Archive for Katie Russell
Marketing Automation for Real Estate Marketers is Key to Lead Generation
Real estate marketing is an increasingly complex undertaking. Luckily, marketing automation for real estate is here to help you streamline your efforts.
Highlights:
- Marketing automation tools automate the process of personalizing leads’ interactions with your properties
- Create email workflows, schedule social media posts, and streamline CRM with automation software
Real estate marketing is a massive undertaking, which only grows in complexity as real estate buyers demand more and more personalized experiences throughout the buyer’s journey. Enter marketing automation, featuring a range of solutions for custom lead-nurturing content to all prospects in your database.
The term “marketing automation” describes a variety of tools used to automate the process of personalizing the interactions that your leads have with your properties. Email workflows, social media scheduling tools, and customer relationship management (CRM) are all examples of automated marketing. You can tailor custom email messages based on indicated interests, streamline social media efforts with scheduled posts, evaluate the success of your efforts, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
HubSpot recently reported that businesses using marketing automation to nurture leads received a whopping 451% increase in qualified leads. The same principles apply to marketing automation for real estate. Used correctly, marketing automation software can deliver real-time, personalized messages to prospective buyers and renters at every step of the lead-generation process.
With so many tools and insights available, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Here’s our guide to what you need to know about marketing automation for real estate.
Marketing automation for real estate: Email workflows
Having a segmented email list — sorted by when a prospect joins the list, what emails they’ve opened, their demographics, etc. — is key to creating effective email workflows. With a quality list, you can ensure you’re sending the most relevant information to your prospects, keeping them invested (and keeping you out of their spam folder).
The first step is setting up a template; once you do that, you can plug in your content, manage your contact list, and schedule your emails in advance.
Our favorite tools for email workflows
1. Customer.io
This tool lets you send targeted messages to your prospects, crafting them based on how they interact with your property, and making personalized messages simple. You can also keep track of conversions and create customer profiles. Our favorite part? It integrates with your mobile app or website, letting you see data in real time and trigger actions by adding in predefined rules.
2. Constant Contact
This powerful tool has some features that are unique — and can take your marketing capabilities beyond the basics. Beyond setting up and managing an automated database, Constant Contact offers Facebook fan promotion, coupons and deals, and event management.
Social media scheduling
Keeping your posts on multiple platforms up to date, consistent, and engaging can be a major time drain. Automating your social media marketing efforts lets you plan ahead and schedule updates on some or all of your social media channels, and lets you easily strategize about peak posting times.
Our favorite tools for social media scheduling: AdRoll
AdRoll is an extremely effective tool for retargeting prospects through re-engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere on the web. It offers cross-device and cross-platform retargeting capabilities, as well as flexible segmentation, letting you provide customized experiences that dramatically improve your marketing efficiency. It also offers customized budgeting and full control over ad spend.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Converting website visitors to leads is always the goal, but it often comes with a back-breaking load of time-consuming labor. The right software lets you move your prospect through the sales funnel automatically, sending emails to educate them on the next steps, and scheduling them for viewings.
Our favorite tools for CRM
1. Pardot
Pardot is an all-inclusive marketing automation suite, but it’s particularly strong for amping up your engagement with CRM integration. It’s a great tool for helping your sales team shorten the sales cycle. And, in addition to CRM integration, it offers email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and ROI reporting.
2. Marketo
This cloud-based marketing software lets you drive revenue with lead management and mobile marketing. It not only helps build prospect relationships, but it helps you sustain them as well. Best of all, you can try it out for free until you’re sure it’s right for your company.
Select one or more of these tools, study them carefully, and get to work. Eventually, marketing automation for real estate will become second nature, save you time, and, most importantly, generate solid leads.
Related Posts:
- Our 6 Favorite Marketing Automation Tools for Real Estate Marketers
- 5 Marketing Automation Ideas for Real Estate
- Social Media Can Be a Strategic Weapon in Real Estate Marketing
Archive for Katie Russell
Infographic: 5 Tips to Make Digital Marketing for Real Estate Count
Digital marketing for real estate is a powerful strategic weapon. Our infographic gives you some key tips for a well-rounded strategy.
Highlights:
- 88% of all home buyers use the internet to collect information, and for 43%, an online search is their first step.
- When you kick off digital marketing for real estate, setting clear goals, rather than just blindly generating and sharing content, allows you to measure success, drive strategy, and ultimately, demonstrate ROI.
- Video is an ideal way to give your target audience material to share with their networks — with the potential to expand your reach exponentially.
As the realm of marketing has undergone a seismic shift in the past decade, digital marketing for real estate has taken off. According to the National Association of Realtors, 88% of all home buyers use the internet to collect information, and for 43%, an online search is their first step. Real estate marketers are increasingly targeting their efforts on digital media, and content marketing is one of the best ways to do this.
