Marketing automation refers to the scheduling and tracking of marketing outreach, using automated processes that contact your leads for you. Marketing automation platforms save you the time and energy it would take to perform marketing tasks manually by automating the creation, scheduling, and sending of marketing campaigns.

Whether your real estate business is up and running or you’re just getting off the ground, the best way to maximize productivity while saving yourself time is to automate marketing processes. Marketing automation schedules, sends, publishes and tracks a large portion of your communications for you, saving you tremendous amounts of time.

Marketing automation isn’t just about saving time – it also helps grow businesses. To properly scale – or expand – your business these days, it’s become necessary to utilize automation. Aside from hiring an assistant to help mitigate your workload and track your team’s productivity, automation is the only process you can implement at any stage of growth that will scale with your business.

Real estate-specific marketing tools, like the marketing software included with Market Leader Professional, offer numerous professionally-designed print and email marketing templates built for engaging with real estate consumers. The best real estate marketing automation systems allow agents to quickly put their leads and past clients on marketing campaigns, either individually or in groups.

Marketing automation software allows you to manage and market your database by integrating with your CRM, streamlining lead generation and management, email marketing, single property websites, listing marketing, and social media marketing.

Marketing automation should include the following features:

Individual agents, teams, and brokerages alike use marketing automation tools to streamline their lead generation, nurturing, and real estate marketing. Marketing automation helps real estate businesses of all sizes achieve their marketing and lead generation goals.

Marketing Automation Software for Real Estate Agents:

Contrary to popular belief, marketing automation is not just for large businesses. Real estate marketing automation offers substantial benefits for agents operating independently. Imagine doing away with the strains of running your business day-to-day, from multiple systems. Marketing automation makes this possible by streamlining your CRM with lead generation and marketing efforts, as well as activity tracking to amplify your outreach throughout the sales cycle.  

Marketing Automation Software for Real Estate Teams & Brokerages:

Marketing automation gives teams and brokerages a 360 degree view into their agents’ and leads’ activities.  Automation allows brokerages to manage agents via performance tracking, route leads to agents based on brokerage-specific automation rules, and the power to make data-driven decisions through custom reporting.

Marketing automation software also helps teams and brokerages strengthen and grow their brand by allowing their agents to send out personalized marketing communications, while maintaining brand consistency. Real estate marketing automation should be scalable, meaning it will grow with your business, without any down time or growing pains.

Automated marketing campaigns are coordinated series of steps that promote companies, products, and services using automated processes. In real estate, you can develop marketing campaigns to promote listings on your website, or campaigns that promote your services and expertise to new leads. Each promotion will likely have different objectives, and can be separated into different campaigns.

Types of Automated Marketing Campaigns

Listing Marketing:

A relatively new, but incredibly valuable, type of automated marketing campaign is listing marketing. Real estate listings can be an agent’s most valuable marketing assets because they are ultimately what most consumers are interested in. The ability to automate the process of marketing listings can save valuable time that’s better spent in front of clients.

In order to automate listing marketing, your software will need to integrate with your MLS to pull listing photos and details to create marketing assets for the listing agent. Your real estate CRM should then fill marketing materials by pulling information from contact records. These campaigns should include the following auto-populated print marketing, digital marketing, and social media marketing materials:

Social media marketing posts

Automatically marketing your listings allows you to fully market your listings and brand, without the legwork.

Event-based Marketing Campaigns:

These messages are 1:1 and respond automatically, based on a lead’s actions. You might think of event-based messages as responses instead. This could be as soon as new lead comes in, you assign them to a “Welcome” campaign where they are thanked for subscribing and offered resources, and your availability to answer any questions. A great next step is to chain them to an appropriate drip campaign.

Evergreen Marketing Campaigns:

Evergreen campaigns consist of content that never expires. Due to the finite nature of most information, evergreen messages are few and far between. For instance, “How to prep your house for a flood” could be considered evergreen, as its information isn’t time-sensitive or likely to lose relevance. Evergreen campaigns are truly the only “set it and forget it” campaigns, as their information is always relevant and never out of date.

Drip Marketing Campaigns:

A drip campaign is a series of automated messages that are sent over a period of time to nurture leads through the sales funnel. Drip campaigns can also nurture past clients with messaging to keep you top-of-mind. These messages are targeted and can include pre-written emails, texts, and even postcards, that are sent based on the source of the lead, where they’re located and how they’ve interacted with your website. This process is almost exclusively automated and has been proven successful in nurturing leads, when done correctly.

Examples of real estate-specific drip marketing can include:

Listing alerts for seller leads, letting them know when new inventory hits the MLS in their desired area

• Monthly housing market reports to keep people updated, while keeping you top-of-mind
• A series of communications that offer sellers resources and checklists as they prepare to list their property

With marketing automation, the opportunities to engage prospects, while minimizing the time you spend on outreach, are endless.

About Market Leader

A leader in real estate technology since 1999, Market Leader proudly serves over 250,000 agents and teams across the United States and Canada. You can build and manage your business, lead-to-close, with our products:

Market Leader Professional

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