Millennials now account for the largest generation of homebuyers on the market, making up 37% of the market share. If you're not marketing to millennials with millennials in mind, there's a chance you're missing out on potential sales.
By learning to market to millennials, you can expand your customer base and boost your business. Millennials often share their happy (and unhappy) experiences online, too. Selling to one millennial could help you reach dozens more.
Keep reading for our top tips on marketing homes to millennials. With these tips, you can expand your reach, attract more buyers, and start closing sales.
Get started with these ten easy marketing tips today!
1. Keep Branding Consistent
Before you can start marketing homes to millennials, you need to make a thorough marketing plan. Your marketing plan will give you direction moving forward and help you accomplish your goals.
Before you can start marketing, you need to look at your brand. Your brand identity will help you stand out from other real estate agents in the area. If you can't differentiate your brand, millennials won't find a reason to choose your agency.
Take the time to consider your mission statement. What goals are you trying to accomplish for your target audience? What promise can you make them?
For example, you might focus on finding millennials their dream home, negotiating the best price, or helping them find luxury homes. Discuss your qualifications, too. What expertise and experience can you offer that will benefit your clients?
Pinpoint the value you're offering your customers. Then, use that value as the focal point of your brand.
Your value will help set you apart as you start marketing.
Make sure you keep your brand consistent across all marketing materials. A consistent brand can increase revenue by up to 23%. If your brand changes between your digital ads, print materials, and website, you might confuse your audience.
2. Remain Real and Authentic
Millennials know when someone is trying to sell at them. Instead of using sales-heavy language, focus on creating a brand that values authenticity.
For example, millennials have experience recognizing stock photography within ads. They're even making memes out of stock images now. Stock imagery can make your brand look cheap.
Instead, use real photography in your ads, on your website, and in your marketing materials. Get rid of the sales-heavy jargon and focus on speaking with instead of to your audience.
Focus on what your audience needs instead of sales tactics. Remove unnecessary adjectives from your marketing materials. Instead, get real and remain transparent.
Highlighting transparency within your brand will make you look like a real person, not just a salesperson. Transparency also makes it easier for you to connect with millennials. If you can create a connection, you're more likely to establish trust between you and your clients.
3. Update Your Site
Realtors expect 2020 to be the peak year for millennial home buying, considering that millennials accounted for 45% of mortgages last year. If you want to make the most of marketing homes this year, you need to focus on every opportunity to reach your target audience.
According to the same source above, about half of buyers find their homes using the internet.
Whether homebuyers find you through search engines like Google or through social media, there's a chance they'll end up on your website. An old, outdated, unappealing website could scare them away. It could have a negative impact on how they perceive your brand, too.
Instead, step into 2020 with a modernized, sleek website!
UX Design Trends
One of the best ways to improve your website is to focus on user experience (UX) design trends. UX design focuses on providing website visitors with an easy, convenient online experience. The easier it is for people to use your site, the more likely they'll linger and explore.
A higher dwell time and clickthrough rate, along with a lower bounce rate, could increase your ranking on Google.
UX design trends include:
- Website security (make sure you see "HTTPS" in front of your URL)
- Easy, organized page navigation
- Readability (legible and large fonts, shorter sentences and paragraphs)
- Mobile-optimization
- Faster page load times
People will stop using your website if it takes too long to load. In fact, the longer the page takes to load, the more likely people will leave without clicking around. A higher bounce rate can make it difficult for you to reach new clients.
As you update your website, make sure to keep your branding consistent. Use the same style within your photography, brand colors, and language.
Consider adding a search function and chat function to your website, too.
Adding more lead generation opportunities will help you provide users with a convenient and enjoyable experience. At the same time, you'll gather more leads and increase engagement on your site.
As people click around and explore, your ranking on search engines will increase, allowing you to reach more people.
4. Make Sure You're Mobile
A millennial's online experience from their mobile devices is important, too. More people are searching for the answers they need while they're on-the-go. If you're not mobile marketing, you're not marketing homes to your entire audience!
In fact, people who have a negative experience on mobile devices are 62% less likely to make a future purchase from a brand. Even a single second delay in mobile load times could impact conversions by 20%.
If they're not happy with their mobile experience, millennials won't contact you to talk about a property.
Meanwhile, 76% of people who search from their phones are likely to visit or contact a business within a day. Imagine the leads you could rake in!
You can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to make sure your website is mobile-optimized. If you're not, it could impact your search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
5. Consider Your SEO
Make sure your website includes a blog. You can use blog posts to convey your expertise and experience in the industry. Posting on your blog regularly will help keep potential buyers up-to-date with new listings, too.
Before you begin blogging, make sure to optimize your website for search engines like Google. SEO will make it easier for millennials to find you online. When they search for a real estate agent in the area, your blog or website might appear.
The higher you rank, the better for your brand awareness and credibility. Many people don't look beyond the first page of a search. Improving your ranking will help you generate more traffic, making marketing homes online easier, too!
To improve your SEO strategy, make sure to thoroughly research your target audience. For example, are you targeting millennials who earn a specific household income?
Then, you can determine which keywords they use in a Google search. You can use SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner to build a list of keywords.
You'll use these keywords within your content to appear in relevant searches.
6. Utilize PPC
Like SEO, PPC is a form of search engine marketing that can help you reach homebuyers online. While SEO is a free strategy, PPC does require an advertising budget.
With PPC, you can create digital ads that appear on Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.
You can create text ads, animations, and video ads to target your audience. Don't forget to create a remarketing campaign as well. Remarketing allows you to reappear in front of previous website visitors.
This way, you're giving yourself a second chance to attract new leads.
7. Getting Rolling With Videos
Video content is one of the best ways to attract attention from millennials. You can use different forms of video content for your YouTube strategy, including:
- Video tours
- Live videos
- Webinars
- Animations
- Vlogs
- Augments or virtual reality
- 3D renderings
Interactive content encourages people to click around and engage with your material. Videos can also keep people on your website longer, which can improve your SEO ranking.
In fact, 91% of consumers seek visual and interactive content. It's new, fun, and sharable, helping you keep homebuyers interested and engaged.
8. Know What They Want
As you start marketing homes, take the time to recognize common millennial preferences. Maybe they're looking for smart homes that utilize new technology. If that's the case, consider creating a marketing plan for that audience.
What amenities are they looking for? What size homes do they want?
Remember, research is key. You can use your audience research for your blog posts, videos, and social media posts.
9. Stay Social
Take the time to stay social and grow your social media following. Social media can help you attract more visitors to your website. It's also a great way to generate conversions.
Don't forget to use real, high-quality photos in your posts. Otherwise, your audience might scroll past you.
10. Keep Up With Trends
It's also important to keep up with new trends when marketing homes to millennials. If you're not up-to-date, you won't look relevant to your audience.
Make sure to research marketing trends and trends that are specific to your industry. For example, Google's search algorithm changes regularly. Voice search is now impacting how we write SEO content.
Meanwhile, new smart home technologies are popping up, too.
Stay up-to-date and you'll stay relevant to your target audience.
Marketing Homes to Millennials? Use These Tips for Sales Success
Give your marketing strategy the upgrade it needs to attract millennials to your real estate agency! With these ten tips, marketing homes to millennials will come naturally. Get started with these marketing tips today!
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