To answer the question of how to get more high-quality property leads, I would first like to cover a few reasons why you might not be getting as many leads as you’d like. It may seem like I’m preaching to the converted, but while the solution to getting more leads is simple, it is far from easy, and these points, as you will see, are relevant.
Why you might be struggling to get more property leads:
- Fewer people are listing their properties
- Economic uncertainty makes people hesitate for longer before buying
- Higher Inflation and Interest rates reduce the number of first-time buyers in the market
While the number of competitors in the property arena has dropped 1 or 2% annually over the past couple of years, it is not significantly impacting the amount of choice available to prospects. If you are to believe the most conservative estimates, the number of people selling their homes has dropped by 10% in 2023. Many agents are reporting a much more significant reduction in listings. One agent I was listening to in an interview said their listings had dropped 90% in London.
Who knows what the actual number really is?
The most significant drop is the first-time buyers. This has the biggest impact on the property market since they are usually the most active.
This makes competition for other property clients as high as ever, with a dwindling number of serious candidates available. At the end of the day, if the need to move isn’t immediate and urgent, waiting is the default action.
So, how does an obvious overview of the UK property market help you?
It doesn’t yet; please bear with me.
The Property Lead Generation Gravy Train Ends
Most property professionals get lead generation wrong pretty much all of the time.
That may sound like a negative view of the UK property industry or a generalisation, but it’s a fact.
The truth is that when times are good, business is booming, people are getting money from the banks for almost nothing, and energy bills and inflation aren’t spiralling out of control, then there’s no need to put a massive amount of effort into lead generation.
It’s only when things start to slow down, and everyone has a bit more time on their hands that reality starts to bite.
So, while times have been good over the last decade:
- What systems have you implemented that capture your perfect prospect details before they are ready to buy, sell, or invest?
- What systems do you have in place to nurture and educate your prospects?
- What method do you use to find people wanting to buy or sell who aren’t talking directly to you?
- What makes you different from everyone else and will get new clients to contact you without doubling or tripling your ad spend?
This is why I say that nearly every property professional gets lead generation wrong.
If you were generating leads sustainably from day one in your business, I wouldn’t need to write this post. I know that most property professionals do not do this because if they did, it would be evident to anyone who went and looked online. The sad truth is that the property industry in the UK is poorly catered for by property experts when it comes to the best possible way to generate property leads.
The Power of a Content Goldmine in The UK Property Market
When times get tough, the best way to generate leads is to show up for your prospects. Whenever they look for an answer, wherever they look, there you are with the information they need.
The fact is, creating a content goldmine is the very best way to get leads, no matter the state of the market. It’s the best way when times are booming because you stand out above your competitors. When times get bad, you’re one of the few who show up consistently with the information people need because you’ve taken the time to position yourself as an expert.
Creating a content goldmine for your business will establish you as an expert. It will enable you to show up for every prospect with any question and capture their details.
Once you know who your perfect prospect is, that is to say, you have their name and email address, you can nurture the relationship, build trust and rapport, and be ready to solve any other problems they have.
You cannot do this efficiently or effectively if you haven’t put the effort into your content goldmine, which is the best marketing tool available to any business today.
The quest for more property leads: Challenges and Opportunities
One of the biggest challenges you face as a business owner is building trust with people you haven’t met or spoken to. That kind of brand power isn’t easy to come by.
Since over 70% of people will look for answers online before even considering speaking to a company, you need to be online with a digital footprint big enough to ensure they find you.
Now, since almost nobody in the property industry is doing this correctly, you have an opportunity to get ahead of the pack. I won’t tell you this can be set up in a weekend, and all your lead generation woes will be solved. Everyone would do it if it were that easy, and you’d be back to square one.
No, instead, I want to convince you that creating a content goldmine is your best option since it will not only set you apart from nearly every other agent in your area but will set you up for levels of success which, until now, you only dreamed were possible.
The Roadmap to Success: Crafting a Compelling Content Strategy
An automated source of high-quality leads is at your disposal once you realise that delivering value is the key to the online promise of “every lead in your area is at your fingertips”.
