Finding Your Focus

Hyperlocal marketing needs to focus on what makes your specific geographic area unique and what it can provide to potential home buyers over other locations. Help prospective buyers envision what their life could be like within your area, what their neighbors are like, and what type of homes are available. I’ll share five easy tactics to help refine your hyperlocal marketing initiatives and help build your local real estate brand.

• Create Local Area Pages: One of the biggest hyperlocal marketing activities you can do is create web pages specific to the neighborhoods you service. Any IDX system worth its salt will allow you to create specific pages built around location-based criteria. Talk about schools in the area, points of interest and anything else based on your local expertise. You can go one step further and create automated email alerts for people looking for properties in a specific area as well.

• Interview Neighbors: It’s a proven fact that new buyers value the opinions of your previous clients. What better way to show off your specific neighborhood or market than by interviewing people that currently live there? This establishes immediate credibility and lets the people that matter the most sell your business.

• Highlight Relevant Local Businesses: What’s at the top of mind for new home buyers once they’ve purchased? Renovations, lawn care, childcare etc. – highlight the local businesses in your area. Give potential buyers a good idea of where they can go for their home care and family needs. That’ll give them more confidence when making the final purchasing decision.

• Video Tours: Virtual or video tours aren’t just for the homes you have on the market. Take interactive video tours of the actual neighborhood where you’re selling. Show off popular common and recreational areas, parks,  landmarks, etc. Homebuyers can better assess if a neighborhood fits their criteria and helps them visualize living there.

• Connect with Local Influencers: Make the necessary connections with local “influencers” in your area. These could be news anchors, event planners, prominent business owners etc. Connect with them on events, publications, blogging, fundraisers etc. This will help get your name out in the local community so you remain top of mind. Make sure these connections are genuine and in line with your personal branding. Not every connection is a good one!

• Use Hyperlocal Social Media Tools: Make sure your real estate business is properly listed and profiles updated on location based review applications such as Yelp, Foursquare and others. Once again, consumers trust the opinion of other consumers so these are vital to building up your local reputation.

Executing these tactics in addition to your broader marketing and real state plans can help increase your consumer base and lead generation rates. The goal of any hyperlocal marketing plan is to make you the expert within your specific region or market. One of the biggest benefits of hyperlocal content is giving you the ability to compete on search engines against larger, national brands. Hyperlocal terms are less competitive to rank for in search engines so putting the time in to create quality content will help you compete. Putting together a highly localized plan can seem tedious but the benefits to building such close relationships provides a consistent stream of business for you as an agent or brokerage.

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Defining Your Spokes

So what exactly are the spokes in this model? Put simply, you won’t get as much value from your hub if you don’t have spokes, or links, leading people back to it. The spokes are the ways in which you amplify or share everything that’s located on your central hub. Very few people are going to know about that awesome blog post you just wrote, or the tour video you spent hours producing, if you don’t promote your content. Knowing the most effective way to get your content out and use it to drive people back to your site is critical to the success of the hub and spoke model.

• Email: Direct emails are a great way to send a message out to your client base that links directly back to your website. Make sure emails are timely and relevant otherwise your click-though rates won’t look to great and the content you shared won’t be engaged. Spread them out and make sure links back to your site are prominent throughout.

• Syndication: Do you subscribe to larger networks or websites within the real estate industry (i.e. RETechnology, Inman, Active Rain)? Networks like these are always looking for content to share through their daily or weekly emails to their members. Take the time to research and develop relationships with these networks in hopes that your content gets picked up!

• Guest Blogging: Not only is this a good way to lead people back to your hub, it’s just genuinely a valuable option when making connections in your market or industry. Offer to guest write for other industry related sites, it’ll help build your credibility and presence.

• Comments: Staying active doesn’t always mean you need to be the one creating the content. Providing valuable opinions, feedback and insights on other blogs, article etc. are a great way to increase your presence and web traffic as well. You don’t want to be that person that has tons of comments on your personal blog but never provides any feedback of your own!

• Social Media: This is probably one of the easiest ways to drive traffic back to your hub. Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are a great way to interact with your client base and amplify any existing content you may have.

While this only covers some of the major ways to create the spokes of your model, there are plenty of other opportunities such as YouTube videos, social advertising, search engine ads and more. Anything that leads directly back to your site or content hub is considered a spoke.

Learn how to use these spokes effectively to continue to drive traffic and potential leads back to your hub. The next question then becomes – you have all this traffic, now how do I manage it all? We’ll cover that in the final part of our Hub & Spoke Marketing series.

The post The Hub & Spoke Model, Pt. 2 – Establishing Your Spokes appeared first on WolfNet.