10 Real Estate Marketing Ideas the Pros Use

While there’s no shortage of online marketing opportunities, the online market is fiercely competitive. Unless you already have a large online platform, getting your real estate business in front of the right people takes time. However, using the right real estate agent marketing tactics can help you reach your online marketing goals even faster.

5 Necessary Real Estate Lead Generation Tactics for Agents

With so many new technologies, gadgets, apps, and real estate lead generation systems on the market, it’s difficult to know where to focus your energy to generate real estate leads. Add to this mix hundreds of different marketing options designed to attract, capture, nurture, and close the deal – it’s easy to get overwhelmed fast.

Rather than pursuing all of these methods at once, take a step back and focus on the ones that are most important to pursue regularly. The following five real estate lead generation tactics help increase leads and improve your online presence over time.

1.    Client Reviews and Testimonials

Showcase your happiest customers with client reviews and testimonials on your website. Dedicate a page for sharing written testimonials or take it a step further by turning your testimonials into videos. As you’ll see in a moment, video is one of the most effective marketing tools out there. 

2.    Video Marketing

People love visuals. In fact, ¾ of brands see a higher return on investment with video marketing than any other strategy. While infographics can attract attention, videos are the essential technique to generate significant leads for agents and brokers across the country.

Videos can help develop your brand, show your personality, and promote your expertise in your local market. They can be posted on your website and shared on social media to generate more real estate leads.

3.    Maximize Lead Capture Forms

It’s estimated that 55% of buyers start their home buying search online. If you routinely update your website with fresh, SEO-optimized educational content containing local market information, your website can become your one of the best lead-generating sources for your business.

Once you get people to your site, you can give them several options to provide their contact info, either by gating valuable information or through a contact form. Their personal information can be directed to your real estate agent CRM with automated responses ready to follow-up.

4.    Create Relevant Email Marketing Campaigns

Promotional emails and newsletters are often tracked through a real estate agent CRM. But what most agents don’t realize is not every lead is equal. Various buyers and sellers have different needs, wants, and desires, and therefore,shouldn’t receive the same marketing email.

If you can, put your prospects into distinct lists, or buckets, so you can send different emails to each group of people. By segmenting your leads, you’ll reap more benefits from your email campaigns and prevent yourself from blasting emails to cold leads no longer worth pursuing.

5.    Paid Facebook Ads

Today, Facebook users scroll their feed for news, local events, and more. It’s no longer a place to only post organic content. Facebook ads can show up on the feeds of your preferred audience to showcase new homes on the market and increase buyer and seller leads.

But don’t forget you can still build a presence without paying for ads. Through optimization techniques, consistent engagement, regular status updates, and videos, you can reach more clients and generate interest in your brand.

At Referral Maker, our real estate agent CRM helps agents track and pursue their leads to maximize business opportunities. If you’re interested in the best ways to generate real estate leads, get in touch to learn how our real estate lead generation systems could help you.

Key Benefits of Using a Professional Real Estate CRM Software

A real estate CRM system is a customer relationship management software. Some agents may use real estate CRM software to manage clients. While others may view a CRM as a process involving strategy, systems, and software to nurture and convert leads into clients.

Nearly every successful real estate agent uses some type of residential or commercial real estate CRM to support and grow their business. Consider these key benefits to using a CRM for your real estate business.

Keep All Your Information and Contacts in One Central Location

Successful agents have several lead generation sources. As you gather contacts from social media, direct mail campaigns, online advertising, and others, individual databases for each lead generation source is inefficient.

With a real estate CRM software, your contacts from various sources can be collected and consolidated in one central location. Easily organize and access the data on your desktop, tablet, or smartphone anywhere you go.

Respond Immediately to Inquiries

Fast responses to online inquiries are critical to a successful conversion. Many CRMs offer an automated feature to deploy a response immediately.

Your auto-response doesn’t have to be something impersonal and canned such as, “Thanks for contacting us. We’ll be in touch shortly.” It can be customized and personal while sharing the facts, “I’m currently with clients but wanted you to know I received your message. My team is working on your inquiry. I’ll get back to you as soon as I have a free moment.”

