Let’s be honest here ― real estate agents aren’t always the best marketers. By pedigree or training, most Realtors don’t have the chops or education to know what’s a good marketing idea and what’s a bad one.
Luckily, there are real estate marketing companies that have spent years figuring out ways to get Realtors the best leads for the lowest price.
Real estate marketing companies generally fall into one of three categories:
- A full-blown marketing agency that will provide complete campaigns and strategy tailored precisely to your needs.
- A marketing service company that provides specific offerings and relies a little more on the agent to follow through and complete the tasks.
- An outsourcing option where you can hire specific freelancers to complete very specific work.
Whether you’re looking for help with your real estate video marketing, want to hire a real estate social media marketing company or need some one-off help for a quick marketing task, we’ve got you covered.
Here are our picks for the five best real estate marketing companies.
5 Best Real Estate Marketing Companies
| Real Estate Marketing Company | Category | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Real Geeks (Best Overall) | Service Provider | Realtors who want high-quality buyer and seller leads |
| Parkbench | Service Provider | Agents who specialize in real estate farming |
| Thrive | Marketing Agency | Real estate pros who want to dominate social media marketing |
| Chatter Buzz | Marketing Agency | Realtors who want customized a la carte marketing services |
| Fiverr | Outsourcing Option | Agents who need help with quick, one-off tasks |
Let’s dig into each provider and find the real estate marketing company right for you.
Best Overall Real Estate Marketing Company: Real Geeks
When most people think of Real Geeks, they think of top-tier real estate lead generation services, and rightfully so. Real Geeks regularly ranks near the top of the list of the best real estate lead providers in the industry, but many people don’t know that it also offers comprehensive marketing services, filling just about every need a real estate agent could have, including agent and property marketing, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, an internet data exchange (IDX) integrated website, and more.
Real Geeks Pricing at a Glance
Real Geeks’ marketing service prices start at $199 a month for an IDX website and access to their CRM. For $50 more a month, you can utilize their lead generating Home Valuation Landing Page. It offers other specific marketing services like Google PPC advertising, and Facebook marketing starting at $300 per month.
Real Geeks Pricing At a Glance
| IDX Website + CRM | |
| Home Valuation Landing Page | |
| Google PPC Advertising | |
| Facebook Marketing | |
| Onboarding Fee | |
| Lead Assignment Tools, SMS AutoResponder, Market Reports, Automated Communication Services |
Real Estate Marketing Tools Provided by Real Geeks
- IDX-equipped websites: Your website is the hub of your marketing strategy. If you don’t have a solid place to point people to online, you’re missing out. Real Geeks has been constantly iterating on its websites for years, teasing out more lead generation opportunities constantly.
- Landing pages: Real Geeks’ landing pages supplement your full website and give your lead traffic a better chance of converting. Our favorite Real Geeks landing page is the Property Valuation Landing Page.
- “Real Leads”: This is the Real Geeks lead generation platform, offering management of your Google and Facebook advertising. Use this platform to drive traffic to your landing pages or website.
- Real estate CRM: Real Geeks includes a full-featured CRM that integrates automatically with the lead generation tools on your website. It also offers communication options like email and short message service (SMS) texting.
- SMS Autoresponder: Integrated into the Real Geeks CRM, the SMS Autoresponder feature lets you send a text message in response to an activity automatically, thus keeping your new prospect engaged and talking.
- Market reports: Many of your prospective buyers and sellers are waiting for what they perceive is the “right market opportunity.” With this tool, you can craft customized market reports to be sent automatically, keeping your clients informed and increasing the chances that one of these data-driven clients is going to call, ready to buy or sell.
- Facebook marketing tool: If you want to do more on Facebook―say, advertise individual properties―the larger Facebook Marketing Management tool is the way to go. Market your entire business, individual homes or services, and do it with Real Geek’s custom tools. No need to enter into the Facebook Ads Manager at all.
