The real estate industry can be intensely competitive and extremely complicated. Countless variables may impact realty, realtors, and the markets in play. Without the right real estate marketing strategies, many real estate professionals may struggle for success.
This is why sound, responsive real estate marketing tools are critical in today’s ever-changing industry. Since the advent of the internet, realty marketing has become increasingly more accessible to agents all over the world. Although vast and complex, this online domain can be very advantageous to those who know how to use it.
Through cutting-edge lead generation tools and increased access to service prospects, the right real estate marketing can be a boon for realtors and investors alike. With a suite of real estate marketing tools, a real estate agent can keep conversion rates high and sales numbers positive.
So what marketing solutions are must-haves in real estate? We take you through ten of the best real estate marketing tools you should have to scale your business.
1. CRM Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a necessary tool for real estate marketing. It assists agents in aggregating the various mediums through which they interact with clients. Think mailing lists, social media handles, workflows—a CRM software handles them all.
With effective CRM software, you have all the necessary data and knowledge in one place. This means you can harmonize your marketing strategies and improve your decision-making with consistency.
Benefits of CRM Software
The realtor-client relationship is crucial to production and outcomes. Beyond helping to seal the deal, this rapport may also establish new network connections, expanding a realtor’s profile and solidifying that agent as a strong player in the industry.
The innumerable variables are complex enough. For agents who aren’t using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, things can become significantly more difficult. The ability to systematically manage the client relationship should be a central consideration for all real estate professionals.
There are various benefits to using CRM software as you scale your business and expand your professional profile.
Automatically Stores and Preserves Vital Data
Many beginning real estate agents are just starting to establish their network. Their lead generation tools may be minimal, making it easy for them to keep tabs on everyone. In these cases, realtors can use their phones or simple spreadsheets to aggregate and maintain data.
Most real estate agents who are starting even hold onto points of contact such as business cards, invites, letters, phone logs, and other forms of connection. Once an agent’s database of contacts has grown considerably (usually 100 people), it may be time to consider CRM software.
By preserving such information, especially about contacts you haven’t seen in a while, you ensure that you never miss out on new lead generation or referral opportunities. With CRM systems, you can effectively scale your business while not having to focus disproportionately on menial tasks.
Varied and Adaptive Functionality
For any large-network real estate investor or realtor, CRM software can facilitate many tasks. However, the use of the system also depends on the particular needs, objectives, and goals of the user. This is why there are many CRM systems available, ranging widely in price and capability.
Again, the marketing automation power of CRM software can vary significantly. Some have basic features and cost as little as $25 a month. Others used by large real estate teams may cost upwards of $1,500 monthly. If you’re a member of a brokerage, you may have free access to CRM software.
Before you decide the software is right for you, you must consider the breadth and depth of contacts and contact information. CRM software can be used to store data for a variety of client connections, such as:
- Past Clients
- Current Clients
- Potential Clients
- Qualified Leads or Referrals
Your use of the CRM software will likely change as you scale your business. Through the integration of CRM with your marketing efforts, you can efficiently expand your reach, profile, and reputation. As time progresses and your lead generation matures, you may have to upgrade to costlier software to automatize many functions.
Overall, CRM software can serve as a great lead generation tool in your greater marketing strategy. Depending upon the system used, you may be able to build your own landing page or aggregate other systems. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of getting more leads and converting new clients.
Some CRM systems even have (Internet Data Exchange) IDX integration, which allows you to connect an MLS to your website. This facilitates client interaction and communication, as they can jump directly to your website. This is highly useful if you’re looking to directly connect with clients with relevant property information.
Again, what you do with a given software depends on the software’s capabilities and your needs as a realtor. CRM software can be a tremendous resource for any scaling business. If you’re a real estate professional, plan on getting a CRM system.
2. A Real Estate Website
While it may seem overemphasized in the industry at this point, a website quickly gives you an edge on the real estate market. In 2022, however, owning and operating a website takes on a whole new meaning in light of the work-from-home mentality spurred by the global pandemic.
Due to global health measures and restrictions across the world, an agent can no longer rely solely on physical tours or appointments to close a deal. Trends are changing, and you need your website to step up to the plate. Video tours, FAQs, and informational, data-driven guides are just some of the standout website features sure to give any agency or marketing team a boost.
