Talk to them. Your clients are on social media, and thus, you should be too. Friend and follow people consistently. Spend a few minutes a day liking and commenting on THEIR posts. Post a few times a week with relevant, real-estate related content or with content that makes you seem approachable, likable and human. The point, from a marketing perspective, is to stay present, relevant and visible to folks who might one day be a client, or refer one.

When you have a listing, post all over the place about it. Post the professional pictures you took or paid someone to take. You worked hard for that listing—now show it off. And show it off preferably in a way linking to your own acre of digital real estate, your website.

A website is yours—your space, yours to design, yours to control fully. Your own website won’t one day arbitrarily change the rules of content distribution or (important!) client data collection or face a congressional probe or suddenly go bankrupt or be bought out by some other social media platform. Websites establish credibility, and they also allow you to collect detailed and valuable data on the folks most interested in your services.

Search Engine Optimization. Make your website visible to Google. Rank higher in results when people search for “Colorado Springs Realtors.” Real estate is a little different in this regard, though. We’re honest with clients here. Realistically, the space is so crowded that a realtor with a new website is never going to rank really highly in general searches like the one just mentioned. BUT, there are some exciting, untapped opportunities to dominate really local and specific searches — when people search for real estate in really specific areas or neighborhoods. “Colorado Springs Real Estate” might already be dominated by Zillow and Redfin and Realtor dotcom, but “Old North End Colorado Springs Real Estate” or “Pinecreek homes for sale” probably aren’t. We have seen dramatic increases in our clients’ website search rankings when they target specific areas, their listing “farms.”

Some people are skeptical of the effectiveness of email. Our answer to them is pretty simple—we show them numbers. Skeptics point to the FLOOD of marketing emails we all experience in our inboxes these days. While this is true, rarely have you ever met the CEO of Amazon personally, or even spoken with an employee of that company marketing a 50% Off sale this Friday, only. The point is if you have a relationship with people before you send them email, the response rate is actually really, really good—the best, actually of any of the individual strategies here. On a recent realtor client email campaign, 45% of the recipients opened the email and 7% actually “clicked through” and left the client reviews on Zillow and Facebook. When most digital marketing campaigns consider a 1% “click through rate” a success, this figure obviously stands out.

You should be collecting emails of every client you come in contact with, and you should be keeping in touch with them regularly in as many ways as possible—email included.

Pay Per View. Pay Per Click. This is more direct digital marketing, “traditional” digital marketing, if you will. Pay a platform or an ads network to display ads (video or static) for specific listings or for you or your brokerage. There’s still a place for this and opportunities for realtors and small businesses to further take advantage of ads-marketing online have seriously increased with more advanced but relatively new, available, relatively easy to implement technologies like customer tracking and remarketing (where a visitor to your website will see your ad on another website or social platform after they’ve left your site).