As a real estate agent, you may think that technology can’t help you attract new customers. After all, your business has too many physical aspects that can’t go online. But your customer demographics are changing. A new generation of home buyers is entering the market that has spent most of their lives using modern technology.
Millennials born between the 1980's and 2000's have their peculiar ways of perceiving the retail market. Some of them just don't consider buying a house a life goal. Others don't consider themselves capable of buying a place in the foreseeable future, since they have too much debt to pay off.
Nevertheless, this group makes up a large population of potential real estate customers. In fact, one Statista survey revealed that 80 percent of American millennials plan to buy a home eventually.
So, you should make it a top priority to offer your services to millennials. But you also need to come up with new ways of marketing that appeal to this tech-savvy generation, and one of them is upgrading your content. But if you can’t come up with original ideas, asking a professional essay writer for help is a perfect option for getting useful content for your business purposes.
Now let’s review some other suggestions you might heed to up your selling game.
Understanding Millennials’ Shopping Preferences and Behaviors
Like any form of marketing, you need to first get a deep understanding of your target audience to better engage and communicate with them. Knowing what they value most gives you many ideas in this regard.
Feminism, LGBT rights, animal rights, environmental issues, and sustainability are among the most important issues that millennials care about. Find a cause related to any of such issues and support it. Millennials like to do business with brands that take a stance on issues they value.
They also place a special emphasis on expert advice. In fact, they’re more likely to trust experts than advertisements. According to HubSpot, the influence millennials y get from blogs or social networking sites is 247% more than from any source of information. So, instead of just trying to promote your business to them, establish yourself as an expert in the field. This way, they’re more likely to trust you.
Millennials like to be heard, participate, and have a say in the brand story. So, giving them the chance to be part of your business does wonders in turning them into loyal clients. An excellent way to achieve this is through user-generated content.
Encourage them to create videos of living in the houses they bought from you. Ask them to share their ideas with you about how you can improve your services. Be creative and tailor these attempts to the special features of each platform you use to engage with them.
Appealing to Millennial Real Estate Prospects
For millennial buyers, the online world is the first go-to source when they’re on the fence, trying to decide which product/service they want to opt for. It doesn't matter what decision it is. It can be anything, from shopping for groceries to buying a house.
So, if you're going to attract these prospects, you should transfer all aspects of your business online.
However, it’s not enough to just build a website for your brand. You should have an online presence across multiple online channels to make sure your prospects can find you anywhere.
Fortunately, you can leverage the most visual social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, to attract more potential millennial buyers and convert them to customers.
But every social media platform requires specific strategies to appeal to the users of that particular platform.
With about 70% of American adults using Facebook, this platform is the most important social media channel for appealing to millennial real estate buyers.
The biggest mistake that most real estate agents make on Facebook is that they simply post listings without paying attention to other nuances of the platform. They reduce this great opportunity to a bulletin board for displaying their listings.
But there's much more to Facebook real estate marketing, from the cover photo to Facebook ads. Moreover, the platform gives you access to an ocean of data that helps you discover millennial home buying trends and incorporate this knowledge to your marketing efforts.
First, you need to set up a business page rather than a personal account. A business page gives you access to many other options, such as an unlimited number of followers, Facebook Insight, and paid advertising.
Your profile photo should either be your own photo or your brand logo. And here’s a quick tip: don't change your profile photo frequently because it’s what your followers associate your brand with.
Facebook Content
The content that you post on Facebook should be a combination of educational content and listing promotions. The key is to have the right combination: 80 percent of informative texts, and only 20 percent of listing promotions.
Millennials love to be informed about everything, so by posting informative content, you both deliver value and focus on your prospects rather than concentrate on you and your business only.
Facebook Ads
Ad campaigns on Facebook are an essential tool you can leverage to reach a broader audience among millennial real estate prospects. The different types of Facebook ads include News Feed Ads, Right Column Ads, Lead Ads, Carousel Ads, and Canvas Ads. Each of these types serves a special purpose.
Before running Facebook ads, you need clear goals. For example, do you want to attract more clients in a particular location, or do you want to attract more followers on your Facebook page? Defining your goals helps you devise a clear strategy.
Now it's time for audience targeting, which is crucial for businesses like real estate. With recent changes in Facebook targeting options, you can’t use age, gender, or zip code as a base for targeting. So, the best option is to use automated ads. This way, you can target your preferred audience without violating Facebook anti-discrimination rules.
Make sure to include a clear CTA in your ads. Studies have shown that a simple CTA can increase click-through rates by 84%. The most frequently used CTA is the ‘Call Us’ one, which can considerably boost conversion rates.
A fascinating hack to improve the Facebook conversion rate is to target only the users who connect through Wi-Fi. This simple strategy can improve your conversion rate by up to 25%. That's because people who use Wi-Fi are probably sitting and not walking. It means they pay more attention to your ads or content. You can use this strategy both for Instagram and Facebook.
