Generating leads can sometimes be an expensive yet fruitless process. Marketing companies can rapidly squander thousands on ads trying to figure out what language works best, or what your audience are likely to click on, before you actually generate any leads.
According to Sally Lawson of Agent Rainmaker, there is a better way. You can trigger an avalanche of organic traffic to your agency website in order to build your database, without spending a single penny. Sally knows it makes good, solid business sense to reduce costs, not just increase profit, so her advice is to figure out what makes your audience tick for yourself, before you spend a small fortune on expensive Facebook, YouTube or Google ads.
Do your own market research, by applying her top tips for what letting agents can do to achieve optimum value in their marketing, generating free leads for their agency in 2022.
Create Generic Content Everyday
The ‘Facebook Zero’ policy means Facebook will not show your ads unless you pay them. However you can generate traffic to your Facebook posts without paying for the privilege, by creating generic posts instead of ads. Simple, fun, everyday content about you and your team.
We live in a reality TV culture. People love to see what goes on behind the scenes to watch natural human interaction, so give your audience exactly that. Show them what actually goes on in your office. Did some exciting new freebies arrive at the office from a supplier? Post about it and thank the supplier. Did someone turn up to the office wearing something a little crazy? Great, share it on Facebook.
From your morning coffee experience to your after work team drinks, all make great posts for engaging with your audience, and by utilising Facebook and Instagram stories and generic posts, you can drive mass traffic to your website. Traffic to the Agent Rainmaker website doubled from over 4000 to over 8000 in just one month, when they focused on posting generic Facebook and Instagram stories.
Utilise Hashtags
Hashtags are massively underused and can actually make a huge difference to traffic. Choose hashtags that are relevant to your audience, such as #Landlord, #Lettingagent, or #Letmyproperty. More people will see your post if you include a hashtag or two, which ultimately means more engagement and increased traffic to your website.
Tag People
Tag individuals and companies into your posts whenever you can. By tagging someone it automatically shows on their feed, which can increase visibility considerably. They will like it, people that know them will like it, and before you know it your post has legs and is leading the sprint to your website, and you still haven’t spent a single penny on ads.
Get Your Team Engaged
Your team will likely be local, so get them to like and share your posts and engage with your agency online. Their friends will see your posts and again they can quickly gain momentum. You can also share posts into groups and on different pages, as can your team, and if you have multiple pages on Facebook then interlink them all by liking all your posts from your other pages too.
Remember, have fun with your posts and create content that is engaging. Do play around with different headlines, images, content, or hashtags, and tagging different individuals or companies.
Once you are up and running, give yourself one month to generate as much organic traffic as possible. Once the month is up, it’s time to assess what worked for you. Did certain hashtags generate more traffic than others? Did a particular image fair better in the likes department? Once you can analyse what created the most engagement from your audience, simply do more of that.
If at this point you want to run some ads you can do so, safe in the knowledge your paid-for ads will now use a certain image, hashtag or content that you already know works well for your agency.
About Sally:
Former ARLA president Sally Lawson set up her first letting agency aged just 18, now more than 30 years on, she’s created the Concentric Lettings franchise, given speeches on stages across the world, and has turned her attention to supporting other agents through her mentoring and training company Agent Rainmaker. Visit here for more information.