Our infographic below represents our favorite digital marketing tips for real estate marketers. Read on for ways you can use this powerhouse tool to market your brand and properties.
Digital marketing for real estate — 5 tips
1) Start with clearly defined, measurable goals
Effectively selling or leasing property requires a comprehensive, data-driven approach to marketing — which means starting with clearly defined, measurable goals. Are you looking to generate more leads? Raise brand awareness? Grow your social media presence? When you kick off digital marketing for real estate, setting clear goals, rather than just blindly generating and sharing content, allows you to measure success, drive strategy, and ultimately, demonstrate ROI.
2) Get blogging
Blogs help you sell real estate. Period. There are all kinds of benefits to blogging, from increasing search engine visibility to building relationships to nurturing leads. The more you publish, the higher you’ll rank with search engines. And every time you publish a blog post, you increase the chances that a user searching online for real estate will find your website.
Blogs also help tell your brand story. They help buyers imagine themselves in your space. They nurture leads and build trust among potential buyers. In a recent audit of a client’s website, we found that people who read the blog converted at an almost 30% higher rate than other web traffic. That’s significant.
3) Use video
If you’re a frequent reader of our blog, you’ll know that we’ve been writing about the astronomical rise of video in real estate marketing for a while now. We can’t stress it enough: video is here to stay, and it’s time your business starts embracing it as a highly effective content marketing tool.
Part of what makes video such an appealing form of content is its inherent shareability, which drives organic traffic. Getting your content and properties out to your base audience is one thing but empowering that audience to be your ambassadors is a huge next step. Creating appealing, engaging video is an ideal way to give your target audience material to share with their networks — with the potential to expand your reach exponentially.
4) Get on social media
Real estate is a people business. That’s why you should leverage a marketing tool that is also all about people: social media. If you have not begun developing social media strategies for your real estate business, now is the time to get started.
Consider for a minute that in 2017, 81% of Americans had at least one social media profile. And the numbers are projected to continue skyrocketing: by 2020, 200 million people just in the U.S. are estimated to be on social media. Used wisely, social media can help build your brand, engage your potential buyers and renters, generate leads, and establish your reputation as a trusted resource.
5) Create Infographics
Infographics can be one of the most effective mediums for digital marketing for real estate. We know that digital natives, who make up the majority of real estate buyers today, prefer short-form, highly visual content. So, infographics make a lot of sense when it comes to speaking their language. Infographics are also prime candidates for reposts on social media.
Since the text in infographics isn’t readable by search engines, you can make the most out of your content and bump up your SEO by including a transcript of your text with your graphic, ideally at least 350 words.
Final thoughts
Online searches have changed real estate marketing for good. In fact, the possibilities that digital marketing offers are varied, constantly evolving, and exciting. Savvy real estate marketers are using quality content to raise brand awareness, improve SEO, build relationships, and generate leads.
Related Posts:
- A Visual Guide to Social Media Posting Frequency for Real Estate
- 10 Social Media Statistics for Real Estate Marketers 2018
- 10 Quick Ways to Grow Brand Awareness
Archive for Katie Russell
How to Use Instagram for Real Estate Marketing
Instagram is a natural fit for real estate. Here’s what you need to know about using Instagram for real estate marketing.
Highlights:
- Instagram content needs to be consistent in tone and timing, visually appealing and engaging.
- Instagram Stories and Highlights are ideal ways for real estate marketers to give users a look into their brand.
- Hashtags promote engagement and raise brand awareness.
With its highly visual platform, robust Stories feature, and growing user base, Instagram is a natural fit for real estate marketing. The platform boasts over 500 million users and 4.2 billion likes per month. Used strategically, it’s an ideal place to showcase your properties and brand.
Real estate marketers should be aware that Instagram requires a different content and posting strategy from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social media platforms. For example, engagement on Instagram is ten times higher than it is for Facebook, and the demographic is substantially more affluent — making it a no-brainer for luxury real estate.
In general, marketers have been relatively slow to adopt Instagram for real estate marketing, a puzzling reality given its overall popularity and natural fit for the visual nature of real estate. But savvy marketers, like these five real estate accounts for example, have figured out how to use this platform to great success.
Instagram for real estate marketing — the right kind of content
Instagram is a fantastic platform for engaging users. But to get the most out of it, it’s important for real estate marketers to post the right kind of content. Obviously, Instagram is a highly visual medium. It lends itself to beautiful, arresting images, and pitchy hashtags.
Keep your content and visual style consistent. Your profile is your calling card on the platform and should reflect the overall tone you want to set for your brand. This also means posting content at a consistent rate, ideally 2-3 times a day.
Chances are, you’ve had fun playing with Instagram filters. But you may not know that certain lighting and color presets perform better than others. According to Iconosquare, the most popular filters currently on Instagram include Clarendon, Juno, Lark, and Ludwig — and they really do have an impact on engagement.
