Top 13 Real Estate Marketing Tools

You love listing homes, hosting open houses – even driving from location to location isn’t a bother. But when it comes to marketing yourself, there are a million things you’d rather do. It seems like there’s always a new trick or “hack” to generate better results from your real estate marketing plan! 

We know that you don’t have all day to learn about and pay for confusing new applications that ironically claim to simplify your life. 

So we’re going to clarify which specific marketing tools will help you consolidate your real estate marketing strategy in a way that is efficient, easy to follow, and easy to measure.

Why Use Real Estate Marketing Automation Tools?

Automating some of your day tasks can help you save time, reach audiences efficiently, and maintain a positive brand image online. Real estate businesses handle mounds of private and important data both for their clients and themselves. Handling these large and detailed data sets manually can be a painstaking process that leads to the risk of human error.

Marketing automation also allows marketers to accurately monitor campaigns. Automation allows you to get measurable data to on the success of your marketing campaigns so that you can make the right changes in the future.

The most attractive function of automation for many agents is the ability to save time. With the right real estate automation software, you can focus on selling homes while mundane tasks are rtaking care if themselves in the background.

The types of automated marketing software available to real estate agents are wide and detailed, however, we’ll focus on the foundational, best marketing automation tools agents need to use now.

Chances are, you already have some type of automation existing in your day-to-day process—whether it is your calendar reminders or automatic alerts, for example.

• Cost: With the right marketing tools and strategies, you can execute a success full digital marketing plan for a great price.
• Automation: With automated tools take care of simple tasks, agents can focus on other parts of the job like meeting clients, prepping listing appointments, and showing properties. Plus, marketing automation can decrease the risk of burnout, increase satisfaction, and cut down on manual errors.
• Search Engine Optimization: SEO has a nearly incomparable power to build your online reputation and build traction with the right audience. SEO strategies push your real estate website to the top of Google search results which can lead to a consistent and surprising amount of leads.
• Strong client relationships: Regular activity on online platforms such as social media and email allows realtors to build lasting relationships with current clients, leads, and propsects.
• Wider reach. Early 21st century advertising usually meant newspapers, Tv commercials, posters, and other tangible marketing materials. However, physical ads can get expensive and only come agents were able to afford enough to make a serious impact. Online advertising has evened the field for all agents, no matter the budget.
• A clear understanding of what your audience wants: Analytic features on most current marketing tools will help you to understand exactly which marketing strategies click with your audience and which marketing channels you should invest the most time and money in. No need for guesswork or trial and error.

How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Software for Your Real Estate Business

Sit down with your team and brainstorm some activities that could be simplified by automation. Ask specific questions such as:

• What are some common repetitive tasks that agents do at each stage of the client journey?
• Which of these repetitive tasks commonly have manual errors and are time-consuming?
• Are these processes major contributors to business growth and production?
• Which tasks create the most frustration for your agents or team?

When considering areas for real estate marketing automation in your existing process, take note of the data analysis tools that come with each tool. Once you get familiar with the analytics tool, set time aside each month to look into that information for more insights into how to improve your lead gen and marketing strategy.

We’ve broken down the top ten recommended real estate marketing tools into three broad categories:

• 1. CRM’s & Contact Tools
• 2. Lead Generation
• 3. Email Marketing
• 4. Social Media

Now, let’s look at this process with real estate marketing automation:

1. A new lead shares their information through an open house sign in form or a lead magnet from your real estate website. All of these details are immediately sent to your CRM.
2. When a new client ID contact is created, the clock automatically starts. You receive alerts for a new interaction and prospects enter your lead funnel where automatic drip emails are sent, guiding them towards an initial meeting or phone call.
3. Your automated email and messaging tools automatically maintain the follow-up sequence with information that is relevant to them such as guides to the local area, homes that match their preferences, and detailed information about the success they can exact working with you.
4. You receive an alert when a leads indicate interest. They may have opened an email, clicked a link, or sent you an SMS message to express their interest in finding or selling a home with you as their agent.
5. Your CRM actively manages all of these interactions so you can see who is a hot lead, who is a cool lead, and which tasks require extra attention.
6. Clients now follow you on social media platforms and engage often with posts that you scheduled in advance.
7. In order to learn more about their new home and neighborhood after buying, they return to your website to find helpful articles about the area.

