8 Real Estate Tools to Create a Hyperlocal Marketing Plan

If some of your properties are sitting on the market for months and you have no clue how to reverse the situation, it’s about time to focus your efforts on hyperlocal marketing. It carries some great benefits for every local real estate company struggling to do more business. In this post, we’ll see which hyperlocal real estate marketing tools agents can use to ramp up their marketing strategy.

You might have already figured out that hyperlocal marketing deals with a much more targeted and precisely defined audience as opposed to the target but more general one. For real estate, this means you’re aiming at a specific (usually very small) geographic area like a neighborhood, zip code or even something as small as a block.

Given that the real estate market is a highly competitive one, it pays to only center your marketing efforts upon a number of local areas you work with. Oftentimes, it’s not even a city at large but a specific neighborhood. Moreover, what makes hyperlocal marketing so important is that prospective homebuyers literally can’t resist it. When you’re considering buying a home in some neighborhood, you’d like to find info exactly about that one and why it’s a better place than anything else the city has to offer.

Additionally, 98 percent of homebuyers start their search online. It’s essential to help them understand the community on a granular level so they can grasp the benefits before switching to another neighborhood. Let’s take a look at some of the best real estate marketing tools to do just that.

8 Hyperlocal Real Estate Marketing Tools to Create Outstanding Marketing Campaigns

1) Your own real estate website

First things first – if you want a long-lasting, trustworthy digital representation of your real estate business, you should create your own website asap. No social media profiles are enough to convince potential customers that your service is great if it’s not showcased via your own website.

Real estate listings, neighborhood landing pages, blog, customer reviews are all important mediums that prove your expertise and prompt people to contact you. When creating your real estate website, make sure it’s locally optimized so both people and search engines understand it’s all about real estate in this particular area. (To do this right, you might want to use this guide: Get on the Map: 21 Brilliant Ways to Ultimately Master Local Real Estate SEO).

Also, make sure your website is mobile-friendly as an overwhelming amount of local searches comes from mobile devices and Google starts making it mandatory for websites to show up fine across all devices:

*Stats taken from Understanding Consumers’ Local Search Behavior survey by Google

2) Google My Business listing

Google My Business feeds directly into Google results so chances are big your site may come up when someone searches for real estate services in your area. You may even create a few listings if you work in several neighborhoods (just be careful not to produce duplicate listings featuring exactly the same content).

Here are also a few things to know about:

• include correct contact information – NAP (name, address, phone number) and your business hours;
• select the right business category;
• post a link to your website;
• include your photos and branding visuals to showcase the best about your agency and its location;
• don’t add keywords in your business description as Google can penalize you for that. Your NAP details are going to be enough.

More on Google My Business guidelines can be found here.

[Related post: Real Estate Marketing 101 for Aspiring Agents: What Works Today]

3) Video

According to Cisco, video is going to be the number one source of traffic in 2017. Quick videos are a great way to engage with people across any device.

For this reason, you may want to create some nice brand videos about the neighborhood and the best it has to offer. If you’re on a tight budget, you can still make it without breaking your budget. Simply convert some beautiful, hi-res photos into a video and a powerful marketing channel will be at your disposal right away.

By the same token, you can create quick videos featuring any of your properties. Together with the neighborhood overview, they will do a great job of showcasing your area to hundreds of your website visitors.

Remember to promote your videos on your YouTube channel and social media, For example, Facebook video tabs offer a good opportunity to reach and engage with plenty of people.

[Related post: How to Effectively Target Your Real Estate Niche via Your Website]

4) Virtual tours and panoramic photos

If you’d like to make the customer experience more immersive, virtual tours are among the best real estate marketing tools to do just that. There are plenty of apps and software you can use to produce them; as they vary greatly in their functionality and pricing, you’ll definitely find the one that’ll work for you.

Another real estate tool from this category are 360-degree photos. Again, there are plenty of (free) apps to take panoramic photos that you might use. Additionally, Facebook recently rolled out a new feature supporting 360-degree photos. Now you can upload them to Facebook and share with your fans easily.

[Related post: More Than an Image: How Agents Can Get Started with 360° Photography]

5) Interactive maps

In one of the recent surveys, people voted interactive maps as one of the most useful features to offer on a real estate website. Interactive maps with their clickable points provide a wealth of additional information about the local area and its landmarks without making people go elsewhere to find this information. This information can include photos, videos, text and links to external and internal resources.

In other words, an interactive map lets you not only pinpoint the location of the property but also showcase information such as price, property size, amenities nearby, etc. Interactive maps are great real estate tools to have on your website as they help people get a much better knowledge and impression of your neighborhood.

6) Neighborhood landing pages

A neighborhood page is one of those real estate tools that let you create a valuable cornerstone content for your website. They positively affect local SEO as these pages naturally cover hyperlocal keywords that you’d want to rank high for organically.

Alongside local SEO, neighborhood landing pages will serve you a lot of other useful functions:

• they perfectly showcase local markets and neighborhoods and the best things that make living there comfortable;
• these pages help you stand out from the competition;
• they educate prospective buyers on everything they want to know about the neighborhood;
• they are one of the best real estate tools to help you build your trust and knowledge as a real estate expert.

[We have a full post covering neighborhood landing pages: How to Write a Perfect Neighborhood Page in 5 Easy Steps]

7) Real estate SMS marketing

Do you know that customers are four times more likely to open an SMS than an email? Together with email, real estate websites and social media, SMS campaigns help you create stronger multichannel communications with your leads.

Also, rather than spend on print advertising and local classifieds, you can target your audience via mobile. Bulk messaging lets you reach a huge number of contacts in minutes and still at an amazingly low cost.

Here are a few things you start with:

• text for property information. You can set up an autoresponder campaign and include a click-to-call phone number to let people contact you easily;
• text people updates about new listings, open houses, price changes, community events and anything else they are interested in, and keep everyone in the loop;
• create your virtual business cards. Another way to promote your services is to text people your contact details upon their request;
• sent appointment reminders. Just enter all important dates into your SMS campaign, schedule campaigns accordingly and enjoy an easy and organized communication with your clients.

8) Real estate blog

Similar to neighborhood landing pages, a blog is one of those hyperlocal real estate tools that create a positive long-lasting effect for your business online. It carries so many crucial and helpful functions:

• continuously drives traffic to your website;
• helps to convert traffic into leads and customers;
• strengthens your social media presence and vice versa;
• boosts your website’s SEO;
• builds you a reputation of an industry expert;
• is your valuable long-term asset;
• creates you a creative space dedicated to your company, its vision and services.

Here are a few examples of hyperlocal content to feature on your real estate blog:

• neighborhood events;
• buyer questions;
• seller questions;
• local market updates;
• guides for foreigners.

All of these offer an excellent chance to emphasize on the best opportunities your neighborhood offers in a helpful, relevant way.

[Related post: 7 Types of Real Estate SEO Content That Make an Exceptional Blog]

What’s next?

If you want to engage prospective homebuyers and make them curious about the neighborhood or community to the point they contact you, it’s going to take more than a listing. Start focusing your efforts on hyperlocal marketing and take these useful real estate marketing tools for a spin to reinforce your properties with the exposure they deserve.