To promote your real estate business successfully, you not only need a range of skills such as creativity and understanding data and analytics, but you also need to know how to use the best marketing software and tools in order to bring your brand campaigns to life and achieve the leads you’re after.

To gain access to the best real estate digital marketing tools usually involves a subscription, either monthly or annually. So, how do you know what you should sign up for in your ‘marketing tool kit’? Which marketing subscriptions do you truly need, and how do you avoid paying a bucketload of money each month for subscriptions that don’t provide you with a tangible business return?

To run my digital marketing agency effectively and ensure my creative team have all the marketing tools they need, I invest circa $35,000 a year on software. This is just for subscriptions, with no other marketing costs like advertising budgets. You do not need to spend this amount but you do need the right tools to produce high-quality professional brand marketing.

Below, I share details of the numerous must-have marketing tools and subscriptions needed, both free and paid, as a real estate agent to grow your real estate brand effectively and bring in more clients.

Let’s look at the digital and social marketing tools that help save you time and effort and are worth the investment!

How many marketing systems do you actually need?

It may surprise you to know that to make a social media reel, you’ll need at least four different marketing programs or tools! These include video editing software, a caption generator, stock image/video library and graphic design software. You can choose from over 100 different software options for these four components alone. I know, right, that’s a lot, and this number is just the tip of the iceberg.

Whilst there are always quite a few free options in each marketing software category, they usually come with compromises, such as a limited range of services, reduced quality, watermarks or output/time limits. Therefore, they’re not ideal for producing professional brand marketing campaigns for your real estate agency, that will truly impress your audience.

If you want to market your brand effectively, it could take you hours and hours of research in trying and testing different marketing tools to understand which ones are right for your needs.

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In fact, there are so many different types of digital and social media marketing software available that it becomes highly confusing and frustrating to establish exactly which tools will have the capabilities that you’re looking for.

As a digital marketing agency, we subscribe to a whole range of tools, to ensure our creative teams have them at their disposal so they can produce quality brand marketing campaigns.

These types of digital marketing tools we use can be classified under the following categories;

  1. Research
  2. Copywriting
  3. Stock imagery and video libraries
  4. Graphic Design software
  5. Video production tools
  6. Email campaign platforms
  7. Funnel & automation software
  8. Landing page software
  9. Social scheduling platforms
  10. Paid advertising platforms

Now, let’s look at the current best of breed digital marketing and social media tools for each category. Following are my picks, based on their common use by our real estate clients or our own experience trialing, testing and using the tools.

Tools that a real estate brand marketer needs

To give you an idea of the scope of tools needed by a real estate brand marketer, here is an extensive list of a whole range of types of subscriptions that are necessary for every aspect of the real estate brand marketing function and some of the companies that offer each of them…

1. Property market research tools

The two most popular data sources for Australian property data are;

We use these data platforms to build an understanding of micro markets that you operate within.

2. Copywriting

Every piece of marketing has an element of writing in it and making sure it your words are error free and get your message across concisely is key. Our favourite copywriting helpers are

3. Stock Imagery and Video Libraries

You will never have a custom picture or video for everything you need for your marketing and just taking one from Google Images is never the right choice. You can easily and affordably (not to mention legally) source them from a stock library such as

4. Graphic Design Software

Good design is a leading way to get your target audience to recall your real estate business, whether it be for your printed or digital pieces. Leaps in the ease of use of graphic design software programs have given most people the confidence to professionally produce more visual content themselves. Leading the way are

5. Video production tools

Video has become increasingly important to incorporate into your marketing mix. Just like graphic design, the enhancements in our smartphones and apps have meant we are capturing and using it in the marketing mix much more. Look at using the following for a smick end result

6. Email campaign platforms

Email is often overlooked, but it consistently delivers the best results for leads and should be an integral part of your digital marketing program. You may already have basic eDM capabilities within your real estate CRM but if you want even more functionality, consider these

7. Funnel & automation software

Having marketing automation in place means that you can put much of the monotonous marketing tasks on autopilot and ensure your leads are consistently nurtured right through to conversion. Check out these options for managing your regular communications

8. Landing page software

A landing page is a web page that allows you to collect a prospective client’s details with a a lead-capture form. Without a landing page, you will never know the details of someone who checked you out. If you aren’t using landing pages, here are some choices

