If you’re like most realtors, you’re always looking for ways to streamline your business and make it more efficient. This usually involves buying a CRM or some real estate marketing software. But in order to get the most out of these tools, you need a strategy to activate marketing automation for your business.

By being strategic about your marketing automation, you can free up more time to focus on other aspects of your business.

If marketing automation for your real estate business sounds like music to your ears, keep reading!

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is the use of software to automate marketing processes such as customer segmentation, customer data integration, and campaign management.

A well-executed real estate automated marketing strategy allows you to target potential home buyers who have been searching for homes in a certain price range and will position your real estate brand in front of those potential home buyers, even while you’re sleeping or working on your open houses (to be more realistic!). 

Marketing automation is where the money is at! Because, quite frankly, your day doesn’t have more hours. And if you want to hit those audacious goals, you’ll need to be able to do things differently than your competitors.

However, marketing automation is more than just software- it’s also about using strategies to improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Or else you’ll find yourself with lots of tools and no direction on how to use them to actually generate leads.

Let’s cover our top 5 real estate marketing automation strategies that are design to save you at between 30-40 hours each month. You ready?

Marketing Automation Tools & Ideas

There are a lot of ways to do this, but we’ve compiled a list of the five best ways to automate your real estate business to get more real estate listings. By automating the tasks that take up the most time, you’ll be able to focus on what’s important: selling houses!  

1) Real Estate Content Marketing Automation  

There’s no question that content marketing is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. After all, without content, there would be nothing to share on social media, no way to attract new leads, and no way to build trust and credibility with your audience. However, many realtors leave content marketing to their broker. This is a mistake for several reasons. 

First of all, your broker is likely already marketing their own brand. As a result, they’re not likely to be too interested in promoting your content. Second, even if your broker is willing to promote your content, they probably don’t have the time or expertise to do it effectively. And third, by creating your own unique content, you’ll be able to reach new people online who might not otherwise be exposed to your brand.

Fortunately, there are plenty of automated tools and software programs out there that can help you with the content creation and promotion process. Below are some of the content automation tools you can use for your real estate content marketing:

1. Google Alerts. Follow your top targeted cities and neighborhoods and use Google Alerts to get news as soon as they happen. 
2. Create your very own bank of ideas based on the questions that your clients have. No software required! Just use a Word Document or Google Document. 
3. Generate a content calendar for the full year and plan the content that will support all the stages of your prospecting process. You can also plan content that can assist you to generate referrals from your existing clients. If you’re looking to automate your workflows and get reminders, we recommend using Monday.com. We’re been using it with our clients and works great.

By using a content publishing tool like HubSpot (for articles) or Later.com (for social media), you can plan, create, and publish your content ahead of time. This way, you can spend less time creating content and more time promoting it and following up with leads. 

2) Real Estate Social Media Automation 

If you’re manually posting to social media every day, it can start to feel like a full-time job! To make your life easier, try automating your social media process by breaking it down into smaller tasks. For example, you can batch create content ideas, graphics, and captions ahead of time. That way, when it comes time to post, all you have to do is hit publish. You can also use hashtags and location optimization (geotagging) to reach a wider audience. 

That’s why social media automation tools are so valuable. Here are some of the tools we recommend for social media automation:

1. Facebook (now Meta) offers great features where you can schedule posts, stories, and videos ahead of time.

•  A pro tip: Schedule stories with clickable links using Meta, so you can ask your audience to book an appointment

1. Use the Canva pro features to set up your branding so your social media content looks uniform. You can even get Canva templates that can help you create your graphics quicker. Or simply outsource this process entirely so you can always have amazing graphics! 

Just remember to keep an eye on your social media accounts so you can respond to any comments or messages in a timely manner. 

How to schedule Instagram Reels ahead of time?

If you’re looking for a way to save time on your Instagram Reels, you can actually schedule them ahead of time. This can be a huge help if you’re trying to keep up with a consistent posting schedule. You use the native scheduling feature in Later. With Later, you can create your Reel and then select the date and time that you want it to go live. 

You’ll be able to be consistent in pushing  Reels out on a regular basis, even if you don’t have the time to post them every day.

3) Real Estate Newsletters Automation 

Staying in touch with past clients and potential leads is essential for generating referrals and repeat business. However, manually sending out newsletters can be time-consuming. 

Fortunately, there are plenty of great newsletter automation tools out there that can save you hours every month. 

MailChimp and Constant Contact are two popular options that allow you to create beautiful newsletters with ease. Plus, they make it easy to manage your contacts and send out automated emails when someone subscribes to your newsletter.  