Although marketing automation tools may come with a financial cost, it is well worth the time you save while wearing them. These tools can get your real estate marketing campaigns out the door in lightening speed and help you generate materials and answers before a human could even type them out.

Let’s get to it!

The Best Real Estate Marketing Tools on the Market

Real estate agents have digital tools for almost everything. From client management to social media, there is a wide range of digital tools at a range of different details and costs. It can be challenging for agents to choose which tools are essential and how much they are worth paying for. The following list will identify which tools have the best ROI in every major category.

CRM’s & Contact Tools For Real Estate Agents

Countless customer relationship management issues can ruin a good day. Do you have trouble tracking leads for future opportunities? Missing data and analytics about your client’s interests? How about the dreaded booking mix-up?

The real estate marketing tools below are meant to help you expand and nurture your client network at every stage. Customer Relationship Management tools (CRMs specifically), help to automate and consolidate countless relationship-oriented tasks so that you don’t miss the details. You can expect the best CRMs to cover a few essential tasks:

• Automatically personalize contact information with each lead’s name.
• Sort different clientele for different follow-up tracks or outreach efforts.
• Assess the efficiency of your current lead pipeline and predict transactions for the year or quarter.
• Assign (and reassign) prospects to different real estate professionals on your team based on your programmed variables.
• Streamline your data entry processes so accounts are automatically updated as prospects interact with you, and sent to the next stage of the funnel.
• Automatically set up tasks for each stage of a lead’s journey so you receive timely reminders, have appointments scheduled in your calendar, and never leave misplaced leads between stages.

CRM automation is like having a virtual assistant who manages clerical tasks on your behalf so you can focus on meeting the right clients, networking, and building your real estate business.

FollowUp Boss

FollowUp Boss (FUB) is a CRM that helps you respond faster and nurture your leads; ultimately turning more contacts into listings. A couple key qualities make this CRM one of the most popular for real estate professionals: keeping teams connected and lead-follow up. Try using the team inbox feature to have all inbound calls, emails, and texts flow into a larger sales system (that way someone on your team can respond, even if you can’t). Plus, you’ll be able to consistently measure each agent’s outreach activity. 

When it comes to leads, FUB emphasizes a dedication to lead distribution, which makes the platform especially valuable to real estate teams and brokerages. Use stages and tags to plan follow-ups within a specific time frame. To create stages, think about how you would define the journey of a lead and what should be happening next for clients in each stage. For example, you may call your stages; hot prospect, active client, nurture stage etc. When all of your potential leads are organized in FUB, easily search through them and develop an action plan.

There are tons of features to explore and several ways to customize your leads in this CRM. Luckily, phone and email support is available 7 days a week. With all of the real estate marketing tools this platform provides, you’ll never let a lead go cold.

With whatever AgentFire stack you have, our web designers easily integrate FUB into our clients’ real estate websites. Curious about how FollowUp Boss would work with your site? Ask a web designer.

LionDesk

LionDesk is another CRM and alternative to Followup Boss. Many clients prefer LionDesk for the clean and easy-to-use layout, although it doesn’t have as many options for customization as FollowUp Boss. However – similarly to FUB – LionDesk aims to simplify marketing automation and provide transaction management solutions. 

Users are able to create designated tags for each lead and create custom filters to organize them. The details of each lead’s contact info, among other details, are stored in accordion files that make sorting through them super easy and organized. One of our favorite details within this feature? You can even customize a client’s credit score. 

When it comes to working on larger, more general tasks – perhaps within a team, Lion Desk gives you the ability to add things to activity logs, build in-task reminders, and basic performance reporting. 

LionDesk has been exploding in popularity with our clients. To learn more about CRM integrations on your AgentFire website, take a look here.

Docusign

If you are a real estate agent that hasn’t worked with Docusign, you are seriously missing out on one of the most beneficial tools to hit the industry in recent years.  

Docusign allows you to handle paperwork from anywhere. This makes it convenient to get signatures and manage your contacts from one location.

They even offer specific plans for realtors so that you can get all of the most relevant features in one place.

You never have to worry about keeping your books organized and forgetting a signature, as the status of your signed or unsigned documents is available to you. You can even organize them based on if they are completed or waiting for signing. 

We love the ability to set the order in which the forms are signed and received. Add personal instructions for recipients who aren’t used to real estate jargon and set a gentle reminder if you notice a recipient hasn’t finished signing. 

