Marketing has been the key to success in real estate for as long as the modern industry has existed. Whether you focus on buyers, sellers, or a mix of both, you need people to know who you are when they’re in the property market. For seller’s agents, professional networking and a recognizable name make it easier to bring traffic into open houses and online listing portals. For those representing buyers, you need people to know how to reach you when they are looking for a property and why they should trust you to do a good job. In today’s marketing environment, digital techniques offer unprecedented reach for the price, but they also require a specific set of skills to optimize.

If you’re just getting started with real estate marketing online, the best thing you can do is enlist help. Professional digital marketing agencies make this work their area of expertise, and many work in a consulting capacity in addition to providing outsourced services, so they can help you learn the ropes while providing the labor you need for key steps like website construction. One of the first things they will tell you is that you need to figure out how to create a funnel that brings you leads, as well as the importance of having a single goal in mind for each tactic you pick up.

If you’re going it alone, both of these tips are important. For example, a Facebook ad campaign for the purpose of driving page likes and increasing reach will be crafted very differently from one meant to drive people to your mailing list to sign up for a newsletter. The keys to successful long-term marketing are creating ongoing contact and making it easy to reach out to you, so balancing a newsletter or custom real estate app alongside social media and a traditional website is essential. This brings people into your content, then shows them how to stay in touch and how you can help them find what they are looking for.

You might need to approach setting each of these up one at a time, so what order do you go in? It’s probably a good idea to do the site and email list first, so people can sign up for your newsletter when they find you. From there, a social media presence followed by ads and finally a custom app complete the picture, and going in that order means putting the resources with the widest appeal out there first. That way each new, more sophisticated step is well-supported by the rest.