Kara Taylor is Vice President of Marketing at ATTOM Data Solutions, where she oversees marketing, creative and public relations teams.
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Real estate is a local game — and highly targeted marketing is key to winning it. Whether you’re an agent, mortgage broker, insurance firm or home services provider, delivering the right message to the right audience is critical if you want to close a deal.
Years ago, that wasn’t so easy. Agents plastered entire ZIP codes with door hangers, and insurance and home services providers sent out mailers to entire communities, whether they were up for renewing their policies or not. The result was more money spent than necessary and less-than-ideal results.
Today, real estate professionals have access to robust and detailed property data, allowing them to be more deliberate about their marketing efforts — pinpointing the exact consumers with the exact message at the exact time they’re most likely to convert. As the vice president of marketing for ATTOM Data Solutions, I see the importance of marketing data from multiple perspectives: understanding the uses of our platform’s property data in real estate marketing, as well as in my own efforts of driving traffic to our company’s website via pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, search engine optimization (SEO) and engaging content.
In order to lead successful campaigns of any kind, data is essential. And in real estate, here are a few ways we’re seeing our clients use property data to guide their strategies:
Identifying Potential Customers: By leveraging property data, real estate professionals can more easily home in on appropriate target audiences. You can spot trends in home purchases and home prices, sort renters from homeowners (even new homeowners from old ones), and identify pre-foreclosures, foreclosures and other distressed opportunities. This allows you to be much more pointed, focusing your resources and efforts on the audiences most likely to convert — rather than shooting in the dark with community-wide marketing that only wastes money and time.
Improving Targeting: By digging down deeper and learning more about possible clients (and their properties), you can gain a clearer idea of how to effectively target them. Analyzing demographic and financial data, property characteristics, loan info and more can allow you to create a more effective and relevant marketing campaign on the whole.
Discovering New Niches: New, high-potential niches are emerging from property data. From this data, you can pinpoint subgroups, like high-credit or high-earning consumers, new homeowners, distressed borrowers, and even homeowners who are likely to sell or refinance soon. This opens up new doors of opportunity — and more room for profit — across all real estate segments.
Enabling Better Precision: You can use property data to execute more precise marketing campaigns. By looking at data-based automated valuation modeling, for example, you can better estimate a home’s worth, which could then be used in marketing collateral for potential home sellers. Paying attention to local trends and price data can also enable you to deliver more precise, accurate messaging and sales collateral to the appropriate audiences.
Creating More Relevant Marketing: At its most basic level, data lends itself to more relevant and relatable marketing content. By better understanding where the consumer is coming from, what stage they’re at in their financial and homeownership journey and where they may be headed next, you can create more individualized and effective marketing content.
Finding The Right Data Marketing Tools
Data helps marketers of every industry to build products and improve audience targeting and return on investment (ROI). Data is a powerful tool and can be used to drive business decisions, but having the right data is key. While property data can be a key component in your marketing campaigns, to drive traffic, convert leads and offer valuable insight, you must know how to leverage such data and have the right tools to do so.
Do your research and invest time in testing various platforms and make sure the data you are utilizing is beneficial to not only you but your customer as well. For instance, when creating a website for your business, make sure what is being displayed represents your brand. Ask yourself if what is being displayed will entice users to fill out a form to learn more or stay on your page longer. Are your calls to action properly placed? Do they convey the right message?
You will have successes and you will have failures, but if you don’t test and try new tools, you may not evolve with the times.
Random Marketing, Be Gone
Real estate marketing doesn’t have to be randomized or one size fits all anymore. By leveraging detailed property data, real estate pros can be much more pointed and deliberate in their efforts. This means more conversions, more clients and ultimately more profits.
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