If you’re like most agents, you got into real estate because you love people. To your surprise, as you gain experience in the role, you might realize a lot of your time is spent in the office behind a computer performing office work and doing repetitive tasks. You did not get into real estate to look at a computer all day. So why not delegate these time-consuming tasks that are outside of your expertise and aren’t directly related to real estate? Why not have someone or something else do the boring tasks so you can have more time meeting clients?
In this article, I will share 5 tasks every real estate agent should stop doing and automate to increase their amount of free time, so they can focus more on their clients and closing deals:
- Lead Generation Through Digital Marketing Ads
- Send Lead Nurturing Emails Manually
- Writing Blog Copy to Increase Organic Traffic
- Follow Up Manually with Leads
- Website Optimization and Development
1. Lead Generation Through Digital Marketing Ads
Social Media and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Ads are powerful tools that can help you generate online real estate leads. However, learning how to properly use these tools and optimize them to increase your ROI is very time consuming. The online certification courses to learn these methods of lead generation can take days and even weeks to complete. Then you must test your ads through trial and error to determine which message and content combination resonate with your audience best - which could waste a lot of money. Then you must analyse the data to discover opportunities to create more effective ads. This process is ongoing and can take upwards of 4-6 hours to manage each week.
Consistently filling your pipeline with leads is vital to your success as a real estate agent but it’s not a task that requires your expertise. Since online lead generation through digital ads are very time consuming and don’t require your knowledge, consider outsourcing or automating it. Agents that delegate their online lead generation tasks to others regain the 4-6 hours a week managing ads and reallocate that time to tasks that require their expertise like showing homes.
2. Send Lead Nurturing Emails Manually
How many emails do you send per week? Hundreds? Thousands? Whatever the official count is, it takes extensive time to write an email, personalize it with the correct name and information, and send it to the right person. Sure, you can use listing, home search, reengaging or templates to save time, but you still have to research and input the relevant information into it. If you add up the total amount of time spent on these repetitive tasks – researching, writing, editing, liking, reviewing, and sending each email - you could spend up to 5-7 hours a week on these email process depending on the size of your contact list.
Your real estate expertise is going to waste by spending time and energy on emailing tasks like these. Instead of emailing leads manually, set up email drip campaigns that personalizes content based on the recipients, inputs relevant information that the recipient finds valuable, groups contacts by type/location, and sends emails automatically. By automating your emails in this fashion, you can reduce spelling and grammar errors, send emails in a timely manner, and save between 5-7 hours of your time. Granted, you will still have to send those one off emails, but you can rely on email drip campaigns to nurture your leads long-term.
3. Writing Blog Copy to Increase Organic Traffic
If you want to generate more organic website traffic, blogging is one of the best tools to accomplish this goal. Topics related to real estate processes and your local market would get the most organic traffic. However, depending on the length, amount of research, and other variables of an article, it could take around 4-5 hours to write. Plus, you must be consistent and post regularly to see the benefits of blogging, which can take months. Blogging does utilize some of your expertise, but your expertise communicated through blogging isn’t the best way to share it nor is it going to convert a website visitor into a lead.
Instead of wasting time and energy blogging, consider using SEO friendly neighborhood pages on your website. These pages have comprehensive information and include valuable content like local market, community, school, and points of interest reports that update automatically. Details related to the neighborhood of a listing is the second most sought after information on a real estate professional’s website, which makes sense, right? If the listing is the product, then the neighborhood is a complementary good which contributes to the value of a listing. Therefore, a consumer wants information about a neighborhood because it can increase or decrease a listing’s value based on its surrounds.
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4. Follow Up Manually with Leads
After you’ve converted a lead, you must follow up with them in a timely manner. Your goal is to reply to them within 5 minutes of them entering your contact database. After 5 minutes, your chances of getting them on the phone and converting them into a client decreases dramatically. That sounds easy enough on paper, but there are times when you’re too busy and won’t be able to follow up this quickly. For example, you might not feel like it, you might not want to, you might be driving or in a meeting with a client. If you can’t consistently follow up with new leads in a timely manner, especially if its due to lack of time, then it’s in your best interest to automate this task.
By leveraging automated follow up messages, you can ensure a reply within 5 minutes of a lead conversion, giving you the best chance of continuing the conversation and evolving it to a call or an appointment. Automated follow up messages also show your attentiveness to help and provide value. For example, if a lead will receive a follow up message about scheduling a showing for a listing if they view a listing multiple times or save it to their favorite’s list. Since you’ll rely on technology to message leads, you can stop worrying about leads following through the cracks because the system will do it for you.
5. Website Optimization and Development
The best real estate websites are simple and cater to the consumer to streamline lead generation. They only include most valuable information and tools that push a consumer further down their pipeline and nothing else. To provide the best experience for your website visitors to push them down your pipeline, set up your website so that valuable information like listing details, neighborhood information, and recently sold homes are easy to locate and access – meaning they don’t require many clicks or scrolls to find and access them.
A simple website provides a positive experience for your visitors and keeps them on your website, but it also gives you a good experience. You won’t spend countless hours making minor formatting tweaks or have to learn HTML or CSS coding to get a page a certain way. Most of these minor, insignificant edits only matter to you and don’t provide significant value to your website visitors. So instead of personalizing, branding, sharing useless information, and making your website about you, try optimizing your website for lead generation by keeping it simple and by focusing on the visitor’s experience. Then you can spend less time developing your website and more time meeting clients.
Real estate agents that delegate these tasks and automate or outsource them have more time to focus on primary tasks that directly relate to real estate and utilize their expertise. They spend less time on repetitive tasks outside of their skillset like online lead generation, long-term nurturing, blogging, follow up, and website development. Since these tasks can be extremely time consuming and irrelevant to real estate, your time, energy, and knowledge is best applied to more important tasks like meeting clients, showing homes, hosting open houses, or with your family. So what are you waiting for? Regain hours of your work week back by quitting these tasks and automating them!
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