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9 Real Estate Marketing Tools Every Agent Needs

If you’re not a tech geek, keeping up with the latest real estate marketing tools can be challenging. That’s why we rounded up the top contenders for you.

Written By

Jodie Cordell

Reviewed By:

Melanie Patterson

Mar 19, 2024

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Technology is moving at a breakneck pace, and if you’re not a tech geek (like me!), it’s difficult to keep up with all the latest real estate marketing tools out there. However, marketing tools are necessary to help agents build their businesses easier, faster, and with less stress—so you need to know what’s available. I’ve gathered the best marketing tools for agents and brokers so you can investigate what’s needed to propel your business to the next level.

The Close’s Top Picks for Real Estate Marketing Tools
1. Websites
2. CRMs
3. Social Media Marketing Tools
4. Graphic Design
5. Video Production
6. SEO Tools
7. AI Tools
8. Landing Pages
9. SMS Marketing Tools
Methodology: How We Chose the Best Real Estate Marketing Tools
FAQs
Your Take

The Close’s Top Picks for Real Estate Marketing Tools

Real Estate Marketing Tool Category	Best Tool	Starting Price
Websites	Agent Fire	$149/month + $500 setup fee
CRMs	Wise Agent	$49/month for up to 5 users
Social Media Marketing Tools	Coffee & Contracts	$74/month
Graphic Design	Canva	$10/month for Pro
Video Production	Animoto	$8/month
SEO Tools	Ahrefs	$83/month
AI Tools	ChatGPT	$20/month
Landing Pages	Real Geeks	$299/month + $250 setup fee
SMS Marketing Tools	EZ Texting	$20/month

1. Websites

Pros	Cons
Stunning website designs with white glove setup	Not an all-in-one (but that may be a pro for some agents)
Built-in marketing and lead capture tools	Startup could take days instead of hours
Affordable pricing	Bit of a learning curve

Visit Agent Fire

My Favorite Features of Agent Fire

Pricing: $149/month + $500 setup fee

Every agent in 2024 should have a real estate website that not only showcases listings but also generates leads. Agent Fire is one of the best all-in-one platforms out there, especially for the price. It has real estate marketing tools to help you generate and capture leads, including neighborhood guides, visitor search pages, and listing searches, and feed them directly into your chosen customer relationship manager (CRM).

Screenshot of a website designed with Agent Fire — Example of a website designed by Agent Fire (Source: Agent Fire)

Website Alternatives

Placester: Affordable alternative to Agent Fire with easy-to-use website templates.
Real Geeks: Many similar features as Agent Fire at a budget-friendly price.

2. CRMs

Pros	Cons
Super easy-to-use interface	Does not include SMS text messaging
Built-in marketing and lead capture tools and automated drip campaigns	Not an all-in-one solution
Affordable pricing	No mobile app
No long-term contract

Visit Wise Agent

My Favorite Features of Wise Agent

Pricing: $49/month for up to 5 users

When all the fabulous leads start pouring in, you’ll need a way to keep track of them all. A great CRM will allow you to run your business without pulling your hair out. There are a lot of real estate CRMs designed explicitly for your business, but one of my top picks is Wise Agent. It gives you a lot of functionality without breaking the bank. Its functions include concierge onboarding, tons of training, and excellent customer support to get you up and running fast. It also has tons of integrations to build the system you want.

Screenshot of the contact list in the dashboard of Wise Agent CRM — Wise Agent’s CRM dashboard is easy on the eyes for agents. (Source: Wise Agent)

CRM Alternatives

Follow Up Boss: More robust CRM with tons of functionality, but at a higher price.
Placester: IDX website with built-in CRM to capture and manage leads.

Pros	Cons
Stunning fully customizable social media templates	No automated posting
Templates from The Broke Agent	No in-app template editor
Content vault	No print-on-demand options

Visit Coffee & Contracts

My Favorite Features of Coffee & Contracts

Pricing: $74/month

Agents know that their clients (and future clients) will start looking for their next home online. It will be challenging to snag those home shoppers as clients if they’re not in front of them on social. So, social media is key. But work smarter, not harder, by tapping into the brilliance of Coffee & Contracts to plan, create, and schedule all your social media faster.

I love Coffee & Contract’s trendy, stylish templates and its arsenal of great content. The templates open in Canva, making them super easy to edit, customize with your branding, and use on social media platforms.

Coffee & Contracts lead generating social media post template — Example of a social media post template from Coffee & Contracts (Source: Coffee & Contracts)

Porchlyte: Beautiful designs for your social media, but at a slightly higher cost. Designed for real estate professionals by a seasoned veteran of the industry.