Websites as Real Estate Marketing Tools
Website development is no longer a necessary skill for having a real estate website. There are plenty of services that offer free or relatively inexpensive templates. You can also enlist the ability of a seasoned website developer to bring your vision to reality. Many agencies, software, and listing services may offer some form of website building and maintenance.
Whether you create a wordpress website or have it professionally designed, you should know how to leverage it. If done smartly and effectively, your own website can be utilized to significantly scale your business.
There are three primary reasons you should boost your business with a well-designed, interactive website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is all about visibility. With the right website structure, content, and other aspects, you can rank higher in search engines such as Google and Bing. This means that you get more eyeballs on your website, which can potentially draw more traffic and convert more visitors. This is one of the easiest ways to draw traffic to your listings.
Because the internet is integral to any real estate agent or real estate team, an optimized website is critical. Just like you see signs or billboards for businesses, you see search rankings and results for websites.
A top SEO company can help incorporate all the necessary technical tools with your business’s own branding.
Conversion Funnel
Getting seen is the first step, but then you have to convert a potential client into a current client. This hinges on several factors. A strong real estate website makes use of its own media, such as high-quality videos, high-resolution images, and relevant links and web pages.
The content should be eye-catching and professional, clearly and concisely communicating how you address client needs. Aside from its visual content and non-visual content, your website can also offer other real estate marketing tools.
Using a conversion form, you can readily collect voluntary visitors’ information. This is significantly easier than chasing down leads all over the place or making calls and emails. Once you have collected enough contact data, you can start pursuing potential buyers!
Landing pages, Google ads, and other social media management and real estate marketing tools can help.
Authoritative Social Proof
The best real estate websites are catered toward certain markets, clients and objectives. You may be focused on a niche market. You may be part of a traditional brick-and-mortar store or a member of an online, global brokerage.
Whether your expertise lies in a certain city or neighborhood or is more broad-spectrum across state lines, you can highlight it with your own website. This will allow you to better target specific needs, questions and concerns. It will also establish you as an authority with insider, on-the-ground knowledge that other realtors may lack.
A good website can display this expertise and experience in an attractive, interactive way. As real estate marketing tools, good websites show both buyers and sellers that you know the market and can seal the best deals.
Targeted, relevant websites are just another example of effective real estate marketing tools.
3. Social Media
Any notable digital marketer would tell you that your real estate marketing can gain a massive boost with social media platforms. Services such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are excellent examples, and allow you to engage many people in your target audience through their social media tools.
Benefits of Social Media Real Estate Marketing
Social media marketing is a must-have for any realtor or realty agency. Because most home-buyers are now millennials, real estate agents need to be active online. By managing social media, real estate agents and agencies can differentiate their content and establish their brands.
Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, especially, offer various opportunities for social media management. You can tailor paid ads, share dynamic videos, distribute links and images, and generally increase your professional profile.
It may take some time to see what works and what doesn’t, but this is where paid promotions help further. These social media services also allow you to track and parse data so that you can tweak your ad campaigns at any time.
It is also important that real estate agents organically interact with potential clients. Due to the viral potential of every social media platform, you may find one of your Facebook page social media posts being shared, liked, and commented on numerous times.
With the global pandemic and prioritization of digital connectivity, social media marketing tools may be more important than ever. Just as an investor or realtor may diversify a portfolio, so too must one diversify his or her social media strategy. There are many different platforms that when used together can lead to substantial lead generation.
4. Data Analytics
How do you visualize all the data you generate from your real estate marketing tools and campaigns? How do you know they work? Getting the correct information on your strategies is essential for an effective operation – knowledge, they say, is power.
A data analytics tool allows you to see how your campaigns are performing at a glance. You can derive insights that will help you take the next profitable step.
Benefits of Data Analytic Marketing Tools
Data analytic tools may encompass a full range of marketing tools and marketing strategies you’ve employed. How is your website performing? What’s the traffic? How many people are clicking on certain links and pages? How much time, on average, are visitors spending?
Are your royalty-free images compelling or do you need richer, more relevant photos? What is the average watch time on your videos?
Get more Real Estate Leads now!
Aside from analyzing your website performance, data analytics are also a great way to make sense of large data sets.
Reliable analytics can be used to predict market trends, describe realty data, and explain certain realities of the industry.
How are median property values changing?
What are the transaction rates?
What are the most popular open houses?
What are the pertinent demographic and geographic variables?
With data analytics, you can efficiently answer many complex, critical questions without giving yourself a headache.
