If you’re a realtor or a real estate agency, you know how challenging it is to get your listing seen.

You’ve done everything you thought of. You took quality photos of the property. You submitted it to Zillow, Realtor.com, and any other listing website you had the budget for.

But it’s difficult to make it work, and you know why: there’s just so much competition in these places. You’re up against hundreds and often even thousands of listings at a time.

More than 5.5 million homes were sold in 2017—and this is just in US. Standing out with your own listing feels like an impossible task.

Here’s the good news: great real estate marketing goes beyond just the listing websites, and it’s not crowded yet. In this guide, we’ll show you tips that will help you make a bigger impact in a cluttered market.

How home buyers look for properties

You can market pretty much any industry online, but there’s a special element that comes with real estate marketing: it takes a while to complete a sale because people aren’t buying an easily replaceable item.

They’re buying a home, and that takes time.

We looked into the Real Estate in a Digital Age 2017 report, compiled by the National Association of Realtors, and found these insights:

• 44% of all home buying processes start with looking online for properties for sale
• 36% of people look at videos online in their home search
• 58% of all buyers found their home on a mobile device

In other words, your potential clients have gone digital, and they expect you to be there.

People aren’t buying a set of walls and a roof, they are buying a home.

The same report revealed that the majority of realtors use Facebook and LinkedIn in their marketing, but other social media, such as Instagram and Pinterest, remain largely untapped.

Yet if you look at some of the frequent searches on Pinterest, you’ll notice many that are specifically about finding an apartment or a house in a certain city or environment.

Are you showing up where home buyers are looking for you? Are you doing everything you can to get your listings to stand out from the crowd of others?

If not, don’t panic—the steps we’ve listed are easy to follow and implement.

Step 1: Tell a story and emphasize what’s special about the listing

One of the most common downfalls in real estate marketing is only focusing on the listing’s physical features like the number of rooms or square footage.

These are important differentiators and filters when someone is narrowing down their options, but they won’t be what the buyers will particularly remember.

Here’s why: Messages delivered as stories can be up to 22 times (!) more memorable than just facts.

Remember, they’re not buying a set of walls and floors with a roof, they’re buying a home. This inherently involves memories, feelings, and a long-term commitment. As much as 92% of consumers want brands to make ads that feel like a story, and it’s obvious that real estate should be no different.

Your task here? Make a listing memorable with a story.

Here are some ways you can add a storytelling element to your promotion strategy:

Talk about experiences that a certain location of a listing provides, such as weekend cycling or other outdoor adventures, family trips, or community activities. Of course, always tailor these experiences to the type of home buyers you’re selling to.

Turn the features of a listing into benefits by painting a picture of them. For example, if a house is spacious, instead of focusing only on the square footage, talk about the ease of decorating and the generous space for large gatherings of friends and families. Get creative with your real estate marketing.

Find something that the house will be easy to remember by. Remember, your potential buyer will browse through dozens of listings online in a day, and you want them to be able to say “Hey, I really liked that house with the huge kitchen island!” When you find something desirable and easy to recall, make it part of the story.

Finding a unique selling point for each of your listings is what will empower your promotion on any channel you choose, so make sure not to skip this step.

Step 2: SEO is just important in real estate marketing as anywhere else

Search engine optimization of your listings might feel like a boring chore, but it’s crucial in order to show up in results for searches that matter to you.

Here are two crucial advantages of search engine optimization:

1. It goes beyond what you think your potential clients are searching for and focuses on the words they actually use
2. It looks for related terms they use and makes the real estate listing more detailed and relevant

Both of these help search engines to prioritize your listing over others when showing results.

The easiest way to look for these terms is by using Google itself.

When you Google for a specific term, you can find two more areas that show you related questions—People also ask (closer to the top of the page) and Related searches (at the bottom of the page).

They both imply that these terms are the most searched for right before or after the one you just Googled.

