Who doesn’t love some good free stuff? I know I do! There are some real estate marketing tools that cost hundreds of dollars, but some don’t. Hopefully, this article will save you some money and time searching for the best marketing tools for real estate. I’m listing the marketing tools that I personally use or have used in the past so they are tried and tested. They all have free options but there are paid ones available depending on your individual needs.
Real estate-related businesses those days are trying to find some new tools for advertising, data, or sales. In these environments, it is more important than ever before to have a nice networking approach. In the past years, there were a big amount of marketing platforms around which made this process easier. But today it’s difficult to choose one because all of them have limitations and some of them even don’t support mobile phones.
Set Yourself Up For Social.
Make sure you have social media accounts on all the big networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and even Instagram if you snap a lot of house pics). Interact with users, share good press, and promote your properties.
Real Estate Marketing Tools
1. CRM
It feels like every time anyone talks about real estate marketing tools, social media is the first suggestion. And I’ll get to social media, but there’s one thing that outranks Facebook and Instagram when it comes to real estate marketing. That’d be a CRM.
A CRM or customer relationship management software is a tool that brings all of your marketing tools — your email marketing platform, your social media accounts, marketing and sales documents, and workflows — into one place.
Each of those tools — combined, your tech stack — has a specific and important purpose for your real estate marketing strategy. But, when you’re managing social media in one place, your website in another, and email in yet another, it’s difficult to align your marketing efforts, and harder still just to keep track of what’s posting or sending out when.
A good CRM brings all of those tools into one simple, easy-to-use platform, with the added benefit of tracking every single lead that comes into your real estate development or agency.
Never drop a warm lead or forget to send an email again. If you’re serious about boosting your real estate marketing strategy, it’s time to get serious about a CRM.
There are a ton of options out there, but we always recommend HubSpot. They offer a free version (not a trial, a totally free version of their CRM), that’s a great way to get started and see how much a CRM can do for you.
When all of your marketing tools live in one place, it’s so much easier to make the most of all of them.
2. ClickUp
Clickup is similar to Trello, but offers more features. Both of them are pretty standard productivity apps that can keep you organized. If you collaborate in a team setting, Clickup would be a better tool for you. The web and mobile apps are intuitive and simple to use which makes it a favorite for industries like real estate.
You can organize or assign projects (statuses) day-to-day, just like in other popular project management tools. These statuses are customizable. For example, you could have statuses catalogued as lead generation, in contract, sold, follow up etc. There are three viewing modes – list, box, and board. It helps filter information so you’re not overwhelmed with to-dos.
Pricing
Clickup is essentially a free project management software. The Business plan starts at $5 per user per month billed annually.
Tip
It’s easy to follow up on tasks in a team setting using the assigned comments feature. You can create an assigned comment directly within any existing comment (action item) and assign it to anyone on your team.
3. Zoom
Zoom is many things to many businesses – a collaboration tool, a teleconferencing tool, a meeting tool, a quick chat tool, or just a tool for conducting training sessions. It’s very versatile, which is probably the reason why the company saw a lot of growth in 2020. For real estate, you can conduct showings with Zoom, client or team meetings, or just leverage Zoom chat for assigning tasks.
Zoom Chat is an IM client that allows you to instantly jump into a meeting and see or post company-wide announcements. You want to limit the ability to make postings to executive leadership or your PR team. To reference a conversation in another chat, you can create a direct link to that chat group by typing #[channel name].
Pricing
Zoom Basic is free, Zoom Pro costs $14.99 per host per month, Zoom business costs $19.99 per host per month.
Tip
Use Zoom’s settings to make your appearance better – the “touch up my appearance” option in Zoom settings would come handy. You could also get a ring light which cost less than $40 since lighting is very important for making good videos.
4. BoxBrownie
360-degree photos in real estate have become the norm. You can get a high-resolution 360-degree camera for less than $300. And they work because people love immersive content. BoxBrownie has a slew of photography experts who help fine-tune your 360-degree real estate photos.
For real estate agents, they offer CGI renders and photo enhancements including virtual staging, removing unwanted clutter, turning property photos from day to dusk. BoxBrownie is on this list because of its virtual staging services, allowing you to use top-notch home staging with your 360° photos to create the right impression.
Pricing
Pricing is per project. Regular image enhancements cost $1.6, day to dusk enhancement costs $4. You can do virtual staging at $32 per project and full virtual renovation at $24 to $172, depending on complexity.
Tip
When taking a 360° photo, you want to show off an area or room with many interesting features, considering that the viewer will want to explore the full image.
05. Chatbots
Chatbots are an amazing real estate marketing tool.
Why?
Let’s think about your homebuyers.
When are they most often actively browsing for homes? While some people might browse on their lunch hour, or on late Friday afternoons when they’re ready to be done with work, the majority of your leads are scrolling through virtual home tours at night and on the weekends.
And while you like to be available as much as possible, most prospects aren’t going to call you up on a Thursday night at 11pm to ask about a house or property.
That’s where chatbots come in.
These handy little real estate marketing tools work for you 24/7, helping you engage with leads around the clock — whenever they’re most interested in a home, lot, or property.
Chatbots work in a few different ways — you can set them up to message you directly, you can give them a few questions to ask, or you can build them out to be fully interactive.
No matter how you start, any chatbot does a great job of making your real estate company available to your leads whenever they’re most interested in you. That creates some serious lead generation potential.
Conclusion
There’s always a new app or a new website pushing for your attention, telling you it’s the next big thing. There are hundreds of real estate marketing tools out there. But, when it comes down to it, the most successful real estate marketing tools are the ones you own.
When it comes to building your real estate business, you’ll need advertising tools because you will be fighting for the attention of potential clients. But which tools should you use? The choice is yours!