Instagram stories have become one of the app’s most powerful features for generating leads. Just like stories on Snapchat, Instagram stories stay on your profile for 24 hours, during which they can be viewed by all your business’s followers and beyond.
However, unlike Snapchat, Instagram’s Highlights offer you a way of retaining these stories on your business’s page for as long as you’d like.
A huge part of a real estate agent’s work involves using compelling visuals of properties to generate leads and sales. This process has been made a whole lot simpler with technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR). However, Instagram remains one of the best tools you can use to market your real estate agency and sell homes.
If you’re wondering how you can make the best use of Instagram stories to do so, this guide is for you. We take you through some of the best strategies you can implement to skyrocket your real estate agency’s sales using Instagram stories and how you can use Predis.ai’s suite of tools to create them.
The Benefits of Instagram Stories for Real Estate Agencies
According to statistics, one in every three users on Instagram said they were more interested in a brand after seeing it on Instagram. This goes to show the power of how interactive Instagram stories can be in marketing your real estate agency.
Capitalizing on Instagram stories to market yourself as a real estate agent or your real estate agency offers several benefits. Some of these include:
- Instagram stories are a lot more interactive than posts on your feed. This helps build greater engagement with your audience over time.
- Instagram stories have drastically increased the amount of time users spend on the app, making it a great way to build brand awareness, provided you’re consistent.
- Unlike posts, Instagram offers you a great tool to redirect your audiences to your agency’s website, thereby diverting traffic to its other marketing channels.
- Instagram stories are discoverable, which means they stand a chance of featuring on accounts that don’t follow your business. However, this happens only when users find your stories engaging.
As you can see, Instagram stories offer your real estate agency a brilliant avenue to market your real estate business. In the next section, we take you through some of the best ways you can effectively use this feature to generate leads and build greater brand awareness.
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The Best Ways to Use Instagram Stories to Sell Homes
The highlight of using Instagram stories to sell homes is that they offer you a host of tools that allow you to inform, engage, and redirect your followers and audiences.
In this section, we take you through some of the best ways you can use this feature to sell real estate through stories as a real estate agent.
1. Use Stories to Educate Your Audiences
Marketing your business today is no longer just a transactional affair. Audiences expect you to offer them value through informative content that helps guide them through the customer journey.
Some examples of how you can add value to your stories include:
- Offering buying and selling tips
- Informing audiences about the latest trends in real estate
- Highlighting trends in the real estate market and their direct influence on customer’s lives, among others.
Audiences are more likely to engage with your brand if you offer them information that’s relevant to them and that they may not be aware of. When done over time, this practice reinforces your value in their minds, building up their interest for when you actually decide to list properties for sale or rent.
What’s more, users often prefer saving informative content to view later should they need it. Now, you might think that Instagram stories expire after 24 hours, so doing this might be a challenge.
However, the solution to this is to save these stories to highlights on your page, thereby allowing your followers to view them whenever they want to.
The Chou Team, which is a real estate agency based in Southern California, has done a great job with its Instagram page. A quick look at their profile will show you that they’ve saved their stories with real estate tips on their highlights.
You can check out how these stories have been saved on their highlights in the image below.
2. Share Client Testimonials on Your Stories
There’s no better way of showing your audiences what you have to offer than sharing testimonials from existing clients. This means of offering social proof can go a long way in building your reputation as a trusted and reliable real estate agent or agency.
In fact, statistics show that 75% of customers search for reviews and testimonials before making a purchase or an investment. Promoting such testimonials on an interactive medium such as Instagram stories can go a long way in building and bolstering your reputation.
Quick Tip: You can save these testimonials to your highlights just the way you save. This is another strategy that The Chou Team has leveraged, as you can see from the image below.
3. Answer Your Audience’s Questions
Another way of building your reputation on Instagram as a realtor is to answer your audience’s questions.
For example, if you run a real estate agency in Orlando, chances are that a sizable segment of your followers are based in the same city. However, it’s also essential that you cater to those who may potentially be looking to move to Orlando in the near future.
This segment will likely have a number of questions about what it’s like living in the city. As an expert on the real estate market in Orlando and, by extension, its amenities and infrastructure, you can use the Question Sticker to ask your followers if they have any questions, which you can then answer in your stories.
This is where you can offer a great deal of value, ensuring your audiences are likely to remember you should they be looking for real estate in the city.
You can easily access the Question sticker, among several others, in the Sticker tray on Instagram.
Make Use of Stickers to Drive Engagement
Instagram also offers a whole host of other sticker options aside from the Questions sticker. From those that allow you to create quizzes to set up polls, you have a range of options to choose from.
Each of these stickers serves a unique purpose and can be a great way of driving engagement on your profile’s stories and, in turn, its other marketing channels.
For example, if you have two properties on sale that both feature different styles in terms of their decor, you can post them as a collage and set up a poll, asking your audiences which ones they like better. You can then use the responses you receive to market the property that was better preferred.
Another sticker that you can make effective use of in stories is the Link sticker. This allows you to link to other pages or websites from your stories.
So, for example, if your website features a full video tour of a property that’s generating a lot of buzz, you can link to its landing page on your website, driving traffic to it from potential customers. Predis.ai’s Instagram Story Maker offers various AI-based tools that you can use to create engaging stories and ensure you offer your audiences immense value at all times.
Show Your Audience What Happens Behind the Scenes
No matter what industry you’re in, everybody loves a good glimpse into what happens behind the scenes. The same applies to real estate as well, as a good behind-the-scenes video can be a great way to build a deeper connection with your audience.
A good example is recording and posting a behind-the-scenes video of a recent open house you just completed. This can be an intuitive way of showing your followers how you and your team work together and what goes into setting up a successful open house.
Another brilliant idea is to use your stories to inform your followers of a new series of posts you might be posting on your Instagram handle.
For example, if you’re posting a guide on how to take advantage of the trends in the real estate market or whether it’s a better idea to buy or rent, you could use your stories to build a sense of excitement about what’s to come.
Create Compelling Stories for Instagram With Predis.ai
As you can see, Instagram stories are a great tool that you can leverage to ensure your success in the real estate market. However, consistently creating stories to keep your followers engaged can be a challenge. This is where Predis.ai’s Instagram Story Maker can help.
As one of the many tools Predis.ai has to offer, its Story Maker allows you to craft engaging narratives using Instagram Stories to keep your audiences engaged and ensure higher conversions.
From personalized templates, an array of media elements, and AI-generated captions and hashtags, you can seamlessly create stories for your real estate agency without breaking a sweat.
In Conclusion
Instagram stories are a crucial element of any successful Instagram marketing strategy. If you run a real estate agency, you must incorporate this application as a part of your brand’s marketing strategy.
Being a visual platform, Instagram offers a host of different features that you can use, but one of the most impactful is that of Stories. From educating your audience, sharing client testimonials, answering questions, and using tickets to drive increased engagement, there are plenty of ways you can use stories to sell homes.
However, successfully selling homes using Instagram stories involves creating engaging and visually appealing stories, but doing so manually can take time. However, with tools like Predis.ai, you can automate the process of creating engaging stories and scheduling them as well.
What’s more, Predis.ai also offers a host of other features you can use, such as AI caption generation, generating ad copy, creating reels, and a whole lot more. Reach out to find out how we can streamline your business’s Instagram marketing efforts.
