The automation of marketing is really going to separate the winners from the rest in real estate in 2018. What can investors do to streamline their businesses, stay in the game, and grow?


The Importance of Real Estate Marketing Automation


Real estate investors and businesses must automate as much as they can, especially in marketing and customer service. These departments are jammed with repetitive tasks, that can suck time, and don’t always deliver the best ROI on it.


Automation can streamline the management of these parts of your business. It can free you up to work on more important money making tasks, help you get better returns on any labor you have others putting in for you, facilitate faster and larger growth, and maximize your marketing budget. This can all dramatically increase both the top and bottom line, while making what you do a lot more enjoyable.


So, what should investors be automating?


Email


Investors must have some type of email marketing automation software. You need follow up emails, autoresponders, newsletters,marketing emails and alerts to new opportunities. Once you plug these into a good system, it slashes your workload, and makes it much easier to grow and convert leads. Infusionsoft has grown in popularity, but Mailchimp is still among the most affordable, easy to use, and easy to integrate with websites, forms, and landing pages. Done right, recent stats show that email is 3x better at generating leads than social media, and leads to higher sales.


Outsourced Workers


Outsourcing to remote workers is now far more common than hiring locally. It offers a lot of efficiency. After all, we still can’t effectively automate everything without humans. We still need original content, and human experts to decipher the big data. However, there is a lot that investors and business owners can do to automate this work as well. Consider creating briefs for different roles and types of content, which act as template guidelines. That ensures you get what you want the first time around, and it is uniform with your branding. It’s also seamless if you need to switch staff or have a temp stand in. Some really bog themselves down in managing remote teams too. They send everything one piece at a time, and set themselves up to have to go in and set up new milestones or make payments throughout the week. All of which can disrupt more important work and closings. Or they end up not being consistent with marketing. It’s far better to hire better teams, give them a big deposit, or put them on an automated hourly system, and just let them crank away in the background, while you get on with closing the sales.


Automating the Phone


The phone is still a powerful tool in real estate. It’s just that the best practices have changed. New tech enables real estate marketers to blast text messages in bulk, and even drop voicemails in inboxes without risking being bounced by callers who reject strange numbers. When integrated with your CRM, all of your calls and reminders get stored in one place, with call data getting automatically recorded. That again saves time, saves customer frustration because you can easily see their history, and enables you to help them better on the fly.

How are you automating your marketing?