Best Real Estate Marketing Tools: A Curated List

These days, a majority of home buyers are looking for their next home online. With the number of online listing sites available, the time for visiting multiple open houses has long gone. Most buyers scout locations online, eliminate options based on the listing's online portrayal, and choose a home based on what they see. But this makes the real estate market even more competitive for agents. Not only do agents have to acquire lucrative listings, but they also need to ensure that the online portrayal of the listing is attractive to the buyers. This means that agents like you need to be prepared to engage with clients in the digital marketplace as well. For this, you need to bolster your online presence by using the right real estate marketing tools, which will help give you a leg up from your competition and create a niche for yourself in the minds of customers.

In this article, we shall be discussing the benefits of using marketing tools for real estate agents and listing out some of the best tools available in the market, to fulfill the various niche needs of agents and help them convert potential buyers into satisfied homeowners.

The varied needs of today’s real estate market mean that agents need to invest more time, effort, and resources into the digital marketing space and into modern tools that will help them boost sales. But this investment is very beneficial for agents in the long run and can prove to be more effective in helping them make that all-important sale of a listing. Some of the major benefits of using real estate marketing tools are listed below:

These modern tools help agents skip the hassles of handling the nitty-gritty of all their work. They can just focus on the major aspects of the job, like meeting potential clients and showing and listing homes. This will also reduce your stress levels and help you work smarter, not harder!

Using a real estate marketing tool is often more cost-effective than managing all the minor details like making a website, staging a listing, printing and distributing flyers, organizing in-person showings of a listing, and much more. With digital marketing tools, you can reduce your effort and save funds which you can invest elsewhere into your business, reducing your capital investment amount!

Not only do you reduce the amount of effort and funds you put into maintaining and upselling your brand, but you also save so much time! The time you used to put in forwarding all those marketing emails, physically staging and showing a listing, searching for new leads and callbacks, and managing your website, all can be done at the click of a button! You can use your saved time and maintain a work-life balance, along with investing time into other in-person aspects of your job, like building client relationships.

You can generate more leads and market yourself effectively using such marketing tools. These tools will help you rank higher on Google searches using SEO strategies and tools, and hence help you generate more traffic on your website and increase the number of potential clients you can cater to.

These tools help you go global! If the standard forms of real estate brand marketing before were billboards, benches, buses, and flyers, now you can reach a higher number of potential owners through the power of the World Wide Web! You don’t need a high budget, just some targeted tools and some smart homework, and you can level the playing field and attract big customers.

These marketing tools also help you analyze trends in customer behavior and what they like and dislike. This can help you curate a more personalized and client-centric marketing strategy and curate listings that sell faster!

Now that we have understood the benefits, let us look at a list of the best marketing tools for real estate agents. To make this curated list easier to comprehend, we have divided the tools based on the tasks they can help you complete and the different services they offer, like property listing software, social media marketing, website building, CRM, SEO, and many more.

● Styldod: Styldod is the best virtual staging software in the USA. It is an all-in-one software specifically to fulfill your needs when listing homes. Styldod is a holistic software that helps provide solutions for virtual staging, 3D 360-degree tours and rendering, floor plan visualizations, real estate photography editing, formatting of real estate agent bios, making real estate flyers, object removal, image enhancement services, and many more features. Not only is Styldod a composite solution, but it offers some of the lowest and most effective market prices for its various services. They offer several design templates for their virtual staging options, with unlimited revisions and a quick turnaround time, which makes them the most preferred virtual staging and enhancement service available online.

● Loomly: Constantly churning out content is a must for effective social media marketing to grow your business. But managing your online channels and pages and posting curated content regularly is essential, but extremely hectic. Hence, you can use a tool like Loomly, which helps you manage all of your organic and sponsored posts and content that you publish. Additionally, Loomly helps you save time by automating the posting process and creating a schedule for it. It also helps you upload all of your content onto a centralized cloud-based platform, which helps you retrieve that data with ease whenever you want to upload it. Furthermore, you get access to key optimization tips, hashtag manager tools, and media studio options.