Keep in Touch with Clients

A good real estate CRM system isn’t just for cultivating new leads, it’s also for keeping in touch with your past clients. The 2015 NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers stated 88% of homebuyers said they would use their agent again or recommend them to others. While people don’t buy homes every day, they may buy again in a couple years and you don’t want them to forget you.

Keep in touch with mailings, newsletters, and other “touches” throughout the year. A real estate CRM system can keep track of your touch points including client birthdays and anniversaries.

Personalize Your Business and Services

The more information you can gather about your clients, such as their preferences for types of homes, neighborhoods, price range, and number of bedrooms, the more you can personalize your services. By having this information available, you can pinpoint your emails to send new home ideas with features they love. They may not be ready to buy yet, but your attention to detail will only increase your chances of gaining their business when they are ready.

Automate Your Tasks

Combine a personal touch with the ease of automation. If you want to send your clients an email for their “home buying anniversary,” you can search for clients with an anniversary that day. All you need to do is write an email and program your CRM to send it on the anniversary date. Emails can be set up quarterly and the CRM can do all the hard work for you.

Instant Data Tells You What’s Working…Or Not

Are your mailers gaining any traction? Do clients ever open your emails or newsletters? You could keep doing a task and hope it’s working, or you can start tracking your response rate to know what does and doesn’t work. A good residential or commercial real estate CRM will tell you how many people actually opened your email and click-through rates on links.

Experiment with different subject lines and calls to action. Focus on what works and ignore the rest. With the Referral Maker CRM, you can measure your efforts to know what’s really effective.

Flawless CRM Software: Right Option for Real Estate Agents

What do you do with leads and contact information you receive from real estate marketing efforts? If you’re like most agents, you need reliable and user-friendly real estate CRM software to keep them organized.

Today, CRMs are more than just databases to hold client or prospect names, phone numbers, and emails. Top real estate CRM software offer agents many valuable features and benefits:

2017 Real Estate Marketing Ideas

Commercial and residential real estate continues to show growth in 2017 as the demand increases. To help you keep up with the digital age, we’ve gathered the latest real estate marketing tools and ideas for 2017.

Real Estate Agent Marketing Checklist

Your Real Estate Website

The foundation of your digital marketing efforts is your website. Your website is critical for managing your brand, gaining new prospects, and driving lease efforts and sales. The following are a few strategies to make an impact with your website in 2017.

Keep it Fresh with an Active Blog

Company blogs are great real estate marketing tools and help keep your website visible by search engines. Use your company blog to dialogue with clients and add value with tips, advice, company news, and relevant industry information. Position yourself as an authority in your industry and invite readers to participate through comments.

Your Website Should Be Responsive

Your website should be accessible on mobile devices to reach more brokers, tenants, and investors. To be effective in communicating your brand and services, your website should be optimized for Android, Windows, and iOS devices including desktops, smartphones, and tablets.

Share Market Reports

Do an analysis of your local market monthly, or even quarterly, and post it on your website to attract readers. Include average rent prices, vacancy rates, rentable square footage, and any high-end transactions.

Post Videos

Most people will spend a few minutes watching an interesting video. Videos give your audience an interesting way to interact with you and offers you an easier way to showcase your company.

Don’t Forget SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important for your real estate website to generate free traffic from search engines. Targeted keywords related to your industry should be used naturally in your website content and blogs to gain more organic views.

Gather Emails for Your Newsletter

Build your database of potential clients and partners the easy way by allowing prospects to give you their email. Even if you don’t have an email marketing plan in place, start building your list now.

Track Your Results

Make sure you’re running Google Analytics on your site and track results once a month. Knowing the data helps you make better marketing decisions and understand how your website is performing.

Digital Marketing

Once your website is optimized, digital marketing efforts help drive people to it. By increasing online marketing, you can improve brand recognition and stand out amongst competitors in fun, new ways.

Start a Company Newsletter

Email newsletters are an effective way to promote your brand and services online. It helps you stay in touch with clients and can showcase your company’s activities, provide valuable resources and tips, and continue building relationships.

