Being a successful business professional isn’t easy. It has never been and it ain’t now, nor will it get any easier. It’s getting even harder to find customers and convert their potential interest into sales. Mostly, it’s not the customer chasing the agent to close a deal, but rather the other way round. That is why you have to provide yourself the best tools and apps that help you do your job and, further on, grow your business in an effective manner. By “tools & apps” we mean every piece of technology that sustains the various sides of a real estate business: customer communication, social interaction, data analysis, research, visual material, content optimization, data storage, backup and administration.
While the discussion around tools and apps for real estate professionals is very complex and can be split into various particular subjects around this matter, we will focus on several business processes which can be streamlined through web tools that support and add value to any real estate business.
These main categories are (without setting up a hierarchy based on their importance):
1. Social interaction
Social interaction can be a great trigger in establishing relations to (potential) customers, in gathering leads for your business and in maintaining an engaged community. As more and more people move towards the online environment, businesses tend to follow this emerging trend, in order to be where their customers are.
Social channels you can consider using for your business:
- Google+
- YouTube
- Pinterest.
Statistics show 70% of B2C marketers made a conversion from a Facebook lead, 43% of US marketers gained a customer through LinkedIn, Twitter users send out 400M tweets each day, 41% of online B2C marketers use Google+, 700 YouTube links are tweeted every minute and 500 years of videos are being watched on Facebook every day, 69% of brands can be found on Pinterest.
2. Data analysis & research
If you plan for your business to have an online facet (which is actually a must nowadays), you have to get prepared for monitoring your audience, your market and your online performance, otherwise you risk struggling in vain, without being effective in the sales process.
There are several online tools that can be used to track what people say online about your business (reputation management), what trends characterise the market and how your pages (website, Facebook page) are doing. Some of these tools are:
- Google Analytics
- Facebook Insights
- Google Alerts
- AdWords
- Google Blog Search
- Technorati
- good old Google Search (for googling yourself/your business)
Monitoring and market analysis can help you channel your efforts in the right direction and avoid reputation problems.
3. Content optimization & visual material
It is a known fact that a visual material such as a picture, a video, an infographic, has a bigger impact on the human eye than bland text blocks. Therefore, you have to make sure you capture your customer’s eye with something visual. This applies to many aspects of your business, starting with your website design and continuing with more specialized elements of the site’s content.
Visual material and content optimization refers to:
- photo editing - there are different software packages that help you make photos look professional: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, Pixlr, Gimp, FotoFlexer, Picfull, LunaPic
- video embedding - you can make property videos or agent videos to enhance the power of your service using tools like YouTube or Animoto Pro
- map integration - give your customer an idea about where a property is located, use Google Maps, Google Earth, BatchGeo in order to do so
- mobile testing - check how customers view your website on mobile devices and operate improvements, if necessary.
4. Customer interaction
Beside communicating with (potential) customers through social media, it is very useful to offer them a reliable way to contact you for further information directly on your website. Of course you can provide them an email address where they can write to you, although you will have to manage requests by yourself and have no possibility of personalizing the interaction. A more effective solution can be found in online forms. Add a contact form to your site and you will see how leads will stock up, as it fulfills the role of a lead generation form. Furthermore, you can make use of other types of online forms which will simplify the customer’s information search, as well as your workflow. Examples of other forms for real estate businesses are request a quote forms or online surveys.
5. Data storage, backup and administration
As no business can exist without this part, luckily there are tools that can help you deal with it. Whether you need a place to store files or to share them with others, to backup your important information or to handle the financial part, some of these tools are:
- Dropbox (file storage)
- Evernote (information gathering & storage)
- Xpenser (bookkeeping)
- Thunderbird (Gmail backups)
- Sugarsync (backup & file sharing)
- Invoicera (invoicing tool)
- Karl’s Mortgage Calculator (house & mortgage value calculator).
- web forms (which have data administration features - they enable you get visual reports which provide a quick overview of the submitted data, plus some of them are integrated with Google Spreadsheets).
These are only some of the available online tools. While you can choose between many more, it is always important to find the most suitable ones for you.
What tools do you like to use in your real estate business?
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