9. Social scheduling platforms

Save time by scheduling a week or month’s worth of social media posts at once. This will not enable you to be more productive, but you’ll also never miss posting when you need to. These are my top recommendations

10. Paid advertising platforms

As I like to say, you can’t sell a secret. Unless you are out there actively advertising your real estate business, you are in danger of slipping out of the view of those who aren’t ready to transact. At a minimum, you should be using

Meta Ads Manager (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger & Whatsapp) facebook.com/business/tools/ads-manager
LinkedIn Campaign Manager (LinkedIn) linkedin.com/campaignmanager

If you’d like to explore offerings of additional digital and social media marketing software and platforms we have put together this full directory of marketing tools and software subscriptions for real estate professionals and dedicated brand marketers.

Challenges for the in-house brand marketer

Even if you only needed one tool for each marketing task (which is never actually the case), that’s still a lot of subscriptions that you have to fund and manage each and every year.

In addition to the budget required, if you have a lone in-house brand marketer or your receptionist takes care of your digital or social media marketing, he or she is going to come up against a whole range of challenges. These include:

  • Hours and hours of research to scan through the enormous number of digital marketing tools and their associated features.
  • More time to evaluate each marketing tool in order to choose the best one for your real estate business’s needs.
  • Learning how to use the tools in the most effective way. Once again, this could take some time as some digital marketing tools are more complex than others.
  • Managing the constant changes that occur as software companies evolve and enhance their systems.

Without a marketing unicorn (noun. an extremely rare breed of marketer who is pretty much good at everything) in your team, these tasks may take hours out of their day and time away from other operational tasks that are more productive for your real estate office.

But, there is a better way to take your brand marketing to the next level without you having to employ an experienced in-house brand marketer and stressing about the number of subscriptions you must pay every month – partner with a brand marketing agency.

Advantages of working with a brand marketing agency

When you engage a brand marketing agency (ahem, like us) to take care of all your digital marketing needs, you can just sit back and let us do everything for you.

Here are just some of the advantages of working with Hoole.co;

  1. As a digital marketing agency, we already subscribe to the best available digital marketing tools. This means that our real estate clients don’t have to worry about paying for their own subscriptions for every creative tool.
  2. With our marketing team, we keep abreast of the leading tools as soon as they have been developed and released to the market. We try and test them out and select the best marketing tool for the task.
  3. This means that our dedicated team will often spend hours learning how to leverage each tool in order to get the best results.
  4. Our agency staff are constantly upskilling, so they have the expertise to get the job done effectively and efficiently.
  5. Within our digital marketing agency, we also have a peer network. This means that if someone is stuck, they can reach out to another member of the Hoole team. This is not an option for a lone in-house marketer or even the receptionist in your real estate office.
  6. Our team supports clients with a wide range of different real estate CRMs. This means that we have a broad range of tech knowledge, and know exactly how to navigate the systems to create email templates and send marketing campaigns on your behalf.
  7. We are recognised as a pro agency and have support from Meta, Google, and Mailchimp, just to name a few.
  8. If one of our staff members is sick or on leave, we have other experienced digital marketing staff that can step in and take over.

Unfortunately, there is no escaping software subscriptions if you want to market your real estate brand effectively. That’s why many savvy real estate professionals choose to engage a digital marketing agency like ours.

Engaging the Hoole.co team to grow your real estate brand

When you choose our marketing agency to take care of all of your brand marketing initiatives, you only pay a low monthly fee, and this gives you access to all of the expertise (people, including 9 different creative disciplines) and marketing tools that we have at our disposal.

Engaging professional digital marketers allows you to get on with what you do best, buying, selling or leasing properties for your clients. You can leave all the brand marketing to us. After all, it’s what we do best, and we’re very good at it.

If you would like help with branding, digital and social media marketing for your real estate business you can organise a free 1-hour consultation with me, Melanie Hoole. Go ahead; take a step toward improving your business, today!

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Written by Melanie Hoole

My team and I specialise in helping real estate and property professionals perfect their personal brand, build a first-class digital profile and implement inbound marketing activities to attract leads. If you are unsure which direction to take with your digital marketing contact me for help.

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