Imagine your marketing running by itself for weeks at a time.
You would have a lot more time for the people to people parts of real estate. The important stuff.
You can start automating parts of your marketing and prospecting to accomplish this.
Each one of your days is usually different, but there are still handfuls of tasks that don't need your immediate attention.
Part of your marketing should be aiming for consistency and being consistently known as the go-to agent.
The more people see you as an authority over and over again, the truer this becomes.
Look at what you do weekly and which of these tasks can be automated. Most of this automation is online.
Your brand online is something you can send any leads to, so they can learn more about you and what value you offer. But you don't need to be looking over each part of this every day.
You should be active on your Facebook, email lists and your website. You can schedule an entire quarters worth of blog posts, emails, and social updates over the course of a couple of hours.
Automating your marketing can also track leads, inform you about them and help you respond to them instantly.
Before you set any of this up you need to:
- Segment your leads and then plan on continuing to do that.
- Have a timeline planned out of your leads, prospecting, and current listings.
- Have it all on a marketing calendar with any other content or marketing you want to do.
Your CRM (customer relationship management system) is a tool that will save you time and money.
There are a lot of free ones you can easily find online. Creating separate email lists is also important.
In your CRM you should separate your hot and cold leads. You should decide what groups to put contacts in and as you add them.
Your hot leads are any people who've you interacted with, in person or online. They may have filled out a form or provided you their contact information in person.
You can target these leads/owners with relevant market information, that we'll get to later.
Your cold leads have not had any contact with you. They are FSBOs, expireds or any other owners that you want to pursue down the line.
If you want to add warm leads you can. They would be anyone you have had contact in some way with, but may not be selling yet. For agents this category isn't that important, you can just call them cold leads.
Then sort what types of leads you have.
Separate FSBOs, expireds, luxury homes and so on. This way you can send them relevant marketing material and information about their housing situation.
Most realtors don't do this and just mass market. It can make a huge difference.
Then you should have a timeline for your listings. Ads, brochures and anyway you promote your listing should be planned out.
This way since it is not as crucial as prospecting an owner, you don't have to do each step. The first 30 days are the most important.
And if everything is planned out and runs smooth, you can use that for your marketing material, talking about how precise your marketing is.
Successful automation is all about timed actions. So after a certain number of days or a certain interaction online, another ad will follow.
Create a calendar of content you want to promote online (or with direct mail), that will bring value to your lists.
You should plan it out a month or a quarter and either get it wrote or curate other people's while giving them credit.
Past clients should be involved in this. Plan to send out holiday greetings and anniversaries for their move.
Once you've completed these steps, you can choose what to automate and where.
Here is what you can automate:
Your Social Media Business Accounts
Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter all work great like this. Schedule out your posts for months at a time.
In Facebook, you can even run ads toward your segmented audiences.
You can post:
- Funny real estate content from around the web.
- Content from your own blog.
- Other people's blogs and content.
- Give people their credit and work with them when posting.
The main thing here is to give people items of value. There are a seemingly endless number of subjects you can post in the buying and selling process.
Mortgages, title insurance, appraisals, the subjects for real estate are almost endless.
Send leads or people you meet to these pages. Ask them to like or follow you. Then they'll see what you post and learn important parts of these processes.
This will increase their trust in you.
Post about local events going on and stuff around the community.
Ranking the best restaurants, parks, and things of that nature are great things to posts about. Even people who aren’t in the market for a home will be interested in them (your cold leads).
Then whenever they are looking for stuff on the housing market, they should have you in mind. They will not want to do business with others because you have established yourself as the local authority online.
But for this to happen, you need a steady flow of incoming content on your platforms.
It's easy to schedule these out on each platform.
Email Newsletters and Market Updates
These work the same way as your social media accounts. It paints you as the authority in that market or niche.
Email is the easiest way to segment specific owners. If the luxury market is going up, email your list of luxury home owners.
If you found a great blog on tips for FSBOs, send it to your FSBO list. When they do eventually list, they'll remember you as the one who helped them.
