The real estate industry is one of those areas that require extensive marketing activities to boost business. Regardless of this fact, many real estate marketers still rely on old-fashioned marketing tactics to reach out to potential property buyers and manage their prospective customers, which may be effective for keeping the status quo. But, if you want to grow, why not adopt a different, modern marketing approach?
Marketing automation is something every real estate marketer should consider these days. It sounds sophisticated and very tech-ish but the truth is, it has nothing to do with tech expertise. From a new real estate agent/broker to large organizations, everyone could use marketing automation to supercharge their current marketing activities.
Why Automate Real Estate Marketing?
Not all your prospects are willing to buy home right now. Some of them are planning to get one after a few months or even after years. Nevertheless, they are your prospects and you will miss out on quite a bit of money if you lose any of them. Therefore, you must keep in touch with them constantly and update them with relevant information.
Let me ask you a question: would you buy a home from an agent who you just met or are you going to buy a home from someone who was constantly in touch with you for a long time and built a good rapport? Obviously, the second one (unless a friend of yours strongly recommends an agent).
Now, if you have 30 prospects, it’s easy to do personalized communication manually. But if you have built a prospect list of a thousand, then doing personalized communication by yourself will be a bit of a hassle. I mean, if you are sending a thousand personalized newsletters by yourself when you are going to focus on accruing more listing and organizing more open houses?
So, what’s the solution? Well, you have two options: you could hire more people to do these repetitive, time-consuming tasks or you could simply use a marketing automation platform to take care of all the communication work for you.
Yes, the power of marketing automation is nearly unlimited! From the process of signing up for a newsletter to posting content on social media, you can automate these tasks. Delegating these tasks will free up your time so you can work on other important tasks that require a more human touch — such as closing deals.
Want to learn a bit more about how automation can work for you? We have compiled the top five automated marketing approaches for real estate marketing to help boost your lead generation and client conversion.
Top 5 Automated Approaches in Real Estate Marketing
Method #1 Social Media Management
Social media marketing is multifaceted and can be used in many ways to market yourself as a real estate agent. For instance, you can feature your latest acquired listing, boast positive reviews from your satisfied customers, do live videos from featured listings, post interactive content (polls, quizzes), etc. Through social media, you are not only reaching millions of prospects, you are also building your social profile. A positive social profile can boost your credibility as a great real estate agent, which is the most powerful tool you can have.
However, you may not have much time to manage social media by yourself. You need to automate parts of your social media accounts by using a social media automation tool. Depending on the types of tools you are using, you can schedule posts, view analytics, boost a few posts to reach more audiences, and easily navigate and interact with your followers.
Method #2 Web Traffic Monitoring
If you have listings, you must have a website. And if you have a website, be sure that your prospects are viewing those listings all the time. The question is: how do you know which listing is getting the most views or in which area users are spending most of their time? These questions are important because they will let you determine which of your properties are getting the most traction and how much emphasis you need to put on those. For instance, if a home in a semi-urban area is getting more views than a downtown condo, and people are spending more time on the page featuring that home, then you know that you should promote that home on social media, as well as push that home to the buyers and organize more open houses.
Web traffic monitoring also tells you other factors that determine your website performance, such as bounce rate (how many people exited your website without having any interaction), exit page rate (how many visitors closed your website and from which pages), and, most importantly, demographic information (such as which age group is viewing your listings or from where you are getting most of your audiences).
This information is invaluable to your business, but to try and obtain it using a form? Your visitors will immediately run away after they find out that they need to fill out a massive form! But, this information can be easily obtained via a web analytics tool.
Method #3 Email & SMS Automation
You have a list of prospects that you acquired via social media campaigns and sign-ups. Now you want to send emails and SMS notifications each time there is a new listing or any significant update within your operating area. What’s your move?
Option 1: You can list the updates in a PDF file and send the attachment to each of them manually.
Option 2: You can create a lucrative e-newsletter and send it via a personalized email to all your prospects. You can also send a personalized SMS to all your prospects with a contact option.
Guess what? I’d pick option 2 because it saves money, time, and certainly is more engaging than just a “Hi, I have a new listing; check it out” message.
Sending out a mass email is not a big deal if you have the right automation tool. You have the liberty to create your email message, schedule it, and send it whenever you want. A good idea is to set a CTA in the email message so the prospects know exactly what they need to do. You can also set criteria in the email such as clicking on a link will trigger another email to be sent to recipients. You can schedule a chain of emails to follow up with recipients and automatically include the option to unsubscribe if anyone wants to opt-out. Read this blog to learn how to craft email templates.
