Lead generation in real estate investing is the key to real estate success. Like any other business, generating leads in the real estate business is also challenging. You can get more tricky given the covid-19 restrictions. This blog will explain the fundamentals of lead generation for commercial real estate investors and cover the top 5 ways of generating quality leads for your commercial real estate to help increase your sales and revenue.
What is lead generation in the context of real estate investing?
Lead generation, in essence, is a marketing term that describes a process of turning someone who is your target audience into a paying client or business. In the context of real estate investing, a lead might be someone who wants to sell their home, or it could also be a home buyer who wants to purchase a home, depending on the nature of your real estate investing business.
There are two ways to go about a lead generation which is inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Inbound marketing is when the potential lead comes to you because of the content that you have created or because of your visibility on various social media platforms or discussion forums. Outbound marketing is when you directly solicit business from your potential client by cold outreaching.
Both inbound marketing and Outbound marketing are great ways to generate quality leads for your commercial investing business. In our opinion, to develop the most qualified lead, it is essential to consider both. We will now cover the top 5 ways of lead generation for your commercial real estate investing.
Top 5 ways of lead generation for commercial real estate investing
#1 – Develop powerful lead magnets
A lead magnet is a free service or content given away in exchange for the ability to gain access to your potential leads contact information like an email address or phone number.
While most real estate businesses provide a downloadable gift that is accessed through a landing page or the website as a lead magnet, you should know that it can also be more helpful for you to offer quick service as your lead magnet.
For example, you can offer to give your sell leads a free, comparative real estate market analysis so that they have a better understanding of how much their home is worth.
In exchange, they might provide their contact information to you, which you can later use to reach out to them, and ask if you could give them an exclusive service, and voila, you have a new client for real estate consulting.
Similarly, you can find various other ways of creating lead magnets depending on the type of real estate investing business you are in. It is essential to know that data is everything in the world of the internet, and lead magnets are the most powerful way of collecting contact data of your potential target customers.
#2 – Paid Ads and Campaigns
The following powerful way of generating leads for your commercial real estate investing business is to run paid ads or campaigns as part of your lead generation strategy. Suppose you have a Facebook account for your commercial real estate business.
In that case, you can launch a paid Facebook ad that advertises your listing to your potential buyers in the target market.
Facebook is one of the best ways to reach out to your target audience. You can also use powerful analytical tools like a Facebook pixel to track and with the effectiveness of your advertising until you understand the formula that works well for your business type.
Similarly, you can also run paid Google ad campaigns to help your commercial real estate business appear in front of your target audience, enticing them to take action and reach out to you.
#3 – Content Marketing
A robust content marketing strategy is at the heart of every lead generation strategy. The name suggests content marketing involves creating valuable and informative content that helps position yourself as a thought leadership expert in the field and will draw people into your real estate website.
While there are different forms of content marketing, one of the most common examples of content marketing that works well is blogging. You can have your real estate team create a newsletter, send out email campaigns, or create informative videos of your listings.
Content marketing is considered one of the most powerful ways to generate free leads instead of the paid options like Facebook ads and Google ads. You are very certain about lead conversions or the quality of leads you will get.
#4 – Cold emailing and calling
While many marketers believe that cold emailing and calling is dead after social media took to power, it is proven repeatedly that cold emailing and calling still work and work pretty well at that.
Especially for a business like commercial real estate investing, direct emailing is a popular and well-working lead generation strategy that involves sending letters or postcards to your prospective leads in your target market area.
There are various tools out there that will help you refine your emails based on selecting subject lines to the length and content of the email body, which will entice your potential leads to take action. While email marketing must not focus on hard-selling, it must be noted that you can still persuade your customers to buy your services or buy anything else that you are offering as part of your real estate investing business.
Besides, one of the best ways of putting your email database to use is by sending out email newsletters that will keep your target audience engaged and provide you an immense opportunity to cross-sell and upsell your products and services in front of your customers.
#5 – Outsource your lead generation activities
Suppose you think that the process of lead generation is confusing or that you don’t have the luxury of time to indulge in the same.
In that case, you can always consider outsourcing your lead generation activities to a lead generation company that will exclusively run different types of inbound and outbound lead generation activities to generate quality leads for your business.
Suppose you do choose to hire a lead generation company and outsource your lead generation activities to them. In that case, you must ensure that you decide to go with the company, giving you exclusive leads and is not dumping junk leads onto you – where you know that your potential leads are not very interested in buying your product or service.
Most of the lead generation companies out there provide a short free trial period of 5 to 6 days where they will generate leads for you, based on which you can decide whether or not you want to hire them to do lead generation activities for you.