- Automated Communication Services: If you want to take the email drip campaigns provided by the Real Geeks CRM a step further, check out the Automated Communication Services. This allows you to integrate text messages and even postcards into your automations, making your communication with different leads types varied and even more effective.
SMS Texting Options: Our Favorite Real Geeks Feature
Across the suite of Real Geeks’ services, there is an underlying thread of support and availability for SMS texting options. We all know that the open and read rates on text messages―more than 90%―crush that of email―at slightly more than 20%―and certainly that of snail mail―less than 17%―which makes the Real Geeks integration of this service into their platform all the more valuable.
You can send and receive text messages straight from your Real Geeks CRM, even scheduling them like they were emails. This is quick and convenient and allows you to integrate texting into your automated communication drips.
No Intuitive Team Interface: Where Real Geeks Comes Up Short
While Real Geeks does offer decent lead routing options if you are using the platform in a team setting, there is no distinction between “team members” and “team leaders,” meaning there isn’t a great way to manage the performance of your team as a whole. Although there are ways around this, it would be nice to be able to customize the dashboards of team members a little more and give the team lead more analytics they can use to continue to push performance forward.
Outgrown Your Own Marketing Skills? Real Geeks is for You
Real Geeks is an ideal platform for real estate agents who’ve taken their business as far as it will go with their own marketing skills and are ready to level up as far as exposure and strategy.
If you’re looking for someone to help write posts for your social media following, Real Geeks isn’t for you. If you’re looking for a real estate marketing service that is going to get your name out there with targeted campaigns across all the major ad platforms, manage a fantastic website, and drive leads through custom landing pages, you’ve got to give Real Geeks a try.
Best Real Estate Marketing Company for Real Estate Farming: Parkbench
Real estate farming is a specialized approach to marketing that involves establishing yourself as the go-to source for all things real estate in a particular neighborhood. Parkbench makes real estate farming easier by giving you a website that serves as a central hub for your farm area, complete with local news stories, deals in local restaurants and, of course, opportunities to request local real estate market information and obtain a valuation on a home.
Parkbench Pricing at a Glance
Prices for Parkbench websites start at $3,000 a year and vary slightly by community size. There is no estimator on the Parkbench website to allow us to get an idea of the cost in specific communities, but this information is available from the Parkbench sales team if you call them on the phone.
Real Estate Marketing Services Provided by Parkbench
- Hyperlocal website: The foundation of the Parkbench platform is their website; a place real estate agents establish as a hub for those in the communities they’re farming. Because Parkbench only allows a single Realtor per neighborhood, you can be assured that your hyperlocal website will be the only one.
- Auto-populated local news: To keep the maintenance and effort as low as possible, Parkbench has developed an algorithm that scans local news for relevant stories, events, and even deals that your audience might be interested in.
- Dedicated success coaches: Parkbench knows they’ve got a relatively specialized product, so to make sure everyone’s getting the most out of it, they provide each subscriber with a coach to answer questions and provide regular guidance.
A Real-world Conversation Starting Platform: Our Favorite Parkbench Feature
Parkbench works best when you’re out in the community talking about it, promoting it, and driving traffic to it one conversation at a time. Of course, this sort of face-to-face interaction isn’t the only way that you’ll get the word out, but it’s one that creates real opportunities to not only talk about the community you want to represent, but also to start real estate conversations that will lead to new clients, and, eventually, closed sales.
Parkbench provides some great tools to help start these conversations like local business interview templates so you’ll know exactly how to start on the right foot.
For those of you who are still a little squeamish about hopping on the phone or getting face-to-face with people you don’t know, I get it―this might not be considered a strength. But, honestly, if you’re going to make it in real estate, these are things you’re going to have to figure out sometime, so why not start now?
Inflexible Pricing: Where Parkbench Comes Up Short
Parkbench offers a single product for a single, annual price. There is no trial, there is no monthly option, and there are no installments. While we certainly understand the value of a neighborhood or community website like this and can appreciate the investment that value demands, the lack of flexible pricing is a standout among other real estate marketing companies.
