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Real estate marketing guide: Ideas, tips and tools

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The real estate marketing guide is a comprehensive look at real estate marketing ideas, strategies, tools & software. This guide covers both offline and online real estate marketing ideas, from direct mail postcards to email campaigns. If you’re a broker or marketing director for a real estate agency, sharing these marketing ideas with your real estate agents will help you stay on the same page as you work together to build a formidable real estate brand.

We’ll start first with marketing strategies.

PART 1

Marketing strategy

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Give readers value.

Your agency’s content should be relevant, timely, and offer something new to your audience (such as information, data or insights).

Write for the internet.

Writing for an online audience is different than writing for print. Shorten your sentences, break up text with brief paragraphs and bullet points, and always put the most important info first.

Provide visual interest.

Our brains process images quicker than text, so if you really want to attract attention, use visuals. Photos, infographics, charts & graphs, and quality real estate listing videos are all great ways to add visual interest to your real estate content.

Harness social media.

Gone are the days of “If you build it, they will come.” Today, you have to promote your real estate content. Social media can help you spread the word, or you can create content directly on the platform. For example, you can host a live video session on Facebook.

Use SEO.

Search engine optimization can seem daunting, but using basic best practices like including keywords in your content and landing pages will drive traffic to your real estate website. Use website plugins like Yoast to quickly add metadata and sitemaps to your site to improve your discoverability in Google.

Repurpose your content.

Remember the old saying, “Reduce, reuse, recycle”? It applies here, too. Get more mileage out of your content by adapting it to different forms: blog posts, infographics, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, video, or any other format you’re itching to try.

It starts with a keyword.

People will opt in to your advertising by texting a specific keyword to a 6-digit number called a shortcode. Make it short (2-15 characters), easy to remember, and relevant to your business.

Advertise your keyword and short code.

Share the details on your website, social media pages, and business cards. You can even include it in places like physical “For Sale” signs, so people will see it when they drive by.

Give your audience an incentive.

Texts are a personal form of communication, and you don’t want your content to feel intrusive. Offer something in return for opting in, like a discount or early access to new real estate listings.

Follow the law.

Text message marketing has to follow certain guidelines. Make sure your opt-out process is clear, and let subscribers know how often they’ll hear from you (e.g. “2-3 texts per month”). Don’t send irrelevant messages to your subscribers—keep it focused on your marketing campaign.

PART 2

Real estate marketing technology

DocuSign

Takes care of all the paperwork your real estate agents have to handle during the buying process. It’s quick & easy, and it makes storing and searching through all that paperwork simple.

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Trello

An online project management program that will help your real estate agents collaborate closer on their real estate projects. You can assign tasks to your team members and watch their progress.

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Slack

A messaging service that makes communicating with your real estate agents a breeze, because everyone is connected across all of their devices.

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WeVideo

Helps turn your phone into a video production agency. People want to see videos of the properties and areas they’re shopping in. Create beautiful and professional-looking videos with this app to offer your clients a visual experience.

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Matterport

A 3D visualization tool that empowers you to create three-dimensional tours of the homes you’re selling. This will give buyers both near and far the opportunity to get to know the property before going inside.

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Realeflow

A tool designed for beginner and intermediate real estate agents. This investment tool helps users find, fund and sell properties and manage other real estate tasks.

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Marq

A brand-templating platform. You can design branded templates for professional-looking flyers, brochures, postcards and any other marketing content your real estate agents need. The lockable templates protect your brand from rogue designers and make sharing easy between listing coordinators and agents.

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Adobe Photoshop

a powerful but complex design tool preferred by most professional graphic designers today. If you’re proficient with Photoshop, you can edit photos with a deep level of control and a wide variety of techniques.

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Google AdWords

Promotes your website with digital ads that pop up whenever potential buyers are searching for services similar to yours. It’s a great way to quickly boost traffic to your site and raise brand awareness.

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PART 3

Real estate branding

Establish the brand:

This is where you create your brand. Now, this is more than just the logos, fonts and colors. It also includes the big ideas behind your brand. What will your voice be like? How will you interact with clients? There should be a definitive beginning and end to this phase that results in a strong brand identity.

Position the brand:

Now that you’ve developed a strong brand identity, it’s time to communicate it to everyone. Each interaction with the public should set and reinforce the expectations for your brand. This phase requires that every brand player on your team has access to current brand assets and messaging.

Maintain the brand:

Brand management is very important for real estate, especially because clients want to feel that they can trust you. A consistent brand and message will help buyers and sellers feel that they understand you and know what to expect.

Brand prison

In the brand prison, no one is allowed to make content except for corporate staff. Designers are overloaded by all of the updates and tweaks they have to make, instead of focusing on bigger projects. Even worse, rogue content is still created in brand prison—you just don’t know about it. Understandably, designers and agents both feel stymied and frustrated.

Wild West

In the Wild West, there are no brand management guidelines, or they are not enforced. Rogue content is everywhere as real estate agents make their own materials without any direction. Understandably, your brand consistency suffers.