying a property. You never know when people might have a question, and you might not always be available.
Have specific working hours of people who know about your business to monitor the live chat, and talk to people who may have questions. These people might be interested, and the professional outlook of having someone ready to answer their questions might be the tipping point to generating leads.
Features along this category that can help your business are:
- Live chatting
- Appointment booking
- Surveys
- Chatbots
Conclusion
These are just some of the ways in which you can boost engagement through your real estate agent websites, and increased engagement might just lead to more consumers for your real estate CRM.
In general, having such ergonomic features will boost your website up the rankings as well, because people will have more use out of your website.