In order to determine the best types of content to engage your target audience, keep an eye on your competitor and peer brands’ presence on the platform. You can also make use of Instagram analytics tools to track, analyze, and benchmark your Instagram content.
Instagram Stories and Highlights
When the feature was first introduced, Instagram Stories was a gamechanger for the ways in which users interact on social media. Stories are sequences of content that users post to their Instagram accounts over a 24-hour period. Besides photos, Stories can include videos, live and prerecorded, as well as Boomerangs, seconds-long motion clips that play forward and backward.
Stories can also be customized with various design tools, including stickers and filters. Notably for real estate marketers, these tools include location tags, as well as time, weather, or holiday greetings. Audiences can view the Stories of the users they follow within the 24-hour window after they are posted. They can find users with active Stories by scrolling the user icons at the top of the app. Or users can tell their followers that they’ve posted a story by tagging them, which notifies them through a direct message.
For brands, Stories offer the invaluable feature of having metrics wrapped into the experience. The feature allows you to track not only how many views your story has received, but exactly which users have viewed it, and how they interacted with it.
In addition to its Stories feature, Instagram now lets users create a featured group of “Highlights” in various categories on their profile. Stories have only a 24-hour lifespan, so featuring your most effective Stories clips in Highlights gives them a second life, and a chance to engage future followers.
Hashtags
One of the most effective ways to grow your Instagram following is to use hashtags effectively. Since Instagram gives users the ability to follow hashtags that interest them, and they function as links to other relevant content, choosing the right hashtags is the ideal way to reach and engage your target audience.
Keep an eye on accounts of peer brands, to stay up to date with the best hashtags to be using. The most effective hashtags are short, memorable, and easy to read. You can also use a free online tool like InconoSquare or Websta to find relevant hashtags for the real estate industry. For much more, check out our guide to using hashtags for real estate marketing.
If you want engagement, engage
It’s easy to forget that the fundamental benefit of social media is that it’s social. Users want to be part of a conversation. Encourage your followers to interact with you on all your social media platforms, including Instagram. This means responding to comments and brand mentions, as well as engaging with your followers’ content.
Starting and fostering a conversation with your followers and peer brands on Instagram is a key to getting the most out of this platform. Encouraging interaction helps drive brand awareness, and lead generation for your properties. Now, the time has come for you to master Instagram for real estate marketing.
Related Posts
- How to Use Social Media Hashtags in Real Estate Marketing
- Real Estate Instagram Accounts You Should be Following
- Social Media Trends for 2018 Real Estate Marketers Need to Know
Archive for Katie Russell
6 Simple Tools for Creating Animated Real Estate Marketing Videos
When it comes to real estate marketing, video is not just the future — it’s now. These 6 tools will give you a leg up on creating animated images, GIFs, and videos that will elevate your marketing presence.
Highlights:
- Savvy real estate marketers are making video a central part of their strategy.
- Animated videos can be surprisingly easy and affordable to create, with the right tools.
- These are our 6 favorite tools for creating GIFs, animated images, and videos
We’ve written a lot about video marketing as a trend that isn’t going anywhere and how it’s a natural fit for real estate marketers. It can be one of the best and most cost-effective ways to grow your social media audience and generate leads. And the numbers are backing us up — research from Social Media Examiner has shown that nearly two-thirds (63%) of marketers use video content in their social media marketing.
Savvy real estate marketers are jumping on the video bandwagon, but the process can still be intimidating. Creating an animated image, GIF, or video can sound impossibly difficult —particularly if you’re over the age of 15! But in reality, there are plenty of tools that make creating these items not only simple but cost effective as well.
Here are our 6 favorite tools for creating animated real estate marketing videos.
1) WhatFix
This free tool is incredibly handy for creating animated flows, such as how-to videos (“How to search for your first apartment,” for example). WhatFix allows you to create easy flows showing the steps your audience should take. All you need is WhatFix’s extension for Firefox or Chrome to build widgets that you can imbed on your website or send “live” to your audience. The website will guide you through the simple process of creating a flow.
2) Gyazo
When it comes to creating GIFs, this free tool will make it as simple as it gets. Technically, Gyazo is a screen-capture tool, which now lets you capture and save GIFs and videos. The platform is straight forward, and while it doesn’t necessarily have advanced tools, it’s ideal for taking a screen capture from a video and turning it into an eye-catching GIF.
3) Make a GIF
Make a GIF is a more extensive tool than Gyazo, which allows you to choose from multiple options to create your GIF. It lets you use screenshots, YouTube videos, uploaded videos, or pre-made GIFs. It has the added benefit of being a free image hosting site, which means that once you’ve created your GIF, you can link directly to it from the website’s gallery. Make a GIF is free, and lets you create an account to store your creations, or request that they be deleted any time.
