General marketing: edX Marketing Fundamentals
Social Media: What is Social?
SEO: Hubspot Academy SEO Training
Social Media Ads: Meta Certificate
TikTok: Mastering TikTok
Digital Marketing: edX Digital Marketing Strategy
Graphic Design: Canva’s Design School
Copywriting: Skillshare Copywriting for Beginners
Branding: edX Digital Branding and Engagement
PPC: Wordstream PPC University
Email Marketing: Email Marketing Basics
If you’re making your list of the new year’s resolutions and getting some education is one of your goals for 2043 – great news! We have put together a list of FREE OF CHARGE marketing courses that will help you bring your real estate business to the next level and create your strategy, understand your consumers’ needs, boost your social media presence and nail it with the PPC campaigns. For those who struggle with the creative side of marketing – you will find a great copy writing and graphic design courses, too, and it’s all free of charge.
Free Real Estate Marketing Courses
See the free online courses that we think will help real estate agents and brokers break through and get more clients in 2024. The courses that we’ve chosen cover all the areas of marketing: from general marketing to digital marketing: Marketing fundamentals, SEO, PPC, Meta Ads, Social Media communications (Tik Tok included!), copy writing and graphic design online courses.
1. General marketing:
edX Marketing Fundamentals: Who is your Consumer
The edX Marketing Fundamentals course will help you put together your marketing plan and understand the essential components of a successful marketing strategy as well as identifying the needs of expectations of your target audience, which will help you reach them more effectively. It is taught by two Babson College lecturers.
You will learn:
- Segmentation, targeting and positioning methods to acquire customers
- 5P marketing mix: product, price, promotion, place
- Consumer behavior
- Market data
- Value creation
Course duration: 4 weeks (4-6 hours per week)
2. SEO
Hubspot Academy SEO Training
Using relevant keywords is essential for your website’s visibility, especially if you want to be found by new clients. They rarely type in your name in the Google search – rather than that, they will. type in (location)+for sale, (location)+ real estate agent or specific words for a given area. Even basic knowledge of core SEO elements will help your real estate website rank higher in Google and be found by prospective clients in your area.
While most real estate professionals will rely on a professional SEO agency to audit and optimize their website (or subscribe to a website provider that guarantees SEO optimization of the page), there are things you can learn and do by yourself, too.
Hubspot Academy offers a free SEO training run by Rachel Sheldon (digital marketer) and Matthew Howells-Barby (former VP at HubSpot) that will walk you through everything you have to know to use basic optimization on your website.
You will learn:
- Keyword research for SEO
- On-page technical SEO
- Link building
- Website optimization
- SEO reporting
Course duration: 3,5 hours
3. Design
Canva’s Design School: Graphic Design Basics
We live in the era of visual media. Whether you communicate with your audience through Facebook, Instagram or email campaigns, your visuals will play a vital part in how engaged your followers and email subscribers will be. Having consistent imagery will positively influence its performance on your social media and strengthen the brand awareness among your followers.
You don’t have to be a professional designer to create your own images for social media. All it takes is to create an account on Canva – an easy and intiuitive free platform to create social media posts and other designs, and take this free training course on how to create stunning images.
You will learn:
- Basic graphic design principles
- Alignment
- How to think like a designer
- Communication through design
- Color wheel basics
- Font types and how to use them
4. Social Media
Coursera: What is social
In the digital age, social media plays a vital role in establishing personal relationships with your potential and already existing clients. For some businesses it is the main channel of communication – as a real estate agent, it is important for you to be in constant contact with your audience and provide them with interesting posts that might take the form of images, videos, success stories and testimonials. This course will help you understand social media marketing and choose the best strategy for reaching a wider audience.
You will learn:
- Social media marketing
- Effective social media strategies
- Growing relationships through social media
- Social media engagement
Course Duration: approx. 7 hours
5. Social Media Ads
Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate
There are many online courses dedicated to Meta ads but we believe that it’s best to learn your skills straight from the source.
Well-performing Facebook and Instagram ads can help you effectively reach a significantly wider audience, convert users to your real estate website, generate leads and strengthen brand awareness. The Meta Social Media Marketing course will equip you in tools that are crucial to achieving these goals.
You will learn:
- AD fundamentals
- Establishing Platform Presence
- Creating and managing ads
- Effectiveness measurement
Course duration: 7 months
6. TikTok
In a short time, TikTok has grown into one of the most popular social media in the world with over 1,5 billion active users. It’s safe to assume that there are some home buyers and sellers from your area, too!
Although TikTok was famous as a platform where people shared their funny dances, this year it has become a more versatile medium with educational content and a marketing tool for many brands. If you think that your target audience uses TikTok, take this course to master the platform and use it to your advantage.