The same goes for SMS communication. With the power of shortcodes and keywords, you can use SMS to effectively reach thousands of clients. If automated, SMS can be one of the most effective communication tools since people are easier to reach via SMS than email. To learn more about SMS marketing, check out this blog.
Method #4 Landing Page
A landing page is a standalone page you can create for clients to hit right after they click on the CTA button you mentioned in your newsletter or social media. Usually, it is a webpage with a few details and a sign-up form for your real estate marketing. Hence, you need to be really careful with your landing page design because if that doesn’t appeal to the viewer, all your efforts are going to be in vain.
Now, are you going to build a landing page on your own with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript or are you going to let a tool handle the tech part so you can focus on the creative side?
Using a landing page generator, you can design eye-catching landing pages for your prospects. To learn more about how to create high converting landing pages, check out this blog post.
Method #5 Customer Relationship Management
You’ve done all the things above to boost your marketing activities. Then what? Yes, you nurture the leads and turn them into deals!
Here’s where a CRM comes in. From building a master contact list through sign-ups to segment contact groups according to their position in the sales funnel, you have it all.
Need to send a few selected listings to contacts who requested some listings? Need to share some hot listings for some specific prospects? Want to see individual contact profiles? You can do all these by using a CRM.
A CRM will help you keep potential and current clients and leads organized and compartmentalized, using unique tags, scores, and many other identifiers, which will assist you to adjust your marketing approach accordingly. Just by organizing your customers and populating the information on their profile, through automation you can get a clear idea about the segment that is interested, which segment is buying what type of properties, and how to best interact with them. For instance, if you see millennials are more interested in buying a condo through your CRM data, you will want to tailor your marketing campaign based on that finding.
Synchronize It All: More Than Just Marketing
You must be thinking that connecting all the abovementioned approaches could take a good chunk out of your work hours! I wouldn’t be surprised if you think so. But let me inform you that you can synchronize all the marketing approaches by using a marketing automation platform easily and quickly!
Let me give you a scenario:
- Post content on multiple social media. Add a tracking link to each piece of content that will redirect your viewers to the pages you want. In this way you know which ones work and which ones do not.
- When viewers will click on the link, they will end up on a custom landing page. Now, it's up to them if they want to sign up.
- As soon as they sign up, leads are added to a contact list. An automated acknowledgment email will be sent to them instantly. Also, the contact list will be imported into your CRM.
- If you want to follow up with your contacts, you can send a preset chain of emails, SMS messages, or voice messages.
- If they respond to you, only then you have to update their status in the CRM, which may lead to closing a deal!
Now, in this process, how many times do you have to intervene?
To synchronize all these automated marketing approaches, you don’t have to move a finger unless it’s time to get some personalized touch with your prospect (which happens when they turn into hot leads).
How Can You Automate Your Real Estate Marketing Strategy?
Try SimplyCast!
First, it is comprehensive. SimplyCast boasts over 15 tools that you can use to customize your marketing strategy. From communication tools such as email, SMS, or voicemail to complex web tracking systems to social media automation tools, SimplyCast has everything you need so you don’t have to switch between different platforms and end up paying for each of those. Just subscribe to SimplyCast and enjoy all the tools you need.
Second, it is user-friendly! We understand that as a realtor, you are always busy and do not have much time to learn too many new technologies or use a complex system. Therefore, SimplyCast is the best solution. Its interface is optimized in such a way that you can easily visualize your strategy on a workflow platform. Simply drag and drop the tools you need, connect those, and set criteria. Voila! You’re done! If you need help setting up your automation platform, don’t worry: our team is here so you don’t have to worry about learning a new system from scratch.
Third, subscribing to SimplyCast will get you a powerful CRM. You can manage all your leads in the CRM to boost up your sales. Our CRM has options to import data from your offline contact list as well as integration services to third party CRMs (if you are using one).
Fourth, our platform is designed for any business size. It doesn’t matter if you are working for a small business, a big real estate agency, or working independently, you can choose the package that best suits your needs.
There are many other features within the SimplyCast platform that may appeal to you in addition to those above. However, you don’t have to subscribe to try the platform. Give it a try first and see if it works for your needs!
Click below to get your 14-day free trial!
