Articles Tagged "DeltaNET 6"

Many real estate agents around the United States swear by online advertising.

Even if you've never used an online ad, you're probably familiar with the idea: Set it up correctly and you enjoy "overnight" traffic to your website or listings. An optimized ad provides the opportunity to accelerate interest in your most promising properties and meet qualified buyers sooner.

When you think of online ads, you might think of Google first. For real estate agents, though, the picture is a little bit different. People go on platforms like Facebook and Instagram (also owned by Facebook) to browse aspirational properties, and that's where an effective agent should seek out traffic.

Facebook is also helpful for maintaining connections with leads and past customers.

When it comes to advertising for the first time, most agents have these two questions:

• "Do ads really work?"
• "Will ads work for me?"

The answer to question #1 is a resounding "yes!" In 2020, it cost under $10 on average for a Facebook ad to be seen 1,000 times. Most businesses spend about 5% to 12% of their revenue on ads, but agents can facilitate thousands of dollars in transactions with much less.

Will ads work for you? Again, the answer is yes.

But it won't work in a vacuum — you need to be ready to service the new traffic you get. There are two main ways to use online advertising to grow your real estate practice:

Drive New Leads Directly to Your Website

Your real estate website is the cornerstone of your digital brand. It's where people go to find out who you are and what you can do for them. Ads that go directly to your website can be helpful for people comparing real estate agents or just getting involved in the early stages of market research.

Ads are particularly effective when you've already published helpful, informative content such as blogs or videos. Content helps your visitors get informed about their options, connect with neighborhoods or listings, and ultimately become leads within your business pipeline.

Show Off Your Best and Brightest Properties

What if your website is new and not fully developed yet? You can direct online traffic to live listings on your MLS. In cases like this, it's essential to be sure any contact forms are set up correctly, so you can use them to capture details directly from interested leads.

You can display live listings directly on your website as well. This can be especially useful since it gives you more data. You'll end up with a granular sense of which listings attract attention, how long each visitor spends on each listing, and what features are most captivating to your audience.

Best Practices to Get the Most from Your Ads

Interested in jumping in with social media ads? You have a huge advantage compared to professionals in many other fields – the potential to move transactions forward with a tiny fraction of the revenue you'll stand to make. Still, you need to lay the right groundwork for success:

• Be Ready to Connect with New Visitors Fast
  Many newcomers to advertising run them only during the day at peak activity hours in their own time zone. This ensures that if someone calls you right away, you'll be able to respond immediately — one of the biggest factors in scheduling that all-important first meeting.
  
  
• Use Digital Marketing Automation to Your Advantage
  Optimizing your ads is a learning process, but it's one you can speed up. Social Media Ad Wizard makes it easy to plan, launch, and monitor your ads. By quickly learning what works, you'll spend less money and improve your results. It's all part of the DeltaNET®6, your all-in-one real estate solution.
  
  
• Capture Leads as Social Followers or Subscribers
  People who follow your ads may be ready to buy, but they could also be weeks or months away from a decision. Encourage them to follow you on social media or, better yet, join your email list. This lets you build the relationship over time and position yourself as a trusted advisor.
  
  
• Be Involved in the Social Media Conversation
  Ads can work well on their own, but they're even more effective when you're active on social media. Focus your time on the platforms where the customers you want are most active and engaged, then join the conversation when you see them with questions or problems you can help with.
  
  
• Use Video to Attract the Right Customers
  Video is the cornerstone of effective social media. It's fun, easy to consume, and much more memorable than plain text. For listings, that means a video tour of the property. For your website, it means adding video to your most popular blog posts and other pages.

Contact us at Delta Media Group to learn more about social media ad success.

A real estate CRM has the potential to transform your business. But there are still many brokerages not using the power of CRM. Likewise, many agents have decided to forgo CRM, not realizing it doesn't take a large team or a big budget to benefit.

As technology evolves, change follows. But even the most sophisticated technology can't replace the most important part of real estate: The human touch. Instead, a CRM is a tool, albeit a versatile and powerful one. It helps you get more done in less time.

That equips you to focus more of your attention on strategic matters that grow your business.

Before you jump into CRM with both feet, though, it's a good idea to know exactly what you're getting into. What is a CRM and what can you expect from it? What is it really all about? And perhaps most importantly, what is the experience of using it actually like?

Let's take a closer look.

Customer Relationship Management Centralizes All Your Data

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and this sums up the main goal in a nutshell. It gives you a centralized database that acts as a single source of truth for all the information about your prospects, leads, and customers. For real estate agents, this is huge.

