Over the years, we’ve seen tons of agents, teams, and brokerages that took our advice and built great brands. Of course, when it came time to show off their new brands online, most dropped the ball. Why? They didn’t take the time to find the real estate marketing tools that would help them look professional online.
That’s why we decided to put together this comprehensive list of the best real estate marketing tools available for agents, teams, and brokerages in 2021. Since most of these tools are free or very cheap, there’s simply no excuse to market your brand in an unprofessional way.
These tools won’t only make you look good online, they will help save you time, money, and effort in the process. Sound good? OK, let’s jump right into our list of the best real estate marketing tools for 2021:
A Website to Show Off Your Brand & Convert Leads
In 2021, your website is even more important than your office. After all, no matter where they find you, your potential clients are going to want to kick the tires and learn more about you. Your website is where they’re going to do that nine times out of 10. That’s why a merely OK website won’t cut it for real estate lead generation. You need a GREAT website. Here are the best website options available today:
Real Geeks
Cost: $249 per month
Learning curve: Low
One of the earliest providers of all-in-one IDX websites and customer relationship management (CRM) tools, Real Geeks offers agents, teams, and brokerages a true turnkey solution for their online marketing efforts. There are way, way too many features to list here, but you will get a gorgeous IDX website optimized for lead generation, a powerful CRM, a property valuation tool, SMS texting, market reports, and—yeah, way too much to list here.
Propertybase
Cost: Starting at $89 per user, per month
Learning curve: Low
Originally Boston Logic, Propertybase is the professional real estate team’s secret weapon. They offer killer IDX websites with mapping features as well as an integrated CRM that is designed to help teams nurture leads long term and drive more referrals and business. If you already have a website, they offer a standalone CRM that was recently revamped to be even more effective at keeping teams organized and marketing like Fortune 500 companies.
WordPress Website
Cost: Free to $5,000 and higher
Learning curve: High
If you’re a bit more tech-savvy and want to get your hands dirty, then you might want to try your hand at building a WordPress website to show off your brand online. While WordPress is easy to use compared to building a site from scratch, the learning curve for non-tech-savvy agents is high. You’ll also need to pay to add features like IDX listings, which come standard with most real estate websites.
InCom
Cost: Starting at $44.94 per month
Learning curve: Low
If you need a website on a budget and don’t need any of the bells and whistles Real Geeks or Propertybase offer, then InCom is a great choice. They offer real estate websites with landing pages, lead generation features, and a built-in CRM starting at just $44.95 per month. A great deal in anyone’s book.
Placester
Cost: Starting at $80 per month
Learning curve: Medium
While they don’t offer an integrated CRM, Placester is definitely worth considering for one reason: they make lovely websites. While there is some debate on whether or not your website needs to be beautiful to convert leads, there is no debate that an ugly site will hurt your brand. So if you already have a CRM you love, you can’t go wrong with a Placester website.
Social Media Management Tools
While most agents understand just how important social media is to their marketing efforts in 2021, few of them actually use social media effectively. Sure, they tweet up a storm and share lots of listing pictures on Instagram, but they waste too much time tending to their social media feeds the old-fashioned way. They manually send out every tweet, every comment, and every video.
Luckily, there are marketing tools that can automate the bulk of your social media posting, which means you don’t have to stop what you’re doing to Tweet at the times studies have shown get the most engagement.
Here’s a quick rundown of a few tools to help you automate your social media posting:
Hootsuite
Cost: $29 to $599 per month
Learning curve: Low
Hootsuite is the social media software that 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies trust to plan, create, and schedule their social media posts to maximize views and engagement. Hootsuite lets you store frequently used assets like images and logos so you can create and schedule social media content for multiple channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more from one app.
Buffer
Cost: Free to $99 per month
Learning curve: Low
Like Hootsuite, Buffer also lets agents plan, create, and schedule social media posts. They also have a cool feature that lets you add a first comment to your Instagram posts in order to entice your followers to engage and include more info about your post. The best part is that unlike Hootsuite, Buffer offers a limited free version that lets you manage three social accounts and schedule up to 10 posts. Most teams will probably opt to upgrade to the Pro plan for only $15 a month, though.
Tailwind
Cost: Free to $9.99 per month
Learning curve: Low
Spend lots of time on Pinterest or Instagram? Then an app like Tailwind is right up your alley. Tailwind lets you schedule social media posts for Pinterest and Instagram, but also helps you discover key influencers to work with on Pinterest and trending hashtags to post with on Instagram. Even better, Tailwind has a free trial that lasts forever, so you can use a limited version of the app without paying a dime. Of course, if you want to upgrade, Tailwind is only $9.99 per channel, per month. So if you only want to use Tailwind for Instagram, you’re in luck.
