Real estate lead generation belongs at the core of any business strategy. Whether you’re looking for buyers or renters, you need to know who to look for to know what to do.

Lead generation is something you need if you’ve invested in real estate. It’s the only way to turn investments into profits.

If you don’t have a good lead generation strategy, you could be sitting on millions or even billions of dollars in potential money, lost to competitors with stronger strategies for lead generation.

Any real estate investor worth a dime has mastered lead generation. If you don’t take charge, there’s no way to take on the best of the best.

Here are 9 tips to make sure you’re at the top of your game and you’ll be generating leads in no time.

Know Your Client Base

Understanding who your clients are has benefits at every stage of the process. It will inform your decisions in terms of amenities, rent, and expected repair costs at properties.

It’s always more expensive to have four college kids renting an apartment than a septuagenarian couple.

Just as there is always a greater likelihood that a factory building gets damaged than a florist’s shop.

But the first benefit (and the most important,) of knowing your client base is the benefit that knowledge provides for real estate lead generation.

That’s because your renters are the focus of your marketing campaigns.

Everything from where to put fliers to whether or not to significantly invest in online advertising is based on having an intimate knowledge of your client base.

So take the time to do client research.

Have a Good Website

Your website is your face to the digital world. In the early days of the internet, you could get away with having a poorly designed, weak, or tacky website and still be successful online.

Looking at any notable business’ website in the Wayback Machine sheds a lot of insight into that fact.

But looking at these websites, it also becomes obvious why we’re so amused and befuddled by these sites: there’s no way we, as consumers in 2017, would take them seriously.

Today, even having a “just OK” website can kill your real estate lead generation potential. You need to have an exceptional website, something that lets you stand head-and-shoulders above the competition.

Good investor websites rope in clients and are essential to real estate lead generation.

Use Social Media to Your Advantage

The average person spends two or more hours per day on social media.

In fact, the influence of social media on spending habits has caused websites like Facebook to integrate eCommerce tools into the platform.

Though we haven’t yet reached the point of homes being sold and apartments and office space rented over Facebook, it has become abundantly clear that successful real estate developers must take advantage of social media.

That means Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram should all be a regular part of your day. This is important for customers of all ages, but particularly essential if you’re looking to generate leads with millennials.

Buying Facebook advertisements and having an active presence on social media should lie at the core of real estate lead generation online.

Simply put, social media is where your clients are. That means social media is where you should be.

SEO Is Everything

Search engine optimization is an essential element of marketing for a real estate engine.

If you aren’t dominating social media in your real estate market, you’ll be left unable to compete.

How seriously do you need SEO?

Consider this statistic: 75 percent of people searching for a given query never scroll past the first result.

If you’re even the second result, that’s three-quarters of people who will never see you.

If you’re on the second page? Enjoy the empty units, because nobody will find you.

Get your SEO taken care of by seasoned professionals. SEO as a field is always changing: between the hyperactive rate of change among the big search engines and the marketing world’s gravitation toward one-upmanship, you can’t even count on the same strategy working six months in the future.

People who work in the industry know how to navigate the complicated world of digital marketing. So hiring high-quality professionals to handle your SEO means you can rest easy with a dominant real estate lead generation strategy.

Use Video Marketing

You might not think video marketing has a place in real estate. But the use of video remains absolutely essential to generating leads.

Something like a video tour offered circulated on social media and through email marketing can be the shot of adrenaline your real estate lead generation plan needs.

Even going further, something that could attract the attention of potential leads is putting videos full of helpful apartment tips and “life hacks” on social media.

These videos will get shared and can lead to a self-sustaining real estate lead generation strategy.

So make sure you keep video at the heart of your strategy.

Use PPC for Real Estate Lead Generation

Overusing PPC advertising can be bad for business. But using it to supplement your already strong SEO strategy can boost returns for your business.

The key is making sure PPC is a small part of your real estate lead generation strategy and not the core of it; a weak strategy that relies too heavily on PPC will never compete with strong SEO.

Don’t Forget Physical Offline Ads

This is particularly true for those buying or selling to the fifty-and-over demographic. A number of people still do not use the internet regularly: they might not have social media accounts and may only use search engines for more trivial queries. Though they may have a smartphone

Though they could have a smartphone, they likely use it as a high-powered flip phone or camera phone.

That is not to say this demographic is less sophisticated or intelligent: they just make decisions the classic way.

That means searching for new homes in the newspaper.

If your real estate lead generation strategy involves roping in second-time homebuyers, retirees, or selling luxury apartments you’ll probably want to use physical offline ads.

That’s not to say you also shouldn’t advertise these properties online; on the contrary, that remains essential regardless of which other strategies you employ.

Real estate lead generation involves casting a wide net and letting clients come to it. If you’re a real estate investor, you’ll want to have a great website and use a killer SEO and social media strategy.

You’ll also want to put up fliers and buy newspaper ads.

You never know where your clients might come from.

Cold Calling Still Works

Cold calling may seem like a primitive method of bringing in new prospects. But if you’re looking for people interested in buying or renting a home, it can be helpful to use a bit of cold calling to supplement your strategy.

Every once in a while you should pick up the yellow pages and look for potential clients. This is particularly true if you are selling commercial or office space, where you are more likely to find business owners looking to relocate as a means of reducing overhead.

This tip should not be taken as a main point of strategy: consider this a supplement to the hard work you already do finding clients on and offline.

Start Blogging

Once you’ve built a killer website, it’s going to be necessary to figure out what to do with it.

Obviously, ecommerce and providing a good space for contact will be a part of that. But even more important will be keeping people coming in.

Real estate lead generation means finding two types of leads: people who knew they were looking to get a space similar to the type you’re offering, and people who had no idea.

People don’t just stumble into the decision to buy a home or commercial unit, but they do stumble into the exact type they want.

If you have an apartment or house that fits a certain look? Use your blog to advertise it.

If you have commercial space in an up-and-coming neighborhood, some nearby business owners might not have known was a good place to build their store or restaurant? Blog about reasons that neighborhood is the next big thing.

Blogs lead to readers, and readers lead to sales. Thus, a blog is the silver bullet of real estate lead generation.

Conclusion

Real estate lead generation is a complicated endeavor. But if you’re a serious real estate investor, it is the only way to convert investments to profit.

There are many avenues to doing this, and taking a one-size-fits-all approach is dangerous for business owners looking to succeed in a wide variety of customer segments.

Looking for leads from multiple angles will be a very lucrative strategy.

If this has you feeling a bit overwhelmed or you’d like more information on building a successful real estate lead generation strategy, check out this free guide to get high-quality training and start wheeling and dealing like the pros.