Be Consistent on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become THE professional networking platform. With 300 million users, people from all industries and walks of life can connect professionally. It also offers a powerful marketing and engagement system with discussion boards, blogs, and search functions.

Tap into Google Adwords

Google Adwords offers an easy and efficient way to target potential investors and tenants online by showcasing your services in search results for specific locations. This is a fast way to get in front of good prospects.

Be a Guest Writer

Submit guest content to large blogs, news platforms, and trade journals to get your name out there and establish yourself as a thought-leader in your industry. Good content helps you gain exposure by linking back to your website. This drives traffic and improves your SEO and search rankings.

Create a Video Marketing Campaign

Establish a high-quality video campaign with interviews, sneak peaks at properties, and information on your company to help drive traffic from social media accounts to your website. Popular accounts forreal estate agent marketing videos include Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo.

Utilize Twitter Marketing

Still not sure about Twitter? Twitter now offers several new marketing tools to showcase content from your site, embed multiple images, and capture email addresses through Twitter ads. Use these tools to share events, market data, and property updates with prospects and customers while growing your network.

Publish High-Quality Content

Content should be exceptional and add value to your audience or it shouldn’t be used. It’s important to create well-written, informative blog posts and high-quality HD videos or infographics to capture the attention of your audience. Good content helps you build your audience, create trust, and leverage other marketing tactics.

In-Person Marketing

While many real estate agent marketing tips focus on online marketing, don’t forget the power of in-person strategies. By combining both online and offline marketing tactics, you’ll reach a wider audience.

Host Brokers for an Event

Draw people from across the industry with a hosted broker event to increase exposure to your properties. Broker events allow you to build relationships and engage with people in ways you can’t do online.

Create a Dynamic Presentation

Portraying a good brand story doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a presentation style that leaves an impression. Invest in a professional presentation that’s both engaging and targeted to your audience.

Attend Networking Events and Conferences

Real estate events and meetups bring people together to create new contacts and make new deals. You may also create your own group to gather people in the real estate, marketing, and finance industries if such a group doesn’t already exist.

Support a Local Charity or Organization

Give back to the community by sharing your time and resources with a local organization you feel strongly about. Supporting local organizations also allows you to engage with people you may not meet during a regular business day. 

Improve Your Printed Materials

Quality designed print materials say a lot about you and your brand. Invest in a professional graphic designer and writer to update your marketing materials so they’re on brand and targeted to your audience. Update contact info and include social media links to mirror your online presence.

Attract Buyers with Drone Photography

As drone photography and videography has become more accessible, real estate marketers areflocking to sharea bird’s eye view of their properties. Include drone videos and photography on your website and marketing collateral to “wow” your audience.

Ask for Referrals

It never hurts to ask. Relational and word-of-mouth marketing is one of the best ways to get your name out there. Create a referral program and maintain close relationships with previous clients. Check-in frequently to keep relationships flourishing and don’t be afraid to ask for their business.

Interested in more real estate marketing tools? We can help.

Pros and Cons of Real Estate CRMs

Many seasoned real estate brokers are choosing real estate CRMs to manage their client information and help market their business. While technology offers many conveniences and perks, are there any downsides?

As with any new technology or system, there are pros and consusers may experience. The following are a few positives and negatives to choosing real estate CRMs for your business.

Pro: A real estate CRMdoes everything you dreamed of and more!

It’s true. Many CRMs offer limitless capabilities to organize your client information, assist with marketing campaigns, delivering daily call lists, and more. Quite possibly everything you need to grow and expand your business is at your fingertips with a real estate CRM.

Con: You’ll experience a learning curve with a new system.

The downside to such a robust system is the learning curve. It may have incredible capabilities, but many users barely learn the half of it. An initial learning curve is common and can become frustrating as it takes time and effort to learn the new system.

Take advantage of training and resources provided by the company and be prepared to spend extra time in the beginning to master a new system.

Pro: It saves important client data in one central location.

