Between touring homes, preparing open houses, and responding to emails from new clients, real estate agents have a lot to do. And, as a real estate agent, you may feel like you have no time to work on your social media presence. Still, you probably know that marketing yourself online can help you make more sales.
The secret is to automate your social media, so you don’t have to update it during your busy day. Trust the numbers: businesses that using marketing automation to nurture prospects see a 451% increase in qualified leads.
So how can you use new tools to automate your social media and boost your incoming leads?
Here are a few tips to get you started.
1. Use GAIN to create a content calendar and automate your social media posting for the week or month ahead.
Who has time to pause in the middle of the day to post something on Facebook? Instead, set up your content calendar on GAIN and plan out your posts for the week or month ahead. GAIN allows you to create and schedule your posts to publish automatically on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Using GAIN is also a highly-visual way to see all of your posts over time. You can see exactly how your social media content will look before it is published. After content goes live, GAIN automatically updates the status of each post on your content calendar so you know exactly which posts are live, scheduled, etc.
2. Nurture your leads with an automated drip email campaign.
Sometimes, a well-timed email can make all the difference in capturing that hesitant buyer. But what if you’re busy when they are checking their email? Write out your email newsletters ahead of time and set them up on an automated email service such as MailChimp.
You can capture email addresses at local events or through your website, and then schedule messages to any potential leads or clients periodically. MailChimp even offers pre-formed email workflows, so you don’t have to do any hard work to set it up. Just write your message in the template, and you’re good to go.
3. Short on time? Outsource your social media.
Let’s face it. Sometimes you don’t even have an hour or two to write out your social media posts at the beginning of the week or month. Alternatively, maybe writing copy isn’t your cup of tea. You can outsource your writing to a freelancer through platforms such as Fiverr or Upwork while still maintaining control over your message using GAIN.
GAIN allows you to add outside content contributors to your social media accounts in order to write social media content for you, but not publish it. Depending on the workflow you design in GAIN, all content can be automatically sent to you first for quick approval before it is scheduled to your social pages.
If you don’t have time to review posts right away, GAIN will send automated reminders letting you know you still have content to leave feedback on or approve. GAIN can help you streamline your social media efforts with outside help while keeping your social media accounts safe.
4. Use chatbots to reply to customers quickly.
Many professional marketers see much higher response rates from direct messaging than email. But what happens if you are showing a house exactly when someone asks a question through Facebook Messenger or Drift?
You can set up a chatbot to automatically respond to any frequently asked questions and showcase your availability even when you’re out of the office. Some chatbots use artificial intelligence to learn how to answer questions with more sophistication each time, so you only have to jump in when a lead is sales-qualified. However, always make sure your bot introduces itself as a chatbot; it’s creepy to talk to a robot when you think it’s a person.
5. Automate collaboration with your whole team for a more consistent social media presence.
In some cases, it might make sense to create a team workflow for your real estate business’ social media marketing efforts if you aren’t a solo agent. GAIN allows you to collaborate with teams of any size to make your social media efforts more consistent.
By automating your team’s social media content workflow through GAIN, you can assign team members certain roles – such as content contributor or content approver – and have content automatically move to the next person in your workflow.
As the boss or marketing manager, you can arrange to have the final say over what gets published so that you can be sure all messaging stays consistent. GAIN can even help your team automate collaboration efforts for blog posts, PDFs, and sales materials.
As a real estate agent, building and maintaining an online presence can help you source and qualify more leads. However, it can also be time-consuming if you don’t plan ahead.
Using an automated social media tool like GAIN, you can prepare your social media content ahead of time, streamline collaboration with your team, and even invite outside content contributors.
Automating your social media posting allows you to keep up an online presence for your real estate business, even when you’re out busy with clients.
