#PropTech is on the rise. Whether it’s a new portal or a blockchain solution for sales, the industry is moving fast.
But how can any of this make your job as an estate agent easier & more productive?
Thankfully, the best property marketing technology should be able to help real estate agents minimise work, generate more leads and close more sales.
To get a free copy of our 50 top marketing ideas for estate agents in 2020, click here.
1. Virtual Reality (VR)
Effective marketing is all about standing out. It’s about grabbing the attention of your prospective client and giving them a reason to choose you over your competitors.
There are certain things that estate agents should be doing as standard – using professional photography, optimising their portal listings and effectively managing their SEO – but virtual reality offers a marketing tool to really separate yourself from the pack.
Virtual reality includes things like 360 virtual tours and virtual staging.
Using these tools can generate up to 4x more interest, 49% more leads and sells homes up to 5 weeks faster. This makes them attractive to buyers but vendors also.
In a market where vendors don’t simply instruct the first agent they find on the high street, real estate agents need to demonstrate that they go the extra mile.
Some other reasons property VR is good marketing technology for estate agents:
- 71% of millennials show a particularly positive attitude toward VR property marketing. Millennials make a large number of the 36% of homes being sold to first time buyers.
- 68% of people would like to see what their furniture would look like in a potential new home.
- Virtual tours reduce the time spent on wasted viewings for buyers.
By incorporating VR into your property marketing campaigns, you may find it easier to attract clients and win those vital instructions.
2. Rapid Auto Photo Editing
It’s no secret that your property photography is generally the most important part of any listing. Images are where potential buyers spend most of their time when searching.
This means that maximum results are achieved when you use professionally taken and professionally edit photos.
Using artificial intelligence technology, services like PropertyBox enable estate agents to quickly and easily upload photos and floor plan sketches that are returned professionally edited in hours.
A good professional photo editing service like Propertybox can automate edits such as colour correction, item removals and even virtual staging.
This means estate agents can quickly and easily produce photos and floor plans for their property marketing that are professional, eye catching and impressive to vendors and buyers.
3. Marketing Automation
One of the most difficult parts of running your marketing campaigns is finding the time to do it consistently.
As busy estate agents, it can be hard to frequently send out emails and post to social media.
An effective CRM (Client Relationship Management) tool is what you will use to automate your marketing efforts. A study found that 60% of real estate agents estimated that they saved 11 hours or more per week by using marketing automation software. The same study found that 95% of agents believed automation to have had a positive impact on revenue.
A great use of marketing automation software for estate agents would be to schedule emails that go out automatically at different points. This ensures that you are in constant contact with potential clients so that when they are ready to buy or sell, you’re first in mind. Email lists are often an estate agents more neglected assets. You want to keep your email leads warm with consistent, value adding email content.
A good CRM can actually go a step further: triggering different emails and sequences based on different actions. For example, you could have a specific set of emails go out to someone who read a particular blog that’s completely different to the emails that go out if someone didn’t read it. The CRM can be set up to manage all of this automatically.
This intelligent approach to marketing is not only easier for estate agents to manage due to the automation but also allows for more effective marketing as contact can be personalised based on specific actions.
4. Chatbots
A chatbot is a piece of software that simulates a conversation. They enable estate agents to be “available” 24 hours a day as people can get a response at any time of day.
There’s a number of reasons why implementing chat bots is a good marketing tactic for estate agents:
- 83% of people want to be able to get a response from a company at any point. Delays in communication can easily lead to loss of a customer.
- 40% of people don’t mind if questions are answered by a chatbot as long as they get a quick answer.
- Estate agents can save time by using chatbots for initial contact and simple questions.
Given that many buyers and sellers worry about customer service when it comes to engaging an estate agents, the speed and efficiency of a chatbot can improve the customer service experience and feel potential clients with confidence.
Estate agents can install chatbots on their websites but also use Facebook’s bot to work in a similar way on their Facebook page.
Chatbots can be used very creatively to help direct people to specific listings or pages you want them to see in order to progress them along the marketing funnel.
Don’t forget to download our FREE Marketing Jargon Buster For Estate Agents to decipher any marketing lingo!
For example, you can see the Facebook chatbot on Burberry’s page invites visitors to visit product pages after welcoming them. Estate agents could direct people in a similar way inviting them to visit listings or download a useful ebook.
5. Digital Marketing
Most estate agents accept that their marketing efforts need to be focused on digital now. It’s generally easier and cheaper to reach potential clients online and so estate agents need to ensure that they are using the right digital marketing strategies for their business.
As platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Google are more widely used, they get more sophisticated at marketing. These types of technology get smarter the more they are used.
Estate agents should explore implementing social media, content, SEO and paid ad strategies to ensure that they keep generating leads and winning instructions as more and more people switch their offline attention online.
You can read more about Digital Marketing for estate agents in our blog here.
6. Sales Progression
Sales progression technology does not specifically relate to marketing as it’s something you would use for actual clients versus potential ones.
However, given the importance of word of mouth, reviews and referral marketing, effective sales progression software could help boost your customers’ experience and increase the chances of them referring you to their friends and family.
Word of mouth marketing is among the most powerful and it’s also free so estate agents want to maximise their chance of getting it!
In short, sales progression technology automates communication with your clients; keeping them consistently updated on how a sale is moving forward.
It’s reported that 55% of people would pull out of a transaction if there was a lack of visible progress and 49% of people aged 18-34 would like daily updates.
Sales progression tech allows estate agent to provide this level of communication easily without the need to remember and manage doing it for several different clients.
Obviously, integrating new technology into your estate agency has a cost but estate agents should consider implementing those tools that best increase their productivity and growth of their business.