Tips to facilitate your newsletter automation workflow:

1. Use a planner so you can build your newsletters around strategic dates. 
2. Avoid sending newsletters during busy seasons. While there’s nothing wrong about sending a newsletter during Thanksgiving, you’ll be competing with the e-commerce brands who are already sending dozens of emails to your potential clients.
3. Write the content for your newsletters in batches. Here’s an example of your Q1 newsletters: 

          – January 11: Welcoming 2023 with market predictions for 2023
          – January 25: Top 5 Communities for families in your city
          – February 7: Top 10 Ideas to Celebrate Valentines as a Family
          – February 23: Featuring a listing 
          – March 1: Downloadable PDF with trusted providers for Spring Cleaning
          – March 14: Calendar of events for families (feature popular festivals during April, May, and June

1. Segment your audience so you can plan nurturing campaigns for your renters.

• Once you plan the topics ahead, you then can automate your content management system and create reminders with the information you’ll need in order to prepare your newsletter following your content lifecycle plan. And just know that you can hire a real estate marketing agency and they will take over this entire process for you!

Between automating your real estate social media and newsletters, you’ll be saving at least 20 hours each month (if not more!).

Now let’s get you to save time with those repeatable tasks that are part of your real estate marketing.

4) Postcard Automation 

Nothing says “professional” like getting a personalized postcard in the mail from your favorite realtor! However, writing out and mailing dozens of postcards can take up a lot of time—time that could be spent generating new leads. 

Luckily, there are plenty of postcard automation services out there that make it easy to design and print professional-looking postcards without breaking the bank. Postalytics and Send Out Cards are two great options that offer affordable postcard printing and mailing services. They even offer automated campaigns so you can set it and forget it! 

You’re probably doing all the above real estate marketing tactics. But if you want to stand out, a great real estate marketing idea for 2023 is to level up your Local SEO efforts so that people who are near you can actually find you.

So what is Local SEO and how can this be integrated with your real estate content marketing automation strategy?

5) Local SEO Automation for Realtors

One of the best ways to ensure that your site is visible to people in your vicinity is to optimize your online presence for local SEO. This involves making sure that your name appears prominently in search results for relevant keywords.  This works great for realtors who have a physical location. Your broker might have Local SEO and you might be able to leverage their presence if you play your cards right.   

While you’re not expected to be a pro and learn SEO, it’s important for you to know that your online presence can be optimized in a relatively fast way by using SEO automation tools.  And by SEO Automation tools we mean automating the workflows. Unfortunately, while there are artificial intelligence tools for SEO tasks, the work that it takes in order to make edits on the site and actually distribute links and build directories is still done by humans.

Final Words

Real estate can be a very rewarding career, but it takes a lot of hard work to be successful. It’s important to have a clear vision for your business from the beginning. If you’re only looking to close a few deals per year and make some extra money, that’s perfectly fine. However, if you want to build a full-time business, you’ll need to be strategic to attract more clients. 

Having a solid digital marketing presence is essential for driving leads and closing sales especially if you don’t have to be the one doing the work! Wouldn’t that be great? 

Taking the time to invest in your marketing will pay off in the long run and help you achieve your business goals.

About MFG – Jessica Campos

Before becoming a digital marketer, I was a real estate attorney and closed close to a billion transactions. However, my success was all 100% offline. Facebook didn’t exist. The kind of digital marketing tools we have these days are in my opinion, untapped by real estate agents. This makes me excited to partner up with realtors! 

Real estate is all about relationships and building trust. And what better way to build trust than by being present and accessible online? 

I believe that the real estate industry is ripe for some serious disruption and that agents who embrace digital marketing will be the ones who come out on top. So if you’re a realtor looking for an edge, I hope you liked these real estate marketing ideas. 

Don’t hesitate to reach out! I’m confident that I can help you take your business to the next level. Request a marketing assessment today!  

Real Estate Marketing Automation Services We Offer

When it comes to real estate marketing, having everything in one place is essential so you can move as quickly as possible. Luckily, we take pride in our fast turnaround for our marketing services.

We develop a real estate automated marketing system, customized to your needs and goals. This includes:

1. Social media management
2. Messenger auto responders
3. Content management
4. Automated newsletters campaign
5. Postcard design 
6. Hello neighbor mailers
7. Local Guides 
8. Local Events
9. Recommended vendors  
10. Heartfelt letters 
11. Branding 
12. Website 
13. CRM management  
14. SMS marketing