Are You a Real Estate Farmer? Parkbench is for You
If you’re currently operating a real estate farm and are looking to offer more to your target neighborhood or are looking to take your real estate marketing in a new direction and are considering a hyperlocal approach, Parkbench should be on your radar.
Best Real Estate Social Media Marketing Company: Thrive
For many real estate agents, social media is the place you have to be to gain notoriety and build a reputation in your market. To be successful on social media, real estate agents need to know which social networks are essential to their area, the best ways to maximize those networks’ benefits, the content to engage with their audience, and the time to execute the plan.
We know, this sounds like a full-time job, which is why hiring an agency like Thrive to do it for you can make a lot of sense.
Thrive Pricing at a Glance
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency has a fixed hourly rate of $125 per hour. This hourly rate applies to all of Thrive’s services, including SEO, web design and development, social media marketing and advertising, PPC, content and video production, email marketing, and reputation management. They are a month-to-month company with no minimum contract length.
Real Estate Marketing Services Provided by Thrive
- SEO: Getting your website to show up in the top results on Google can mean the difference between an active website with a full lead funnel and an empty inbox. SEO is especially important for real estate agents since you’re competing with the likes of Zillow and Realtor.com, so a solid hyperlocal strategy is essential.
- Website development: Thrive offers custom-built websites for real estate professionals that are mobile-ready and SEO-friendly. Before consulting Thrive on a website, we suggest you check out our list of the best real estate website builders first to see if a real estate-specific provider might be a better option.
- Social media marketing: Often the most vexing marketing problem for real estate agents, Thrive provides a whole suite of social media marketing options, including identifying your target audiences, creating a content strategy and implementation plan, consistent monitoring and research of paid and organic posts and ads, and even content development.
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: PPC ad campaigns are a terrific way to reach customers quickly, but these ad spaces can get very competitive and expensive in the real estate world, which is why having someone working with you on this to maximize every dollar spent is helpful.
- Video production: Video is the best way to share a message online, but making great video can be challenging, which is why Thrive offers a full range of real estate video marketing production services.
- Content marketing: Creating content for your website is an essential step in your SEO strategy. It’s your chance to show your prospects and Google that you’ve got an expert opinion to contribute to the conversation when real estate questions are asked. However, writing great content, similar to making great video, is tough, so Thrive also offers content marketing services to guide or complete the content process for you.
- Reputation management: Reviews are very important in the real estate world, so having someone working on your behalf to solicit and manage your reviews as well as monitor the major review sites for red flags is beneficial.
- Conversion optimization: Getting people to your website is one thing. Getting them to fill out a form and ask for more information is another. If you’re getting people to visit your site, but they stop short of becoming a lead, you may need some help analyzing the conversion process and making sure there are no roadblocks in the way for someone interested in becoming your next lead.
- Email marketing: Email marketing remains a tried-and-true way to reach your audience, but all of your competitors know this too. If you need help taking your email marketing to the next level, Thrive can get you there.
Your Own Dedicated Social Media Marketing Specialist: Our Favorite Thrive Feature
Thrive stands out in the realm of social media marketing, and this is especially true when it comes to how they service their clients. Every real estate professional who uses Thrive for social media marketing has a dedicated social media marketing expert who they work with to build, implement, monitor, and adjust a strategy with.
This is especially important when it comes to social media marketing as things on social can happen quickly and hopping on a trend or making an impact with a timely post or statement can be a real difference-maker. With Thrive’s individual contact approach, you don’t have to call an 800 number and hope to get someone who knows about your account. Instead, you have one email and one phone number for your person, the person who can work with you to make sure you’re making the best decisions and getting the most out of every opportunity.