The truth is actually the opposite of what most people think. You are available to every lead online when their fingertips dictate, but only if you put in the work first.
For you to show up when your perfect prospect decides to go looking for an answer, you need to know why they are looking for an answer and what they expect as a result.
Once you understand these basic concepts, you can craft an expert piece of content to educate and engage your audience while building trust and rapport. You can take them on a journey down the proverbial rabbit hole and show them all the wonders they might have missed if they had gone elsewhere.
By learning how to create well-researched, well-written, well-laid-out content, you can dominate your local property profession by becoming your area’s best-known, most trusted agent.
With a fairly simple plan and some consistency, you can achieve so much more than people who think paid ads and property portals are the only options.
Understanding Your Audience
While this is a huge topic for many marketing experts, I can simplify the process so you can get started immediately.
While you can undoubtedly refine your target audience significantly with enough data, you don’t need it to get started on your content goldmine.
Identifying your target audience: Who are your ideal property leads?
To get started on your content goldmine, you need to know what people are looking for. If you’ve been performing your role for more than a year or two, you’ll already know instinctively what people ask, because you’ve already been answering those queries repeatedly for some time.
What are the top 10 questions that people always ask? This is where you start.
If there are more than 10, great. You might have 15, 20 or 30 questions to start researching, planning, and outlining.
Once you’ve done those, what are the questions that people should be asking, but don’t?
Then, you can start to look at related questions that should perhaps be answered by your perfect prospects, which may dictate how they complete a particular task or achieve a specific outcome.
To get started, you have all the data you need. You are, after all, a property expert.
Creating buyer personas: Uncovering the pain points and needs
When you have data, you should be analysing it for the purpose of uncovering where you can deliver more value.
If you know of a particular reason that causes a high percentage of sales to fall through, for example, create content around all the reasons it happens, what could prevent it, how to overcome it, and so on.
A buyer persona isn’t all about Age, Sex, and wage brackets; it’s also about the problems people face and why.
Tailoring your content to resonate with your audience
When you know what problems people are facing, you can draw on your experiences with previous clients and present them in a way which will resonate with your audience.
Showing that you understand your audience’s situation by sharing stories of others you’ve helped will instantly build rapport. It won’t take many examples of ways in which you know your potential client’s issues before they start to trust that you are the go-to expert.
Building the Foundation: Content Goldmine Essentials
While you may have everything you need to start, you’re probably more like an accidental landlord with their first rental property than a seasoned build-to-let investor when it comes to creating a content goldmine.
I’m assuming you’re here to actually get more leads and not just think or talk about it, so let’s look at a few tips for creating expert content to attract your perfect prospects.
The Pillars of Valuable Content
Creating high-quality blog posts and informative and engaging articles for your social channels is necessary. But what makes your content high-quality?
First up is research.
Now, you might be thinking, “I know what to write; I’m the expert.”, and for the most part, you’d be correct. However, it is my experience that people can be forgetful, focus on the wrong things and be biased towards a particular point of view.
None of this will mean that a piece of content is bad. On the contrary, unique ideas and opinions will help you stand out.
But, a genuinely outstanding piece of content will be, on the whole, unbiased, objective and thorough.
By researching what is already online, you can make notes and ensure you cover every aspect of the question you’re solving. To do this, check many of the articles your competitors have produced, incorporate all topical elements into your post, and then write about each with your values and opinions woven throughout your stories to demonstrate your expertise. You’ll stand alone in your thoroughness and attention to detail, and you’ll start to build the all-important trust and rapport with your audience through your content.
Leveraging SEO for Visibility
While researching your latest expert post, you’ll likely notice patterns and phrases that keep popping up. These may be keywords that your competitors are targeting. If you can determine how they are leveraging this information and converting their readers into leads, you’ll have an opportunity to template their system and improve upon it for your own site.
Keyword research: Identifying the correct search terms
As online searches get more nuanced, so must your approach to providing answers. If you create and optimise a post called “Getting on the Property Ladder” for SEO, but people are searching for “What do I need to know about buying my first property?” and “What is the smallest deposit I need to buy a starter home?”, you’ll likely miss a lot of leads unless they search again, possibly because they didn’t find what they wanted.
