Marketing automation is said to grow marketing ROI by up to 25%. But what does it take behind the scenes to hit these promising numbers in real estate?
Being one of the newest breeds of marketing tools, automating marketing processes have already helped multiple businesses increase the number of prospective customers by 27%, improve prospect conversion by as much as 30%, and, even more importantly, grow marketing ROI (return on investment) by up to 25% (Salesforce).
However, in a resistant-to-change real estate industry, very few know how to make use of marketing automation intelligence to maximize marketing output and gain a tactical advantage over competitors.
So, let’s start with the basics – marketing automation definition.
Marketing automation in real estate is the use of technology to automate repetitive tasks and workflows for the marketing and sales processes, including prospect and customer segmentation, pipeline stage transitions, personalized email campaigns distribution, and lots of other activities that help agents keep leads nurtured and customers engaged.
If most of the above-mentioned activities seem just as another batch of buzzwords from the marketing world rather than tangible results, no worries, as no matter how difficult these categories may sound, they will always translate into 2 main benefits for a real estate agent – more time saved on automating manual labor and more money earned on closing deals.
Let’s consider these outputs 1 by 1.
Optimizing Sales Funnel and Increasing Closing Rates by 10%
The most obvious return on your marketing investment is the number of deals closed, which, in fact, largely depends on how your sales funnel functions as a whole.
With marketing automation, real estate agents can systematically improve each stage by incorporating:
Centralized management of marketing channels like social media campaigns, content marketing, landing pages, email marketing, SEO, etc.Advanced lead segmentation and scoring to analyze your customer profile based on a few variables including industry, job title, and company size (segmentation) and determine how interested leads are in your product or service and if they are ready to proceed to the next stage of your funnel (scoring). So, you will never waste time and budget on generating and qualifying leads that will never buy.Personalized customer journeys based on previously captured data. Not only can you track your buyers/tenants potential journeys through your campaign, but once your campaign is live, you can track your performance for each stage and quickly spot potential issues right in your campaign builder.Automated prospect conversion to let the marketing automation system create a Deal, using information from the lead you're converting. Or you might want to re-route less engaged and cold leads back to customer journey stage to be warmed up to a sales-ready state.If combined, these marketing automation techniques can increase the likelihood of the transition from leads to prospects by 18%, while the percentage of won deals will grow by 10%, based on a Salesforce report.
Cutting Time on Completing Administrative Tasks
Believe it or not, salespeople, including real estate agents, spend only 32% of their time actually selling, according to CSO insights. What do they do the rest of the time? They craft marketing campaigns, property brochures, manually capture leads’ data in Excel spreadsheets, and lots of other tedious activities that make a real estate agent’s day seem like a juggling act.
Luckily, most of these tasks can be easily automated with marketing tools. I’ve already mentioned quite a few tasks that relate to your sales funnel, like lead scoring and delivering personalized campaigns, but there is far more to automate.
Just think of the time you spend on generating property brochures and flyers on your client’s request – you may kill a better part of an afternoon trying to put together all property data and photos into an adequate document using amateur tools like Photoshop or PowerPoint. Or even worse if you need to reach out to someone more creative, spend an hour or two explaining what needs to be done and then wait a couple of days to get your deliverable back.
If you choose marketing automation software like Ascendix Composer or Buildout, on the other hand, you’ll be able to generate digestible, meaningful, and professional documents in a matter of 5 clicks as all property data, photos, and clients’ records will be pulled out from your Customer Relationship Management system or another database, so you won’t need to fill in all fields by hand.
This way, instead of just 32%, you’ll be able to focus on what matters most 100% of the time.
Final Words
Marketing automation is an investment, and like any investment, it should pay a return. For real estate agents, it pays off in the form of saved time and the number of closed deals. But if you start using marketing automation to the fullest, the return goes far beyond just these two. Why not check out marketing automation tools and get started today?
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