All you need to do is go to the Ads Set and choose Automatic Placements. Then scroll down and find "only when connected to Wi-Fi" option. This way, your target audience might get smaller, but your ads will be more effective.
The highly visual Instagram platform is a perfect place for attracting millennials. Millennials' social media usage indicates that these individuals are indeed highly attracted to visual content. Stories, highlights, contests, challenges, and IGTV are very effective for paying prospects’ attention. Also, advertising on Instagram is much easier than on Facebook these days.
Hashtags are also great for categorizing your posts and increasing their visibility. The number of Instagram hashtags doesn't have any limitations. But it doesn't mean that you can throw in any hashtag that seems relevant. If you use too many hashtags, your posts will end up showing for users that don't find your posts relevant.
You can use the auto-suggest feature in the search bar to see which hashtags are popular. But don't use highly popular ones because they’re competitive. Also, pay attention to hashtags related to your target one. When you click on the related hashtags, you can see the posts that are like yours and check what hashtags have been used.
Instagram Content
High-quality images and engaging videos are what a real estate business can benefit from most. After all, no matter how much you try to describe a house, a professional video or image can outdo text.
In addition to videos, you can use virtual tours to give a more realistic view of the house. Using interactive image slides or leveraging virtual reality tours can engage your millennial customers more than any other tool.
By using virtual reality, you can save your customer’s time because they don't need to be physically present in the house. It’s also very appealing to millennials who love technologies like this and appreciate the time they save by watching the house remotely.
To take virtual tours, the customer only needs a virtual reality headset. The format of the tour can be guided or interactive.
Other Tips for Engaging Your Followers
To boost your marketing strategy on Instagram, you should engage your followers actively. Instagram has many features that allow you to stand out from your competitors, including:
- Hyperlapse. It’s an attractive feature that helps you take videos in time-lapse forms. You can use this feature to catch the eyes of your followers in different ways. For example, if you’re preparing for an open house, you can take time-lapse videos or showcase the facilities in the neighborhood like beaches and parks.
- Customer testimonials. Ask your happy customers to take videos of themselves living in their houses and show how satisfied they are with their new homes.
- Instagram Direct. Not everything you share on Instagram needs to be public. Create a pleasant level of personalization by sending photos or videos to particular followers.
TikTok
Recently, this social platform has gained considerable popularity among millennials. And its popularity is continuing to grow by the day during the COVID pandemic. So, it seems reasonable to look for ways to expand your presence in this platform to capture its growing potential in attracting millennials.
You can do TikTok marketing in different ways. Set up your own business channel, use the paid advertising feature, and work with influencers to introduce your brand to millennial real estate buyers.
TikTok challenges have changed into a standard social media activity, which you can leverage to attract buyers. If your brand channel is small, collaborate with influencers to reach more users. And if starting a challenge is difficult for you, join one instead.
The fun and laid back atmosphere of TikTok lends itself to publishing unedited, candid videos of your brand, including a typical day in your real estate agency. This feature allows you to post daily, which is essential in content marketing.
Instead of using hashtags, it’s a good idea to use music that TikTok advertises to you in your videos. Also, search for viral music on the “For You” page and incorporate it into your videos to get more benefits in marketing.
Another beneficial feature of TikTok is that it allows you to share your content on other social media platforms. This way, you can attract your audience from other places and ask them to subscribe to your TikTok account.
Millennials use Pinterest to search for images, but it doesn't mean you can’t use it to interact with them.
The most important feature of Pinterest is its unique content. Unlike Facebook or Instagram, which need new content all the time, Pinterest requires evergreen posts. On average, it takes a Pinterest post quite a while to receive engagement. So to attract millennial real estate prospects, you should create content that will be relevant even one year after you posted it.
Therefore, posting listings on Pinterest doesn't seem a good idea. Instead, it's better to introduce neighborhoods that might be appealing to millennials or buildings that have a fascinating history behind them. So, think about the perks of the house and see what you can write to be still relevant after one year.
Another critical feature of Pinterest is the demography of users. According to OmnicoreAgency studies, women make up more than 71% of Pinterest users. Also, millennials comprise the majority of active pinners. With these demographics in mind, plan your strategies to appeal to this audience.
Pinterest boards are also a great opportunity for you to establish your authority. Find out what potential customers are interested in and create Pinterest boards around them.
This platform also has an advertising feature called Promoted Pins. Using it, you can run a Pinterest ad campaign to target specific home buyers. The most profitable one is the “traffic campaign." Target the audience who live in your own area by using specific keywords so that only people who want to buy properties in your geographical location could see your ads.
Bottom Line
Moving businesses online is a must in today's world. To attract millennial buyers, you need to know what they want, how they respond to social media posts, and how you can appeal to them. Each platform requires a unique strategy in terms of content creation and engagement. By using these tips, you can make sure that you will attract more millennial buyers and convert them into customers.
James Baxter is professional ghostwriter, editor at write my essay and blogger, who loves sharing his experience and knowledge with readers. He is especially interested in marketing, blogging and IT. James is always happy to visit different places and meet new people there.