Many people use their smart tech to ask questions and even type in longer-form questions since they are getting used to Google understanding natural language. This is a significant shift in how people search over the past few years, so take advantage of it.
Back in the day, one of my many IT skills used to be finding answers on the search engines others struggled to find because I could quickly figure out what keywords might have been used. This is no longer an advantage since AI is getting so good at understanding intent. So, while my example of “Getting on the property ladder” will eventually get you in front of other keyword searches, it will take more time.
By learning to match your content with how people ask questions, Google will be more likely to show your content, assuming you stay on top of all the other SEO elements you control.
Optimising your website: On-page SEO best practices
I’ll keep this bit short since I don’t want to turn this into an SEO post. It is, after all, supposed to help you understand how to get more leads. That said, SEO is essential to your lead-generation efforts. You will need to learn SEO basics even if you plan to outsource the more advanced aspects to a 3rd party. Showing up on Google is vital to getting organic leads. While it can be done without Google, it’s much more difficult.
SEO is comprised of technical, on-page, off-page, and local categories. At the very least, you’ll need to understand On-page SEO since you’ll be involved in creating the content. Content written and structured well has some On-page SEO baked into it.
Knowing this will save you time because knowing what’s required means you can add what’s needed while creating it, rather than after the fact.
It will also save you money since your outsourced SEO worker will have less to do to make your content SEO-ready.
Once you understand why SEO is needed and how easy it is to incorporate into your content, you’ll be glad you spent a little time learning about it. You don’t need to be technical to understand SEO well enough to have it significantly impact your content and your audience.
Check out my “What is SEO?” post for more info about SEO in non-techy language.
Creating shareable content: Increasing your online presence
Your content’s primary goal is to educate your audience and, if possible, entertain and engage them.
However, did you know that your content also has secondary goals?
You probably know what they are without even realising it. Your content’s secondary goals are to get likes, comments and the holy grail of SEO, shares (also known as backlinks and off-page SEO).
Engagement and Interaction
Getting people to engage with your content and share it with others is the secret to growing your online presence. Without comments and shares, you’ll always struggle to get those elusive page #1 rankings on Google, and the social media platforms won’t show your stuff to many people, either.
Getting people to share your content will be the most critical factor. This is essentially Off-page SEO. Backlinks to your content will significantly impact anything else you do to rank on Google.
This is why making your content the best possible, is the best strategy for your content goldmine. Statistics from the leading Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tools show that well-researched, well-written, well-laid-out long-form content is much more likely to be shared than a shorter post.
If you want more leads, learning how to discover what people want a solution to, and creating engaging content to help them achieve it, will fill your pipeline with higher-quality leads than you could ever expect from a paid ad.
The importance of a responsive website: Mobile-friendliness and usability
When creating your content, you won’t think too much about how people will consume your content. However, it is something you’ll need to look at.
More people will view your content on mobiles and tablets than desktop computers. This means that everything needs to work well on mobile devices.
If somebody can’t sign up for your “10 Steps to Staging Your Home for Maximum Profit” guide or they can’t share your latest post on “Everything You Need to Know About Buying Your First Home”, then your potentially perfect prospect will get frustrated, maybe a little annoyed, and be less inclined to tell their friends and family about the fantastic agent they just found.
Harnessing the power of social media: Expanding your reach
I briefly mentioned social media; it’s worth diving deeper into another area many property professionals get very wrong.
When you first start your content goldmine, you won’t instantly get leads to your website from Google, especially if you’ve never created expert content for your website before.
Social Media will be an excellent way to get traffic to your content. Like Google, the trust levels are likely low with your social platforms, but getting views on Social Media is much easier and quicker.
Since you’ll have lots of facts, figures, and quotes to play with from your expertly created content, coming up with exciting and engaging content will be much easier than when you only had your latest offer or instruction to post.
