Real Estate Marketing Tools You Need in 2023

Any real estate investor worth their salt knows you can’t rely on the MLS to provide good, consistent deal flow. That’s where real estate marketing tools come in — a good set of tools allows investors to source their own deals, on their own terms, all year round.

And when I say “tools,” I mean software and services you can use alongside your other lead-generation sources, like driving for dollars, cold-calling, etc.

In this article, you’ll get a list of marketing tools that will enable you to generate exclusive, high-quality leads and then convert those leads into deals. It’s like a marketing one-two punch!

What Are The Best Real Estate Marketing Tools

The following tools and services will be the bedrock of your digital marketing strategy and include:

• Email marketing software
• Website
• Customer relationship management software (CRM)
• SMS and Voicemail marketing tools
• Social media apps
• Graphic design software
• Outsourcing Tools

However, marketers like to copy each other. Don’t expect any one tool or tactic to work the same way every year because if it works too well, you can bet your competition will start using it.

You’ll need to combine these real estate marketing tools — the best I’ve used throughout my career in the real estate industry — with clever marketing ideas to stand out amongst your competitors.

Let’s dig in!

Email Marketing Software

Email is arguably the most powerful digital marketing tool available to real estate marketers. It’s more personalized than television or radio, cheaper than social media or paid search campaigns, and deceptively simple to master.

By sending targeted, personalized messages directly to your audience’s inbox, you can build relationships and establish trust with potential sellers on a grand scale. And with open rates averaging around 20%, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to get your message in front of your target audience.

Why You Should Use Email Marketing

While there are dozens of reasons marketers love email, I want to highlight the five best reasons for using email marketing:

• Email is cheap – market to thousands of people for pennies on the dollar.
• Email is easy – not a marketing guru? That’s okay. Thanks to user-friendly software and templates, emails are easy to prepare, write, and send.
• Email is automated – nurture your leads on autopilot for weeks, months, or even years without lifting a finger.
• Email gets read – emails enjoy an industry average open rate of 20%.
• Email is measurable – see exactly how well your emails are doing with real-time reporting — no guesswork required.

My Pick: Flodesk

Flodesk is my current favorite pick for email marketing software. It’s cheap, easy to learn, has a “drag and drop” email builder, and allows marketers of any skill level to build an effective email campaign from scratch.

While Flodesk has fewer bells and whistles than competitors like Mailchimp or Hubspot, in my experience, 99% of real estate investors don’t need those added features or the premium price tag they demand.

If you want email marketing software to generate leads, nurture prospects, and send out the occasional holiday-themed “howdy,” Flodesk is a great place to start.

Website

Websites are the glue that holds your entire digital marketing plan together — the bedrock of your online marketing efforts. Sadly, they are often overlooked in favor of other “shiner” marketing tools, like social media platforms, pay-per-lead services, or direct mail.

But a website is one of a few real estate marketing tools that you actually own. The traffic on your website is yours to do with however you wish. You can advertise your services, broadcast your brand message, and collect leads that are exclusive to your real estate business.

3 Reasons To Own A Website

1. Websites are assets – Even if you aren’t using your website to generate leads — if you have traffic, those eyeballs are valuable to someone. Selling your wholesaling business? Why not sell your website alongside it that ranks for keywords like “sell my house fast” and gets thousands of readers each month that might be in the market to sell their distressed homes? Other investors would jump at the chance to own that traffic source.
2. Websites generate leads – There are hundreds of ways to collect leads through your website, but here’s a simple example: You write a blog post about rehabbing houses in your local market (it’s your hobby, after all), someone with a distressed home in your area searches in Google for help rehabbing their home in that area, they find your site, see you have contact information listed on your site, and they reach out to you to see if you’d buy their home. Got ’em!
3. Websites are versatile – Want to start an email newsletter? Add an email capture form to your website. Want to compete for keywords? Add a blog to your website. Banned from social media? Add a forum to your website and keep the conversation going with your rabid fans.

