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6 Real Estate Marketing Tools Agents Need From Their Brokerage

October 5, 2016

A brokerage is only as successful as its agents are ready to make it. Fail to offer them guidance and helpful real estate marketing tools, and they’ll find a brokerage that thinks of their success as a priority and empowers them to work better. Marketing support is essential to keep agents happy and productive; if you want to attract talented professionals to join your team, you might want to start building the marketing toolset you offer them from the ground up.

Agents may join brokerages for a variety of reasons. Some are seeking support from a big brand, others want to join independent brokerages. More recently, a growing number of agents are willing to join smaller boutique brokerages and it seems there’s an interesting explanation to it. These smaller brokerages are more aggressive in their marketing and readily adopt the new, advanced real estate marketing tools that enable them to market better.

Whether you’re a part of a big real estate brand or run your own agency, you wouldn’t like to see your competition outstripping you at every step. If you want talented, experienced agents to join your team, it’ll pay to update the list of tools you give them with an advanced, easy-to-use solution. Not only will this add a cutting edge to your marketing, but the word about your brokerage will also travel faster making people curious about what you have to offer.

6 real estate marketing tools agents need from your brokerage

1) A real estate website

98% of people start their home search online. Moreover, Google saw a 253% increase in real estate related searches in the past four years. This means few people head to the High Street to find the latest offers in your area. You may deliver unparalleled customer service and have great testimonials from happy clients, but what does it matter when people can’t find them? Quite simply, if you don’t have a website, you don’t have a way to engage with potential clients. They may never have the chance to discover what you have to offer.

Meanwhile, the opportunities an online presence gives to agents are both exciting and challenging. On the one hand, everyone can have an online property exclusively dedicated to their services, experience and market offer. On the flip side, this makes it more difficult to cut through the noise and reach your niche faster than your competition.

So the first thing you can start with is to promise your agents a meaningful digital presence. Obviously, the most important info all agents need to showcase is their current and sold listings, customer reviews, blogs and neighborhood landing pages. These can be featured on a company website, or you can even reward your top-performing agents with their own websites which can be created directly from your CRM account.

2) Strong exposure for a brokerage – both online and offline

Agents thinking of joining a brokerage expect it to already have a solid marketing impact both online and offline. If you haven’t got any, it rings all sorts of bells for agents who are seeking marketing support. It might appear that you don’t invest enough in promoting your brand in the first place which leaves little hope you’ll dedicate enough efforts for the marketing guidance for new agents as well.

Start with online first – in today’s digital landscape it’s more likely to bring you marketing dividends without ruining your bottom line. For one thing, you should offer your agents a website. For another, you need to offer them an even stronger incentive to join you. For example, you can feed their properties to any property portal in the world (AgentDrive’s customers use a simple XML generator for this) and win them a powerful online exposure.

If your brokerage is big enough and already has several branches, you can create your own property portal exclusively available to the members of your network. This is a great way to stand out from the competition and strengthen your positions online.

3) A real estate CRM to acquire and nurture qualified leads

Brokers and agents no longer argue about the role of a real estate CRM for their business. It’s a central platform that lets them build a next-generation real estate brokerage at times when marketing gets harder and harder to succeed in.

In a nutshell, a real estate CRM offers a variety of useful features agents can use every day:

manage leads, customers, properties, projects, commissions and transactions from one central platform;
automate follow up and run email marketing campaigns;
create and schedule tasks and reminders;
automatically create marketing materials like property proposals, brand videos and ready to print flyers;
use multichannel communications like email, social media or SMS to reach prospective clients…
…and much more.

These features deliver some remarkable benefits to your entire team:

all business information is now located in one central platform, available anytime;
agents can effectively follow up their contact databases, however large, with email automation functionality;
agents can stay connected with past clients and set up a great referral process bringing them a continuous flow of positive customer reviews;
your brokerage can finally offer a personalized service tailored to an individual’s needs;
your agents save a lot of time and eliminate manual work;
advanced CRMs like AgentDrive have a powerful site builder which lets you run your entire business via a single platform instead of switching between various tools. This helps you create a scalable brokerage.

4) Great marketing outlets for listing presentations

The next real estate marketing tools to offer to your agents are some advertising tools. To create a strong listing presentation, agents are going to need some samples, outlets and property proposals to impress their clients with.

Of course, no one wants to spend long hours getting these ready. Provide your agents with simple solutions and pre-made templates to put this process on fast track (e.g., AgentDrive’s customers use the ad & flyer maker for this right inside their CRM). Same goes for property proposals: nobody has time to spend hours preparing these so use your CRM to get them ready.

Besides, another benefit of using a CRM with essential advertising tools integrated into it is you don’t have to hire an advertising agency and you’ll never leak any sensitive sales data.

5) Help with social media

Many brokerages aren’t sure what to do with their Facebook pages. Meanwhile, 95% of people use Facebook to get information about an agent before contacting them.

One great way to add powerful functionality to your business page is to use Facebook custom tabs. Here are a few examples of what you can do:

grow your email list by placing your newsletter signup forms onto a Facebook business page;
showcase your featured or sold listings;
collect customer testimonials;
promote your blog with an RSS feed;
cross-promote your Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube profiles;
run photo and video contests;
create a library of your content to get more Facebook leads.

Additionally, make sure your real estate CRM lets you automatically post your properties to your social media profiles.

6) Real-time marketing insights

Last but not least, a brokerage needs real-time performance data. One of the most helpful real estate marketing tools to have is automatic reporting. Of course, the best way to generate marketing and sales reporting is from your CRM.

Real estate CRM dashboards give you intelligent insights into your marketing and sales. For example, a good real estate CRM:

automatically generates reporting on all of your contacts, properties, customer requirements and transactions;
automatically calculates your sales pipeline progress so you can see how qualified your database is;
generates franchise reporting regardless of how many offices and locations you manage;
provides an easy way to get timely feedback – daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc.
tracks everything – properties added, proposals sent and printed, emails received, documents changed etc.

What’s Next?

There you go – a quick list of marketing essentials agents want from their brokers today. The above tools are a great way to ramp up your marketing without breaking your budget. So if you seek to attract talented professionals to your team, make sure to bring these powerful real estate marketing tools to the table.