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5 Free Graphic Design Tools For Real Estate Agents

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As a real estate agent, you know how important marketing is. After all, marketing is a prominent aspect of selling homes. Competition amongst real estate agents and firms is fierce, which means effective real estate marketing is critical to not only your success but your survival. Graphic design is an important part of a good marketing campaign.

As such, establishing your online presence and creating marketing materials is an essential part of any real estate marketing strategy. While writing content will help you to express your unique value proposition, potential clients will also be looking for visuals that support your brand. After all, human beings are visual creatures and often make decisions based on what they see.

This is where graphic design comes in.

The Importance of Graphic Design For Real Estate

As a real estate agent, you need to stand out from the crowd in order to get noticed. After all, there are plenty of other agents out there vying for the same clients. One way to make sure you stand out is to have an online presence that is professional and eye-catching. As such, good graphic design is essential.

Graphic design can help you build a brand identity, create a website and social media pages, and develop marketing materials that are visually appealing and will help you attract the attention of potential clients. Not to mention, using high-quality visuals can also make your brand appear more trustworthy and credible.

While hiring a professional graphic designer can be costly, there are plenty of great tools out there that you can use to create stunning visuals on your own.

Free Graphic Design Tools For Real Estate Agents

There are countless graphic design tools available that you can use; fortunately, not all of them are expensive. In fact, many of them are free. The following are the five of the best free graphic design tools available:

1. Canva

Canva is a user-friendly graphic design tool that is perfect for beginners. With this tool, you can easily create beautiful visuals without any prior experience or design skills. Canva provides you with everything you need to get started, including templates, images, and fonts. You can even upload your own images to use.

As such, Canva is great for creating blog graphics and eBook covers, preparing real estate presentations, and even for adding text (such as quotes) to your blog posts or social media updates. Plus, it’s extremely easy to use; simply drag and drop your way to a stunning design. Although available for free, there are premium add-ons available for an additional cost.

2. Adobe Photoshop Express

Adobe Photoshop is known as one of the premier graphic design tools; however, it can be quite expensive. Fortunately, they have an Adobe Photoshop Express tool that is available for free.

While it doesn’t offer as many features as the full version of Photoshop, it’s still a powerful tool that can help you create stunning designs. You can use Adobe Photoshop Express to edit photos, create collages, and design logos. You can also upload and enhance your own JPEG, JPG, and JPE files that are 16 megapixels or smaller. Their photo editing feature lets you adjust the brightness and saturation of your images, do touch-ups, and save high-quality versions of the images for free.

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3. Free Logo Design

Creating a logo is vital to creating a recognizable brand identity. As its name suggests, Free Logo Design is a tool that you can use to create free logos. This is perfect if you’re just starting out and don’t have the budget to hire a professional logo designer.

To get started, simply enter your business name and industry, and then browse through their library of stock logo icons. Once you find one you like, you can customize it by changing the colors, fonts, and layouts. You can also upload your own images to use. You can download your logo for free in either PNG or JPG format.

4. Piktochart

With Piktochart, you can turn boring data into visually appealing and easy-to-understand visuals. This is a great way to make complex information more digestible for your readers or viewers. Plus, infographics are highly shareable on social media, which means they can help you attract new leads and grow your online presence. Piktochart offers both free and premium plans; however, their free plan still provides you with plenty of features and templates to work with.

5. Skitch

Skitch is a unique tool that lets you add annotations, shapes, and arrows to your images. This is perfect for highlighting specific features of a property or drawing attention to a particular area in an image. As such, Skitch is useful for highlighting information on images to share on social media and can help make important text jump out at your followers.

Good graphic design is essential to building your real estate business. While these are just a few of the many great free graphic design tools that are available, they should give you a good starting point for creating visuals that will help you market your real estate business effectively.

  Struggling with low website traffic? Get practical tips to boost your online presence and attract new leads.  
Real Estate Marketing Trends to Look Out

Real Estate Marketing Trends to Look Out for in 2023

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Real estate marketing changes by the minute, given the constant entry of new trends, thanks to digital platforms. Other factors that dramatically affect marketing in the real estate industry are the following:

  • Changes in interest rates
  • A growing population of remote workers who want to work and live where they choose
  • Shortage of available homes (There was a 38% shortage of home listings in November 2022 compared to November 2017-2019).