5. Email Real Estate Marketing Tools
As you generate leads from your website and social media outlets, you’ll need to put them to good use. An email real estate marketing tool or email marketing software allows you to keep engaging your audience, even after finding solutions to their needs.
There are many ways to leverage email marketing tools to scale your business and capitalize on your direct mail campaign.
How Email Marketing Software Helps with Real Estate Marketing
As one of the most common digital marketing efforts, this digital marketing automation tool can allow you to communicate regularly with large numbers of clients, investors, contractors, and other professionals.
Benefits for Real Estate Marketing
You can give updates through a mailing list, notifying clients of a new property lot or a change in property value. You can provide groundbreaking info on some unforeseen recent development relevant to particular professional interests. You may even send out a newsletter to inform recipients of general industry changes and trends.
The main point of email marketing is to provide useful information, maintain a consistent rapport, and increase the likelihood of leads and conversions.
Depending upon the program or service you use, you may also take advantage of various analytic tools to see how your program is performing.
The best part of email marketing services is that they allow you to efficiently compose professional emails and send them out to thousands with the click of a button.
Even so, the real estate industry continues to trail the average industry in terms of email open and click rates, according to Mailchimp’s latest data.
Industry Open Rate Click Rate
Average Industry 21.33% 2.62%
Real Estate Industry 19.17% 1.77%
6. ChatBots
Online user behavior has changed over the decade, especially among visitors of real estate web pages. Prospective buyers from all over the world can now access realty information at any given time. As a result, you may not always be on hand to take their requests (i.e., at night).
This is where chatbots are extremely useful. These applications can receive messages all day long and notify you about information received when it’s convenient for you.
What Chatbots Do For Real Estate Marketing
Chatbots can even go a step further and provide interactive experiences to website visitors while you’re away. Overall, chatbots are a reliable way to ensure that you don’t lose leads due to poor communication or online presence.
They communicate outside of regular hours to generate leads, boost marketing tools, establish credentials and promote follow-ups to visitor queries.
Chatbot Benefits for Real Estate Agents
According to real estate industry data, chatbots present the following benefits to websites:
- Increase engagement by 200%
- Increase conversions by 45%
- Increase visitors’ return rate by 63%
The capabilities of chatbots depend on how much you’re willing to spend and what features you want to be installed. These automated programs can be used across desktops, laptops, mobile apps, and other devices.
7. Photo Editor
It might not sound like much, but photo editors can bring your real estate agency significant gains. Your brand’s visual marketing is just as crucial as other forms of marketing for lead generation and client conversion.
If the content is aesthetically appealing and personally relevant, prospective clients will promptly respond to what they see.
A solid photo editing software such as Adobe Photoshop enables you to create stock photos and hero images for your website and social media channels. Some so-called photo editors may also allow you to create videos for your digital marketing efforts.
Using a Photo Editor for Digital Marketing
Using graphic design tools, your own branding, and other visual marketing key features, you can impress any visitors who see your photos.
You don’t need to be an overly tech-savvy graphic designer to use photo editing software. You simply need to have a decent eye for color, an understanding of the property photographed, and a recognition of what clients like to see.
With the right tools, you can show off new listings in the perfect way.
Common edits may include light balancing, clarity adjustment, line straightening, lens correction, and object removal.
By applying these various edits and filters, you can present potential buyers with their potential dream home in stunning style. In the end, this may help you convert a top lead, scoring a major win for your realty profile.
8. Scheduling Software
As any good real estate agent knows, marketing is all about access and availability. If you aren’t available or aren’t present, how are you going to build your reputation? How are you going to establish a network, connect with clients, and become successful in the industry?
As a realtor, your time is precious.
Your busy schedule can get crazy very quickly, filling with all types of calls, negotiations, travel times, and unforeseen events. Whether closing on a new home, scheduling open houses, contacting contractors and inspectors, or spending hours on project management, you need to spend your time wisely.
Scheduling Apps for Real Estate Agent Marketing
When clients and others try to reach you for appointments, meetings, and deals, you have to be organized. This is why you should learn how to optimize these communication channels to save time and long-term costs.
A scheduling app allows you to schedule posts, arrange appointments and keep track of contacts in real-time. With a scheduling app, you can be the first in the know and the first to act. Synced with your website, scheduling apps may allow you to instantly alert clients, agents, investors, and other relevant parties.
Moreover, you can save money and resources on administrative expenses by streamlining the process through a singular app. With certain features, you can pre-screen potential leads and become more productive as you refine your real estate marketing plan.
