Does mobile marketing generate leads for Real Estate? Yes!!! Real Estate is a business founded on the concept of marketing property to prospective buyers and representation for sellers. It’s all about marketing and reaching prospective buyers. One of the key success factors is providing information to buyers in a quick and timely manner. Consumers are accustomed to being able to get the information they want fast. Time is of essence for Realtors. This is where mobile marketing comes in.

Mobile marketing has the ability to deliver information to buyers in a quick, easy, and timely fashion helping Realtors be responsive to requests for information automatically. Over the last few years our society has become more and more mobile oriented. There are approximately 260 million cell phone plans in use in the USA, out of a population of just over 300 million. That covers about 86% of the population. With such a deep market penetration and the growing capabilities of these devices, mobile marketing becomes a natural space for Realtors to reach new buyers.

The question is what mobile technology should I use? There are many technologies for use in mobile marketing and in order to use it effectively you have to be able to reach buyers in the way that they are most willing to communicate. For some buyers this is a phone call directly to the agent, others prefer to get information before talking to agents. This is why a program that offers a well rounded mobile technology package is required to reach the majority of buyers.

What is a well rounded mobile technology package? Based on what we’ve seen and heard, we think a well rounded mobile marketing package incorporates voice, email, text messaging and the web. By using all of these technologies Real Estate Agents can enable prospective buyers to retrieve information instantly via text, listen to a recording about the home property, contact the realtor directly, and get in-depth information via email or web site. At the same time the agents are enabling buyers to learn more about their properties, the mobile marketing package should also be capturing lead data for the agent. While we are seeing many home buyers take the initiative to reach out to the Realtor, we also provide the agent the information about when a request was made, the phone number the request was made from and the property that was inquired about.

Is Mobile Marketing in your marketing plan?  Has it been effective for you?

Text Messaging is an emerging technology in the Real Estate industry.  REALTORS are using it in many different ways.  We thought we would list 3 ways that REALTORS could use texting to generate leads.

1. Mobile Flyers – Many mobile services (like Digital Home Info) offer a mobile real estate flyer that returns the property and agent information in a text message.  Many of them also offer an instant notification that provides the lead information to the agent.
2. Mobile Virtual Tours - If your virtual tours are mobile optimized include a link to the mobile version at the bottom of mobile flyers and messages that you send to prospects.
3. Text Card – A text message business card.  Puts your information on a prospects phone and provides you with their lead information at the same time.

These are just a few of the many ways that text messaging can be used by REALTORS.  Let us know how you are using text messaging by leaving a comment.