The real estate industry is fierce, and with the uptick in buyer demand, marketers must adapt to the changes. Your retail estate marketing business must evolve with the changing times to maintain a competitive edge. It also must embrace the current trends to generate more leads and close more deals.

This post delves into the top real estate marketing strategies shaping the industry in 2023 and beyond. The details will go a long way in helping you stand up, stand out, and show up for your customers to establish yourself in the market firmly.

Digital Showings and Virtual Tours

Many home buyers prefer digital home staging because of the convenience they offer. Your real estate marketing strategy can digitally showcase beautiful listings to your customers wherever they are.

Video walkthroughs are an excellent approach to this quest and stand out on social media platforms. Through virtual home staging, you can highlight the best features of a house as you narrate how they resonate with the customers’ needs.

Double the impact of your real estate marketing strategy by recording excellent videos as soon as you list a property. That will save you the drive whenever a client requests a virtual house tour. During live video calls, show off your expertise by answering questions live. Digital showings and virtual tours can reduce your real estate marketing costs by approximately 97%.

Incorporate Social Media into Your Real Estate Marketing Strategy

Pay attention to the power of social media in your marketing strategy. Take the best pictures of the homes you want to market and post them on your Instagram or Facebook. You can also leverage social media to display your warm personality, for example, by using humor in your posts. Your audience seeks engaging, informative, and educative material besides the promotional content they encounter.

Your social media marketing strategy must also be consistent. Posting once a month and not responding to your audience’s questions or concerns is the easiest way for your audience to ignore you. Look at the leading competitors and draw inspiration from them to build a memorable online presence with interested followers.

Boost Your SEO on Single-Listing Websites

Over 50% of homebuyers search for detailed information about real estate listings. They appreciate photos, interactive maps, neighborhood information, and real estate agent contact information. There’s no better way to achieve this quest than using single-listing websites. This is a must-have platform for every realtor that wants to:

  • Build brand awareness using their company logo
  • Showcase more photos
  • Capture detailed descriptions of their listings
  • Optimize their listings for search engines
  • Bring together all their favorite social media networks on a single platform

Sadly, only 30% of real estate agents use single-listing websites. Your real estate firm should not miss out. Consider leveraging the built-in lead capture forms to capture potential buyers’ contact details and email addresses. You can take your marketing strategy a notch higher by incorporating email marketing and newsletters.

Social media integration makes your listing website easy to share on all your social media networks. You’ll capture more attention on your listings and enjoy more referrals to boost sales.

Use Drone Photography to Provide a Better View

Today’s prospective buyers want to see high-definition aerial shots as part of property listings. The shots also provide a glimpse of the neighborhood to help buyers decide. To many buyers, the surrounding is often more important than the property when buying a home.

With aerial photography using drones, your real estate firm can create stunning aerial videos and images. You don’t have to spend a fortune to pull off powerful representations of a property’s surrounding environment.

The forecast is that 2023 will experience a housing market slowdown and a demand for exceptional real estate photography. That’s why you can’t afford to ignore this trend.

Target Millennials in Your Marketing Strategy

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that Millennials are now more than a quarter of the nation’s population. Their growing population contributes to a generational shift in the type of buyers in the real estate industry. Being the largest demographic cohort in America, Millennials have a strong voice. That’s why brands are vying for their attention.

You must understand this market segment if you wish to win them over. Learn all you can about their needs and expectations of the buying process, which is crucial to selling more homes. Millennials are more tech-savvy than previous generations. Pivot your marketing strategy to digital solutions, paying attention the following:

  • Millennials are two times more likely to use their mobile devices to search for properties on sale
  • A majority would be confident making an offer on a home they toured virtually
  • Most millennials would like to see 3D virtual tours and digital floor plans when window shopping for a home
  • Approximately 39% of millennials would not mind buying a home online

With that, take charge of your digital presence and marketing strategy. High-quality photos, tours, and social media presence can boost your digital marketing strategy. You also must have convenient communication channels.

Keeping Up with the Real Estate Marketing Trends

The real estate market changes rapidly, and you must keep up with the pace to carve out a niche for your business. An effective real estate marketing strategy you constantly fine-tune will establish you as a genuine contender.

Given the above trends shaping the real estate market in 2023, work with a professional real estate marketing agency. They can help you fine-tune and implement them for solid results. At Steven & Tate, we have a dedicated digital marketing team willing to take your marketing to the next level. Contact us to schedule a consultation.

