Please don’t hate me. Some of my clients are not real estate agents. They’re nice people but they don’t sell houses. Everybody I work with appreciates regular reporting and has an idea of what message or tone they’d like associated with their company. Traditionally people hire a digital marketing or SEO agency to take care of things affecting the way their business appears to the general public so they can focus on their bigger passion or running their actual company. Maybe because their brands are so closely tied to their personal identities, real estate agents generally want to be more involved in day to day website management compared to other industries. This is awesome. Involved passionate clients are the best kind of clients. As much as I like working with agents, I know they really want to be with their own clients. With that in mind here are some quick productivity hacks to make the most of whatever time you can spend on marketing.
Set Up Goal Tracking
No two websites are exactly the same. Even if they’re using the same apartments for rent template with different phone numbers it’s extremely unlikely the agents have identical goals and performance benchmarks while also sharing a marketing strategy. Lots of time in digital marketing, whether it’s on your own or with an agency, is spent applying default analytics metrics to an individual websites’ performance before relating that performance to the business’ overall objectives. Goal tracking does all of that for you. It can be annoying to set up but is a perfect example of short term frustration for looking like a genius in the long run. Once enabled you can look at metrics specific to your site and company for a custom and more comprehensive understanding of how customers interact with your site in the same amount of time it would have taken to bring up a default traffic report
Goals are sorted into categories of revenue, acquisition, inquiry, and engagement. There are templates for common situations like registering online or making a purchase directly from a site. You can also set up unique situations or funnels for things specific to real estate like visits to listing pages from blog posts, how much time users from a certain demographic spend on listing pages in a given neighborhood, or use ‘smart goals’ to create top level reports on how ppc activities interact with the rest of your site. All of this information is technically accessible without goal tracking but can take hours to compile. If productivity is remotely important to you, consider isolating a few key marketing objectives and setting up goal tracking to have them compiled automatically.
Manage Social Media From One Platform
By now Hootsuite is almost as popular as Twitter and Facebook. There are other aggregators like Buffer, Sprout Social, and Sprinklr and frankly I think there all fine and it comes down to personal preference. So much about effective social media involves cultivating a brand or personality. Management software reflects this with different programs catering to different tastes or styles so the best one for one agent’s social accounts may not be ideal for another. This is based on the content they create not the program’s technical performance.
It’s very difficult to attract new business, especially from younger buyers without some kind of social presence. The vast majority of agents I work with all have at least 3 social accounts (normally Facebook, Twitter, and one of Pinterest or Instagram) and manage all of them all separately. Logically running all your social accounts through one of these aggregators will save you time. In terms of a hack, consolidating social accounts into one platform makes it so much easier to see how they interact with one another and leverage posts from one platform to boost another. You can’t help but get savvier when everything is laid out in one place. One client told me she loved Hootsuite because it got rid of clutter on her smartphone. Never thought of that before but keeping your phone ready for client’s calls, alerts from real estate to consumer messaging apps, and email notifications is a definite plus.
Calm Down And Give New Things Enough Time To Work
Even though it’s perfectly understandable, a lot of time is technically wasted in marketing by checking the performance of new initiatives when they haven’t had enough time to actually perform. In any situation results take time. At the end of the day small bits of mid campaign tinkering or just stopping what you’re doing to bring up a progress report won’t affect the end result. This means they’re technically wastes of time. The excitement over a new idea can lead to tunnel vision in both marketers and agents. This is really common on things that produce daily or even hourly statistics like PPC campaigns, real estate lead generation services, or specific keyword rankings. Contextualizing new initiatives is key to establishing realistic expectations and actually extracting the marketing benefit from whatever you did. Holding yourself to little rules, like I won’t check the lead gen software for a week or track keywords month over month will do wonders for your sanity and productivity.
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