My Pick: Wix (or WordPress)

You can get your hands on a website in several ways — you can build one, buy one, or even rent one. But here are a few suggestions based on my experience with past clients:

The easy DIY option: I recommend Wix. Wix is slightly better than Squarespace (another great website builder), and even a complete novice can build a good-looking website in a few hours with their drag-and-drop website builder tools. Plus, a basic site costs less than $50/month.

A slightly more difficult DIY option: I recommend WordPress. WordPress (WP) is what most of the world’s websites run on, largely due to its customization options. If you can imagine it, you can likely create it using WP. But be warned, there is a learning curve if you’re starting out.

Want a done-for-you website? I recommend a marketing agency. Just do a Google search for “real estate website” or “real estate marketing agency,” and you’ll find someone that can help. However, your custom-built website could run you anywhere from $2500-$25,000, depending on how many bells and whistles you want.

Customer Relationship Software (CRM)

If you want to get serious about generating, tracking, and converting leads, you need a CRM — ideally, one set up for real estate investors. If you don’t know of any, I wrote an article on the best CRM for real estate investors — take a look.

Anyways, your CRM will be the central command for your real estate marketing strategy. And a good one will connect seamlessly with all your other real estate marketing tools.

Leads from your website traffic, email marketing campaigns, or social media can be funneled, organized, and converted from within your CRM. It’s the big ol’ spider web all your leads get trapped in!

My Pick: RESimpli

RESimpli is a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) software for real estate investors. Some of the key features of RESimpli include:

• Lead management – capture and organize leads from various sources, including your website, social media, and other marketing channels.
• Deal tracking – track your deals from start to finish, including the status of each deal, seller profiles, and essential deadlines.
• Automated workflows – streamline your workflow with automation that helps you automate repetitive tasks, such as follow-up emails and lead nurturing.
• Reporting and analytics – provide detailed reporting and analytics that allow you to track your campaigns’ success and identify improvement areas.

SMS & Voicemail Marketing Tools

While not as popular as they were a few years ago, SMS (aka, text messaging) and Ringless Voicemail marketing are highly-effective lead-generation sources. Thanks in no small part to people’s addiction to their phones and instantaneous communication.

Ding! — those little tones your phone uses to alert you when a text message or voicemail arrives are engineered to be addicting.

SMS marketing tools and services allow you to take advantage of classic conditioning and get your message into your audience’s pockets and purses — no joke, you can send thousands of messages with the click of a button.

My Pick: SimpleTexting

SimpleTexting (for SMS) and SmarterContact (for ringless voicemail). Both are solid tools with good reputations, something that’s increasingly important in the marketing world.

Social Media Apps

Love it, or hate it, social media marketing is one of the most effective real estate marketing tools, especially for establishing your brand.

Why does social media work for real estate businesses? Consider how personal real estate transactions are — what better way to gauge a stranger (or business) than see how they present themselves to the world on social media?

Your online image is a very real, important thing in 2023 — social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Linkedin will let you put on your best face for the world.

My Pick: Facebook

My top pick is still Facebook.

I know it’s not the most popular, has taken a lot of heat in the news, and is hard to build an organic follow on — I KNOW! But Facebook is the social media app with the most users, the most users aged 45 and over, and it has a few features that make it a versatile platform.

1. Facebook Groups allow users to join communities or “Groups” tied to certain professions, areas, or any conceivable denomination. These groups are a goldmine for lead generation and networking with other investors or real estate agencies in your target market.
2. Facebook Ads can be used to create and launch a social media marketing campaign from your phone. Facebook’s advertising tools are incredibly easy to learn and use, which goes a long way if you don’t want to shell out thousands of dollars to hire an ad agency.

Facebook is great for real estate investors and real estate agents alike, but I also want to mention my number two pick: Youtube.

Youtube is the rare and lethal combination of a social media platform and search engine. But it’s my second recommendation because video marketing can be a hurdle for the business owner.