4) PowToon
For $59 a month (or $19 a month if you buy for at least a year), PowToon lets you create animated video and presentations, and export them to YouTube. All you have to do is “pick a look you like” from one of five animation themes. Then you can put together characters, objects, layouts, backgrounds, and anything else you need to tell your story.
5) VideoScribe
VideoScribe offers a free trial, and pricing ranging from $29 a month to a one-time purchase of $665. This tool specializes in whiteboard videos, giving you the potential to create clean, engaging video animations. It’s not a web tool, but a downloadable software, that you can even take offline if you purchase the Pro plan.
6) Moovly
For $24.92 a month (though it does offer a free trial period), Moovly is a “drag, drop, and animate” tool that lets you create quick animated real estate marketing videos in your web browser. It can create explainer videos, whiteboard animations, advertisements, and more. Not only that, it gives you 750,000 free video clips to work from.
Creating videos is one of the best ways out there to boost your real estate marketing game. These 6 tools go a long way towards making the process affordable and easy. If you try one, let us know in the comments how it turned out!
Related posts:
- 3 Ways to Boost Your Real Estate Marketing with Video
- How Inbound Marketing for Real Estate Works to Improve Sales
- 4 Real Estate Marketing Trends 2018
Archive for Katie Russell
3 Social Media Mistakes Real Estate Companies Still Make
Social media is a valuable tool for real estate businesses, but only if they use it to their best advantage and avoid these three common mistakes.
Highlights:
- By 2019, there will be an estimated 2.77 billion social media users around the globe.
- It’s imperative for real estate businesses to have a clear strategy that includes types of content, frequency, and pillar topics.
- Real estate companies need to focus on creating content that leaves their users wanting more.
As many as 81% of small and medium businesses use a social platform. And we all understand why. By 2019, there will be an estimated 2.77 billion social media users around the globe. That’s a lot of potential customers.
So, there’s no question as to why real estate companies are jumping on the social media bandwagon. And there’s no disputing social media is an effective way to increase brand awareness and generate leads. But it can be fairly useless if your company isn’t doing it right.
Top three social media mistakes real estate companies still make
Mistake #1: Using objectives instead of strategy
Social media platforms are continually making changes and updates to improve the user experience. In order to weather these changes and keep your audience engaged, it’s imperative to have a clear strategy that includes types of content, frequency, and pillar topics. Posts should reflect your real estate brand, so make sure posts follow style guidelines and reflect your specific tone.
A strategy will also help prove ROI. Social Media Examiner’s 2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report found that only 44% of marketers agree that they know how to measure social media ROI. That means two-thirds of marketers don’t know whether or how much their marketing efforts are paying off when it comes to the use of social media. A strategy that incorporates defined goals, tracking and measuring will help prove data-driven ROI and improve your social media presence.
Mistake #2: Using the most popular social media platforms
Not all social media platforms are created equal. In fact, all social media channels have different qualities that make them appeal to specific audiences. Start by identifying which platform your target audience is the most likely to seek out. For example, 81% of millennials view their Twitter account on a daily basis. If your company is looking to capture millennials as leads, your social media efforts should certainly include Twitter.
Once you’ve determined where you should be posting, concentrate on creating content that caters to those specific platforms. Lots of companies post the same content across all of the apps they use. We understand how easy that is for marketers, especially with automation tools. But the foundation of social engagement is authenticity, something that is hard to achieve when posts are the same across all channels. Work to create content — including video and images of properties — that caters to specific platforms to build brand awareness and loyalty.
Mistake #3: Promoting instead of connecting
Social media is all about engagement. Users don’t want to engage with brands that are pushing their properties. Users want informative, interesting, and yes, even fun content. Real estate companies need to focus on creating content that leaves their users wanting more.
Companies that are succeeding on social media are finding innovative and creative ways to relate to users. When you engage and get users involved in your story, you create long-lasting customer relationships. Storytelling creates an emotional bond with your company and drives brand loyalty.
Greg Hadden, executive creative director of Motive Made Studios, sums up the power of connecting with users: “What often gets lost is the fact that good storytelling is potent stuff. It has the power to make people want to believe and to belong, which is the goal of all storytellers. We’re all selling something, be it an idea, an exploration of the human condition, or say, a vacuum cleaner. It’s no mistake perhaps that good stories often create products.”
Final thoughts
Social media platforms are a powerful resource that can help your real estate business grow. But they have to be used correctly. Creating a documented strategy will help shape your brand’s social media presence and give you milestones to test and tweak your progress. Need help creating a social media strategy? Let us help.
Related posts:
- Infographic: Real Estate Social Media Marketing Strategies
- Social Media Can Be a Strategic Weapon in Real Estate Marketing
- A Visual Guide to Social Media Posting Frequency for Real Estate
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