Schedule out your personal and holiday emails as well.
These are no sweat if you knock them all out at once. It's important for past clients.
Stay in touch with them and email your new leads as well on important dates.
Also, use email automation tools to build and schedule mixes of various types of content and listings. Just like your social media.
Once a template is set up, plugging in your content is quick and simple. This will nurture your audiences.
Set Your CRM to Capture Leads from Your Website
Facebook pixels visitors to pages you set up as well. This way you can target viewers of FSBO articles or home value forms.
This blog goes over that process.
http://smartagents.com/blog/you-need-to-take-advantage-of-facebook-leads/
Once your CRM is set up, it is easy to integrate with your lead capture form on your website.
If you have 60 real estate website visitors in a week who fill out a form with their contact information, instead of going into your CRM and manually adding their information, use a platform that does all that for you and more.
The best ones will do it for you.
Lead Follow Up Reminders
This is one of the most important things. Don't automate your first encounter with a lead at all.
So set up reminders to check your new leads. Then you can reach out to them and inform them while addressing thier needs.
This also makes your lead tracking easier, since your looking it up every week or so to see what new contacts came in.
Automatic Texts/Emails or Voicemails
This is when a lead reaches out to you on one of these platforms. If you can't get back to them that second, you can make it seem like you have with these.
If someone reaches out to you in these forms, these programs can respond with texts that have information about what they requested or voicemails as well.
Our product "Mobile Real Estate Marketer" does just that.
Set your email up to do the same thing as well.
Then later you can respond to the leads in a more personal way, but you have already provided value to their inquiry.
Physical Mail Campaigns
This is where you really can send leads things of value. But you need an assistant or even a virtual assistant to get the mailing done.
It's still automated, however.
There are also mail services that will hit whole areas with letters or materials for you. Smart Agents members send books with valuable selling or buying information to win leads all the time.
You also don't need a contact list for this.
Using services that allow you to generate geographically targeted mailing lists can help you reach an audience without having to build the contact list out.
The books our members send out help them stand out by giving huge value to owners and being a real estate authority.
Those are what we suggest automating.
There are a few of things you should never automate.
Qualifying Your Leads
There are a lot of services that offer this. But like anything that gets put through Zillow, there is no way to get them enough information to do this task.
Use your own judgment when assessing your leads. Not all these owners and sellers will be going through the same timeline for selling either.
So if they aren't ready just classify them as a hot lead.
Any Online Responses to Questions
Having your auto-responders answer at first is good. But you need to follow back up with them in a timely fashion.
If they reach out to you on email and Facebook, it can be set up to respond with information and say you'll also get back to them.
A CMA
You are no more useful than Zillow if you have software that automates this or even pulls from other estimates in the area.
This is a physical task you can use to stand out from other agents (and Zillow). Smart Agents members get a lead capture website that offers a home value report.
What it does is gives the information to the realtor, who can contact them to set up an appointment.
You can set-up a contact form on your website for the same thing.
Any Lead Follow Up
I mentioned this earlier, but this is usually the most important step. You want to make your first encounter with a lead personable and valuable.
What if you left a book that you were the author of with these owners?
Books have a tremendous perceived value. They don’t get thrown away.
It is the most personable and valuable thing to give to an owner.
They can get tucked away somewhere, but most people aren’t going to toss them in the trash. They’re worth something, and they’re worth something to the author’s name.
Do this, and you will position yourself as the authority in your market.
When you give away your book, it will separate you from your competition.
The more of these tasks you have automated, the more time you will have to work on making a connection with an owner.
The books will speed that up, building their trust in you instantly.
Want to get a free sample of the book that will get you more listings? Click the link below.
Joe Nickelson is a real estate professional dedicated to helping home buyers and sellers achieve their dreams of owning property, and helping real estate agents stop using the sometimes-vicious tactics that weigh on their consciences. He believes that the Smart Agents books will, quite literally, change people’s lives for the better. Check out his full bio here!