In case you were wondering, only posting offers and deals on social media is one of the fastest ways to reduce your reach to zero. That is where most property professionals get social media wrong. It is not another property portal; it’s a place to engage with other people and be (yup, the clue is in the name) social.
Consistency is Key
No matter where you plan on showing up online, one thing that will be essential to your success will be consistency.
Without this one staple, all of your efforts will be for nothing.
For your content to be shown on Google, they need to trust you are a good source of information. Regularly showing up is the first step in establishing yourself as an expert content creator.
Of course, your content must be excellent, engaging, well laid out, and all the other good things that make it valuable to your perfect prospects. But you’ve got my book, so you’re covered there.
For your content to gain traction on social media, you must post regularly and get likes, comments, and shares. Each platform has its own quirks regarding posting frequency and how much engagement is needed. You’ll need to research and test this for yourself, but with your understanding of creating expert content and exciting headline creation (also covered in my book), you’ll do fine.
Staying on top of deadlines: The editorial workflow
Figuring out your process for creating content and completing all the additional tasks that deal with SEO, Social Media, and your email list must be a priority early on.
Scheduling and deadlines need to become a part of your working week. You are, after all, creating a completely automated lead-generating machine for your business. It deserves nothing less than your full attention and best efforts for at least the first six months to a year.
Content quality control: Editing and proofreading
You can’t just write a piece of content and click the publish button. You need a system to ensure that your message says what you intend it to and stays on brand whilst being true to your values and beliefs. I cover this in detail in Chapter 7 of my book.
It’s very easy to get off-track or suggest something is other than what you know to be true when you’re writing. Maybe you get distracted or interrupted whilst you’re in the zone, and then when you pick up from where you left off, you don’t quite know how to finish it off correctly.
Personally, I find that I occasionally write a word or a phrase I didn’t intend to. I don’t know why my fingers did it or how. Maybe I was thinking about something else when I was writing what I thought I wanted to say. A missing word can have the same effect. Sometimes, it’s a typo or an incomplete word that changes the meaning of what I intended to write. Can instead of Can’t, or Does rather than Doesn’t. Content instead of Contact is another one I trip up on.
Whatever the reason, the meaning isn’t what I intended, and it needs to be addressed before the publish button gets involved.
Ensuring your content is factual and accurate is essential to being the go-to expert. Typos, errors and omissions are not acceptable in your content goldmine since it does not match your expert persona in any way. It can be forgiven on an ad-hoc social post, but not in your expert posts.
Measuring success: Tracking the effectiveness of your strategy
This is where you learn to improve your content over time. Understanding what works and, more importantly, what does not work will ensure you keep giving your audience what they want.
I talk about this in the “What is SEO?” post, so if you’d like to know more about what to track when you’re getting started on your content goldmine, take a look at that.
Optimising for Lead Generation
This is where the magic happens. You create expert-level content to help your perfect prospects get an answer. That allows Google to recognise you as an expert content creator and show your content to more people looking to solve those problems.
If you do a good enough job of solving the problem your audience searched for, you have an opportunity to deliver even more value.
However, instead of giving this additional value for free, there is a cost.
In exchange for even more value than you’ve already delivered, which established you as an expert willing to help without expecting a return, you’ll need a name and email address.
Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is simply something of value in exchange for a name and email address. This allows you to deliver valuable follow-up messages until your perfect prospect is ready to become a client.
Since you’ve already provided value to your audience by answering the questions they had, hopefully with added context and perspective, with additional tips, tricks, and tactics to ensure their success, when you ask for their email to deliver even more value, it’s going to be a simple decision for many.
Crafting compelling offers: eBooks, guides, and checklists
If you’ve followed my advice and opted to create long-form content that deep dives into your audience’s problems and gives them a deeper insight and understanding of the issues they face, then a checklist to simplify and clarify the steps required will benefit many.
Creating a checklist, cheat sheet, guide, or ebook will be reasonably straightforward once your expert content creation process is sorted. Since you’ll be expanding or simplifying the content your prospect has just consumed, you’ve got a readymade template to hand to help you provide the additional value.
