Rule #1 in marketing is "be where your customers are", and in real estate that means being online. According to the National Association of Realtors® 2018 Profile of Home Buyers & Sellers, 44% of homebuyers started their home search process by looking at online properties - and 87% percent of buyers & sellers viewed online sites as the "most useful information source" of home information. No surprise here, right?
Marketing your property online takes a lot of work, though! Uploading photos, doing walkthrough videos, writing property descriptions, entering data into your MLS - along with Craigslist, Zillow, your website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. All that typing, tweeting, and uploading adds up, and the more properties you have, the higher your workload will be.
How do most agents deal with this? Frankly, they work after-hours - until they finally decide that "enough is enough", and they start looking to hire an assistant. A bold move! Also a smart one, because when you're uploading photos & processing walkthrough videos, you're not out there meeting with buyers & sellers, which means you're losing potential business.
Why Hire A Virtual Marketing Assistant?
This is where hiring a Virtual Marketing Assistant comes in: they do the grunt-work of getting your properties online for about $10 bucks an hour, while you focus on the dollar-productive tasks that actually make you money. It's the smart way to save yourself time, money, and a massive headache from having to try and split your time between selling houses and promoting them online.
So why hire a virtual assistant? Savings. It really all comes down to that - you can hire a college-educated virtual assistant with real estate marketing experience for far less than it costs to find somebody in town - and with a company like MyOutDesk, you don't have to deal with the advertising, prescreening, or most of the interviewing process either. You just select the best VA from a narrow pool of final candidates, and you're off & running.
In other words, by going virtual you get a "plug 'n play" assistant that you can immediately leverage to take over your real estate marketing tasks, and for a fraction of the cost of hiring locally. We priced it out, and if you actually onboard an employee, you're typically talking about $75k+ in salary, benefits, taxes etc. Compare that to a Virtual Assistant: around $25k.
What Does A Virtual Marketing Assistant Do?
- Manage Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc.
- Gather content to edit, create, update and manage blogs.
- Engage people within the Company’s Social Media Network like commenting on posts or reply-
ing to comments or tweets. - Responsible in expanding Social Media Network - gaining Twitter followers, FaceBook fans, Pin-
terest, and LinkedIn connections. - Research on materials and posts them daily on all social media pages.
- Create materials to proliferate on social media networks of the Company.
- Creates posting template for ads and posting these ads on sites like Craigslist, Backpage, etc.
- Send weekly marketing report.
- Design and create flyers.
- Manage contents of drip campaigns and process leads into appropriate campaigns.
- Review & manage progress of each lead daily.
- Handle basic SEO (update web content, virtual tours, update listings) for team.
- Design, layout and create direct mail campaigns like postcards.
- Update Real Estate newsletter, whether it’s the online copy or hard copy.
- Edit and post videos/virtual tours for website, social media sites, and YouTube, etc.
Those are just a few of the many tasks that a virtual marketing assistant does: every real estate agent typically has a few specialty tasks or "secret sauce" that they put their VA's on as well.
If you want to learn more about why you need a virtual marketing assistant, check out our blog! This article is online as "Why Hire A Virtual Marketing Assistant", or request a free strategy session with us at your convenience!
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