Leveraging lead campaigns: Home Property Agents

When it comes to real estate marketing, lead campaigns are the holy grail. We’d all love it if there was one single magic marketing bullet that would hit the target every time and get prospects to contact us about our services.

The good news is that lead campaigns are effective and should be implemented as part of your brand marketing strategy. In this blog, we learn more about lead campaigns for one of our valued clients, Home Property Agents.

So, what is a real estate lead campaign?

A lead campaign is like a fishing line with a tasty tidbit of information on the end of the line that is attractive to your prospects.

The marketing message for a lead campaign needs to be ‘thumb-stoppable.’ This means that as a potential client is scrolling online in Google search results or through their social media feed, your message catches their attention, and they stop, read and are compelled to give you their contact information so that you can contact them or they book in to have a chat with you.

The key to successful lead campaigns is really knowing your target audience – what information is of high value to them and what buttons (or pain points) you can push to get them to act now.
Your message needs to talk to one of these pain points, and your solutions need to address and solve them.

Different lead campaigns for different property market conditions

We have several different styles of lead campaigns for Home Property Agents in Neutral Bay, Sydney. One is an offer to value people’s homes via a social media contact form, and another gives leads a detailed, free local market report in exchange for an email address.

In the case of Home Property Agents, we found that an offer of a home valuation worked well in a rising market, when people were interested in knowing more about their home’s worth. In a less confident market, a local property report worked well as it gave people information about their asset rather than gloomy news about a possible decrease in value.

First, you must ‘warm up’ your audience

Of course, it’s hard to get someone who has never met you or seen your marketing before to give you their contact information the very first time they see you. This is why other forms of marketing and communications, such as blogs, are employed to ‘warm up’ the person and give them time to become familiar with you. In other words, your brand is just as important as your lead campaign.

Home Property Agents posts weekly blogs about local life, real estate and property investment information for its followers on social media, so the home valuation and market report were a natural extension of that useful information.

When is the right time to run a lead campaign?

Assuming that you have been warming up your audience for some time (three to six months), a lead campaign can be very effective in getting prospects to act. Right now in Australia, national statistics show that Australians are holding on to properties for an average of 9.9 years, which can mean a long time between transactions. In New Zealand, the timeframe for holding a property is shorter at approximately 5 years and 3 months.

To continue with our fishing analogy, the purpose of a lead campaign is to find the fish in a larger shoal of fish that are ready to bite. That is, the homeowners or property investors who own property in the areas that you serve, who have started thinking about selling or need help leasing or managing a property.

This means that ahead of launching your lead campaign you need to do two things;

• First, build a contact list of all the home owners for each property in your patch.
• Second, stay visible to these people at all times, providing information that would be relevant to them whether they are ready to transact or not. This information might include market reports, lifestyle insights, home-related information and more.

How we helped Home Property Agents

This agency is a family-run boutique real estate agent, founded by Gabi Somlai more than 25 years ago. As the company has matured, Gabi’s son, Anthony, has moved into a sales director role and has embraced digital marketing as he develops his own identity alongside that of the family business. And in that time he’s really established himself as the face of Home Property Agents, bringing in new clients and winning many listings.

Traditionally, Home Property Agents primary clients were families with large apartment portfolios across Sydney. The agency operates in the lower north shore, Sydney’s most competitive real estate market, with many celebrity agents. Investing in digital marketing was a new venture for the agency, and a more modern approach to building the brand, which is now reaping rewards as Anthony takes the lead in sales.

Real estate lead campaigns using Messenger

For our lead campaigns, we started with social media advertising, running a campaign to give people the opportunity to speak to an agent about their home’s value. This ad is a messenger style one, which prompts the prospect to give their name, mobile and property address in order to speak to an agent.

The benefit for the homeowner is they get an up-to-date property price, personalised to their home. We’ve found that this type of campaign works best in a market where prices are on the increase – a ‘hot’ or runaway market – as people love to hear good news about their home’s value.

Real estate lead campaigns using market reports

Secondly, we put together a property market report and ran it through the second half of 2023.

This one leads to a form that only asks for the lead’s name and email. They do not need to give their property details or mobile numbers unless they want to, and they don’t need to receive a call from the agent. When Anthony did call, it was more to have a chat and provide general information.

This lead approach has longevity, and has the added advantage of working in an upward- or downward-trending market.

We are not saying, “Do you want to know how much money you’ve lost in equity on your property?” We are saying, “Would you like to know what’s happening in your market in general?”

Even in a downward-trending market, people will bite the bait and you get to have conversations and provide helpful information, which builds rapport and helps you to become known and trusted.

How much does a real estate lead campaign cost?

For every $10 spent on advertising you can expect someone to see your ad up to four times.
You can expect to pay between $15 and $45 for each person who fills in your form and gives you their details to receive the report.

So a budget of $600 would have you seen by 6,000+ people across your suburb, and you might receive around 14 to 50 leads (people) to talk with. This is a much better result than a letterbox drop.

Each time the campaign was run, Anthony gained opportunities to talk with property owners he had never connected with previously and won additional property listings. This gave him a steady flow of properties to sell, and further enhanced his reputation as a real estate professional.

Want to learn more about real estate lead campaigns?

Lead campaigns are a great way to win new listings when carried out alongside other real estate marketing activities. Marketing is not sales – but it paves the way, hopefully, for a sale later on.

We’ve had some great results with our lead campaigns and property reports. The content itself is a combination of statistics, economics, demographics and the agent’s own insights into their micro market or particular area. As such, they are valuable to home sellers in those areas, more so than a news story on a city or country-wide market, which is too general to be useful for many.

If you’re a real estate professional who wants to take your business and your brand to the next level with a lead campaign tailored to your business, take some time to book a free consultation and talk to me, Melanie Hoole. I’ll give you on-the-spot recommendations and show you how digital marketing can help position you as a local real estate expert and get you in front of prospects with a clear marketing proposition.

Written by Melanie Hoole

My team and I specialise in helping real estate and property professionals perfect their personal brand, build a first-class digital profile and implement inbound marketing activities to attract leads. If you are unsure which direction to take with your digital marketing contact me for help.