You may need fancy graphics to help you coherently and attractively present your information. Don’t worry; Canva is here, the online design tool that helps you with all your graphic needs. They have thousands of templates that will turn your text into a proper lead magnet.
I use Canva for everything graphics-related. I recommend the pro plan since it gives you access to many more images and graphics and a few handy tools, such as the background remover and resizing options.
Once you’ve created your latest lead capture masterpiece, you only need to make it available in a form at the bottom of your post. Capture the name and email address of your latest reader and email them a link to download the guide.
The power of email marketing: Capturing and nurturing leads
Once they have the guide and you can see they’ve opened it, you can start to follow up with regular informative emails related to the question you’ve answered for them.
You can check they’ve met all of the prerequisites up to the point where you solved their problem and take them through the potential obstacles they may face with guidance on how to best prepare for or avoid them altogether.
You can provide updates on the market conditions, things they can do to prepare for when it is suitable for them to move, and other helpful suggestions.
This is how you become a trusted advisor and build rapport without ever having to meet or speak with a perfect prospect. Of course, should the opportunity to meet arise, all the better, but if not, you can still position yourself as the go-to expert in your area.
As I am sure you are aware, leads don’t pay the bills. Only when your high-quality leads turn into clients can you say your marketing efforts are working? The nurturing process, whether for one month or one year, is essential to ensuring that happens.
Automated lead generation: Leveraging technology
The best thing about technology is that it never gets bored or tired of doing the same tasks daily, weekends included. It never forgets, gets distracted or has an off day. This is what you need for your nurturing process.
Please do not rely on people for this since they are notoriously unreliable and cost much more in the long run. But you don’t need to take my word for it. You know I love a good stat. Well, I love studies too. 😊
Human vs. Computers
Several studies compare humans to computers for repetitive outreach and follow-up tasks. Here are a few examples:
- A 2019 study by the University of Pennsylvania found that computers were more effective at sending follow-up emails to sales leads than human salespeople. The study found that computers could send more emails, personalise them better, and follow up more quickly than humans.
- A 2020 study by HubSpot found that chatbots were more effective than human salespeople at converting leads into customers. The study found that chatbots could qualify leads more effectively, provide them with more information, and answer their questions more quickly than humans.
- A 2022 study by Salesforce found that artificial intelligence (AI) was more effective than humans at personalising email outreach. The study found that AI could generate more personalised emails, which led to higher open and click-through rates.
These studies suggest computers can be more effective than humans at repetitive outreach and follow-up tasks. This is because computers can send more messages, personalise them better, and follow up faster than humans. Additionally, computers are not subject to the same human biases that can lead to ineffective outreach.
Add that all up, and you have a pretty good case against leaving your follow-up to people, no matter how well-intentioned they are. While you may not jump in at the deep end and start using AI Chatbots to handle your marketing strategy right away, you will want to automate as much as you can so that you can focus on delivering the best service to the prospects that do become clients.
Work On Your Business, Not In It
If you want a business that can generate high-quality leads on autopilot, you will need a lot of cash for paid ads, or a content goldmine.
You can, by all means, utilise both. That is literally the best of both worlds. There is no form of marketing that cannot be improved or enhanced by the presence of a content goldmine. I cover this in my book too.
However, if you’ve read this far, I’m guessing the paid ads route isn’t working out quite so well for you, and you want a better way.
Instead of spending all your time following up low-quality leads that are unlikely to convert into paying clients, use your time to start building your content goldmine. For each piece of content you create, you do the work once, but the outcome can be found by people wanting to know precisely what you’ve written about thousands, even tens of thousands of times.
Creating content consistently over a long period will eventually start to pay off in the form of more leads.
This is because:
- People are always looking for answers to their questions online, and your content will be more likely to appear in search results if you publish it regularly.
- Search engines favour websites that publish high-quality content regularly. Your website will rank higher in search results, making it more visible to potential customers.
- Over time, your website will become a trusted resource for information in your industry. This will lead to more people visiting your website and signing up for your email list, giving you more leads.