If you Google ‘houses in Spain’, here’s what the People also ask section reveals:

At the very bottom, you can see related searches:

If your listing in Spain matched any of these related searches, you could click on that search term and repeat the process again (and again, for as long as you’re gaining new insights).

This strategy will make your listing, both on your website and all the listing websites you submit it to, thorough and extensive, answering many of the questions you know home buyers already have.

Here’s another example, this time with ‘new york two bedroom apartments’:

Again, clicking through to all relevant related searches brings additional insights.

With all of these written down, and with your listing’s story in mind, you can write an exhaustive, eye-catching real estate listing, enjoy the SEO benefits of your work, and focus on promotion on social media channels.

Step 3: Focus on real estate video marketing

Why focus on video? Because of how visually driven real estate is.

Shopping for a home means shopping for a space someone could see themselves in. What better way to make it happen than through video?

Furthermore, video is becoming one of the most preferred formats overall, and this applies to email, social media, and advertising:

Videos in real estate marketing matter because they can help you tell more than words and even photos could.

Remember your listing’s unique selling point from the first step? Video is how you get to showcase it the best.

Here’s the challenge with video and the reason why many realtors and agencies steer clear from it: it can be expensive, intimidating, and time-consuming.

This is exactly why we’ve built real estate video templates that you can use right inside your Wave.video account.

What is it that makes the best videos when it comes to real estate marketing?

1. Crisp footage. You don’t need hours of footage to make a good video—as long as you have even 60-120 seconds of steady, clear video footage of your listing, you can already make a great video.
2. Proper aspect ratio of your video. Vertical videos are perfect for Instagram Stories and IGTV, but YouTube videos are most impactful when horizontal. Square videos are among the top-performing ones on Facebook and Twitter. In other words, make sure you adjust your video’s aspect ratio before posting on each network.
3. Text on video. On-screen text works great on videos because it provides information even when videos are watched in silent mode or in a rush. It can also be used to add extra information that enriches the footage or to turn the video into a listicle.

Templates in our library will help you create videos about a new listing, a group of listings in a specific area, an update to a home, and much more.

Bonus tip: If you’re unsure whether you have enough footage for your own video, our library of royalty-free video and audio material will help you build a complete, ready-to-share video for your potential home buyers.

Step 4: Don’t forget your call-to-action (CTA)

All of this effort is pointless if you don’t remind your audience what to do next.

Since buying a home is a process that takes weeks and months rather that minutes and hours, your CTA should be focused on getting the potential buyer to sign up for updates or contact a real estate agent.

Everything you publish, from your website listings through to social media posts and videos, should have an obvious next step. Tests have shown that:

• A CTA within a video can get 380% more clicks than normal sidebar CTAs
• Watching an informational video before presenting a CTA increased conversions by 144%
• Emails with a single call-to-action increased clicks 371% and sales 1617%

The message is clear: one strong and specific call-to-action can have a dramatic impact on the success you have with your promotion.

The key is to make your CTA hyper-specific to its purpose.

For example, if every single post or listing you publish vaguely says ‘Sign up here’ or ‘Click here’, you likely won’t see much success.

Instead, you can get into more detail by adding CTAs such as:

• Sign up for all updates on this New York listing
• Speak to your agent about this two-bedroom apartment today
• Click here to ask us about this listing

You can alternate between specific and more generic call-to-actions and see which ones bring more results on each channel or type of listing.

Make your real estate business stand out

Now you know: you no longer need to publish a listing and simply hope that a potential buyer will find you by accident.

You can take dedicated steps to get your listing to stand out by:

• Crafting a story that will help potential buyers remember it over all the others
• Including most relevant keywords that you know they are searching for
• Getting creative with your landing pages and social media posts
• Including video in your real estate promotion
• Adding call-to-actions that are specific to each listing

The more you go through this process and optimize it as you go, the better success you’ll see. Then, rinse and repeat.

Have you started creating real estate videos? Share in the comments below!