Not that long ago, agents would devote days every week simply to figuring out where everyone in their network stood on their current or pending transactions. It was difficult to know when to follow up, and options for doing so were limited. Connections would "disappear" off the radar for weeks or months.

With a real estate CRM, this never needs to be the case again.

And here's why...

Customer Relationship Management Helps You Be More Proactive

Your CRM isn't just a collection of information. It serves as a living ecosystem for your most important business data. While there may be some manual data entry in the very beginning, your CRM will soon save you thousands of hours by linking directly up to your website, event registration forms, and more.

Every time someone interacts with your digital brand, your CRM has the opportunity to capture more details about them. An AI-driven CRM then "connects the dots" between the different data points. This allows you to recognize when it's the perfect time to follow up and to do so with confidence.

You won't have to wonder when to follow up, because you'll know, for example:

• When leads are looking at content on your website that indicates readiness to buy a home
• Which property listings your users have seen and how much time they've spent on each one
• How many actions each person has taken that suggest they are about to become a customer
• Their "score" compared to other customers that you sourced through your listings or website

In the olden days, sales professionals would manually "score" each lead, follow up, and keep their notes as the transaction progressed. This is no longer necessary because your CRM is always there to do the guesswork for you. Machine learning helps it to see patterns that would be invisible otherwise.

What Is Using a CRM Actually Like?

A modern real estate CRM has a variety of features that can all work together, creating a "center of excellence" for your digital marketing. You can keep your experience very simple or you can use each feature, in turn, to get even more value from your CRM.

The core of your CRM is the database of contacts for your business. You'll be able to see at a glance the relationships that matter in reaching your goals — new prospects, leads, and customers. Each entry will offer all of the latest interactions your CRM has picked up from each person.

Event-based triggers bring individuals to your attention whenever it might be a good time to follow up. You can also connect with anyone through email, social media, and other means simply by looking at the contact information your CRM has collected for you.

Marketing Automation Through Your CRM

With DeltaNET®6, you also have a wide variety of options for digital marketing automation.

The power of automation means you can stay in touch and keep your brand "top of mind" with more consistent, higher-quality communications — all while spending less time writing emails or social media posts. You can even source custom content for your blog directly from DeltaNET®6.

Over time, marketing automation has the power to turn your real estate website into a conversion engine that attracts ideal customers to you. That means less time spent "chasing leads" or doing tedious, error-prone tasks — and more time doing what's most important to you.

Contact us at Delta Media Group to learn more about the world's first true real estate CRM.

One of the most powerful digital marketing approaches is also the least expensive.

Once you set it up, email marketing costs only pennies a month. With an all-in-one real estate solution like DeltaNET®6, you automate the process. That leads to a constant flow of targeted emails that deepen relationships with your prospects, leads, and current customers.

Not sure email is right for you? Experts estimate email offers more than $30 of ROI for each dollar spent. With email, you have the power to inspire your potential customers, helping them get off the fence and onto the market.

Some real estate agents worry about rules and regulations that apply to email marketing. Luckily, all the compliance issues are handled by your CRM as long as it's configured correctly. That gives subscribers a one-click solution for unsubscribing, which represents the bulk of your responsibilities.

In exchange for this little bit of digital housekeeping, you can leverage a powerful opportunity to stay in contact with your entire network all at once — providing targeted, valuable content to each individual on your list based on their specific needs and interests.

That helps you transform your brand and position as a true local authority.

What Email Marketing Drip Campaigns Are and Why They Work

When you look at email marketing as part of your overall digital marketing strategy, you will probably see the term "drip campaign" frequently. A drip campaign consists of emails you send on a regular basis, typically once a week, but sometimes every two weeks or once a month.

With a drip campaign, you are consistently staying in touch. Each subscriber gets useful, informative content that helps them make informed decisions. At the same time, they become more familiar with your brand and what you can do for them.

For a drip campaign to be successful, there are some key aspects to be aware of:

Email List Segmentation

Segmentation means creating smaller "sub-lists" within your email marketing list to ensure the right people get the right information every time. One of the most obvious examples is having a segment catering to would-be homebuyers and a separate segment for those who have completed the buy.

With email list segmentation, you can laser-target each person's questions and worries wherever they are in the process. Segmentation enables you to get more repeat business than you otherwise would and centralizes the process of asking for referrals, too.

Email Timing

Most email subscribers are recruited through the content on your website, though some may join your list through a current home listing or after signing up for an open house. Whatever the case, it's crucial to set expectations upfront, so they are opting in with complete consent.

