What to Consider When Choosing Real Estate Marketing Tools

Want more time, money, and freedom? As a busy real estate agent, in order to achieve these three things, you need to put the right systems and structures in place to save time and ensure success. 

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: when it comes down to it, it’s really about working smarter, not harder. 

There are hundreds of real estate marketing tools out there that claim to save you time and increase your results, so how do you choose what’s right for your business? In this post, we’ll walk you through 4 key considerations to help you hone in on the best tools to optimize your business.

Outline Your Current Process

The first thing that you’ll need to do is to take a step back and analyze where you’re at. What are you currently doing with your marketing and lead generation efforts? 

Ask yourself:

1. What works well? 
2. What’s not working?
3. What are you not doing but need to do in order to be successful?
4. What’s generating results? 

Once you have the answers to these questions, you can put together your ideal business plan that includes your marketing, lead generation, and follow-up.

Identify What Can Be Automated from your Current Process

Now that you have an overview of your business strategy, it’s time to think about what can be automated, and what you need to do yourself. 

If you’re spending time doing any of the following, you have an opportunity to save yourself time and optimize your results by using a marketing or lead generation tool:

• Manually running Facebook & Instagram ads on every new listing, open house, just sold property or price drop
• Creating marketing reports for your clients by hand
• Sending out follow up emails and text messages 
• Logging and tracking all of your leads in an excel spreadsheet
• Writing down notes from your calls
• Posting your listings and blog posts to social media

Even by automating just one of these tasks, you could find yourself with an extra 20-40 hours per month.

All-in-one Real Estate Marketing Platforms vs. Specialized Tools

Once you have your list of actions that you can automate, it’s time to find a tool that has the right capabilities. 

Some agents will prefer to use separate, specialized tools, for each task that they want to automate. For example, they have a tool that they use for social media posting, a tool to run Facebook ads, a standalone CRM, a blog, and an email service. If you take this route, you’ll need to ensure that all of your tools have the correct integrations so that they can all work together. Otherwise, you’ll lose time (and frankly your own sanity) constantly moving leads from your blog, ads, and social media to your CRM.

If you can, a better route is to use a platform that automates everything you need. That way you can streamline all of your marketing, lead generation, and follow-up efforts and have everything organized in one place.

Assess Ease of Use

There are all different levels of marketing tools from the simplest to incredibly complicated tools that allow you different levels of customization. 

When choosing a tool, you’ll need to take into consideration the learning curve and how long it will take before you and your team can set up the tool and comfortably use it.

If your end goal is to save time with automation, choosing a tool that is easier to use can save you and your team precious hours.

Choose your Ideal Tool!

There are so many real estate automation tools out there, and at the end of the day, it’s all about what works best for you and your business. Starting your search may feel overwhelming, but taking some time to really think about the points in this post should help you narrow down your options and find the tool that will help you optimize your operations and achieve your goals.