Better Analytics: Where Thrive Comes Up Short
Reviews of Thrive on Clutch consistently mention that while Thrive is quick to provide a lot of raw data when it comes to performance reporting, often that data doesn’t come with much analysis. As real estate agents, we are continually analyzing the market for our clients, interpreting the trends for our buyers and sellers so that they can make the best decisions possible.
Though having the raw performance data of their work is a good start, it would be great if Thrive could turn those reports into something a little more actionable.
Are You a Social Butterfly? Thrive is for You
If you’ve got a big sphere of influence and are already making a splash on social media, or you’re in a very competitive social media market and need a leg up over your competition, Thrive is an excellent choice for you. There are many different ways that Thrive can help real estate agents, but its social media marketing is what sets them apart.
Thrive also offers a free consultation and quote for real estate agents, visit its website today and learn what it can do for you.
Best Real Estate Marketing Company for Flexible Pricing: Chatter Buzz
Chatter Buzz is an online marketing agency that has a dedicated vertical just for real estate marketing. With dozens of major regional real estate brokerages like Weichert Realtors, Olde Town Brokers, and the Driftwood Group, they’ve got a solid portfolio of real estate marketing success and have high-performing teams singing their praises.
Chatter Buzz offers everything from web design to video production with a unique, monthly billing approach that is ideal for real estate professionals who aren’t quite ready to pull the trigger on a significant investment or a yearlong commitment.
Chatter Buzz Pricing at a Glance
Chatter Buzz employs a unique point pricing model that is based on deliverables, not on an hourly billing rate. The Starter Package is $3,000 a month, the Basic Package is $5,000 a month, the Growth Package is $10,000 a month, and the Enterprise Package is $20,000.
Each tier of pricing at Chatter Buzz comes with an allotted number of points, and using this bank of points, real estate professionals can work with their account manager to choose what they’d like done month to month.
Chatter Buzz Pricing
| Package | |
|---|---|
| Starter (20 points) | |
| Basic (35 points) | |
| Growth (74 points) | |
| Enterprise (154 points) |
Jumping up to the Basic package unlocks options like actual campaign execution, weekly review sessions, and strategy adjustments, a dedicated account manager, and more.
The Growth package, Chatter Buzz’s most popular option, expands the offerings even further to include specialized social, content, email, PPC and other paid campaigns, all integrated to form a cohesive brand and lead generation strategy.
Real Estate Marketing Services Provided by Chatter Buzz
- Web design: Like other marketing companies, Chatter Buzz provides web design services, providing mobile-ready and SEO-friendly websites for real estate agents who aren’t satisfied with what is offered by their brokerage.
- Branding: As a Realtor, you are more than just a name on a sign, your service, expertise, and experience are a brand. Leverage this brand with a professionally designed logo, style guide, and color scheme to create consistency and recognizability for all your media across every platform.
- SEO consulting: If you’ve got a great website and are producing compelling content but still aren’t seeing traffic increasing, you might have an SEO problem. Chatter Buzz offers specialized real estate SEO consultations and strategy to make sure Google knows you’re an authority in your area and displays you as such.
- PPC/search engine marketing (SEM) services: Chatter Buzz offers a standard suite of PPC advertising services to get your brand and message in front of prospective clients, but also take that a step further and integrate SEM strategies so that agents can take advantage of other display ad formats on major search engines.
- Social media marketing: Chatter Buzz offers a wide variety of social media services, including content strategies, organic growth strategies, paid advertising, and audience management. Real estate agents can be as involved or hands-off as they want. Chatter Buzz specifically calls out this area of service as a “partnership” with their clients.
- Video: Chatter Buzz offers real estate video marketing production services with its remote clients in mind. They coach you how to produce the raw footage and can help you turn that footage into finished products.
- Content marketing: Chatter Buzz will help you decide what the best content to produce is and even help you produce it if you don’t have the time or the skills to execute yourself.