No more last-minute house-calls just to put the pen to paper.  Get everything you need signed in a matter of seconds – all in one place.

Lead Generation Tools For Real Estate Agents

What is a lead generation tool anyways? Every marketing tactic and tool you use should “generate leads” – shouldn’t it? 

The following programs are paid sources and marketing weapons that were created explicitly for lead generation from your website and social profiles. Get these right and you’ll see your leads improve exponentially.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT has changed the ways that many industries conduct research and create written content. This chatbot, built on natural language processing technology, dives deep into its’ database to answer your questions in as much detail as you need, including length, format, and style. In real estate, the ways to use ChatGPT are many, including responding in conversational answers and creating full article outlines. Agents may be especially interested in

Your Real Estate Website

Your professional real estate website is fundamental for a successful digital marketing strategy. Your website is the base of your entire digital presence, marketing plan, and online lead generation.

Most importantly, it needs to be efficient, straight forward and communicate your brand accurately and clearly for results. Your professional website will be the first point of contact for many of your prospects, plus it brings credibility and legitimacy to your brand.

Our AgentFire team has built thousands of top-rated real estate websites. Our platform and custom-made tools were created with our unique real estate clients in mind. To learn more about our web packages, click here.

Open House Sign-in Sheets

Digital open house sign-in sheets are often an underestimated lead generation resource. Anyone visiting a specific open house is likely to be interested in the house based on its physical features, location, size, listing price, or a combination.

With all of this information in tow, you can tailor drip campaigns that will keep these prospects in your lead funnel. This makes it easy to reach out when have the perfect listing via a personalized report that you can share every time a comparable house hits the market.

Zillow Premier Agent

One of the most popular lead generation tools is of course by the property listing beast itself, Zillow. Zillow Premier Agent has condensed the lead generation journey to a concise and at times, unpredictable – yet enticing package. Regardless of if it works for everyone, the consensus amongst most real estate professionals using the platform is that Zillow can bring highly-qualified leads into your sphere.

Here’s how it works: 

Zillow Premier Agent features three main tools: agent care, the premier agent app, and the connections team. The app aims to connect realtors with active buyers and sellers. To really take advantage of this tool, aim to answer at least 50 percent of the connection calls and make an appointment. Tour connections are most likely to convert, so don’t miss the opportunity to schedule the date and ask if there or any other properties the client wants to see. 

Zillow is an oversaturated market, to say the least. It’s crucial that your profile is configured to make you stand out and give clients an idea of what you represent. Think of this as an elevator pitch in an image and text. If you’re just getting started on Zillow Premier, reach out to past clients and ask them to submit a review. As you go forward, keep an eye on user search behavior to get an idea of what they are looking for.

Leadpages

In this age, our attention spans are so short that we need specific pages designed explicitly to convert. Not using a landing page is one of the most common and biggest rookie advertising mistakes. The home page of your website is significantly less engaging and less successful in converting leads. Not using a landing page is one of the biggest rookie advertising mistakes.

Leadpages is a platform for creating landing pages, which are website pages optimized for conversion. 

There are loads of creative ways that you can use their landing page creator for real estate. Some ideas we love include: 

• Set up dedicated listings pages
• Advertise open houses
• Offer digital products like a neighborhood report, buyer guide or e-book
• Create targeted property listings with showing requests
• Push a last-minute booking 
• Hold a webinar or educational sessions

Showcase IDX

Showcase allows you to set up a beautiful property search system on your WordPress real estate website. While Showcase can be classified as lead generation, it also includes delayed forced registration.

Delayed Forced Registration (DFR) means that your visitors are prompted to submit their info after a designated amount of searches using the IDX – in order to continue searching.

This is a great way of generating seller leads. In fact, Showcase has some of the best conversion rates in the IDX industry.

AgentFire websites pair Showcase with Home Junction for significantly improved lead acquisition and search quality. First, listings are collected and organized from Showcase, before being written into market reports customized to suit your webpage by Home Junction.

Shortstack

Shortstack is a straightforward cloud-based solution to campaign creation. As a user, you have several widgets, themes, and templates to choose from. Most real estate agents use the platform to create sweepstakes, contests, landing pages, special offers, running quizzes and more. While you create your campaign, your team will be able to view, filter, and arrange them. 

