Boost Your Business Series: Tools
The best part about being a real estate agent today is that you have hundreds of useful tools at your fingertips. From the internet to smartphones to great apps, there are so many tools you can use to boost your real estate business to new heights. With all of these tools available, though, it can be difficult to find the right one for you.
That’s why we’ve compiled a list of some of our favorites, as well as a few Realtor recommendations.
Animoto
Animoto is a cloud-based video creation service that takes photos, video clips, and music and turns them into video slideshows. You can use Animoto to show off pictures of your newest listing, create a slideshow of your recent clients’ homes or create a fun compilation video of a recent event. Realtors also use Animoto frequently to create virtual tours of the properties they are listing.
Studies show that real estate listings with a video tour get four times more inquiries than those without a video, and 40% of potential homebuyers say virtual tours helped them make a decision. For those reasons alone, you should at least try Animoto, or other video software tools, to help you improve your online listing appeal!
Ripl
Speaking of video, Ripl is a great way to add animated videos to social media platforms. Instead of only text-based posts or sharing linked articles, Ripl offers you a way to animate content ideas – think blogs made visual, compilation videos, fun slideshows, etc. – that attract your audience’s eye. You can add your photo(s) and text, choose a design template, customize the post and share to your social media accounts. Ripl also tracks your engagements (clicks, likes, comments) so you can create more of what works.
Here’s a fun example of How one Realtor used Ripl to grow her social media following.
We hear from a lot of Realtors that they don’t really use LinkedIn, except to connect with people or to check notifications once in a while. If you’re not on LinkedIn, you should sign up and create your profile now. LinkedIn is a powerful real estate tool, arguably just as powerful as Facebook. Not only is LinkedIn another social media platform that can expand your reach to new audiences, but it also:
- Helps you connect with peers in the industry
- Strengthen ties to old or current clients
- Highlights your experience and skills clearly
- Lets you share and interact with content in different ways
You can also use LinkedIn’s powerful audience data tools to target your content and ads to your specific audience. You can also boost posts for just a few bucks to get even more reach, and even upload your audience data to Facebook to use for advertising there, as well.
LeadPages
LeadPages is exactly what it sounds like; pages that get you leads. With LeadPages landing page creator, you can generate leads and increase revenue with optimized pages and neat opt-in tools. Essentially, these are web pages that you can create and link to from a variety of sources – email, social media, referral links, etc. – that are designed to funnel potential clients closer to working with you. LeadPages has a ton of real estate landing pages templates, and you can always customize other templates to fit your needs.
Their opt-in templates are a great way to get people to sign up for your email list!
ManyChat
Facebook messages, especially for your business page, can be hard to manage and reply to in a reasonable timeframe. ManyChat is a little Facebook messenger bot that can “LiveChat” with people who message you on Facebook, and notify you if something needs your attention. But ManyChat also offers broadcast messages that update your followers, boost apps that help you connect with new followers and “sequences” that let you send out automated messages (like an email drip).
If you drive a lot of business traffic from Facebook or would like to, ManyChat is a must-try.
Buffer
You can spend a lot of time on social media just writing posts, publishing them and then managing interaction. But what if you could automate the publishing part so you only need to generate the ideas and then engage with your followers? Buffer is a really robust social media management tool that lets you do just that. Not only can you save posts, schedule them and see how they perform, but you can also share “recommended content” that will better engage your followers! Save time by scheduling your social media so you can focus on what’s important – engagement!
BombBomb
Have you noticed a little slump in your email interactions? Email marketing, while still powerful, may not be converting as well as other visually attractive mediums. BombBomb addresses this by offering video emails – a unique addition to the email marketing world. Instead of plain text emails that link out to video, BombBomb integrates with virtually every email provider to send video emails. The email itself shows a portion of your video, with a click-through button that allows people to watch the rest of the video.
BombBomb users report higher click-through rates and conversions (20% of users have doubled their conversions & sales), and they have a ton of real estate success stories to share. Really, what have you gone to lose?
What Real Estate Tools are in your toolbox?
Hopefully, this list of our favorite real estate tools will get you motivated to grow your business the smart way. While these tools may not be right for every agent, odds are they can be a huge help in many cases.
We’d like to hear from YOU! Do you have any must-have tools in your real estate toolkit you’d like to share?