● Hootsuite: Hootsuite is like an online social media manager for all your accounts. Whether changing post-edit thumbnails or organizing all your apps on a dashboard to keep them organized, Hootsuite’s got you covered! You can even schedule posts weeks and months prior so that your account has a consistent posting schedule, and even keep track of your mentions, new followers updates, and more. Furthermore, you can link everything, store all your data in Google Drive, and have all your creatives in one place. You can sit back and relax because all you need to do to have a great online presence is think of new content ideas, as Hootsuite will handle all the technical aspects!

● Placester: If you are looking to make a unique website, but do not have any coding experience, then Placester is the tool for you! It is a platform that provides templates and solutions for real estate website building, with customizable templates and emphasis on responsive design, for optimal functioning and a simple user interface. Placester also has MLS integration, which means you have the flexibility to design your website according to your personal preferences and company branding. Furthermore, this platform also helps with advanced features like lead capture forms to increase interaction and traffic on the website, and allows you to integrate blogs and excerpts in your webpage, to make it more interactive and engaging.

● Xara Cloud: Xara Cloud is one of the most content-specific real estate marketing tools. The whole point of real estate marketing is to create engaging content that makes buyers stop and stare, and effectively become interested in what you have to offer. Whether it is on your flyers, business cards, billboards, or even your website or social media posts, with Xara Cloud, you can create interactive and interesting content using ready-made templates and design options, along with integrating your brand iconography, colors, and information with the Brand Portal feature. You can even connect your MLS account to Xara and fully automate your website design process! All you have to do is enter your listing number and all the relevant information will be sources, and be ready to post into your attractive brochure or social media post! This feature also allows you to reuse creatives by simply replacing the listing information, which saves you so much time and effort. Additionally, you can even collaborate with others on projects and help edit, comment on, and rework ideas as a team, and you can store all your information and design ideas in one online hub for easier access.

● Ahrefs: In real estate, you have to use SEO techniques to get actual real-time leads without spending all your money on sponsored ads. You can very easily organically get your website to rank first on Google, popularize your brand name, and gain potential clients. Ahrefs helps you check the SEO performance of your web pages, and even that of your competitors, conduct keyword research, check how much traffic your backlinks generate, and explore and generate keywords and content ideas for your next post.

● Zillow Premier Agent: Zillow is probably one of the largest real estate listing websites to be available right now. It is very effective in helping generate high-profile leads for real estate agents, as the portal connects the agents with active buyers and sellers of homes. This way, you get a clear database of individuals you can contact to buy or sell their homes, which can often convert into an in-person walk around of different listings. But, as this platform is very saturated, you need to design your profile to stand out and be extremely attractive to your potential clients. Good customer reviews, a catchy introduction, a reassuring profile, and proper follow-up can help you use this tool to its optimum capacity.

● SalesForce: Customer relationship management is essential when it comes to real estate, as it is the make-or-break bridge between an interested client and a potential sale. For effective CRM, modern tools for real estate agents like SalesForce come in handy. This platform helps you out by automating the secretarial process, from filling out essential forms to filing documents and retrieving important data, which makes more time for sales and less time for paperwork! You can store all your data in one place, and even frame automated follow-up messages and emails to stay in consistent contact with your clients, even when you are otherwise occupied. Furthermore, this platform integrates IDX, MLS, and RETS platforms as well, for an easier user experience.

● Follow-Up Boss: This website is also an amazing CRM tool as has an automated system of distributing leads without any need for manual data entry and additional effort. It cuts your work in half as it helps you contact your leads faster through emails, where you can send information directly from your websites and other marketing material to your potential clients, and distribute them instantly through phone calls or email.

● MailChimp: When it comes to email marketing, MailChimp is one of the top software on the market. With a simple user interface, this portal allows you to divide your clients and target audience based on various categories, and customize emails for them according to their content-engagement behavior on your website. It offers several email templates that can be personalized to fit your brand and its goals and even offers testing features to help you gauge which email format will be the most effective for your clients.

● REDX: With its free set-up feature and reasonable prices, this email tool is perfect for achieving your marketing needs if you are on a budget! REDX will help source lead data from public records and real estate portfolios, with contact information and proper history of potential buyers and sellers, which can help you make your marketing email more detailed and customized. REDX helps you source geo-focused leads, current and expired leads for further follow-up, a state-of-the-art prospecting platform, various tutorials and training opportunities for agents, and helps with lead conversions and management systems.