By delivering information online, rather than always having to be done in person, you are building a digital avatar of yourself that works for you 24/7. Undoubtedly, it is a better use of your most precious resource, time.
Why do paid ads fail?
At the start of this post, I gave a quick overview of the UK property market and suggested why you might fail to generate new leads. Hopefully, I’ve shown you how to create more leads, and you’re already thinking about how you will go about it. If not, I will not clarify my thoughts on paid ads vs. organically generated leads.
If you understand that the criteria for making sales is amplified during a downturn, it makes more sense why paid ads are less effective.
Let’s look at some of these criteria:
- Need: If a purchase or sale isn’t urgent, waiting is often the default option
- Trust: If you’re not trusted, you need a way to build your prospect’s faith in you
- Follow Up: The number of touch points required increases when the trust in the market is low
- Qualifying: Ensuring the ability to move forward will save time on uncommitted prospects
- Value: Keeping perceived value high will be essential during slower times
- ROI: The need for an immediate return is higher since there is no legacy from ads – they stop when you stop paying
For paid ads to be as effective in a slower market as they are during the boom times, they must be shown to the same people more times. This costs you more money at a time when you ideally want to be showing your ads less and saving money.
The Problem with All Ads
And let’s not forget that paid ads still have the same drawbacks to contend with as they always do:
- They are disruptive by nature
- The headline may not resonate with the recipient
- If the headline resonates with the recipient, it may not be a convenient time
- If they don’t click right away, they will forget about it very quickly
- They don’t know who is running the ad or if it could be a scam, and there is no trust
So, you need your ad to be seen more often when there is less trust in the market, and fewer people are considering using your services.
Is it any wonder that you might be struggling?
What’s so great about a content goldmine?
In contrast to paid ads, content is only shown to somebody when they go looking for it. It’s not interrupting their cat videos, the latest posts from their mum and friends, or trying to get them away from anything else they were trying to get done.
Instead, an expertly crafted piece of content is:
- Relevant: This is by far the most critical element: Google only shows content it thinks best suits the search query.
- Timely: Content results are only shown when people search for them (When they are ready and in the correct frame of mind for the information – no disruption necessary)
- Complete: They will get a full answer from an expertly researched and written piece of content, not just a headline and a vague or hyped-up promise.
- Engaging: A well-written piece of content will fully engage your readers and open their minds to new concepts and ideas while fulfilling their need for answers.
- Original: Your content will be as unique as the prospect who searched it. It will incorporate your values, beliefs, and experiences, giving credibility to your answer. Try doing that in 3 seconds with your ad.
- Attractive: An excellent piece of expert content looks fantastic. It’s well-spaced and has great sub-headlines, engaging images, highlights, lists, and links to helpful content.
- Available: With content, you can easily save or share it. Commenting or asking questions is easy. You can return to it anytime with the same search or use a bookmark. It’s just there when you need it.
Now, it might seem like I’m all about the content and paid ads are a waste of time. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Paid ads are great. They’re just not the best way to attract a lead who might not be ready to buy, sell, or invest for six months.
A Content Goldmine vs Paid Ads
If your ads don’t capture your prospect’s details and follow up with vast amounts of value, there’s not much chance they’ll be successful.
If you focus on your content goldmine, though, you’ll find that this is what it does by its very nature. Delivering value and building trust and rapport are why a content goldmine exists.
If you want a pipeline filled with hot, qualified, trusting leads who don’t need to be “sold” to, that are gathered on autopilot and nurtured until they are ready to move, then you know what you need to do.
Getting Your Content Goldmine Started
You could book a call and see about joining my coaching programme to speed up your journey to automated lead generation bliss. However, I recommend starting with my book, Automated Property Leads Forever. It has everything you need to get started from the coaching programme in easy-to-consume sections. There are checklists, quizzes, and review sections to help you take it all in.
For just £6.95, which is a lot lower cost, but no less valuable than the coaching programme, I’d suggest the book is the very best place to get you going.
If you have any questions or need anything clarifying, please comment below. I’d love to hear from you, and I’ll do my best to answer every question personally.
