There is a major but often unwritten rule to real estate marketing today. Most professionals know it, but rarely put a voice to it. That rule is that all your real estate marketing should be for the purpose of generating leads. Without leads, you've got no clients, and without clients, no commission checks.



If your marketing isn't generating you leads to follow up with, you're wasting your time and money. If you're an agent just starting out, or even one in the middle of a career and you want to see a boost in your income, it is time to focus on your real estate marketing. Marketing is something you must be doing constantly. You don't stop when you make a lot of money, and you definitely don't stop when money is short.

As a matter of fact, a slow period is exactly the time to start beefing up your marketing. After all, it means you don't have enough leads to convert into a steady stream of clients and income. Therefore you must make sure your real estate marketing is in full gear so that you will always have a full pipeline of leads to follow up with and convert into actual clients.

Most agents today have a website, so you can start with focusing some real estate marketing in that direction. After all, your website is one of the easiest ways to generate leads, since about 80% of people do some type of real estate research on the web first before speaking with a real estate agent. That is why you need to make sure your site is easily found and it has a call to action that will make people leave you their contact information.

There are several ways to set up your site to generate leads. One of the most popular is to offer free home value estimates, which consumers can only get from you, or by paying an appraiser. By putting a simple form on your site asking for property and contact information, you can easily cultivate leads simply by offering a free CMA to visitors. Offering information they can't easily find on their own is always a good real estate marketing tactic to use to suck in your visitors.

Your website is just one type of real estate marketing you can do to generate yourself more leads. You can also pay for an online lead generation service to supplement your own lead generating tactics. This can save you time and the hassle of setting up various forms of lead generation online. One pitfall of these services however is that some lead generation services are giving your lead out to other agents as well, so you may be competing for the same client with three other agents.

For less tech-savvy agents, there are more traditional forms of real estate marketing that can garner many leads. Open houses are a great source for marketing your services, if you do it properly and make sure you're talking with people that come. Placing your listings in the local Real Estate magazine is also useful, but you must leave enough information out to make readers call you for more - such as the actual price tag of a home. If you put all the information in the ad, you take away a reason for consumers to actually get in touch with you.

There are literally hundreds of other fairly easy techniques to add to your real estate marketing portfolio. As long as you're willing to work hard and put a little elbow grease into things (even the things you may hate doing) you can easily find new clients just about anywhere you turn. Take some time to go through your current real estate marketing plan and analyze each tactic. Remember, if it's not generating leads, it's no longer worth your time!