 

Real Estate Marketing

Creative Real Estate Marketing Ideas for Homebuilders

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As a homebuilder in an increasingly competitive market, getting ahead with your real estate marketing plan will give you an advantage on your competition and increase your value as a contractor. In much the same way you leverage creativity in your trade, you must be creative when it comes to your marketing.

Creative real estate marketing starts with a rock solid online presence and strategy and, once established, can be built up on the foundational level. Here are 8 creative real estate marketing tools you should be utilizing now.

1. Video

Video is a vital piece to your marketing puzzle, especially when it comes to helping prospective home buyers visualize their future home. Whether you’re in the custom home market or not, video content is a great way to help your clients better understand what it is you do and what makes you unique.

Leveraging video by making them personable, relatable, authentic, and unique to your brand helps build brand awareness and rapport in your industry. These articles below can guide you in the right direction to make fantastic video content:

2. Optimized Landing Pages

Landing pages are where your online prospects “land” after reading through your content. This is your customer’s gateway into your sales funnel and where they are willing to enter your sales process with hopes of a return of more education about your brand or products.

Optimized landing pages improve the chances that a potential customer enters your sales funnel and draws their focus toward the important points about the offer presented them. Here are some resources on the value of optimized landing pages:

3. Use Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is far less scary than it may seem on the surface and can actually be an extremely valuable tool for identifying buying trends, behaviors, and interests of individuals and families seeking a quality homebuilder.

Marketing automation can (and should be) personalized and will help your leads matriculate through your sales funnel faster. This gives you the ability to nurture leads into sales and gives you crucial insights into individual buying behaviors. Marketing automation is more than drip emails and encapsulates a vast area of lead nurturing. Check out these useful references:

4. Social Media

An often overlooked aspect but highly important piece of your marketing puzzle is social media. There’s a high likelihood that your customers will start their search for a homebuilder by some form of social media, and your presence there could very well make the difference between getting a lead and losing a sale.

Knowing what to do with social media requires a bit of a learning curve to someone who may be new to it as more than a social platform. Business social media in conjunction with a quality attraction marketing campaign is a slightly different animal, but we’ve got a few key posts aimed at making your social media presence a fruitful one:

5. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC advertising may seem unfamiliar and (if put in the wrong hands) very costly; however, PPC advertising done right is a primary structural piece of your attraction marketing efforts and can greatly improve your marketing ROI.

Two of the leading platforms for PPC ads are Facebook and Google with both performing admirably for myriad industries and are critical for the awareness stage of your buyer’s journey. Take a look at these resources for leveraging PPC to your advantage as a homebuilder:

6. Retargeting

Sometimes referred to as remarketing, retargeting deals largely with resurrecting forgotten leads who have either fallen out of your workflows or to heat up a lead gone cold. Retargeting focuses largely on marketing qualified leads or MQLs. MQLs have already been qualified for sales and have entered the consideration stage of their buying journey.

This is a great time to churn up that cold lead and get it back into your lead nurturing program. Here are some ways retargeting can help your leads heat back up:

7. Content and Inbound Marketing

Often used interchangeably, content or inbound marketing leverages your expertise and online presence as a hub of information and attracts potential customers to your brand. Unlike more traditional outbound marketing where leads were often untraceable, inbound gives you the power to track your leads from beginning to end. Check out these resources for yourself:

8. Email Marketing

As we mentioned previously, email marketing is an essential part of your lead nurturing process and can keep prospective customers in the loop with what’s going on in the housing industry and your company’s building endeavors. Like any tool in your marketing toolkit, email marketing has a place and a time in your buyer’s journey. Specifically, email marketing is geared towards the information hungry buyer during the attraction phase.

Nevertheless, email marketing is relevant throughout their journey. It can be even more critical in the middle of the funnel where leads tend to fall away. These resources below can give you a better understanding of how email marketing fits into a creative real estate marketing plan:

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

Real Estate Marketing Trends You Should Implement Into Your Marketing Strategy

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The real estate industry has seen a lot of change over the past decade. It wasn’t that long ago when a homebuyer would reach out to a real estate agent through their office the moment they became interested in buying a new home. These days, the majority of homebuyers do their househunting online, which means inbound marketing has become a vital part of the real estate business.