Graphic Design Tools

People like pretty things — it’s wired into our lizard brain DNA to appreciate symmetry, complimentary colors, patterns, etc. So it stands to reason that your marketing material should be halfway appealing to the eyes and ears of your target audience.

That’s where graphic design comes in, specifically graphic design tools like Adobe Suite, Canva, InVideo, Microsoft Paint, and others.

You don’t need an art degree to use most of these tools either — with just a few Youtube tutorials, you can crank out an attractive social media post, website banner, or business card.

My Pick: Canva

If I had to pick one tool with the easiest learning curve and the most value, I’d pick Canva.

Canva is a free tool that allows you to create all kinds of marketing material for your business. It comes with thousands of stock images, design elements, and templates, making building your own graphics easy. No joke — I’ve used Canva to create ads for billion-dollar companies, and no one is the wiser.

Outsourcing Tools

Unless you’ve got a crack team of in-house marketers, you’ll need help bringing your real estate marketing plan to life. Outsourcing can be a great way for real estate investors to improve their marketing efforts and free up time to focus on other aspects of their business. And here are the sites that offer the easiest way to find and hire affordable talent:

1. Fiverr – a popular platform that allows you to hire freelancers for various tasks, including graphic design, writing, video editing, and more. Real estate investors can use Fiverr to outsource tasks like designing property flyers, creating social media content, or editing promotional videos.
2. Upwork – is a freelance hiring platform that connects you with talented freelancers from around the world. You can search for specific skill sets, post a job, and let freelancers apply. Upwork is great for finding virtual assistants to help with administrative tasks like appointment scheduling, outreach, and email management.
3. TaskBullet – a virtual assistant (or VA) service that provides trained professionals to assist with tasks like lead generation, research, or social media management. Great for finding affordable help for tedious tasks like scraping tax delinquency lists and sending first-touch messaging.

Bonus: Artificial Intelligence

Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: artificial intelligence (AI).

Tools like ChatGPT, Bard, and Midjourney are just the tip of the iceberg where artificial intelligence is concerned. But these tools are already changing how real estate marketing is done.

• Need to write an email that convinces a stubborn property owner to sell? AI can write copy that converts.
• Or maybe you need to design a logo for your wholesaling company? AI will spit out designs until the power goes out.

But real estate investors/marketers should be careful! Search engines are already penalizing content that is produced with AI, and regulation for AI is still in the early stages. Don’t get caught depending on AI for everything, or it could come back to haunt you.

3-Step Guide to Picking The Perfect Tools

Digital marketing tools are a dime-a-dozen, and newer, shinier tools are released yearly. So how do you pick a winner out of the proverbial haystack? We’ll show you how in three simple steps:

1. What are people saying? Check review sites, or blogs (like this one) and get opinions from several sources. Look for tools with a good customer service history, frequent updates, and added features. These three criteria indicate a provider cares about their customer base, is always working on their software, and is addressing customer needs by adding more features.
2. What exactly do you need? More bells and whistles aren’t always better. Consider the features integral to your business, like lead tracking, multi-inbox messaging functionality, etc. Don’t get distracted by a list of features as long as your arm — that might indicate the tool/software provider is trying to compete on quantity, NOT quality.
3. Use ALL the free trials. Believe it or not, 14-30 days is plenty of time to get familiar with a tool. But make sure you “unsubscribe” immediately after logging in for the first time — you’ll still get your free trial, but can avoid the sneaky first month’s fee if you decide not to keep the tool.

Wrap Up

There you have the tools you need to build a billion-dollar marketing funnel. And before you ask, I’ve seen billion-dollar investment firms use just a few of these tools to drum up multi-million dollar deals and eager capital nationwide.

Most high-level real estate mentors have mastered one or more of these digital tools to build their businesses. That, or they pay big bucks to hire someone who has.

Test a few of these marketing tools, watch a few video tutorials, and take a few real estate courses, whatever you must do to implement them in your business. You won’t be sorry, and you’ll have learned how to generate your own leads on demand.