Real Estate Advertising Using Your CRM (Real Estate Marketing Ideas)

In many ways, there has never been a better time to be a real estate agent. Thanks to the internet, you now have countless marketing methods for finding prospects and connecting them with the homes of their dreams. Still, having countless marketing options can be a challenge unto itself if you don't understand which ones hold the most promise for growing your business. While there are many worth considering, a real estate CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform should be at the very top of that list.

8 Ways a Real Estate CRM Platform Should Improve Your Marketing

Real estate CRM software has emerged as a major competitive edge among Realtors. It's become almost unthinkable for a serious Realtor to try growing their business without one. However, all real estate CRM platforms are not the same. Choose one that offers all eight of the following marketing features so your campaigns don't fall short of their potential.

1. Adding Landing Pages to Your Marketing Funnel

More and more, Realtors are using landing pages to attract new clients. There are two reasons for this. The first is that landing pages are an extremely simple marketing asset. Despite their popularity and potential, they remain incredibly cost-effective.

The second reason is that social media has actually made them even more effective. Facebook ads are a great example of this. Creating a Facebook marketing campaign that drives qualified traffic to landing pages can be both simple and affordable. Most importantly, it can also lead to huge conversion rates. Of course, they can also be a huge waste of time and money. Even with Facebook's notoriously low ad prices, a low-converting campaign can quickly create an overwhelming amount of overhead. This is where a real estate CRM should be a valuable solution by allowing you to create your own high-converting landing pages. Realtors can even make pages for individual properties, as opposed to a general business profile. Then, it's just a matter of displaying ads for that property in front of the right prospects – and conversions are inevitable.

2. Managing and Making the Most of Every Lead

As you get better at creating successful Facebook ads, you may run into a very enviable problem: attracting more leads than you can manage. Right now, that might sound amazing, but as nice of a problem as it is, it's still a problem. If you're not properly managing your leads, you're wasting money.

Once again, this is where a high-quality real estate CRM platform should make your life a lot easier. Whether your leads are coming from Facebook, Zillow, your landing page, or some other website, you want software that will first put them through an enhancement system before you attempt any more marketing. Adding just this one simple step could make the difference between knowing someone may be interested in buying a new home and also knowing important facts about them, like their:

• Full Name
• Company Name
• Job Title
• Location
• Photo
• Social Media Accounts

If you're paying for qualified leads, this extra step is absolutely crucial. Acting on nothing more than an email address carries a high likelihood of failure – a costly prospect when you buy leads. The best CRM platforms even let Realtors split test their leads to learn which messages return the best results. Over time, these kinds of insights will turn any marketing campaign into a consistent source of conversions.

3. Creating Customized Marketing Emails

Email marketing continues to offer the highest ROI of any channel, so it's no surprise that most realtors rely on it heavily. That said, there's a big difference between high-quality, branded emails built on proven templates with HTML images and the kind that anyone can send from your average email service. Obviously, you want to be sending the former. Given how important it is to present a professional image, sending emails without branding could actually do more harm than good. Fortunately, if you use a cutting-edge CRM platform, this is easy. You can quickly create a completely customized email, add a message, and send it out, confident that you're making a profitable impression.

4. Supporting Lead-Nurturing Through Drip Campaigns

One of the best ways to use email marketing is with drip campaigns. Combined with landing pages, drip campaigns can automate the vast majority of your entire marketing funnel. All you need to do is wait for prospects who reach the conversion step and then connect them with the home of their dreams.

In the past, though, this was much easier said than done. Before a Realtor could start enjoying an automated funnel, they had to put in a lot of time creating successful campaigns. Without that essential component, there will be no conversions. However, if you pick the right real estate CRM software, you'll have access to campaigns and letters that are proven to convert. Edit them how you like based on your unique prospects and then start using split-testing to refine your approach until it's nurturing leads all on its own around the clock. Keep in mind that this level of advanced software can still be used for snail mail if you have leads who prefer that channel. In fact, you should be able to use a CRM to print off letters and use mail-labeling and envelope tools to optimize the process.

5. Maintaining Ongoing Engagement with Monthly Newsletters

Often times, nurturing a prospect to the point when they're ready to buy a home can take several months – maybe longer.

This is when monthly newsletters become a valuable tool. It will put you in front of your prospects again and again, so when they're ready to buy, you're the Realtor they immediately think to contact.

The other great thing about a newsletter is that you're actually providing value. Keep prospects posted about the local real estate market and they'll begin looking forward to each month's newsletter. So, not only will they think of you when they need a real estate agent, they'll also associate you with being helpful – an important quality in a Realtor. Choose a real estate CRM platform that can send these newsletters (in English and Spanish) to your entire database and you'll enjoy their benefits without significantly adding to your workload.

6. Curating Custom Content for Your Leads with an RSS Feed

Yet another way a quality real estate CRM platform should help you stay in front of your market is with an RSS tool. While a newsletter is something you can send to an entire database, blogs are more specific. If your CRM software includes an RSS tool, subscribe to any blogs that post content you know may interest your audience. Then it's just a matter of scrolling through your feed every day and picking out topics for individuals on your list. For example, say you have a lead you know is worried about the mortgage process. If you find a post on this very topic, your CRM platform will let you send it to them with one click. Just like with a newsletter, you've now reminded your lead just how helpful you are.

7. Delivering Time-Sensitive Information with Bulk Text Messages

There are a number of reasons Realtors sometimes need to send out mass emails to their entire databases. Unfortunately, when it's a time-sensitive reason, mass emails often don't get read and making that many phone calls is just impractical. That's why the best real estate CRM platforms now support the ability to send mass texts. People might go days without checking their emails. Many ignore calls from numbers they don't know. But everyone checks text messages the moment they receive them. So, if a sale just fell through and you need to get lots of people to an open house ASAP, bulk SMS text messaging is a major advantage.

8. Measuring Your Marketing Plan's Success with Analytics

Finally, you can't improve what you can't measure, which is why it's imperative that you choose a real estate CRM platform with plenty of analytics. Ideally, these reports should be easy to pull, as well. That way, you can track your marketing efforts on a regular basis and make changes as necessary. This is especially important when you're first beginning a marketing campaign. You want to detect which changes need to be made ASAP. The sooner you do, the sooner you can make those changes and enjoy a better marketing funnel. Likewise, the longer you continue relying on an underperforming funnel, the longer you'll waste money on leads you can't convert.

Immediately Grow Your Marketing Campaign with a Real Estate CRM

As you can see, the right real estate CRM software can be a force-multiplier for your marketing efforts. You'll be able to reach more leads, learn more about them, better engage with them, and, of course, convert at a higher rate without significantly increasing your overhead. All you need to do is pick a real estate CRM with all the features covered above.

To view the original article, visit the Wise Agent blog.

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