13 Affordable Tools You Need in Your Real Estate Marketing Stack
Every day is different for a real estate agent and staying organized, informed and prepared is essential.
It’s important to maintain a strong brand image with an up-to-date website, engaging social presence and powerful listing presentation. Below are some tools and applications that you need to add to your real estate marketing stack today to grow your business without growing your marketing budget.
Website Analytics
Understanding and using analytics tools is essential for growing your brand in the real estate industry. Analytics tools can teach you how to outrank your competitors on search engines by carefully refining your website.
Google Analytics This tool is excellent for tracking site behavior in order to see what content drives your traffic. It’s the go-to analytics platform for successfully monitoring and managing website traffic. Google Analytics is robust, user-friendly, and completely free. It’s as easy as entering their tracking code onto your website’s HTML. Google Analytics measures a number of metrics including page visits, entrances, exits, bounce rate and more.
Clicky Similar to Google Analytics, Clicky tracks website traffic and behavior. The most attractive features Clicky offers is metrics reporting in real time and heat maps that track individual website navigation. Heat maps help you track important data on how your website is used by users. How many people are clicking on your testimonials? How effective are your images at receiving clicks on your active and previous listings?
Clicky is a free service so long as your website receives fewer than 3,000 page views a day. Many users claim that Clicky has a cleaner interface than Google Analytics.
SEMrush Gain incredible insights on your competitors with this analytics platform. SEMrush researches keywords found in display ads, organic and paid search, and link building. When you enter a domain or URL into the search bar, SEMrush provides you with these incredible insights. It’s a powerful and easy tool that allows you to see what keywords are working for your competitors and how much traffic they are receiving.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is an effective way to keep your customers informed in real-time. It’s more than sending a one-off email, its a strategic method of targeting specific audiences while creating brand awareness, nurturing leads, and staying top-of-mind with previous clients in order to gain referral business.
Mailchimp Mailchimp has attractive, drag-and-drop templates, which makes it easy for anyone to use. As the world’s leading marketing automation platform, Mailchimp offers a cornucopia of email marketing tools like complete integration with e-commerce, robust marketing automation, social media ad campaigns and more. Perhaps pricing is one of the most appealing elements of Mailchimp, though. For new businesses with less than 2,000 subscribers, this service is completely free. Businesses with over 2,000 subscribers may pay anywhere from $35 a month to $500+.
Organization
A successful real estate agent is an organized one. When you’re working with multiple buyers and sellers at once, it can be easy to lose track of important details, documents and property information. Stay organized with these tools and spare yourself from unnecessary stress.
Cloze Need to work on your client relations skills? No problem. Cloze is the perfect app for on-the-go realtors that need client information fast. It syncs and pulls data automatically from your most used platforms to provide you with every detail needed to stay on top of client relations. It also compiles your communication history with a client, like emails, calls, and exchanged files.
Evernote Brainstorm, write, save, repeat. With Evernote, your innovative ideas are organized and easily accessible both on desktop and mobile. You can clip web pages, images and PDF files. Sharing your notes with friends and colleagues is easy too. Evernote’s free account is enough to get any agent organized and they offer plans with more features for the super organized.
Airtable A spreadsheet like no other. Airtable acts as a database platform for creating comprehensive, slick spreadsheets that make it fun to get organized. It allows you to sort records, color code fields, drag and drop attachments and expand records to see all of the details pertaining to that record. Manage your listings with ease, retain client information, and sync your data through the cloud.
Lead Generating and Nurturing
Real estate is a people business, which means lead generation and nurturing should remain top-of-mind. There are a number of intuitive platforms available that makes collecting and nurturing leads a completely automated process.
Zapier This tool is a one-stop-shop for complete application integration. On the lead generation side, Zapier can automatically add collected contact information to an email list or to your CRM. When you receive a new email, Zapier can take any attachments and automatically add them to your Dropbox and then follow-up by sending you a reminder on Slack or another communication platform.
Sumo It’s all about easy automation. Simply enough, Sumo offers free tools to automate your site growth. Sumo’s well-designed email capture templates can be embedded straight to your website as pop-ups, static footers or on timers for rapid lead generation and thoughtful nurturing. Sumo integrates with major emails services making lead growth and retention a breeze.
Educational
Clients are looking for agents that are informed about the community they live in or are interested in moving to. Be the agent that knows it all from housing market predictions to school zones, to eateries and public parks.
RPR Mobile Stay digitally connected to your community. Realtors Property Resource is now mobile. RPR is 100% owned and operated by the NAR. It provides REALTORS® with complete data on a property and community like MLS and public records, mortgage history and school zones. You can send property reports directly to your clients, add notes and listing photos while staying completely in sync.
Social Media Management
We cannot emphasize enough how important social media is for real estate agents. Social media is a valuable space for sharing listing photos and virtual tour links while staying connected to your audience. Tools for tracking and scheduling social media posts will save you time and effort while building your brand.
Pages Manager Free up time spent at your desk with mobile social management tools. Facebook Pages Manager for iOS and Android allow users to easily check notifications, post statuses and respond to messages on mobile devices and tablets. With Pages Manager you can also review insights, manage your Instagram account, track promotions and more. This app is completely free.
HootSuite Spending time every day posting to social? Well, don’t. HootSuite is the simplest way to effortlessly manage multiple social media channels in one place. With the free plan, you can schedule all content on up to 3 social profiles and engage your audience with just a few clicks. Basic analytics that track follower growth is available as well as free social media courses.
Administrative Tasks
Your workflow should be like a well-oiled machine and in an industry where time quite literally means money, use tools that allow what once were daunting tasks to be a walk in the park.
DocuSign This platform offers more than 200 million users a secure and hassle-free way to share and sign important documents completely online. With DocuSign, you can quickly send documents for approvals, agreements and signatures for same-day deadlines. Not only do you conserve time, but you reduce waste as well. Best of all, DocuSign is available across all devices.
These tools will put you on the path to becoming a real estate marketing genius by helping you stay organized and educated while building a strong brand image. Professional photography is another way to grow your portfolio and build your brand image.
Want more insights? Check out how Virtuance Real Estate Photography fuels your growth and why visual marketing is vital for your brand.