Shortstack provides users with a mobile-friendly URL to share anywhere on the web, even in a post on your Facebook Page.

With the ability to keep all your content in one place, you can reduce your ad spend while increasing overall conversions (this is because people don’t have to leave Facebook to opt-in).

Email Marketing Automation Tools

The magic of email automation is that allows you to send out the right message to the right people at exactly the right time.

Automation bridges the time gap between a completed form and a follow-up email. Say goodbye to skimming through your “sent” folder to see who needs a follow-up. The right automation tool helps remove the overwhelming feeling from email marketing. Instead of making client feel like they’re part of a massive email list, you can group clients and specifically address them based on their needs.

Additionally, your email list is one of your only contact lists that is truly yours. The evolving and contentious landscape of social media means that your follower lists on Instagram, Facebook or TikTok could change or be erased at any time – you never have full control over them.

An oldie but a goodie, email marketing is still one of the most effective methods of lead generation for real estate. With an automated real estate marketing solution, you can perform the following tasks:

• Create scheduled client emails
• Adjust mailing lists based on lead segments
• Send customized and unique email notifications to segmented leads

When your email marketing is tailored to the needs of your clients and leads, they feel seen, understood, and valued.

Instead of packing their inbox with content that’s only helpful to a few members of your audience, they receive what is most useful to them.

With a properly crafted automated email campaign, a casual browser who stumbled upon your real state site can become a qualified lead without extra effort or time on your part.

How to Use Email Automation Tools

1. Write the email

Take advantage of automation by identifying the exact pain points that trigger each email. Email triggers can include signing up for a newsletter, submitting a contact form, and requesting a home valuation.

Whether you are asking users to respond to a request or guiding them to a specific property page, use a CTA that will encourage them to take the next step in your lead funnel. CTA’s are meant to guide audiences through the pipeline to a specific destination whether it is to an open house, initial phone call, or subscription.

2. Program Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Use templates and add your logo and branding to make each email feel unique to your business and professional.

The tone of your emails should be consistent and match with the voice of your other marketing materials.

3. Set the Trigger

Next, determine what triggers you will use and why. For example, a welcome campaign can include multiple emails in a sequence, starting with the first one immediately after initial contact, then nurturing emails for the next couple days and then weeks.

4. Analyze results

The only way to know if your campaigns are performing well is to regularly analyze the results. Many email automation tools will automatically track useful information about who opened your email, how many viewed it, and how many links where clicked within it.

If you notice that some emails are not receiving the amount of engagement that you expected, go back to the drawing board and tweak the cooy, format, or freuqency as needed.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is arguably one of the most efficient tools for marketing on the list. Although social media has become the focus of many real estate business marketing plans, Email marketing still reigns supreme. In fact, email marketing was shown to be 40 times more effective than social media (McKinsey & Company, 2019). 

A successful email marketing campaign can’t just be thrown together. In order to capture high-quality leads and life-long clients, an email campaign needs to be actively planned around the clients’ interests, demographics, and awareness. Mailchimp takes care of everything you need to create an effective email campaign and maintain it with minimum effort and tons of freedom to customize.

After you’ve received the contact information of a new lead, plug it into an automated journey. Mailchimp lets you dive deeper into segments of your audience so that you can send personalized emails to get them engaged. When it’s time to send out a new campaign, use the preview tool to see how your campaign will look across 40 different email clients. Then, send a small group a test email to measure its open rate. The data science team at Mailchimp will calculate your open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, abuse rate, soft bounces and hard bounces. 

There are tons of dynamic tasks you can complete using Mailchimp. However the newsletter feature is often considered the most useful for real estate agents in terms of lead generation. At AgentFire our clients used our Mailchimp add-on to build multi-layered newsletter campaigns with their blogs. We scan their website 1x per day, week, or month, and automatically pull all new blog posts into a Mailchimp newsletter designed to match your brand – with attention-grabbing CTAs to your website & social channels. Learn more about how we work with our clients to build lead grabbing email campaigns.

HubSpot

One of the most well-known email automation tools on the market is deservably, Hubspot. This dynamic tool has many features that create tangible results with real estate marketing.