No more paper files scattered across your office or electronic files you have to email from one computer to the next. CRMs offer one central location to store all your client data, marketing campaigns, reports, and more.

Con: No system is fool proof. Data can still be lost if not properly maintained.

The data still needs to be backed up. Systems can fail and it’s the responsibility of each individual to make sure their data is backed up in the off chance the data is lost.

Pro: Data can be accessed remotely.

No more rushing back to your office computer for information you left behind. Data in your CRM can be accessed from any computer whether you’re in the office, at home, or on the road. This convenience makes doing business so much easier.

Con: Sensitive data could be breached by a third party.

The downside? While security measures are put in place by companies, the threat of a third party accessing your data always exists. Do your part by logging out after use and protecting your account with secure passwords. Limit who has access to the system and train staff about data security to protect your business.

Pro: Create reports and track sales and marketing efforts.

Interested in seeing actual data on your progress? A real estate CRM can track your marketing campaigns and leads so you know which efforts are working and which offer fewer results.

Con: Real estate CRMs come at a price.

A real estate CRM is an investment in your business. While CRMs may differ on functionality or features, they can also differ in price. Some CRMs may have a large initial start-up fee and others may offer their services for a monthly fee.

Keep in mind, the cheapest option isn’t always the best option. Find a quality CRM with the features that will help you grow your business at a price you can afford.

ReferralMaker organizes your contacts, helps you establish goals, tells you who to call or visit, and more. Learn how ReferralMaker can help take your real estate business to the next level this year.

Best Real Estate CRM: Which Tool Is Right for Your Business?

Real estate CRMs are a powerful tool to organize and grow your business in one central location. Generate leads, contact clients, and schedule drip marketing campaigns – all in one platform!

The best real estate CRM is the one that you’ll use. But we understand it can be difficult to navigate the market and choose the best real estate CRM for you. Here we’re comparing a few of the top real estate CRMs on the market to help make your decision easier.

Insightly

Insightly is a great CRM for contact and task management at a low monthly rate. It’s perfect for keeping track of conversations with prospects and managing your daily tasks. Link Insightly with your Outlook or Gmail accounts to save conversations with contacts. Each time you click on a contact page, you’ll view previous emails and notes including opportunities and upcoming appointments.

It’s important to note, Insightly isn’t a real estate specific CRM. This means the settings are generic and need to be customized to your business. Templates can be built with automatic checklists for buying or selling homes. The only downside is you have to create these yourself.

This is a great general CRM, but it lacks MLS integration or direct marketing tools. If this is important to you, a real estate CRM with MLS integration may be a better choice.

REthink

REthink is a real estate CRM loaded with real estate features so you spend less time customizing. Based onSalesforce (a leading CRM product), this CRM is customized specifically for realtors with tools and resources to grow your business. Built-in MLS integration allows you to import listings and match prospects to homes based on their preferences. Also included are real estate marketing tools such as direct mail marketing and automated drip email campaigns (for an additional rate).

REthink is a strong platform with great functionality, but it can be complicated to set up and use on a daily basis. When you include additional features, it can get more expensive with each add-on.

PropertyBase

This real estate CRM is similar to REthink. Both are based onSalesforce with similar interfaces and features. Features unique to PropertyBase include financial management and direct mail marketing tools.

This option does not include the ability to schedule drip email campaigns. Though built on a strong Salesforce platform, PropertyBase costs more for solo agents or small teams.

Referral Maker

Referral Maker is simple and easy-to-use while offering tons of tools to help grow your real estate business. This real estate CRM helps you generate more leads with a relational marketing system that tracks your interactions with clients.

The Priority Action Center (PAC) gives you a daily call list and offers tips for conversation starters. Included is a daily action plan to track your efforts and monitor results.

Referral Maker Pro offers you access to tools to create monthly mailings, mid-month eReports, the ability to track pop-bys, and more. You receive everything you need in one central location to market and grow your real estate business.

Remember, the best real estate CRM is the one you’ll use. Investigate your options and choose one that’s user-friendly for your business. As you track your clients and marketing efforts, you’ll feel more organized and experience faster growth!