A Great CRM
Speaking of automating relationships, a great customer relationship management (CRM) tool can do just that but on an even higher level than your phone, albeit with a less personal touch.
That said, you can use it to automate text messages and schedule phone calls, so there’s a pretty good argument that your CRM is even more important than your phone for marketing. Here are two killer CRMs for individual agents and teams.
LionDesk
Cost: $21 per month
Learning curve: Medium
LionDesk is a lightweight, affordable, and easy-to-use CRM that has everything you need to start organizing and automating your relationships, and transaction management thrown in for good measure. Even better, you can get set up with LionDesk starting at just $21 per month—less than half what other CRM companies charge.
Propertybase CRM|GO
Cost: $69 per user
Learning curve: Medium
New from Propertybase, CRM|GO, a full-fledged real estate platform for teams, has all the cutting-edge features of Propertybase but doesn’t require you to have one of their websites to use it. Perfect if you already have a website platform you’re invested in and need a cutting-edge CRM.
Community Engagement Tools
While online marketing is great, nothing beats engaging with your potential leads in real life. One of the best ways to do that is to work with local businesses. You help them by highlighting their business online, and you’ll get a real-world evangelist for your business for life.
Parkbench
Cost: Varies by ZIP code
Learning curve: Low
When it comes to building relationships with local businesses that will get you tons of referrals, there’s really only one game in town: Parkbench. Parkbench is the only real estate marketing tool that gives you a turnkey solution to building relationships and nurturing them to generate referrals.
Graphic Design & Image Editing Tools
If you want to handle your own design work, then graphic design and image editing software is crucial. In fact, even if you outsource to a freelancer, you should consider having them use what works rather than the tools they swear by.
Adobe Photoshop
Cost: $20.99 per month
Learning curve: high
Of course, if you want to get really serious, then Adobe Photoshop is a no-brainer. It is and has been the choice of every serious graphic design professional for more than 20 years now. Facing stiff competition from the likes of LCA Marketing Center and Canva, prices have gone down dramatically. The learning curve is high though, so Photoshop will require an investment of time and effort to pay off.
Canva
Cost: Free to $30 per month
Learning curve: Medium
Designed as a Photoshop replacement for the non-tech savvy, Canva is a must-have for agents who don’t have the time to learn Photoshop, or just want to create great-looking visual assets right away. It works a lot like Photoshop—the only difference is that it doesn’t offer nearly as many features. Instead, you get thousands of predesigned templates that you can customize and make your own.
Kapwing
Cost: Free to $20 per month
Learning curve: Low
Have you ever wondered how we make all those hilarious memes (our mothers think they’re funny) that we share on social media? The answer is our secret meme-making weapon called Kapwing. Kapwing offers tons of meme templates that you can quickly and easily customize, like you can with Canva. Kapwing also lets you make and edit videos, add subtitles, add music to videos, and more.
Marketing Freelancer Hiring Tools
One of the hardest lessons for new agents to learn is that at the end of the day, they are salespeople, not marketers. Taking the time and effort to become an expert in all of the hundreds of niches in marketing is a game you’re going to lose. Period. That’s why smart agents hire out for skills they have not mastered yet. Here are a few great tools to help you hire great freelancers.
Fiverr
Cost: Starting at $5
Learning curve: Low
Since you probably don’t have a massive budget yet, Fiverr should be your go-to place to get the grunt work of marketing done quickly and cheaply. There are freelancers from all over the world who are experts in editing videos, touching up pictures, making flyers, posting to Instagram, and more.
OnlineJobs|ph
Cost: Starting at $7 per hour
Learning curve: Low
If you’re looking for more permanent marketing help but don’t have a big budget, then OnlineJobs.ph is a great place to find talented freelancers. Since English is so widely spoken in the Philippines, there is generally little to no language barrier, and because of the exchange rate, freelance rates will be far more attractive than in the U.S.
SEO Tools
As a website that gets more than 300,000 pageviews per month from Google, we know a thing or two about search engine optimization (SEO). Of course, as an agent or team leader, the time commitment required to do SEO right might be too much for you. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow best practices. Ranking for a handful of low-search volume keywords can mean a handful of extra leads every month. If you do have the time and team to do it right, these tools will be a lifesaver.
Ahrefs
Cost: $99 per month
Learning curve: Medium
Over the past few years, Ahrefs has managed to wrestle the throne away from Moz and become the most accurate and most useful SEO tool on the market. It lets you take the guesswork out of deciding which articles to write by showing the keywords with the most traffic and the lowest difficulty to rank for. Don’t tell them I told you this, but you could theoretically pay for just one month and research your entire content runway for the year. If you’re more serious about SEO, then a monthly subscription makes more sense.
