Real estate photography is all about business first, and photography second. That’s why real estate marketing is essential to succeed in a competitive real estate market.
But where do you start? What are the best real estate marketing strategies and how can they achieve a seamless fusion with real estate photography to promote real estate properties?
In this article, I will present 4 useful marketing tips for: photographers, agents and real estate agents.
Let’s see how you can promote yourself through online marketing in 2021:
- Solicit recommendations to boost your business.
Word-of-mouth marketing – passing information from one person to another using oral communication.
Most professional photographers win the majority of their clients through word-of-mouth. This is no problem for agencies or real estate agents.
Poti starts with friends and family. Ask them to mention you to relevant people who may be your clients.
However, you need to be well prepared if you want word-of-mouth marketing to really work. You need a shiny and functional online presence.
You need a great website with a portfolio, contact forms, reviews and testimonials.
Of course, you need to produce great real estate photography for this method to work and bring you clients consistently.
- Launch Facebook / Instagram or Google Ads campaigns.
Success in and through photography comes when you as a photographer, agency or real estate agent learn how to promote your personal brand through social media platforms.
The best and relatively easy approach is to pay for ad placement on Facebook, Instagram, Google and YouTube, with accurate targeting of potential clients.
But there is a catch, if you set up your Paid Ads campaign wrong, it will consume a lot of money and will not bring you the results you want.
When choosing paid ads, regardless of the marketing channel you choose, it becomes important to be able to study your target audience and know how you can get your message in front of them, in the right place, at the right time.
An excellent approach to Social Media is to run a UGC (User Generated Content) content marketing campaign.
However, with this approach you will need to find a direction that is unusual and has the potential to go viral.
People won’t repost your real estate photos, but they might share an amazing behind-the-scenes video of a real estate photo shoot (behind-the-scene content) or unique drone footage!
Before and after photos also have the potential to go viral on Social Media.
But the end result depends a lot on your marketing skills and creativity.
- Optimize your site to attract more organic traffic from Google.
From an SEO standpoint, the professional photography industry is a vast topic, since SEO means search engine optimization, and Google is an extremely competitive territory across all niches that use professional photography services.
Why is SEO important?
You can become a reliable and consistent source of potential customers. The bad news is that SEO is hard to master and it can take months, if not years, for your site to gain the authority it needs to rank well on competitive keywords.
SEO for photographers is no different than any other business. On a practical level, SEO involves:
- SEO On-Page: optimizing content, images, titles, meta descriptions and improving the technical performance of the site.
- SEO Off-Page: mainly backlinks obtained through articles placed on other external sites with SEO authority and relevance to your field of activity.
Why focus on SEO?
Whether you are a photographer or a real estate agent, SEO can help you reach potential clients more easily when they are interested in the services you offer and gives you the following advantages:
- educate potential clients about the benefits of hiring a professional.
- offer general recommendations for home furnishing or how attractive features of a room/house/apartment can be maximized and presented.
Retine, even though some real estate agents who read your articles will end up taking their own photos, it’s okay.
You’ve done your part to improve the real estate photography market and there’s a pretty good chance those agents will keep coming back to your blog for inspiration and advice.
Also, when they have a big project and if they appreciate the quality of your photos, you stand a good chance of them contacting you to discuss your real estate photography services.
- Offer a free trial (a free photo shoot or certain bonuses):
There is a right way and a wrong way to offer “free” work. The right approach helps ensure that anyone who finds your services online knows you’re a serious photographer.
How can you do this?
Allocate time and attention to setting up your business: professional website, price list and a portfolio that highlights your photography skills.
When you contact a potential client to offer a “free trial period”, you can also send them a price list and a presentation in which you make it clear that, if they are satisfied with the photos, the final product will have to be paid for: XYZ euro / lei.
In this way, there will be no surprises and you will simplify a lot your customer retention process for your real estate photography services.
Also, a professional photographer is able to easily find ads posted by real estate agencies where the photos were clearly taken with modest quality equipment.
And those real estate agents can become clients of your services.
At the same time, a real estate agent or agency has a lot of bonuses (benefits) they could offer to generate leads (potential clients).
BONUS for photographers: Target new high-value clients.
You don’t have to call every real estate agent in the market at random.
Look for real estate agents based in certain geographic areas where you know property values are higher. Look for real estate listings that are clearly luxury properties.
Of course, some of these potential clients may already have a photographer they work with, but this won’t be a problem for you.
You may eventually find potential clients who are relatively new to their area. Get in touch with them and offer the help they might need to start their real estate business.
And last but not least, you can always turn to professional online marketing services.
Whether you are a professional photographer, real estate agent or agency, the online marketing services of re7consulting agency in Bucharest are at your disposal.
