Real Estate Tools & Technology By realistiQ

Company Driven Content: Drip Email Marketing

While iQ Office, our intranet solution, allows the technologically advanced agents to create and manage their own drip email marketing campaigns, it also allows companies to drive their agents’ drip email marketing efforts through company campaigns.

All the agents have to do is add their recipients to the company campaigns. That can be a done through a very simple process realistiQ calls “Set It & Forget It”. The emails go out to the agents’ recipients from the agent with the agent’s information. All emails include unsubscribe options, so the agents do not have to manage a Do Not Send list either.

Company Driven Content: Website Content & Blog Posts

Every agent receives an auto-generated web site with iQ Web that has an agent blog associated with it. The agent web site alone is a time and money saver for the agent, because it is included in our offerings and the web site doesn’t take any time to set up. If the agents wish to point their existing domain names at their website, they can. If they want to build onto the site, we offer a Content Management System that exists inside iQ Office that offers a lot of flexibility. New and fresh content is important and your company should offer content pages like, area information pages, or even videos, that your agents can borrow and integrate into their own sites.

Blogging will also help agents to establish a passive pipeline and steady stream of traffic to their web site. While iQ Office, our intranet solution, allows the technologically advanced agents to create and manage their own blog, it also allows them to easily import company blog entries into their own blog. Essentially, agents can have their own blog, without ever writing a single entry. They can also have a hybrid blog with some company content, and some personal content. Again, if they wish to have their own content on their blog, they can do that too.

Company Driven Content: Social Media Networking

Companies may want to consider pulling their agents’ time away from social media networking and allowing them to focus on closing deals. This does not mean companies should encourage agents to abandon their social networking strategy. It means they should play a heavier role in it.

There are some free and rather inexpensive tools out there today that can help you get more involved. If you are blogging as a company, you are already creating valuable content for your agents to share on social media that will help them to establish themselves as knowledgeable agents. So, for now, let’s use the idea of pushing blog entries to your agents’ social networks as a company.

Two tools your agents probably are not already using are Ping.FM (It’s Free) and Hootsuite (It’s free, but you will want to get the paid version which allows you to manage multiple accounts). If they are using it, the alternative steps to the following steps will be obvious.

For those who do not already use Ping.FM, you will want to schedule a couple hours out of a day for the setup of your agents’ Ping.FM accounts. During that session, you will ask your agents to sign up for Ping.FM, connect their existing social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) to their Ping.FM accounts and then to provide you with their login information to their Ping.FM account. Then you can connect your agents’ Ping.FM accounts with your company Hootsuite account and publish tweets, status updates, and blog posts to every one of your agents’ social media accounts with one post.

This does NOT mean you will have access to their Social Media, other than posting relevant content to their pages. If they are sensitive to this, they may want to create separate business social media accounts and give you access to those. Then you could post only to those business accounts and work together with your agents’ additional efforts on their personal accounts to create more business. If the company does its part successfully, agents may gain trust and relinquish their efforts to you and focus more on closing deals.

One of the catches here will be whether or not you want to post a link to your company blog or directly to the agents’ blog. If you wish to drive people to your agents’ blogs, any admin could handle this responsibility with ease, and the effectiveness of your company efforts will increase as it will keep your agents’ audience within their view. Hootsuite allows you to connect multiple RSS feeds to selected social media accounts. This means by simply taking the time to write a company blog post, your agents can automate their blogs to import your material, you can automate your hootsuite to pull in an RSS feed from their blog and distribute the link to every social network they have connected to their ping.FM account.

Company Driven Content: SLWS vs. Virtual Tours

Our single listing web sites (SLWs) can save your agents time and money and they serve the purpose professionally. If your agents adopt our SLWs, they no longer will have to purchase virtual tours for each property. Agents who purchase domain names with the street address of each property included will no longer have to pay for the domain names either. While the cost for each of these items is relatively small, it can add up over time. But time is the big money saver here.

Our Single Listing Websites, included in iQ Web, prevent agents from having to spend the time setting up virtual tours and their domain names. Every one of their listings has an auto-generated SLW and domain name for it that includes the street address. Our company web sites and agent web sites automatically generate a link to the SLW, the SLW includes social media sharing, it includes lead sources tied into the lead management system which funnels all leads from the SLW straight into your agent’s iQ Office intranet account, there is a branded and unbranded version of every SLW, the SLWs include lists of schools and businesses and their information and the SLW has a mobile version and their standard versions are quick loading because they do not use Flash technology.

Company Driven Content: Online Document Storage & Sharing

No longer should agents need to come into the office to get a copy of a document that is readily available for everyone in person. iQ Office offers secure, unlimited online document storage and sharing for both the agent and the company. Companies can share documents with staff and agents and all users can share documents externally. Our document library also includes a search tool that allows you to search the text within all of your text documents, not just the titles of the documents themselves.

Assistance with Lead Generation & Lead Management:

Lead Management: What Can You Do To Help With Driving Leads?

We have already talked about supplying your agents with website, blog, social media and drip marketing content with the intention of saving them time. But another area where supplying content can help agents' businesses is how these efforts will also assist their marketing efforts, and in turn, drive leads to your agents.

Every blog or social media post can work individually and create an immediate response, but they also work to create a long term effect with constant benefits. Agents’ sites will not only improve in organic search results by improving their page rank, but your individual efforts will remain online, so the number of tentacles out there for developing a long-term passive pipeline will continue to increase and work for your agents.

Lead Management: Nurturing Leads

There are different ways you can use lead management systems. We are hearing about high conversion rates from our customers using the hybrid approach. The hybrid approach allows agents to nurture their own leads, while allowing the company to scrub company leads as opposed to routing them off to agents. This has proven to be highly effective because the company can oversee, develop and refine its response process to general leads that come into the system and continue to warm the lead up before the agent even touches them.

The alternative is to allow your agents to receive these leads that are generated by the company web site that would otherwise be scrubbed by the company. You can configure the system to keep track of the agent as well. The success of this approach lies HEAVILY in training and internal marketing and understanding of the system you are asking your agents to learn.