- Reputation management: Like their competitors at Thrive, Chatter Buzz understands how important online reviews are, especially for real estate agents. One thing that sets Chatter Buzz apart from Thrive is that since they have a specialized real estate marketing vertical within the agency, they’ve got dedicated support for the Zillow platform, arguably the most important place a real estate agent can collect reviews.
- Email marketing: Most real estate agents can pull off basic email marketing by themselves with the help of a great real estate CRM. Chatter Buzz goes beyond the basics by helping to develop and roll out a specialized content strategy within that email platform as well as helping to establish testing protocols to measure the effectiveness of your message and improve.
Paying for Results, Not Time: Our Favorite Chatter Buzz Feature
Most marketing agencies bill you by the hour, not by the task, which adds a level of uncertainty to your marketing budget. The unique points system Chatter Buzz employs allows you to discuss ahead of time what is going to be accomplished and what your budget will be. Also, unlike other agencies that might require a certain commitment of time to get started, Chatter Buzz is entirely commitment-free. You can pay for services month to month with no contract and can break off your relationship at any time.
Keeping that in mind, we suggest that you don’t go into a relationship with a marketing agency and expect results in 30 days. Brand, message, and reception of your business take time. Make sure you set clear expectations and hold those working for you accountable to their statements but allow 90 days before reserving judgment on results.
Real Estate Specific Product Support: Where Chatter Buzz Comes Up Short
Though Chatter Buzz is well versed in what it takes to market a real estate business, they are noticeably short on their support and integration of real estate specific marketing tools that real estate agents are already using or paying for. For instance, if you’re already using a service, such as a well-known real estate tool like REDX, to do phone prospecting, Chatter Buzz doesn’t have support for integrating these sorts of platforms into the strategies they’re building for real estate agents.
This can be frustrating, especially for agents who’ve paid for an annual subscription somewhere and don’t have an excellent way to weave specific tools into the overall real estate marketing approach.
Are You Looking for a Marketing Partner That Will Allow You to Pivot Quickly? Chatter Buzz Is for You
Thanks to Chatter Buzz’s flexible billing approach and a la carte framework, real estate agents who want a lot of control over their spend and strategy can evaluate what works and pivot easily when necessary. Chatter Buzz offers a free consultation and marketing audit, so you’ve got nothing to lose. Check them out today.
Best Real Estate Marketing Company for Agents With a Limited Budget: Fiverr
Technically speaking, Fiverr isn’t a marketing company. They describe themselves as a “freelance services marketplace for business,” and you can find just about any service under the sun here, including real estate marketing.
When you use Fiverr, you take on another role in your real estate business: project manager. It will be up to you to manage the work of any freelancers you hire, coordinate that work across your larger strategy, and make adjustments to what’s getting done and who’s doing it if you don’t see the results you expect.
This sort of strategy management can be tough, which is why traditional marketing agencies charge a pretty penny for it, but if you have a clear vision of what you’re looking for and, better yet, have a solid real estate marketing blueprint to work from, using freelancers from Fiverr can be a great option.
Fiverr Pricing at a Glance
Each individual freelancer on Fiverr sets their own prices for the projects they work on. Like the name of the website implies, the lowest price you’ll pay for services is $5. We found plenty of people creating marketing materials, offering postcard templates and short real estate property marketing videos for $5.
More advanced services like website design, SEO work, email marketing, and more started closer to $25 and ranged up to $150.
It’s important to keep in mind that when you are hiring someone from Fiverr, you are hiring them as a “gig economy” worker. That means that the money you pay them for their work gets specific tasks done, not a recurring set of functions. If you hire someone from Fiverr for an SEO audit of your website, you are hiring them for a one-time service, so make sure you’re planning accordingly.