Various scheduling platforms allow for easy emails, alerts, sign-ups, and travel information. With the top apps, you can figure out the logistics in an expedient, cost-effective manner. In today’s technology age, there is no reason to waste time, money, effort, and resources on manual scheduling.
Scheduling apps can make you a more efficient, productive, and ultimately profitable agent overall.
9. Call-to-Action Sequence
This is a top real estate marketing tool, a staple in any real estate agent’s repertoire. Whether using a web page, flier, printout, phone call, email, or some other medium of communication, the call-to-action (CTA) is critical to closing the deal.
When you’re positive that a lead is inbound, you need a solution that convinces the hesitant to be brave and take the final jump. Call-to-action sequences are especially useful on websites where they can capture and track inbound leads.
Understanding the Real Estate CTA
CTAs are truly a sequence, and typically consist of three parts: (1) the potential client’s problem, (2) the solution offered, and (3) the future if that solution is accepted.
This sequence allows for strategic targeting of a lead’s particular needs, desires, and wants. When used in conjunction with compelling content and persuasive language, a CTA can turn lead generation into lead conversion.
A seamless CTA should let the potential client know that his or her problem is of concern. It shouldn’t be gimmicky or overwrought. Rather, it should clearly and convincingly convey why the lead needs you as a real estate professional.
Depending upon your services, markets served, and experience and expertise, your CTA sequence may take many forms. Regardless, you should always strive to stress the time sensitivity, paramount importance, and actionable nature of your CTA.
This aspect of your digital marketing and overall real estate marketing stratagem can make or break a lead conversion.
10. Real Estate Software
Your real estate business needs real-estate software.
When you’ve got your social and digital marketing strategy in motion, you must have a sounding board that allows you to view the latest trends in your real estate market.
With top-notch real estate marketing software, any real estate agent can formulate the professional plan that works for them.
Some real-estate software apps have templates with which you can create compelling virtual tours and 3D showpieces. They are also mobile-friendly, which effectively appeals to the growing buyer demographic that consumes mobile content.
Not to mention, these apps can also serve as a centralized and streamlined project management platform.
Incorporating Software into a Real Estate Marketing Strategy
In a time of inflation and economic downturn, proper real estate management is especially crucial. As you scale your real estate business, it may become impossible to handle all the responsibilities without help. Fortunately, top project management software allows you to juggle all the balls while still expanding your properties and holdings.
With this useful software, you can upload the latest and greatest information to the cloud. You can access cutting-edge technologies and utilize real-time data whenever you want, wherever you are in the world. As your business scales up, you can upgrade your storage capacity to ensure your digital marketing keeps pace.
There are many other benefits to this critical software. They include but are not limited to:
Automated Updates and Channels
These allow you to remind relevant parties of payments and fees due, and to communicate with them promptly through easy-to-use, always-accessible communication channels. As a result, transparency and accountability are preserved.
Database Security Features
Sound security features prevent information from being hacked or leaked, maintaining confidentiality, privacy, and data integrity. Due to constant shifts in industry regulations and rules, data must be protected. Real estate management software programs can automatically duplicate critical files.
Comprehensive Storage
You may need to upload invaluable documentation and images, such as renovations or market reports. With a massive storage capacity, real estate software allows you to regularly update and protect important files.
There are many ways in which real estate software can serve to scale the business of an agent. However, this software is just part of the equation. Real estate agents can leverage all types of professional marketing to improve conversions and increase profitability.
All of the aforementioned strategies should be considered for their individual and collective function. A truly effective real estate marketing strategy will include multiple approaches, tools, and technologies. For many real estate professionals, new and experienced, there is always something to be learned and something to be applied.
If you’re seeking to scale your real estate business, consider the top questions that agents frequently ask.
Real Estate Agents’ FAQ
According to the latest data, the average realtor spends roughly $12,000 in annual marketing. This is 6-13% of gross commission for most agents.
According to Forbes’ latest rankings, Wise Agent is the number one software due to its strong value, app capabilities, and automation options for project management.
In the real estate business, getting people to buy properties is the ultimate goal. For agents, it isn’t easy to stand out unless you’ve got the right tools.
Converting a prospective lead becomes much easier if you give them a reason to believe you’re handling the deal in an effective and organized manner.
The tools mentioned above are some of the best real estate marketing tools to help you handle your operations. Their combination allows you to cater to every important facet from start to finish.
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