Some examples include:

• Customized processes: Hubspot allows agents to create and personalize workflows for creating contact lists, property listings and landing pages.
• Intelligent automation workflows: HubSpot allows you to create and customize workflows for building contact lists, property listings, and landing pages.
• Marketing reports and analytics: Within HubSpot’s dashboard you can easily view all of your marketing reports and analytics at once.
• Hubspot’s AI content writing feature quickly generates email marketing text with simple prompts. Or use commands to skillfully rewrite or adjust the tone of existing copy to meet your needs.
• A/B test campaigns: Not sure which email to send to get the most traction with your clients? The advantage of Hubspot’s A/B testing to refine your perfect email campaign. Hubspot also integrates with many third-party apps like Zillow to make your life easier.

Social Media Tools For Real Estate Agents

Finally, the category we’ve all been waiting for: social media. In this section, we’re not going to review how to use hashtags in your social media posts or how to craft an attractive instagram story. We’ll take a broader look at the tools that answer those questions and perform those tasks automatically, so you don’t have to. 

Success with social media marketing relies on a consistent posting schedule. With consistency, you can regularly engage with your audiences and take advantage of a new lead-generation pipeline.

• Automatically resize images and media to fit the required dimensions and character limits for multiple different platforms at once.
• Schedule your posts so they are automatically updated, no matter how busy you are that week.
• Assess the success and reach of different posts to find the right posting schedule and content topics for each channel.

Social media automation means you can publish posts consistently, be alerted to messages you need to respond to and capitalize on tactics that funnel the highest number of hot leads to your online contact forms.

Hootsuite and Canva specifically, are two of the best social media tools to help you create and share content across your social profiles. 

Hootsuite

Think of Hootsuite as a basic, virtual social media manager. As long as you have a good idea of the type of content you want to publish, Hootsuite will take care of the logistics. 

Whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social media platforms, add all of your networks to the dashboard and organize them as you’d like. There are few key features that are especially useful for agents:

Streams 

Add streams in order to keep track of mentions, likes, scheduled tweets, retweets, followers and more. Within this stream, you can search to monitor key hashtags and topics. 

Post edits

Not a fan of the automatic post thumbnail? Customize it with photos from Hootsuite’s stock images or add your own. 

Link-shortening

With link-shortening built in, there’s no need to copy and paste in external pages. 

Organize posts

Schedule posts weeks in advance to guarantee consistent posting on your platforms. You can also post to all of your networks at once in your Hootsuite dashboard. Plus, Hootsuite has tons of integrations such as  google drive, so that you can keep everything organized in one place.

Canva

Canva is a user-friendly graphic design application that makes creating beautiful pictures for your social media, or featured images for your blogs super easy.

Their platform includes tons of free assets that you can drag and drop right into your designs.They also have premium assets that are available with a membership ($109.99 USD annually).

Our clients love to use Canva for CRM-related or marketing tasks. You can easily design cards, postcards and flyers for your next direct-mail campaign. When it comes to marketing, customize your stories templates for social and easily duplicate, then alter them for similar posts. 

You’d be surprised how much professional marketing content you’ve seen in your community has been made with Canva. Learn more here.

SEMRush

SEO for real estate is the most effective way to attract leads through organic search without spending big bucks on online ads. Search engine optimization enhances your chances of getting your website and social media channels ranked first.

Semrush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. Our tools and reports can help marketers with the following services: SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, Marketing Insights, and Campaign Management.

Google Trends

Google Trends tells users what their audience is searching for, in this exact moment in time. This data is then used to measure interest in specific topics.

Users will then see a list of topics that Google believes you may be trying to find.

Click on the relevant topic on the drop-down list to view even more detailed data. When users search for topics on Trends Explore, you’ll even see a graph showing its popularity over a certain period.

The location specificity that Google offers is also important for real estate agents. Agents can search interest by location after than have done a Google Trends search. View data by region and city. You will find “rising” data for topics and queries. Rising data is data that has seen the biggest increase in search interest over a time.

In Conclusion

There are tons of tools for realtors out there. Your job is to figure out which ones are the most relevant and effective for your specific situation. Using this list, you should have a few solid ideas that will produce results. 

We suggest integrating at least one marketing tool from each category: 

1. CRM’s & Contact Tools
2. Lead Generation
3. Social Media

You should never feel overwhelmed or confused by your own marketing efforts. Consolidate them by taking advantage of marketing technology created to make your life simpler. 

What’s the first tool you’ll put to use? Let us know in the comments!