Real Estate Marketing Services Provided by Fiverr
When we searched “real estate marketing” on Fiverr, we were given nearly 4,200 results. Here are some of the most relevant things you can get from marketers on Fiverr:
- Real estate video marketing
- Print ad design
- Virtual staging
- Social media management
- Listing photography
- Blog content writing
- Postcard design services
- Ad copy services
- SEO audits
- Website design
- PPC ad management
- Facebook ad management
Virtually Unlimited Choices: Our Favorite Fiverr Feature
Fiverr is a double-sided marketplace, meaning you have lots of different real estate marketing products to choose from as well as lots of different providers. Not only do you get the option of picking what you want to be done, but you have a centralized place where you can sort through and compare providers of those products too.
This gives real estate agents the opportunity to find exactly the service and service provider they need in a competitive market framework, which ensures you’re paying a competitive price too. When your budget is tight, having this sort of dollar by dollar control is important.
Extra Management Work: Where Fiverr Comes Up Short
Though working with freelancers from Fiverr has lots of benefits, including the possibility of saving a boatload of cash, with those opportunities come the need to manage your new very-short-term employees and the work they deliver. Most real estate agents who are considering working with a real estate marketing company are looking for a way to save time, not create more tasks for themselves, something you don’t always avoid when you’re designing your own strategy and managing your own freelancers.
Are You a Scrappy Startup? Fiverr is for You
Working with Fiverr for your real estate marketing needs is more of the project manager approach, but if you want total control over who you work with, exactly what tasks they’ll have on their plate, and how those tasks fit into your overall strategy, not to mention being able to control your budget down to the dollar for every deliverable, Fiverr is the way to go.
Real Estate Marketing Companies Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
If you have more questions about real estate marketing companies, then we’ve got some answers.
Should I use an agency, a service, or employ a freelancer?
This is going to depend on the amount of work that you need to be done. If you are looking for help with small things here and there, a full-blown agency isn’t going to be the best choice for you. Stick with hiring a freelancer from Fiverr.
If you need some specific tools to augment your marketing efforts long-term, a service like Real Geeks will provide you with exactly what you need so that you can plug new dimensions of your marketing like a new website or some new landing pages into your lead generation or general marketing efforts.
If your business has grown to the point where your marketing requires full-time attention, it’s time to start looking at an agency. Successful agents will hit a point when their growth begins to slow unless they’ve got an experienced marketing team at the helm of their ship. If you’ve got more budget than you know what to do with and growth that has started to slow because you’re not sure how to take the next step in your current strategies, look at Thrive or Chatter Buzz.
What’s the difference between a real estate marketing company and a real estate lead generation company?
A real estate lead generation company has a very narrow focus: to fill your funnel with potential buyers and sellers. A real estate marketing company, on the other hand, takes a more holistic approach to your business, such as how to generate awareness, raise your profile, generate better reviews, and generate leads. More often than not, real estate lead generation companies provide specific tools that you can use to create these lead opportunities, whereas a real estate marketing company offers not just tools, but also information, strategy, and support.
Any suggestions on hiring a freelancer?
Places like Fiverr are filled with a ton of freelancers who would love to work for you, but how do you choose the best fit for you and your business?
Start by looking at the reviews. A good choice will be well-reviewed by people who were looking for similar services, preferably also in the real estate industry. That’s not to say that someone who’s new to the site and doesn’t yet have reviews can’t do a good job, but for your first time hiring a freelancer, stick with someone who has a proven track record.
Also, make sure you ask lots of questions before making your decision. Make sure the person you hire is a good communicator, understands your goals and is clear on when and how you want your results delivered.
Bringing It All Together
Getting the right real estate marketing company for your growing business is essential to elevating your status in your local market in 2020. Do you have a company in mind that you think we should have included on our list? If so, then drop them in a comment below, and let’s start a conversation.
What happened to Zillow and Bold leads
Hi Brenton –
Thanks for the comment. Zillow and Boldleads didn’t make the list this time around because their marketing offerings were a little too one dimensional. They are both great platforms for doing one thing really well, but the companies on this list do lots of things really well. Not belittling either of them, we just chose to look at providers who offered a more diverse range of services.
Chris