Real Estate Marketing Basics Bootcamp: Website & CRM

Today’s lesson on website design can help you figure out:
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• Understand the importance of a lead management system: We’ll make the compelling case as to why you will eventually need a robust CRM to track your leads’ and clients’ activities on your website and with your email campaigns.
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• An idea of what you need in your real estate CRM software: There are several essential bells and whistles you’ll need in whatever CRM you purchase. We’ll tell you exactly what functionality and features you need in a solution to succeed with it.
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• How you can build a plan to organize and prioritize leads: Before jumping right into using a CRM, you first need to learn how to use it. We’ll dive into what agents like you need to do to make the most of their lead management system.

Here’s one positive outcome that you may see from following today’s lesson:
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• You find the right CRM system for your business and learn how to easily integrate it with your website so you can track visitors’ and leads’ activity.
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• Over time, you learn the ins and outs of your solution and, in turn, get a better understanding of how your audience interacts with you online.
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• With each site visit and email open, you get an increasingly clearer sense of which leads are ready to buy or sell and which aren’t.

Pretty much all CRM solutions today integrate with brands’ websites, allowing you to feed visitor activities and contact info into one central location. From there, you can add additional information that you pick up through text, phone calls or in-person meetings so you have a complete picture of your lead pipeline.

View our Day 3 lesson below for tips on how to find the right CRM, and sync it with your website for maximum impact:
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Fast forward: You have a real estate website you’re proud of. The next step is to hook it up to a lead management system so you can follow up with the right people at the right time.

“Marketing automation” may sound scary, but it’s actually a friendly resource that can save real estate agents time, energy and headaches:

• Social media automation tools — like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Edgar — can ensure your website content is automatically shared on a schedule to your Facebook, Twitter, and other social accounts.
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• Drip email marketing platforms like HubSpot and MailChimp can ensure your leads and clients receive various forms of nurture messaging at various intervals so you don’t have to manually communicate with them.
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• Content management systems, like WordPress, offer users the ability to create content and schedule those pages and posts for publication at a later time so they don’t have to manually upload them.

These are arguably the most common use cases for automation today.  The one that’s most relevant to agents, however, is customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Again, “CRM” may seem like a scary marketing term – but the good news is that real estate CRMs are usually pretty basic. Here are the three main features that you are likely to encounter:

• A grading feature that allows you to classify leads. For instance, in Placester, you can assign a green (ready to nurture), yellow (wait to nurture), or red (not ready to nurture yet) label to your prospects.
• Segmentation that lets you bucket your leads into a few (or even several) categories based on customer buying or selling preferences, timelines, and characteristics.
• Quick reminders that tell you when to follow up with certain prospects and create notes regarding your leads’ updated buying or selling criteria and traits.

The most powerful real estate CRM feature of all is lead activity tracking.

Here’s how it plays out in real life:

A prospect fills out a form on your site to get a home valuation, or they favorite a listing or two and spend time on a page that details your sales history. The right CRM will let you keep track of their activity on your website and add additional information to their lead record so you know when they’re ready for a conversation or in-person meeting.

Here’s the general process to put into place so you can sync your real estate agency’s website with your lead management platform, modify your leads’ profiles, and figure out who’s worth nurturing:
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YOUR HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT FOR DAY 3
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1. Collect all of your contacts — top leads, lukewarm prospects, and general connections — from every lead gen source (your website, real estate portals, ads, etc.) so that when you secure your CRM, you can easily import them from a single spreadsheet.

2. Figure out how you want to segment your leads and contacts into different buckets in your lead management software. For instance, you could start basic by simply segmenting them into “hot” leads, “cold” leads, and plain-old contacts.

3. Start the CRM research process. You don’t have to buy a CRM today or tomorrow or even a month or two from now. But if you start growing your business at a strong rate in the months ahead, you’re going to eventually need one to keep tabs on all of your prospects, so you might as well start the search for the right CRM now so you can make an informed buying decision later.

INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE?

Next up for the Bootcamp, we’ve got Day 4: turning your website into a lead generation machine. We’ll see you back here for more tomorrow!