4. Graphic Design

Pros	Cons
Drag-and-drop designing	Limited number of templates
Easy-to-use interface	Can’t use one design element in another design
Affordable pricing	Limited amount of graphic design elements
Scheduling feature for social media
Ability to create your own templates and brand kit

Visit Canva

My Favorite Features of Canva

Pricing: $10/month for Pro

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get into real estate to become a graphic designer. But that’s the game today. Am I right? Make stunning social media posts, flyers, postcards, door hangers, and more with the most amazing drag-and-drop design platform—Canva.

Canva has been my preferred platform for designing practically everything for several years. During that time, it has expanded its library and now includes tons of real estate-specific templates to start your next design. And it recently added artificial intelligence (AI) features that make your projects come together quickly!

Canva template for real estate industry professionals

Graphic Design Alternatives

Kapwing: Amazing video content creating and editing tool.
Adobe Photoshop: The industry standard for design, but more expensive than Canva.

5. Video Production

Pros	Cons
Simple drag-and-drop templates	Not a lot of templates to choose from
Built-in add-ons like music and voice-over features	Can’t upload your logo or fonts on lower plans
Affordable pricing	No built-in stock images on lower plans

Visit Animoto

My Favorite Features of Animoto

Pricing: $8/month

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but if you’re not using video in your marketing stack, you need to start. After all, studies show 44% of people prefer to learn about products and services through video. Luckily, there are plenty of real estate agent tools for video production out there to help you get started. Animoto is one of the OGs of video creation. It is a drag-and-drop video editor designed to create slick, professional-looking results without the hassle. Perfect for making quick listing videos, promotional videos, or social media content that you can easily post directly from right inside the dashboard.

One of Animoto's real estate-specific video templates. — Check out the real estate-centric templates inside Animoto (Source: Animoto)

Video Production Alternatives

Canva: Yes, you can create vertical video content in Canva too!
Capcut: Platform designed to create vertical video content for social media like TikTok and Instagram Reels.

6. SEO Tools

Pros	Cons
Learn keyword difficulty, best keywords to use, and keyword lists	Expensive tool to invest in
Get lower competition keyword suggestions	Might be more than needed
See top SERP results for your chosen keyword	Bit of a learning curve
Free site audit and SEO tools available

Visit Ahrefs

My Favorite Features of Ahrefs

Pricing: $83/month

If you want your future clients to find you online, you’re going to have to learn to use search engine optimization (SEO) whether you know what it is or not. It’s not as difficult as you might believe. SEO drives traffic by allowing your content to be searchable. For your content or website to be found by Google or any search engine, keywords must be in your content. Ahrefs is a tool to help you find those keywords, which are terms people are actively searching for, so you can use them in your content. That’s how you can show up in search results. And we here at The Close love Ahrefs for this.

I love how simple the Ahrefs user interface is and how easy it is to understand. You can use and benefit from this tool even if you’re not 100% sure what everything means. The easiest way to use Ahrefs is to go to Keyword Explorer and type in a topic, like real estate (your city). Ahrefs will show you how many people are searching for that keyword, plus a list of additional keywords related to the original one.

Overview of keyword research (Source: Ahrefs) Ahrefs free keyword generator tool

Free keyword generator from Ahrefs gives you plenty of data to build your blog or social content (Source: Ahrefs)

SEO Tool Alternatives

Semrush: Gives much similar information as Ahrefs, but not as easy to use.

7. AI Tools

Pros	Cons
Simplifies your content creation and increases productivity	Not reliable when it comes to facts and statistics
Simple tool with unlimited possibilities	AI-generated content is not unique
The free version is enough to get a lot of features	Only as good as the prompts given

Visit ChatGPT

My Favorite Features of ChatGPT

Pricing: $20/month

Ah, AI! I love discussing artificial intelligence, the best real estate agent tools with AI, and how AI disrupts the real estate industry. I’ve talked about it a lot here at The Close. If you haven’t embraced AI yet, start simply and expand from there. Start with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Name yours after you sign up (I named mine Charlie), and begin asking basic questions to get the ball rolling. Use some ChatGPT prompts specifically for real estate, like writing a listing description or creating a social media post using emojis and hashtags. You can find tons of prompts in this article about clever ways to use AI tools and ChatGPT prompts.

I’ve since upgraded to the paid version to get more mileage out of my AI. ChatGPT is a magnificent real estate agent tool that helps you do more in less time. I love that you can ask it to try again if you don’t like the results the first time.

