The Digital Marketing Assessment for Real Estate Agents

So you have a really productive real estate website that is attracting visitors and generating leads. You’re doing fine, but could you be doing even better? The answer to that question is the reason why you need to take a digital marketing assessment to see where you can improve and perhaps where you are following behind.

There are key aspects to properly assessing the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy. Some of these important metrics should be readily available if you have built in analytic tools designed to track your visitor and user behaviors.

However, too many agents fail to evaluate these metrics because they do not know how to analyze those results or to measure their impact. Below you will find the most important aspects of your digital marketing strategy that should be assessed throughout the year and how to measure and evaluate them.

Target Market: Who is it and how much have you captured?

Your target market includes the specific groups of prospective buyers that you are trying to capture as well as the localities where they live. Those groups may include among others:

• First-Time Homebuyers
• Retirees
• Vacation Homebuyers
• 55+ Communities
• Luxury Buyers
• Snowbirds

When you review your leads, are these the visitors that you are attracting? How many leads in your target market have contacted you through your website? Which areas and properties are generating the most leads?

Once you have a good handle on whether or not your website is reaching your target market, figure out where your weaknesses are by evaluating your strengths. If a certain neighborhood or community is driving more traffic than others, what is the reason?

Is it the content? Is it your SEO techniques or is it just a more desirable location that is drawing visitors in? Answer those questions to evaluate the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy for your target market.

Pipeline: What are your metrics and how are you meeting them?

If you garnered an influx of traffic when you first launched your website but the traffic has cooled, your assessment can help you figure out why. Your pipeline is your weekly or monthly leads. Are they quality leads? Are you converting those leads?

When you have an effective strategy for generating leads, you have a continuous pipeline of interested visitors coming to your website. You want to figure out a way to keep that traffic coming week after week and month after month. Assess your pipeline by evaluating:

• The Quality of Your Leads
• The Number of Weekly and Monthly Leads
• The Number of Conversions from Leads
• The Spikes and Drops in Leads from Week to Week

Content: Are you answering your prospects’ questions?

When visitors come to your site, are they finding quality information? Your content factors greatly into your overall digital marketing strategy. It is very important that all of your content is useful from your homepage to your contact page, including:

• Informative Blogs
• Robust Property Listings
• Accurate Market Data
• Helpful Community Pages
• Optimized Property Searches
• And Strategic CTAs

Particularly when it comes to property listings and blog content, you need to proactively answer your prospects questions. Yours should be the real estate website that prospects in your area turn to when they need reliable information about real estate in your area.

Review your content metrics like keyword usage, click-through-rates (CTRs), and unique and repeat visitors. This information should tell you where you need to make adjustments and where you are doing great.

Engagement: How are you measuring user behaviors?

Just driving traffic to your website is only half of the battle. The other half is to get your visitors to respond positively. There are many metrics that measure user behavior to see if your visitors are engaging with you through your website. Metrics such as:

• Average Time on Site per Visitor
• Number of Contacts through Your Website
• Weekly or Monthly Newsletter Subscribers
• Any Additions to Your E-Mail Database

You can even measure engagement overall to see whether or not visitors are just browsing your site or are contacting you too. Strong calls-to-action (CTAs) can help to improve flagging numbers on engagement as well as better contact information placement.

Technology: How are you getting things done?

It would be asking a lot for you to be a top selling agent as well as a digital marketing guru! In order to get the most out of your digital marketing strategy you should rely on actual digital marketing gurus. How are you using technology to advance your strategy?

Are you doing it yourself? Are you keeping it in-house by asking your assistant or intern to handle your website responses? If so, you could definitely be doing better. All digital marketing strategies require a high level of skill and technological know-how. Simply put – let a pro handle the technology for you.

Mobile: Mobile is here to stay – how are you doing?

Beyond having an outstanding marketing strategy for desktop users, your strategy must include mobile capability. Whether it is ensuring that your property photo sizes are automatically adjusted for different mobile devices or to ensure that your website appears on mobile online searches, mobile is here to stay so you have to get it right.

In your digital marketing assessment, take note of any slow loading pages, error messages, or missing photos and links on mobile devices. Your analytics tools should be able to show you how many visitors left your site because of slow loads or bad links. Correct these immediately to capture the majority of online searches.

Social: Social conversions count – how are you capitalizing?

Finally your social media strategy goes hand in hand with your overall digital marketing strategy. Conversions coming from visitors who found you through a share on a social media platform count!

Many social media platforms provide their own statistics and analytics for you to measure your site’s effectiveness. For instance Facebook helps you track:

• Post Reach
• Page Likes
• Post Clicks
• Shares
• Comments
• And Overall Engagement

What posts received the most attention? What properties got the most shares? Facebook even shows peaks and valleys over a specified time period. Dig down into why users liked certain posts more than others to adjust your social media strategy.

Let Us Handle Your Marketing Assessment!

It can be very complicated going through all of these numbers. Just because you have the numbers doesn’t mean you will know how to analyze them or what to do with the results. Don’t worry, we do!

When you work with our team at Agent Image, we can do your website and marketing assessment for you and provide you with expert recommendations. Save yourself the trouble and leave your digital marketing strategy to us! Call us for your free consultation now.