SEMrush
Cost: $83 per month
Learning curve: medium
If you want to get serious about beating the competition, then SEMrush is an invaluable marketing tool. It lets you spy on the competition and figure out what keywords they’re ranking for, how much traffic they’re getting, and who is linking to them.
SMS Marketing Tools
If you’ve ever worked with millennials before, then you know that they have a pathological fear of answering the phone. If I had a dime for every time a millennial customer told me to “just text me!” I would be able to retire to a private island in the Caribbean tomorrow. Here are a few text messaging tools to help you reach your phone-shy millennial customers.
SlickText
Cost: Free to $139 per month
Learning curve: Low
SlickText lets agents send bulk text messages for new listings or open house details, schedule texts, add pictures, and set up opt-in text messaging lists to increase engagement automatically. If you start using SlickText to market to your clients and sphere, be ready to give your thumbs a workout.
EZ Texting
Cost: $39 to $119 per month
Learning curve: Low
EZ Texting lets real estate agents build SMS lists that people can subscribe to by texting a keyword to their numbers. You can also use EZ Texting to create SMS polls, drip campaigns, and more.
Virtual Showing Tools
Buyers have been clamoring for virtual showings for years now, and the pandemic has just accelerated that demand. Why not give them what they want?
Facebook Live
Facebook is the best way to reach the boomers, who probably own most of the good listings in your farm area. It’s a huge platform that is also pretty reliable and provides a free and easy way to do virtual showings for your buyers.
Instagram TV
If you want to reach the cool kids, then Instagram TV (also known as IGTV) is where it’s at for cool cats and kittens. It’s totally on fleek. Just make sure to study up on how to use it to avoid looking like a dinosaur.
A Great Source for Stock Images
While you probably already have gram-worthy shots of your listings, you’re going to need royalty-free images and lots of them for your blog, social media, print marketing, and more. Here are a few sources we use here at The Close for awesome, royalty-free images.
Unsplash
Cost: Free
Learning curve: Low
Venture capital-backed Unsplash is the best source for royalty-free images online. Full stop. This is where we get 99% of our images for The Close. The only drawback is that the selection of images is limited compared to other sources. The quality is higher, though, so this should be your first choice for royalty-free photos.
Adobe Stock
Cost: $29.99 per month
Learning curve: Low
Adobe Stock isn’t free, but they have an absolutely massive number of stock images and graphics for you to use.
Pexels
Cost: Free
Learning curve: Low
Pexels works just like Unsplash. You get royalty-free images that you can use in your marketing. They have a bigger selection, but you’re going to have to sift through a lot of mediocre-quality stock photos to find the gems. This should be your second stop if Unsplash doesn’t have what you need.
Your Phone
Cost: $20 per month and higher
Learning curve: Low
While all the amazing software and apps that have come down the pike the last few years are great for your business, maybe the best real estate marketing tool of all time is probably sitting in your pocket right now. Your phone.
After all, your phone gives you the most direct, most personal way to touch your sphere every single day. So set a professional voicemail greeting, make sure your speaker and service work perfectly, and include quick phone calls in your daily marketing mix. If you want to get serious about using your phone to market to your sphere, you can set up a voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) service like Grasshopper to get multiple lines, phone trees, and more.
Video Production Tools
If we have to explain why video is a crucial real estate marketing tool in 2021, you might just be living on another planet. Video is no longer a bonus—it’s increasingly the primary way your leads will interact with your brand.
Rode VideoMicro Ultracompact Microphone
Cost: $59
Learning curve: Low
This tiny little video microphone will make your videos sound professional instead of crummy. Sound is even more important than image quality when it comes to video production. After all, your audience isn’t watching your videos to see what you look like. They want to hear what you have to say. If you buy anything to improve your videos, this should be it.
Lumen5
Cost: Free to $149 per month
Learning curve: Medium
Lumen5 is the easy way to make professional-looking explainer videos with text, stock video, and more. Lumen5 has templates for social media as well as prosumer-level tools to help you create videos that look like they came from a Hollywood studio.
Animoto
Cost: Free to $15 per month
Learning curve: Medium
Animoto is a drag-and-drop video editor that is designed for small businesses. It’s easy to use, and gets you slick, professional-looking results without the hassle. Perfect for making quick listing videos, promotional videos, or anything else you want to make that needs to look and sound great.
Over to You
Are you using a killer real estate agent marketing tool we forgot? Let us know in the comments or join our Facebook Mastermind Group here.
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