ChatGPT interface displaying a prompt to draft a property listing description for a 4 bedroom/2 bathroom home in Brandon, FL — You can ask ChatGPT to create listing descriptions, social media posts, and more. (Source: OpenAI)

AI Tool Alternatives

Copy.ai: Free tools like Instagram caption generator, marketing email generator, and cold email generator give this tool some extra punch.

8. Landing Pages

Pros	Cons
Easy-to-navigate interface	Lack of customization in website templates
Tons of integrations	Content marketing is not included
All-in-one lead management solution	High setup time for workflows
Built-in lead magnet features

Visit Real Geeks

My Favorite Features of Real Geeks

Pricing: $299/month + $250 setup fee

If you’re going to generate online leads, you’ll need a way to capture data. Enter landing pages. Landing pages are single-page websites where visitors land before reaching their intended destination—most likely your lead magnet. Our overall favorite is Real Geeks. I know what you’re thinking—isn’t that a website builder or all-in-one solution? Yes, it is. And it has spent incredible time developing landing pages to make your life easier.

I love that Real Geeks includes many additional real estate agent tools to help you generate and capture leads, including neighborhood guides, visitor search pages, listing search, and more, all designed to engage and capture more leads and feed them directly to your chosen CRM.

Real Geeks listing leads landing page starts the conversation. (Source: Real Geeks)

Landing Page Alternatives

Placester: Built-in lead capture forms ensure leads don’t slip away.
Agent Fire: Tons of built-in customizable calls to action (CTAs) plus LeadPages integration.

9. SMS Marketing Tools

Pros	Cons
Easy-to-navigate interface	Lack of customization in website templates
Tons of integrations	Content marketing is not included
All-in-one lead management solution	High setup time for workflows
Built-in lead magnet features

Check out EZ Texting

My Favorite Features of EZ Texting

Pricing: $20/month for up 500 messages/month (6,000 messages annually)

Raise your hand if your inbox is full of emails you haven’t opened. 🙋‍♀️ Sure, no one wants to listen to voicemail or open email anymore. But you know what gets read? Text messages! If you want to really up your marketing game, you should integrate SMS marketing into your overall strategy. We love EZ Texting for this. EZ Texting is a robust SMS messaging platform with many great features. I love that its AI can help you generate optimized messages that get responses.

AI generated text message options from inside EZ Texting's dashboard

Let the integrated AI help you draft the perfect text message (Source: EZ Texting) EZ Texting's analytics shows you data to help keep your list clean

EZ Texting makes sending marketing messages quick and easy (Source: EZ Texting)

SMS Marketing Tool Alternative

Slytex t: SMS and MMS texting with a pay-as-you-go plan.
FollowUp Boss: Powerful CRM with built-in mass texting feature.

Methodology: How We Chose the Best Real Estate Marketing Tools

Though we here at The Close have years of combined real estate experience, choosing the top real estate marketing tools for agents is not easy. Every agent is different and has varying degrees of expertise, technical proficiency, and needs. But I strongly feel these tools can help almost every real estate pro enhance their existing business or start their real estate journey on the right foot.

To add a degree of objectivity to my ratings, I looked at seven main criteria:

Application
- The tools should solve common marketing challenges (lead generation, client management, automation) while providing tangible, practical benefits in everyday real estate operations.
Pricing
- Real estate marketing companies should have transparent and affordable pricing models. They should offer good return on investment (ROI) for agents with free versions or trials as a bonus.
Ease of use
- Tools for real estate agents should have intuitive navigation, a user-friendly interface, and a short learning curve, which is suitable for agents at all tech levels.
Variety of features and customization options
- We look at tools that cover listing management, lead generation, email marketing, and more. Tools should be customizable to reflect brand identity and appeal to the target audience.
Integration capabilities
- Many tools are compatible with CRM systems, social media platforms, and email marketing tools. Integrating with existing systems promotes a streamlined marketing strategy through seamless data transfer.
Analytics and reporting
- Some tools offer monitoring of website traffic and campaign performance to provide actionable insights for strategy optimization.
Support and training
- Agents should have access to responsive customer support and comprehensive training resources (webinars, tutorials, documentation).

FAQs

The best marketing tool is the one you will use. I believe there are many ways to market your real estate business, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. So, go through this list of real estate marketing tools and choose the best fit for your needs. You probably won’t need everything on this list, but this is a great jumping-off point.

That said, I love CRMs and feel every agent should embrace this particular technology. I say this because it will help you manage your leads so fewer fall through the cracks. Many agents spend money to generate leads, and it would be a massive waste of money if you lost some of those leads because you lack a good system to keep track of and nurture them properly. CRMs are the best, most effective, and efficient way to do that.

The four Ps of marketing in real estate are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. The four Ps are a useful pneumonic to help you remember the marketing mix for anything you sell. Let’s take a deeper look at each one.

Product: The home you’re selling is your product. Your job as the marketer is to learn as much as possible about the property to pinpoint selling features that future buyers will be interested in. Considering your potential buyers’ intentions, find the features and corresponding benefits that match those buyers’ motivations.

The four Ps of real estate marketing.

Price: As a real estate marketing expert, it’s your job to determine the best price for the property you’re selling. You’ll want to do a deep dive into your farm area, complete a thorough comparative market analysis (CMA), and land on a price that fits the current market conditions.

Place: Obviously, the home is fixed and can’t be moved. So, your job as a marketer is to get potential buyers to come to you. Where are your future buyers looking for a new home? Your job is to find out where those eyeballs are so you can get in front of them.

Promotion: Lastly, you’ll need to develop a thorough marketing strategy to get the listing in front of the right people as much as possible. How will you get your marketing message to the right channels so your future buyers will see it?

Once you sign that listing agreement with your seller, it’s time to work on your marketing mix to ensure you sell the home as quickly as possible for as much money as possible. Use the four Ps of marketing to get your plan together quickly.

The truth is there’s no one right way to market a home for sale. But, it’s best to use a mix of different marketing strategies to reach the most people. When you want to market a new listing, you might start with your email list—send out an announcement about your listing and ask your sphere of influence if they know anyone looking for a new home.

Or you might create a post on social media and an ad campaign to reach people looking to buy a home in your area. You can check in with other agents to see if they have buyers looking for a home that matches your property. Send out postcards around the listing—invite the neighbors to an open house. They may have friends or family they would love to move in next door.

Long story short, it all depends on what you feel most comfortable doing and what will work best in your area for the type of property you are selling. What works best for one agent may not be a good fit for you, but that’s perfectly OK. We have tons of ideas for real estate marketing you can check out. Take them for a test drive and see what works best in your market for your listings.

A real estate marketing system is simply a process you create for marketing your listings. It can vary between types of properties—you wouldn’t market vacant land the same way you would market a luxury condo on the beach. But your marketing system can be a combination of ways to get the word out about your property for sale.

Beyond that, you definitely want to create a system to market and brand yourself as a real estate professional and local expert. You’ll want to create a marketing mix for promoting yourself and your brand. So, don’t only focus on marketing listings. Put together a comprehensive marketing strategy to get you in front of the eyes of your target market.

The short answer is yes. Absolutely. You need marketing for many reasons, not the least of which is how else will you sell homes for your sellers?

But other than that, without marketing, you’ll never be able to find clients who would love to work with you. You won’t fill your book of business without getting your name, brand, and expertise in front of potential clients. Marketing is essential to filling your pipeline, building your database, and finding clients.

When you develop your marketing plan, you’ll learn who your target audience is, how to reach them, and the best channels to spend time on to get the best return on investment (ROI) on your marketing investment. Once you implement your plan, you’ll have a pathway to a successful, scalable real estate business.

Your Take

There are so many real estate marketing platforms for agents to choose from. And with so many ways to mix and match, the sky’s the limit on marketing stack options. This list is just a basic primer on the tools that enhance your marketing efforts, help scale your business faster, and boost personal productivity so you can spend less time in your business and more time growing your business.

I hope you learned some cool things about different tools you may not be using and will consider adding some to your marketing tech stack. Let me know if you’re using something great that I didn’t mention. I’d love to hear from you. Leave me a comment and tell me how you use some of these cool real estate marketing tools in your business.

Jodie Cordell

Jodie is a real estate professional and copywriter with more than 10 years of experience in the advertising and marketing space. Jodie built a successful real estate business with Spence Properties in Florida using her copywriting skills and modern marketing strategies, including video. She worked with the military community as a Military Relocation Professional, helping military members handle permanent changes of station from bases all over the world to the Florida Panhandle. Today, Jodie focuses on teaching other agents how to create their personal brands and grow their businesses using powerful, well-constructed content, cutting-edge digital strategies, and the latest technology. She is a Florida Realtors faculty member, specializing in virtual and augmented reality for real estate. She also created a course, “How to Use Content + Canva to Drive Your Real Estate Sales,” which she teaches throughout Florida.

9 Real Estate Marketing Tools Every Agent Needs

The Close’s Top Picks for Real Estate Marketing Tools