As such, it’s important that you stay up to date with the latest real estate marketing trends. While some come and go, some of these tactics could end up making a huge difference in terms of standing out from the competition and attracting new clients. The following are some of the latest real estate marketing trends that you’ll want to incorporate into your marketing efforts:

Establish a Bloglanding page lead conversion rate

While businesses, in general, have realized the benefit of blogging years ago, it’s taking realtors a surprisingly long time to catch up. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 77 per cent of Realtors did not have a blog in 2018. This means that by setting up a blog, you’ll have an immediate leg up on your competition. Regularly publishing helpful and relevant content on your blog helps to build authority and authenticity, which will make it easier for potential clients to trust you. Having a blog will also help with SEO, thereby increasing the exposure to your real estate business and bringing in more potential clients.

Be Mobile-Friendly

It’s absolutely essential that all of your online content is mobile-friendly, including your website. This is because homebuyers are doing the majority of their research on their smartphones or tablets. For example, if a potential homebuyer is driving around a neighbourhood and they see a house for sale, they may visit the website displayed on the for sale sign on their smartphone while they are there. If they have problems viewing it on their phone, they are likely to just give up on it.

Offer Virtual Tours

Because homebuyers are doing the majority of their research online, they are less likely to visit a property in person unless they are absolutely sure that it could potentially be something that they are interested in. You can drum up interest in your properties by offering virtual tours online. This makes it easier for homebuyers to get an idea of what the property looks like. This can help convince potential buyers to get into contact with you in order to see homes in person.

How Will Inbound Marketing Help Me Sell Custom Homes?

media mixUse Social Media

Social media is one of the best ways to reach potential homebuyers. Join Facebook groups and contribute to discussions about real estate advice to potentially connect with buyers. If you give out good advice, buyers are more likely to reach out to you. Social media channels like Instagram are also quite helpful for real estate agents since they provide you with a platform to post pictures of your properties on that can be easily shared. You can also use social media to draw attention to certain events, like open houses. If you’re not using social media at this point, you’re missing out on a huge audience.

Find Influencers

While building your brand authority through a content strategy and a social media presence can be effective, one of the most effective ways to gain instant trust is through the use of influencers. Influencers within your industry, which include previous clients, popular real estate bloggers, and other trusted industry experts, wield an enormous amount of influence within the community and can be extremely beneficial in recommending your services to homebuyers. Connect with such influencers through social media and build relationships with them.B2B website

Create Video Content

People tend to prefer consuming video content over reading text online–especially if they are on a mobile device. It’s why you should create video content, such as videos of your properties, videos of open houses, testimonial videos, and more. Such videos are more engaging, provide better insight, and are more shareable than other forms of content.

Staying up to date with the latest real estate marketing trends can help you improve your own marketing strategy, so keep these current real estate marketing trends in mind.

How Will Inbound Marketing Help Me Sell Custom Homes?

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As a home builder, you might assume that traditional marketing efforts are all that’s required to find new clients. Building homes is not something that’s done on the Internet, after all. However, you shouldn’t discount the importance of inbound marketing and the benefits that it can offer. The following are a few ways that implementing inbound marketing to your overall marketing strategy can help you to sell more custom homes.

1. Make It Easier To Be Found Online

Setting up a website is the first step toward being found online. There are many potential clients out there who are thinking about building a custom home. They are likely to start their research online before they even know who you are. They will begin looking for information on building custom homes and will look for home builders in the area that they want to live in. If you don’t have a website or pages on social networks, odds are they will stumble upon your competitors first.

However, setting up a website isn’t the only part of being found. You’ll want to optimize your website and all of the content you produce for your site using SEO. This means using strong keywords and earning links from outside sources to boost your SEO rankings, which, in turn, will help make it easier for people to find you when doing Google searches.

2. Increase Awareness Of Your Home Building Business

The bigger a presence you build online, the more awareness you’ll generate for your home-building company. For example, if you regularly produce content for a blog on your website, your regular readers will be more likely to share that content on social media. This is a great way to generate more awareness for your business. That one person who shares your blog post on Facebook, for example, may not end up using your services. However, that content will be exposed to their social circle. Someone in that social circle may take note of your company and may, in fact, be looking for a home builder themselves.

You can also use PPC (pay-per-click) advertising to generate awareness for your company on Google’s SERP (search engine results pages).

