March 23, 2016 / BY Admin / no comments

As a real estate professional where would you rather spend your time, in front of your client or bogged down with marketing? What is the hottest technology trend for real estate firms in 2016? It’s real estate marketing automation, and sadly, nearly two-thirds of franchise leaders and real estate brokerages currently still do not use it.

Nearly one third, or 29%, plan on implementing this game-changing technology this year and over 56% plan to increase their marketing automation only next year. The era of paying for billboards, sending out flyers or cold-calling leads is long gone. Automated marketing is affordable, is a time saver, and it frees you up to be out in the field where you are most effective.

In short, real estate marketing automation is the act of syncing your real estate marketing efforts to software that makes sharing, publishing and analyzing your content a cinch. Instead of having to manually share every tweet, send every email and manually publish every blog post, it completes each of these tasks for you.

You can actually schedule an entire month’s worth of emails, blog posts and social updates in a couple of hours.  Some of the key benefits include:

• Saving money – Automation provides an all-in-one fix instead of requiring multiple software solutions to keep your marketing and sales efforts in order

• Updating done in real time – You will know the exact minute when a lead takes an action and you can respond immediately while you have their attention, which increases your engagement level with that prospect.

• Lead nurturing – Automation options inform you how far along your leads are in the sales funnel and even makes recommendations on the next steps in nurturing that prospect.

Sales, lead generation, and website traffic can all be improved but you still must be dedicated to writing blog posts, social media posts and email copy. Your blog plays one of the most vital roles in real estate marketing success as well as offering your clients lots of great content to share, whether you use automation or not, but automation is the key.

If you write five different blog posts in one sitting, your automation software will allow you to post one piece ASAP and will allow you to schedule the remaining four articles over the course of the next few weeks. This eliminates the necessity of manually uploading each post one-at-a-time over the coming month.

You can maximize the performance of your blog posts by sharing them via email, which you can automate as well. This will allow you to send the right messages to the right leads at the right time. Assume someone provides you their email address by downloading an e-book. You need to thank them for their download and for providing their personal information which is done by sending a follow up email. If you get several downloads, this can become time consuming and labour intensive.

This is where the best real estate marketing automation comes in, and is immensely useful. Most automation platforms allow you to set up workflows based on certain actions that are taken on your website. You can set the system so it will send out multiple emails to thank the user three or four times over the span of a month or two to provide them with your newsletter, promotional email or digest. Don’t worry; this doesn’t require a lot of tech know-how to set up.

Automation software systems like MailChimp have pre-set workflows to make it easy for anyone to schedule the appropriate message for different lead segments. All you need in the email is a short description defining the reason for each message and pertinent links to your content.

Would you like to make your social media marketing easier and faster? Of course you would, and there are top real estate marketing automation solutions that allow you to post now and well into the future making your social media marketing less complicated. If you are posting on Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis and you want to tweet links to your latest blog content over a two-week period or publish status updates about your latest listings, there are a couple of excellent automation software platforms that will accomplish these tasks and make it simple for you.

Buffer and Hootsuite are two of the most popular social media automation services out there and they offer an all-in-one automation solution that allow scheduling to all major networks.

Every real estate professional should create a Facebook business page as this offers an excellent digital real estate marketing automation opportunity. It will give you a competitive advantage among local competitors. Facebook’s ad platform allows precise demographic and behavioral targeting and can actually focus on income, behaviours and interests, as well as geographic location.

Before implementing a Facebook ad campaign, make sure you have clear goals in place. When setting up your Ad program, Facebook allows you to choose what you want from your ad campaign such as increasing conversions, promoting a specific page and getting people to claim your offer. If you want to capture leads, then your primary goal would be website conversions.

Another excellent source to find motivated buyers and sellers is on Craigslist. When posting an advertisement on Craigslist your post should paint a story about the property. A headline should inspire the prospect to click on the text and investigate further. Give them what they want by striking their heart and always call them to action by putting “Text us at” or “Are you excited to see more?”, “Email us through the contact button for amazing images”, etc.

Write an advertisement that stands out. Craigslist ads disappear very quickly in populous areas so you will need to re-post them frequently. If you have a specific property you want to feature, consider hiring a professional Craigslist poster to do your advertising for you.

Marketing Automation is a real time-saver for real estate agents and it allows for consistent and improved communication with satisfied clients. There are several reasons you should institute a top-notch real estate marketing automation tool today, including sending timely messages, generating new leads, being available 24/7, offering targeting advice and information, and staying in front of your social media network.