You’ve probably been told time and time again that to get something in real estate advertising you have to give something back. This is where lead magnets come into your marketing strategy. But, what are lead magnets?
A lead magnet is a free asset offered to consumers in exchange for their contact details. They should provide value to your customers and speak to a particular pain point. Good lead magnets will not only draw your preferred customers in to share their contact details with you they will also keep your new contacts coming back to you for more information (and build your credibility)!
Remember, a free appraisal is something that every agent on the market is offering. To generate quality leads you need to be offering something unique in return. This can be anything from a market report to a free ebook to access to an exclusive webinar series.
So, now you know the basics of what a lead magnet is, let us take you through the three things we think are KEY to your lead magnet’s success no matter what type of lead magnet you choose to use [+ download our 5 free lead magnet templates to use in your next Facebook ad campaign].
Generating plenty of leads and adding hundreds of new contacts to your database is an excellent result and is valuable in and of itself. However, for the purposes of this blog, we’ll be talking about “success” in terms of not just generating plenty of leads but also in terms of converting those leads into clients.
Now, you’ll have to define for yourself exactly what number of leads and conversions will count as success to you.
Remember to keep in mind what platforms you’ll be promoting these lead magnets on, how much budget you’re planning to spend on acquiring leads and how much you’re planning to spend on converting them, and how long you’re planning to use these lead magnets in your marketing strategy. All of these questions should factor into your expected ROI.
Got your goal sorted? Great, let’s get into what you need to do next!
As Ryan Thompson, Real Estate Brilliance founder, stated during our last webinar, “marketing on social media is not that different from your other forms of marketing. If you know who your audience is on other platforms then you know who your audience is on social media”. We wholeheartedly agree!
If you haven’t sat down and fleshed out who you’re targeting, we highly recommend using a contact profiling worksheet to do so. This will save you time on marketing in the long run, and make it so much easier to create campaign messaging and relevant content for your lead magnets.
Why should you know your audience before you create your first lead magnet? Well, you need to know what content they’re going to care about!
Ask yourself the following questions?
The answers to all of these questions will help you create content that is relevant to your audience, and that will also be delivered in a way that meets their needs. What will this do? Well, it will make your intended audience more likely to download your lead magnet and provide their details.
If your content is relevant and engaging to your audience, it will also ensure your new contacts like and trust you, and that they’ll keep coming back to you for more information.
Remember, we’re defining success as both generating leads and eventually converting those leads into clients. If you’re content attracts attention you may generate a lot of leads, but if your audience doesn’t find that content valuable once they download it you’re unlikely to build enough trust to convert.
It’s quite a difficult balance to strike, but here’s why you should provide value without giving away everything at once.
How would you feel about the success of your campaign if your new contact opened your lead magnet, found it valuable, got everything they needed out of it and then never felt the need to interact with you again?
It is very unlikely that any new lead you generate from Meta advertising will immediately turn into a new listing. This means, you need to provide value not just once, but multiple times to build a strong relationship with your new contacts to turn them into future clients down the track. That means you need to keep some of that knowledge in the bank to use later.
We recommend getting specific to avoid giving out too much information. Choose one topic to focus on and then expand on that in further phone calls, emails or guides to your new contacts.
For instance, you might be interested in generating leads from potential sellers. A guide about every stage of the sales process is going to be overwhelming for the end user, difficult to market effectively for you and it’s not going to give you an easy jumping-off point for further communication.
Instead, consider a guide on styling your property for sale or how to market your property for sale. This way you can provide thorough, detailed information without divulging your entire sales process.
If you do want to provide a lead magnet about a broader topic like selling your property, remain lighter on the detail. 5 to 10 pages of simple content will provide enough information to be valuable while saving your new contacts from overwhelm.
Once you’ve decided on your topic and what you think needs to be included and what should be excluded, you can build a follow-up strategy to nurture and convert your leads.
If you’re using your lead magnets for social media advertising, it’s likely that the contacts you generate will be completely new to you and therefore not ready to sell with you straight away.
By far the most important element of converting your leads into clients is how you follow up with them.
And, by follow-up we don’t just mean the one call you make after you see a submitted lead. We mean ALL of the follow-ups:
When you first make get in touch with your new contact we recommend getting an idea of their timeline in the market – when are they looking to sell, and when is the best time for you to contact them by phone again? Also, try to uncover how they prefer to be contacted in general and what stage they’re at in their research (what other information would they find of value that they haven’t already seen).
Categorise your new contacts based on the information you uncover in the first phone call and send them different marketing sequences depending on their category.
Are they a very soft selling lead that is only at the very beginning of their research and unlikely to sell within the year? They’ll need more communication from you to continue building that relationship and providing relevant knowledge to them over this longer time period. Are they a warm selling lead that is at the stage of comparing agents in the market? You’ll need a totally different marketing strategy, which means they should be categorised differently.
Get yourself set up with automated email options and prepare as much bulk SMS messaging and future content as possible. Before you even run a first lead magnet ad campaign we recommend having at least a month’s worth of follow-up communication organised. This will save you so much time and can easily be re-used for similar lead magnet campaigns in the future.
Access our free lead magnet CANVA template kit today. The kit includes 5 free templates that you can easily rebrand and tailor to your area: