In the real estate profession, marketing plays a crucial role in attracting potential clients. But how do you reach these potential clients above and beyond Propertyfinder and Dubizzle etc? At present, the majority of real estate agents use automation in some form, but it is most likely limited to an email function. Historically, this has been what was needed, but today it is more extensive work with automation that is required to be competitive.
With a well-planned system of automation, you have the opportunity to create lead nurturing and personalize the potential customer’s experience along the customer journey. This blog post introduces you to the benefits of working with marketing automation as a real estate agent, as well as the importance of a lead nurturing strategy and lead scoring.
Automate your processes as a real estate agent
What automation can you do for real estate agents?
When it comes to finding processes to automate, there is no solution with automation that suits all industries and companies. But it is important to start from their unique business, and then find their recipe for success. Therefore, I have developed some examples that are unique to realtors, the following are:
- Keep order on speculators
- Automate email sending and maintain communication with clients from viewings
- Automate emailing to speculators
- Manage viewing schedules
- Automate offers or information pre or post-viewing
- Implement with advertising, for example on social media
- Facilitate and automate the sales process
The benefits of marketing automationAs you can understand, well-planned marketing automation has many benefits. Below I have listed some benefits that contribute to a big positive change for real estate agents:
- Save tons of time! When you have implemented marketing automation, one of the most noticeable changes is that you save time, whilst the extensive work becomes manageable. With more time, it is possible to focus on other important parts, for example focusing on warmer customers and increasing sales.
- Order in the database. With all the data gathered in one place, you get to order and structure in the CRM. And that data becomes more accessible when you want to use it.
- Personalization. With the structure in the database and manageable work, it is possible to be consistent and personalized in their work.
- A clear picture of the customer journey. To work with marketing automation and inbound marketing, you need to have a clear picture of the customer journey. Because with a clear picture of the customer journey, it is possible to create lead nurturing and analyze where contacts drop off, in order to ultimately increase the conversion.
To become a competitive real estate agent who actively works with automated processes, one must have an understanding of marketing automation. Therefore, I will briefly explain what lead nurturing and lead scoring are. Marketing automation consists of several important components, but I believe these will be important to you as a real estate agent.
What is Lead Nurturing?
In Inbound Marketing, it is recurring that people talk about lead nurturing and creating relevant content. So what exactly is lead nurturing? Lead nurturing means that you nurture and warm up the contact along and during the customer journey. By producing the right content, to the right persona at the right time. This is to create smooth transitions where the contact can easily go from potential customer to promoter.
To give you a perspective on marketing automation, it was previously considered that a lead nurturing strategy was only when setting up simple email campaigns that would be sent out to a contact list.
Today, marketers, like you, are looking for a new method and technology that includes and goes far beyond lead nurturing by email. The goal is to create smooth transitions across all channels that the potential customer has with your company. To be able to create an effective lead nurturing strategy on several channels, you need a marketing automation tool, similar to HubSpot.
Effective multi-channel lead nurturing usually involves a combination of marketing automation, email marketing, social media, paid re-advertising, dynamic website content, and direct sales. Because there are so many methods involved, you really need to make sure your sales and marketing team work closely with each other. Marketing automation facilitates that work because you can automate so that a notice is sent directly to the sales team when a lead has demonstrated a certain commitment.
What is Lead Scoring?
To facilitate the lead nurturing process, we recommend using lead scoring. With lead scoring, you can clearly see which contacts should be prioritized. Lead scoring means scoring different desirable characteristics and behaviors, which results in the desired potential customer accumulating points. This means that you know exactly when the sales team will take over, while not wasting time on contacts that do not match your target group.
An example of behaviors you can score is if a contact fills in a form or clicks on links in the newsletter. To be able to set up lead scoring, you need a clear lead scoring strategy and a marketing automation tool, for example, HubSpot.
As you understand now, marketing automation creates many growth opportunities, at the same time it is important to understand the basics behind it.
Are you interested in learning more? Then I recommend that you download our marketing automation guide. The guide goes through step-by-step how to implement marketing automation, and contains two templates for the customer journey and a lead scoring template.
If you need any help, never hesitate to contact us at Digicon. We specialize in inbound marketing, marketing automation, and adverting.