You will learn:
- How TikTok works
- How to shoot a TikTok
- Editing
- Trending Audio
- Going viral
7. PPC
PPC campaigns help businesses reach a wider audience online through promoting their websites and content online. Most agents outsource this area of their marketing efforts to professional companies who have first-hand knowledge on Google and Facebook paid campaigns. However, if you prefer to run your ads on your own without costly support from professionals, you will be able to do it after completing this Wordstream PPC University course.
You will learn:
- Google Ads and ad types for small businesses
- Google Ads account structure
- Targeting
- CPC (cost per click)
- Writing PPC Ads
- Creating landing pages
- Getting more conversions
- Negative and long-tail keywords
- Dynamic search ads
- Improving PPC lead quality
8. Digital Marketing
edX Digital Marketing Strategy
Digital marketing has become an inseparable part of any business’s communication strategy and it continuously proves to be the most effective area to explore. This course will help you better understand the rules of the digital world and learn how it can bring you more clients and how to create a coherent brand image online.
You will learn:
- Why digital marketing matters
- Developing your own digital strategy
- Conducting competitor audits
- How to create innovative content
Course duration: 8 weeks (4-6 hours)
9. Branding and Engagement
edX Digital Branding and Engagement
Creating great social media content and getting new followers through paid ads is one thing but engaging your community takes a lot more time and effort (but it’s worth it!). This course will help you create a coherent brand and boost engagement among your followers through content and interaction.
You will learn:
- consumer change
- owned and earned media strategies
- different strategies for content distribution
- identifying different levels of engagement
Course duration: 4 weeks (3-4 hours per week)
10. Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of nourishing your leads with your branded content, industry news, new listings and success stories, however, if not done correctly, it can bring the opposite results and make your subscribers receive irrelevant information and eventually sign off of your newsletter. This course will help you put together a great email marketing strategy and teach you how to not to lose subscribers and conduct successful campaigns that inspire conversions.
You will learn:
- Email marketing options
- Crafting great marketing emails
- Managing successful campaigns
- Measuring success in email campaigns.
11. Copywriting
Skillshare: Copywriting for beginners. How to Write a Web Copy without Being Cheesy
Boost your real estate website traffic with great content!
Content marketing is what will generate leads in 2023. Sharing real estate knowledge with your site visitors might take various forms: different blogging tactics, gated content, downloadable PDF guide areas and so on.
Gaining new skills in copywriting will help you get more traffic on your website (especially if you learn basic SEO strategies) and position yourself as a trustworthy expert in the real estate industry. However, there is one thing to bear in mind: your writing has to be clear, structured and start with appealing headlines, and that’s what we call copywriting.
Copywriting also matters when it comes to creating effective Google or Facebook ads. If you want to benefit from your content marketing efforts, try skilling up with the Skill Share copywriting course.
You will learn:
- Basic principles of copywriting
- Creating a text in a structured way
- Writing for the web
- Ways to answer “Why choose you?”
- Creating CTAs
- Writing appealing subheadlines
Course duration: (37 min theory + practice)
Which Course Is Best for Real Estate?
Realtors should choose marketing courses that cover the most effective strategies for their business such as digital marketing, social media, SEO, PPC, building strategies, copywriting, graphic design or video production.
How Can I Educate Myself in Real Estate Marketing?
Whether you’re an experienced agent or you’ve just got your real estate license, continuing education in marketing will always help you keep up with the ever-changing rules and new ways to generate leads.
You don’t have to go to a marketing school or enroll in every marketing course you come across. Rather than that, choose the courses that you feel strongly about and compliment it with practice, feedback and free resources that you can find anywhere on the internet.
Learn from the best
Follow the real estate agents and brokers you look up to on social media such as Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. See how they run their channels, what type of content is popular on their profiles and which of their strategies you can implement to your own social media.
Enroll to a free course
There are plenty of free courses covering different areas of marketing available online. Once in a while when you have some time to spare, enroll to a marketing class or take a video training that you can complete at your own pace.
Practice
All that theory won’t bring any results if you don’t put it into practice. Whenever you learn a new skill, don’t sit on it and try to use it to see whether or not it resonates with your audience. Chances are that some strategies that you learn along the way won’t bring results. Others, however, will turn out to be a game changer for your real estate business.
Run a survey
Ask your clients several questions about how they found you, how easy it was for them to navigate your website or how useful the information there was. The more feedback from your clients you get, the better your marketing efforts will become. You can prepare a short survey with a set of 3-5 questions and ask your clients to fill it in at the end of your successful cooperation.
Listen to a podcast
Learning doesn’t mean sitting in front of your computer fully focused on charts, presentations and case studies. You can stay up to date with the latest marketing trends by listening to a podcast while you drive your car, work out or prepare meals. Try for example Online Marketing Made Easy, Marketing Made Simple, Marketing School or Today in Digital Marketing.
Go to YouTube
Subscribe to marketing educators’ channels on YouTube and watch their videos in your free time. Go to Vanessa Lau, Social Media Examiner, Brian Dean or Semrush channels and see what they’ve got for you!
