You’ve begun building your business and created a website, but should you install other marketing tools? What should these tools do? Well, you should definitely start with your business’s website. This will be your online home, where all of your valuable content will be posted. For example, a blog is a great way to offer what you know to prospective buyers. Once you have a basic site going, it’s time to look at additional options. If you’re starting from scratch today – rather than later – here are some ideas for valuable free marketing tools for realtors:
As a real estate agent, one of the best ways to stand out in this competitive market is to make great use of marketing tools. Realtors who turn to technology for their marketing needs, are ahead of the curve. Not only will they get more leads but also grow their businesses at a much faster rate than what you can accomplish with old school methods.
Free Marketing Tools for Realtors
Real Geeks
Cost: $249 per month
Learning curve: Low
One of the earliest providers of all-in-one IDX websites and customer relationship management (CRM) tools, Real Geeks offers agents, teams, and brokerages a true turnkey solution for their online marketing efforts. There are way, way too many features to list here, but you will get a gorgeous IDX website optimized for lead generation, a powerful CRM, a property valuation tool, SMS texting, market reports, and—yeah, way too much to list here.
Propertybase
Cost: Starting at $89 per user, per month
Learning curve: Low
Originally Boston Logic, Propertybase is the professional real estate team’s secret weapon. They offer killer IDX websites with mapping features as well as an integrated CRM that is designed to help teams nurture leads long term and drive more referrals and business. If you already have a website, they offer a standalone CRM that was recently revamped to be even more effective at keeping teams organized and marketing like Fortune 500 companies.
WordPress Website
Cost: Free to $5,000 and higher
Learning curve: High
If you’re a bit more tech-savvy and want to get your hands dirty, then you might want to try your hand at building a WordPress website to show off your brand online. While WordPress is easy to use compared to building a site from scratch, the learning curve for non-tech-savvy agents is high. You’ll also need to pay to add features like IDX listings, which come standard with most real estate websites.
InCom
Cost: Starting at $44.94 per month
Learning curve: Low
If you need a website on a budget and don’t need any of the bells and whistles Real Geeks or Propertybase offer, then InCom is a great choice. They offer real estate websites with landing pages, lead generation features, and a built-in CRM starting at just $44.95 per month. A great deal in anyone’s book.
Placester
Cost: Starting at $80 per month
Learning curve: Medium
While they don’t offer an integrated CRM, Placester is definitely worth considering for one reason: they make lovely websites. While there is some debate on whether or not your website needs to be beautiful to convert leads, there is no debate that an ugly site will hurt your brand. So if you already have a CRM you love, you can’t go wrong with a Placester website.
Social Media Management Tools
While most agents understand just how important social media is to their marketing efforts in 2021, few of them actually use social media effectively. Sure, they tweet up a storm and share lots of listing pictures on Instagram, but they waste too much time tending to their social media feeds the old-fashioned way. They manually send out every tweet, every comment, and every video.
Luckily, there are marketing tools that can automate the bulk of your social media posting, which means you don’t have to stop what you’re doing to Tweet at the times studies have shown get the most engagement.
Here’s a quick rundown of a few tools to help you automate your social media posting:
Hootsuite
Cost: $29 to $599 per month
Learning curve: Low
Hootsuite is the social media software that 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies trust to plan, create, and schedule their social media posts to maximize views and engagement. Hootsuite lets you store frequently used assets like images and logos so you can create and schedule social media content for multiple channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more from one app.
Task Management Tools
- Trello
- Asana
- Google Docs
- Dropbox
While tools such as Trello and Asana can help delegate tasks and Google Docs and Dropbox are great for sharing documents, Lance reminded attendees that, while technology is great, there’s no such thing as an app that can replace you.
“If you were to have a big dinner party with your 10 most important clients, would you be there, or would you just send your assistant to manage the show?” Lane asked. “So often, even in 2018, I find so many agents and brokers who are still saying, ‘Can’t I just have someone do it for me?’
“Yes, there’s some great tools and apps and products that can help. But, at the end of the day, no one can replace you. No one can replace your knowledge or experience.”
Content Creation Tools
- Medium
- Headline Analyzer (Co-Schedule)
Medium is great to create thought leadership-type blogs, while LinkedIn has a built-in blog that allows you to share on its platform and others.
Headline Analyzer allows you to type in your headline and offers tips and suggestions on how to improve it.
Video Tools & Resources
- YouTubekatie
- IGTV (Instagram TV)
- Videorama
- Videolicous
IGTV is great for vertical videos. (So often we’re taught to shoot video horizontally, even though we’re spending more and more time on our mobile devices.) Videorama and Videolicous are simple video creation tools.
If you’re hesitant to get in front of a camera because you don’t like how you look or sound, Lance shared advice she once received: “That’s how you look, that’s how you sound. Get over it.”
Stock Photo Resources
- Death to Stock Photo
- Unsplash
- Pixabay
Email Marketing
- Mailchimp
- Hemingway App
- Grammarly
- Lists
- Messenger
- Pages Manager
- Insights
- TV
Lance said Facebook Lists are “one of the best available and underutilized” tools. It allows you to get away from your noisy newsfeed and instead sorts your clients separately, allowing you to only see and interact with them.
The Insights tool is great to monitor which posts are or aren’t working, while the Pages Manager allows you to schedule posts in advance. BeLive.TV does the same for Facebook Live videos.
- WordSwag
- Canva
- Boomerang
- Storeo
- LinkTree
Lance believes Instagram is the social media platform to watch in the coming year.
While Instagram Stories are limited to 15 seconds, Storeo allows you to take a longer video and automatically breaks it down into 15-second clips. LinkTr.ee allows you to add more links to your Instagram bio, which currently limits you to one.
Conclusions
The real estate market is difficult to navigate, and you need all the help you can get. That’s why, today, I’m sharing 31 free marketing tools for real estate agents. After sharing with you 31 free marketing tools for freelancers , I realized that another industry also needed the help. So here you go!