Lori Ballen is a member of the Amazon Associates Program and earns money from qualifying purchases. Posts contain affiliate links that benefit Lori as well.
Use these 6 lead magnet ideas to generate more real estate leads through your real estate website, ads, and social media channels.
Lori Ballen Invites You
to a 30 Free Day Trial of the ilsting marketing software and home valuation pages vs. the 14 day trial everyone else gets!
To generate more leads, you can explore myriad options for creating attractive, compelling lead magnets. Here are six real estate lead magnets that convert:
- Property search
- Local market reports
- Home valuation calculators
- eBooks
- Checklists
- Presentations
One of the essential aspects of marketing your real estate business online is generating new leads. If you don’t have a call to action with an offer designed to capture leads, then you could be wasting your time and money with your digital marketing.
What is a Lead Magnet?
A lead magnet is a product, service, or something else of value that you offer to viewers so that they’ll exchange their information, which is usually a first name and an email address at a minimum.
When you entice a person to provide you with their name and email address, they’re permitting you to market to them again via email and, in some cases, by text or phone.
One caution about using lead magnets is to be conservative with the information you ask for. People tend to share their name and email address relatively easily but may be more resistant to provide things like their phone number or email address.
The more information you ask for, the less likely a person is to share.
A Property Search is a Lead Magnet
One of the things people expect to find on a real estate agent website is a property search feature. They want to search by price range, location, number of bedrooms, baths, etc. You can include a property search option to your website using a service like IDX Broker.
What is IDX Broker?
IDX stands for Internet Data Display, an agreement that allows brokers to share each other’s property listings on the web.
IDX Broker is one company that offers IDX service to real estate agents so that they can integrate property listings and other services beautifully on their websites. Included in IDX Broker’s services is the ability to request or force registration for users to view listings, photos, or maps.
Once you install the search widget, you could request or force registration as soon as they perform a search. IDX Solution is the feed that goes into your website that creates lists of homes.
When somebody looks at a certain number of pictures in the photo gallery looking at houses, you could force registration as soon as they click the photo gallery. Forced registration means the viewer can’t close the registration box or view the content unless they register.
A good time to use forced registration is when the user is finding your website via a paid advertisement. But you can select optional registration, too.
Optional registration pops up a registration box, but it does allow the user to close the box and continue viewing without entering their information. Optional registration is ideal for people who found your content organically. You want organic visitors to browse a little bit, get familiar with the website, and get some more action on there.
You can also use forced or optional registration for map views or detailed views of properties.
A Local Market Report is a Lead Magnet
Another feature of IDX Broker is the ability to generate a real-time monthly market report, which you can use as a lead magnet. You can offer a monthly market report on your blog as a featured blog post or use it to attract leads to your database with a call to action like “Subscribe here for monthly market reports in your inbox.”
You can also write and design market reports yourself or hire a freelancer to get the job done.
Using Home Valuation Calculations to Generate Leads
ListingsToLeads.com allows you to tap into and provide a free instant home valuation to home sellers through your website.
For example, if someone found your blog called, “How Much are Closing Costs for Sellers?” and then filled out the home valuation tool form, there’s a pretty solid chance that person is at least considering a sale. You could attach that home valuation offer to several blog posts, including:
- Monthly real estate market report
- Who Pays the Real Estate Agent at Closing?
- Steps to Selling Your Home
- How to Price Your House for Sale
- How to Stage Your House for Sale
- How Long Does It Take to Sell a House?
Facebook ads aren’t the best resource for your home valuation calculators because it’s disruptive marketing. This means that the chances are you’re reaching people who either may not own a home or have no interest in selling theirs. Or you’ll attract homeowners who want to know what their home is worth – but only out of curiosity, not because they have the intent to sell. However, free home valuation tools are powerful lead magnets when people find them organically.
Through IDX Broker’s property search and market report, as well as the home valuation calculators from ListingsToLeads.com, your website has built-in lead magnets. But there are also several types of deliverable offers that can also generate leads via your blogs and landing pages.
How to Use Free Offers to Capture Leads
What is an item of value that a real estate agent might present as a downloadable offer?
- eBooks: You could create a long-form blog post and then use Microsoft Word and Canva to create a downloadable PDF eBook.
- Checklists: People love checklists. For example, you could design a moving checklist for home sellers that suggest things like ordering boxes, forwarding the mail, and transferring utilities.
- Ultimate guides: If you’ve got several blog posts targeted towards sellers, you could copy and merge them to create an ultimate guide or presentation for home sellers that talks about pricing, staging, open houses, or how a buyer’s loan type affects the seller.
How to Create an eBook in Microsoft Word
Open Microsoft Word and look for a template or start from scratch. With a template, you can customize a simple newsletter, a “just listed” flyer, and more. And designing an eBook is easy in Microsoft Word using one of the blogs from your website.
For example, you may opt to publish a long-form blog post of about 2,000 words, featuring all the parks in your area, their amenities, and their location. For your eBook, copy your blog directly to your Microsoft Word Document.
Next, remove any buttons, IDX listings, dividers, or advertisements that may be appropriate for the website but would date the eBook’s content. By the time a viewer signs up for your offer, which could be six months or more from now, the properties will have been sold.
One advantage of copying a blog post into an eBook format is that the blog post links stay when the word doc is exported to a downloadable PDF. Your internal and external links are still fully functioning and beneficial – but you might want to check the links to make sure they still lead to the right pages.
This is also a good time for checking for any typos or grammatical errors.
Then, you’ll want to add a full-page cover photo to your eBook, which you can easily design using Canva.com’s easy-to-use customizable templates.
In the example of area parks, you could also add pictures of each park to add more value and visual appeal to the eBook.
When you’ve tidied up the text, you can manually create a Table of Contents by listing your subtopics as chapters and typing in what page number that park is on.
Once you’ve copied the blog into a Word Doc, cleaned up the text, and added images and a Table of Contents, all that’s left is to export the document as a PDF. When you name the PDF file, use your keywords if possible.
Using Canva for Checklists, Presentations, and other Free Offers
Canva.com opens a vast world of possibilities for quickly and easily creating sleek, professional, well-designed graphics and free offers, like:
- eBooks
- Checklists
- Presentations
- Facebook covers
- Twitter covers
- Business cards
- Brochures
- Magazine covers
There is a plethora of templates to choose from, and you can add and customize elements such as the font size, style and color, add borders, insert shapes, upload images, and more.
Using Your Lead Magnet in Your Original Blog Post
Now that you’ve got your PDF offer ready to deliver, you can go back to your blog post about parks in your area and add a button that says, “Download the guide”, which allows viewers to take it on the go. You can also include a map of where the parks are located in your community.
What is OptinMonster?
OptinMonster is a software program that allows you to create an offer, attach a PDF file, and have that file auto-delivered to your new subscriber via email, so you don’t have to manually respond to each subscription that comes in.
With OptinMonster, you can create pop-ups, floating bars, gamified wheels, scroll boxes, floating bars, and more. Features of OptinMonster include:
- Lead capture forms
- Multiple form types
- Page-level targeting
- Advanced traffic redirection
- A/B testing
- Analytics and insights, and more.
The Bottom Line
You’ll have to be creative to think up and design various items of value for your viewers that are established for the purpose of lead capture. There are several paid and free resources that can simplify the process of designing elegant, professional products your viewers will want, or you can hire a professional marketer who can create and promote those lead magnets for you.
