Sales funnels allow your real estate company to generate consistent leads because it works on autopilot to make prospects aware of your company, nurture them, and ultimately, close them.
If you’re intimidated by all the steps involved with creating a real estate sales funnel, don’t worry! In this post, we tried to simplify the process as much as possible so you don’t have to worry about things that don’t matter.
In a nutshell, the entire process can be broken down into three steps:
- Top of the funnel: Run various types of ads; post house tours on YouTube; publish quality articles
- Middle of the funnel: Have a landing page on your website for each property; give away free educational content
- Bottom of the funnel: Close potential leads via a contact form on your website
What is a real estate sales funnel and why do you need one?
A real estate marketing funnel outlines the entire journey that a prospect has to take to go from being interested in buying or selling a home to reaching out to your real estate company.
There are literally hundreds of different ways you can split up a marketing funnel; for instance, many marketers use the AIDA method (awareness, interest, desire, action), while others go a step further by listing out steps that occur after the close (awareness, consideration, conversions, loyalty, advocacy.)
However, we like to keep it simple and use a top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel approach.
Top of the funnel refers to prospects who’re considering selling or buying a home and are Googling around for a real estate company. Middle of the funnel refers to prospects who’ve already interacted with your company, whether it’s subscribing to your newsletter or watching your home tours on YouTube. Bottom of the funnel refers to prospects who’re convinced that your real estate company is the best choice for them.
What does the typical real estate marketing funnel look like
The typical sales funnel for a real estate company will look something like this:
Top of the funnel
At the top of the funnel, your goal is to make prospects aware of your real estate company. You can do this using Google Ads, SEO, social media ads, YouTube videos, or TikTok shorts. Your goal isn’t to close customers immediately, but rather to put your company out there and get people who’re interested in buying or selling their home to learn more about you.
Middle of the funnel
Middle of the funnel refers to prospects who engage with your brand regularly. They either subscribed to your YouTube channel or email newsletter and might be interested in working with you in the future.
Also known as the consideration phase, this is where the prospect reaches out to multiple different real estate companies, trying to figure out which is the best fit.
Your goal during this phase is to educate your readers and give away as much value as possible to convince them that your real estate company is the best fit. You can do this by giving away free guides on mistakes to avoid when buying a home or publishing YouTube video case studies showing how you helped a family find their dream home.
Bottom of the funnel
At the bottom of the funnel, the prospect has weeded out all the other real estate companies and decided that yours is the best fit. Your goal now is to close them via a form embedded on your website and schedule a meeting.
Below, we'll talk about how you can optimize conversions during each stage of the marketing funnel using various marketing and copywriting strategies.
1. Top of the funnel: Create awareness for your real estate business
As mentioned above, the awareness phase is where you put your business out there, making prospects aware that you exist. We found that the best ways to do this include:
- SEO
- Google Ads and YouTube videos
SEO
The most cost-efficient way of making people aware of your business is to publish articles that help readers overcome problems they face when buying or selling a home.
Unlike ads, it doesn't take any money to publish an article. If you manage to rank it in the top three positions on Google, you can bring thousands of visitors to your website without paying a cent.
This is why it’s important to interview your current and previous customers, asking them what the major challenges, pitfalls, and concerns they had when buying and selling their homes and then creating content addressing these topics.
For example, if you discover your customers' main worry is buying a house with hidden damage, then write articles about how readers can overcome this. Maybe they could hire a property inspector or look for certain tell-tale signs.
If you did a good job addressing the readers' concerns, they'd likely be open to interacting with your website further by signing up for your newsletter or reading some of your other articles, which moves them to the middle of the funnel.
Google Ads and YouTube videos
If you don't want to wait six months or more to bring readers to your website organically, consider Google Ads. You can spend a couple hundred dollars per month on Google Ads and drive readers to articles and landing pages on your website. If readers resonate with your content, they'll take the next step.
If you want to engage prospects more, consider posting walkthroughs on YouTube and TikTok of the homes you’re currently selling. Everyone loves a good house tour, and if a viewer interested in buying a home comes across your video, they might reach out for an appointment.
2. Middle of the funnel: Nurture prospects in the consideration phase
These are some strategies you can employ to move middle of the funnel prospects to the bottom of the funnel.
- Set up a catalog page linking to landing pages containing the houses you’re selling
- Create free educational content like downloadable guides
Set up a catalog page linking to landing pages containing the houses you’re selling
Now that prospects are aware of your real estate business, move them to the middle of the funnel, where you'll have a catalog page containing all the homes you’re currently selling as well as separate landing pages for each one of your homes. This setup allows prospects to browse your catalog of homes, and if one catches their eye, they can click on it and book a viewing with you.
An easy way to embed several landing pages on your website without hiring a developer or learning to code is to use an online form builder like the one we offer here at FormBuilder.
Instead of creating landing pages from scratch, all you have to do is ask our AI to create one for you, and it’ll create a personalized landing page around the specs of the home you're selling.
From here, you can tweak the landing page by changing, adding, and removing questions. You can also add images and videos, and once you're happy with your landing page, simply copy the shortcode and paste it into your WordPress website.
Create free educational content like downloadable guides
Another way to nurture middle of the funnel prospects is to give away downloadable PDF guides. Most real estate companies will combine all the content on their website, organize them into their respective chapters, and give this away as a PDF ebook to prospects in exchange for their email address.
Prospects can go through the guide and educate themselves before selling or buying a home. In the meantime, you can continue providing helpful tips by sending them short email snippets a few times a month.
The goal here isn't to try to close the prospect through email, as the decision to buy or sell a home can take several months. Your email newsletters should be educational because this will ensure you're always part of their consideration set when they are finally ready to buy or sell.
3. Bottom of the funnel: Close prospects via a web form on your website
Now that you've done all the hard work and you're part of the prospect’s consideration set, it's time to close them.
The way we prefer doing this is by using the soft close, where we aren't directly asking the prospect to book an appointment, but we're making the contact page link visible during all our interactions, so it’s easy for prospects to reach out.
This works well in the real estate industry because the buying cycle is so long. The average buyer takes between six months to a year to buy a home, so it's impossible to tell exactly how motivated a prospect is to buy. If you do these hard closes where you're always pushing prospects to book an appointment, it can be annoying, causing them to remove you from their consideration set.
So you want to make the contact page super easy for prospects to click on, but you don't want to prompt them all the time.
Create a contact form on your website
With FormBuilder, creating a contact form that matches your website design takes less than five minutes, and there's no coding required from your side.
Head to the FormBuilder web app and select "Create New Form."
From here, you can choose one of our contact form templates or have the FormBuilder AI create a contact form for you.
You can tweak your contact form on the editor's dashboard by moving around certain questions and adding new fields like open fields and multiple choice question fields.
If you want to match your contact form design with the rest of your website, simply click on the paintbrush logo on the left-hand side of your dashboard, and you'll be taken to this interface.
Here, you can choose between various contact form designs and themes as well as add background images to your form.
Once you're happy with your form design, save all your changes by clicking the "Publish" button in the top-right-hand corner and copying and pasting the shortcode into the backend of your website.
This process will change depending on what website builder you’re using, but with WordPress, all you have to do is add a custom HTML block onto the page you want to embed your form on, paste your shortcode into this block, and you’ll find your form on the frontend of your website.
Build a high-converting real estate funnel with FormBuilder
If you’re interested in building a sales funnel for your real estate company without having to code or manually create and launch several landing pages, consider signing up for a free FormBuilder trial and use our AI to build a form for you.