Read More Related Article – The Silent Generation & Senior Real Estate Marketing

3. Improve Your Authority As A Custom Home Builder

Reputation matters. By producing high-quality content that’s relevant to custom home building on your website on a regular basis, you’ll soon establish yourself as an authority. This is especially true if other websites begin linking to your content. Brand authority is important because it helps strengthen your brand identity as well as build trust throughout your audience. When you’ve established yourself as an authority, potential clients are more likely to choose to work with you because they trust that you will do a good job.

4. Engage Directly With Potential Clients

inbound marketing

The ability to speak directly with potential leads to answer any questions that they may have is invaluable. By establishing a presence on social media and regularly interacting with your audience, you can do just that. Social media will allow you to post questions, articles, links, and more. You can even join various discussions that are relevant to the home building industry to make connections with potential clients as well as business partners. Social media channels like Twitter make it easy for your audience to get in touch with you in a convenient manner as well.

5. Nurture Future Clients

Not everybody that interacts with you on social media or that checks out your website will be ready to begin the home-building process. They may be on the fence, or it may be a while before they will be able to begin the home-building process due to a variety of reasons. You can use inbound marketing tactics, such as regularly posting blog content to keep you at the top of your mind or by regularly sending them email newsletters, to nurture them so that when they are ready, they’ll reach out to you.

As you can see, the use of inbound marketing can be incredibly effective for home builders. By leveraging inbound marketing as a major component of your overall marketing strategy, you can increase awareness, improve your reputation, and attract more potential customers.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers
pinterest marketing

Utilize Marketing Audiences on Pinterest Today

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pinterest marketingPinterest is a valuable marketing tool, as 88% of pinners purchase something they have pinned, and 49% purchase 5 or more products they have pinned. Despite its effectiveness as a marketing tool, only 28% of marketers are already using Pinterest, so get ahead of the competition and start using this visual platform today.

Who’s Using Pinterest?

Pinterest has over 335 million  worldwide users and 88 million users from the United States. With over 200 billion Pinterest pins and 4 billion boards, users save 2 million shopping pins on boards daily. 71% of Pinterest users are female. In the United states, 40% of dads use Pinterest, and 80% of moms. The median age of Pinterest users is 40, however most active “Pinners” are below 40 years old. Gen Z adults and millennials are the most dedicated users, however Gen X users increased daily use by 10% from 2018 to 2019.

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Marketing on Pinterest: Homebuilding, Crafts, Senior Living, Real Estate, CPG, and more

Two thirds of pins represent brands and products, and 50% of users have made a purchase after seeing a promoted pin.  According to Mintel’s February 2020 Arts and Crafts Consumer Report, Pinterest is largely used to spread creativity through DIY crafts, creating a valuable marketing opportunity for craft and home decorating companies. Pinterest is also a valuable tool for homebuilders to reach consumers through typing in keywords linked to related visual boards of ideas and products. Additionally, Pinterest is a marketing tool to promote services as well, such as Senior living facilities. A platform that provides a unique way to visually display information, Pinterest provides a way for your brand to share health and caregiver related articles, exercise routines for seniors, home health care products, images from your service’s website, and even healthy recipes. As nearly 30% of Pinterest users have a 6-figure income, Pinterest is a  sufficient platform for real estate companies to reach their target audiences. In a study of 9 million consumers, consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing research shows that Pinterest households were 29% more likely to try a new product within the first 10 months of launch than non-Pinner households, and the Pinner “trial date” was 40% higher in the first 30 days of launch than non-Pinners. Experts say the study shows that people on Pinterest are more likely to try new CPG products. Overall, 75% of Pinners say they are “very interested” in new products compared to 55% with the same level of interest on other digital platforms.

Click here to learn more about social media from our FREE Social Prospecting Workbook

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Homebuilder Marketing: Target Your Homebuyers With A New Media Mix

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When pursuing new homebuyers, it’s important to think about their mindset and the tools available for marketing to them during various stages of the buying cycle. Consumers act—and react—differently depending on where they are in the buying process. Radio, TV, magazines, and billboards all can be effective ways to deliver your brand to the masses. But no matter how creative or compelling, your message may be lost if it doesn’t reach those who are ready to receive it. That’s why today, your outreach marketing should concentrate on home shoppers—those defined as actively looking for a home, and prospects—those who have made contact with you either by visiting your sales center or registering online. Read more