What is Local Influencer Marketing For Estate Agents?

A market tactic used by only a few estate agents and letting agents even though it has incredible potential to grow your local brand awareness and listing portfolio.

Spoiler alert. When I talk about local influencers, I mainly refer to local business owners, managers and people of influence within your targeted community. Read on to understand. 

Influencer Marketing is quickly becoming one of the most critical aspects of local business marketing. With more and more people using social media platforms to find information, engage with brands, and make purchasing decisions, local businesses and estate agents need to leverage influencer marketing to reach their target audience. 

Influencer Marketing has proven to be an effective way for businesses to reach new customers, build brand loyalty, and increase sales.

People Trust Influencers

When it comes to marketing, influencers have become an invaluable tool. With the rise of social media, people can now trust and rely on the opinions of influencers they admire or relate to. These influencers have built a loyal audience base who follow them because they trust their judgement and respect their opinion. 

This trust and loyalty, in turn, give influencers the power to endorse brands and products to their audience, making influencer marketing incredibly effective for businesses. 

By collaborating with influencers, you can tap into the trust and loyalty their followers have for them. This is especially beneficial for small, local companies with a small online presence.

You Can Target a Specific Audience

Influencer marketing can be a great way to reach potential customers in your local area when building brand awareness for your estate agency brand and services. 

It allows you to target a specific audience and reach out to people most likely to sell, buy, let or rent with you.

You can target influencers who have a following in your local area, such as local schools, businesses, charities, markets or events. As long as they have a decent following on their social media channels, there is no reason why you shouldn’t collaborate with them.

This allows you to create content that will not just be seen by your local community but will increase trust and authority around your business as you are continually rubbing shoulders with respected businesses who have already built loyalty from their followers.

The key is to find the right influencers and target them with content that speaks to their followers. When done correctly, influencer marketing can be a great way to reach potential customers in your local area and promote your business.

You Can Work with Nano-Influencers

Nano-influencers are your everyday social media users. They aren’t professional “influencers” in any way – and the majority of their posts feature typical content like photos of their family, friends, cat videos, and memes.

For your business and branding opportunities, these Nano-Influencers are the local business owners within your community. All have a loyal fanbase and following, and all are no different from you and want to build exposure within the area.

These local businesses, organisations and key figures typically have an audience ranging from 100 to 10,000 followers. However, their audiences are highly engaged, loyal and local! 

They might not look like or identify as influencers, but you know better and see the opportunity of collaborating with them.

To grow your brand awareness, local authority and likeability within your community, the kind of influencer you want to partner with are:

• Independently run businesses: Coffee shops, hairdressers, barbers, gyms and mechanics.
• Local events: Farmers markets, car boot sales, seasonal marketing, charity events and school sports days.
• Local organisations: Charities, schools, theatres and your local church. 

One of the advantages of working with these types of influencers is that they tend to be far more affordable than bigger influencers, and in most cases, you won’t need to spend a penny. 

By planning which local influencers to buddy up with and using some of the content suggestions below, you can leverage the power of influencer marketing without breaking the bank and expect a healthy ROI for your efforts. It’s also a lot of fun too!

Content Ideas For Local Influencer Marketing Campaigns

With all these content ideas, always use the proper social media handles and hashtags and share on all your local community groups. If you can afford it, throw in a small amount of money for a Facebook Ad.

Giveaways and Discount Codes

This campaign is where you can run a series of social media posts offering a free giveaway from a local business in return for donating to a charity, liking your Facebook page or sharing a post. 

Takeover

Your social media page is taken over for a day, and you just focus on posting content to promote a local business or upcoming event. 

Interviews

Interview a local business, such as the local butcher and give them the platform to share their story and to promote their current products and offers. 

Brand Ambassadors

Scratch their back, and they’ll scratch yours. I guarantee no other business will go the extra mile to promote local businesses within your area. So by simply being the only person promoting a local business or organisation, they will become admirers of yours and be happy to return the favour, especially if you decide to spend £10 -£20 on a Facebook ad to increase your reach and engagement of the content. They might even allow you to leave a poster on their shop front window. Imagine a High Street covered with posters promoting your services!

Joint Events

Team up with one or more local influencers to run your own event. Easter egg hunts, Fundraising events, a networking group or even a monthly walk around a nearby nature reserve. 

The Benefits of Local Influencer Marketing

Increase Customer Loyalty and Trust

The fantastic thing about collaborating with local businesses and organisations is that you can easily and quickly build trust with their audiences. If you do this enough, eventually, you can have whole towns and communities buying into you and your role within your targeted area.

Increase Brand Awareness

Each of these businesses will have followers. Plus, this type of content is popular in community groups too. Your brand awareness growth capabilities can be untapped as long as you are consistent with it. Making this form of content super powerful.

Article written by Paul Neal. Marketing Exec for eXp UK and owner of EAM.