If you promise emails once a week, email only once a week. Change things up only in the most serious of circumstances. When people understand what to expect, they are less likely to unsubscribe since they trust you to do exactly what you said you would do.

Another aspect of timing is sending out your emails when your target audience is most likely to be active. You can optimize these settings directly from your CRM. For most working adults, online activity jolts upward around lunchtime and again in the early evening after work.

Calls to Action

Every piece of content, from your blog posts to your individual emails, is meant to inspire action in some way. Most blogs will direct people to sign up for your social media or email, for example. Your email, in turn, usually focuses on getting people to call you for the first time to set up an appointment.

You make this explicit with a call to action or CTA. A CTA can be very simple — "add to cart" is probably the most common one along with "call us today." Each email should have one CTA, though it can be repeated throughout the text if the message is long. Without it, most people simply will not take action.

Limited Time Offers (LTOs)

Limited time offers (or LTOs) are common in retail and other industries, but they need a special spin to work in real estate. It makes sense when you take a step back and look at it strategically: The point of an LTO is to motivate people by giving them a sense of scarcity. The same can be done with your listings.

When you have a hot listing that you know will stand out, promote it to those in your list you know are looking in the area. You can make it even more effective by using a video walkthrough or virtual tour to help them see for themselves just what makes the property special.

Contact us today to get started with email marketing drip campaigns from digital marketing experts.

Building a Custom CMA Has Never Been Easier Than With Delta Pitch.

On May 30, Delta Media Group® will release Delta Pitch, a Comparative Market Analysis tool that makes it possible to create a CMA in as little as one click.

Building a custom CMA has never been easier. And to top it off, Delta Pitch is integrated with the DeltaNET®, so you don't have to look far for it. This feature goes hand-in-hand with DeltaNET® 7, Delta's next generation of customizable, automated real estate technology releasing this fall.

So, how does it work? It's as simple as entering an address and clicking the link to build a CMA. You have a beautiful, company-branded CMA with comps, recent pending's, and more in just one click. Built on top of an AI platform, it will provide all relevant properties and other important information in an attractive, interactive flipbook. Other features include:

• Customization of comps and templates
• Add custom pages
• Automatically created flipbooks with annotations to be shared with customers
• Automatically launch Zoom/video calls directly from Delta Pitch

Delta Pitch will also be integrated into our AVM platform. When a customer comes to your website and enters their property address, they automatically get an automated estimate based on the current listings in their area. As an agent, this gives you the opportunity to land a new listing. Making it easy, the system creates a digital CMA, comparable to a flipbook that you can then send to the lead, with little work on your end.

Michael Minard, Owner and CEO of Delta Media Group, says, "Delta Pitch is more than a CMA builder; it's an entire presentation builder."

Join Franklin Stoffer (Vice President of Sales at Delta Media Group) on Wednesday, May 25 at 2:00 p.m. EST to take a first-hand look at the new DeltaNET Pitch. Don't miss this chance to see Delta Pitch first-hand and how it can transform your presentation process.

Click (here) to register for the webinar.

A real estate CRM provides total visibility into your prospects, leads, and current customers. That makes it easier to know precisely when and how to follow up with the people who can advance your business, potentially saving you thousands of hours of work in a year.

That naturally raises the question: Why doesn't everyone use one?

Long before there was a dedicated real estate CRM, the concept was limited to enterprise sales teams in a variety of unrelated industries. Salespeople who were converting to digital for the first time usually had an established style of doing things, which made them less likely to embrace a CRM with gusto.

In some cases, this meant the old-fashioned approach with Post It notes and overstuffed filing cabinets. In others, there was a slew of unrelated apps where data would bounce from one place to another. In either situation, a CRM offered clear benefits — faster, easier, and usually much less expensive.

But thanks to that history, some myths about CRM continue to circulate. Even today, real estate agents might not realize the powerful benefits they have to offer.

Let's take a closer look at some of the biggest CRM myths around:

• MYTH 1: Having a CRM Means Dealing with a Lot of Data Entry
  Like any piece of software, your CRM starts with a little bit of setup. That might take a day or two — but when you choose a real estate CRM, you have all the help you need. As for data entry, you won't see much of it after the first week. When configured correctly, your real estate CRM can automatically pull lead and customer information from your website and event registration forms.
  
  
• MYTH 2: You Need to Be a Computer Expert to Use a Digital CRM
  A modern CRM is designed to be simple and caters to a wide variety of needs. Everything is laid out where you would expect it and where you can easily find it. Workflows are based on how real estate practices already operate every day. In just a few minutes a day, most people can master the learning curve of a CRM within a week. And once you see the benefits, you won't want to go back.
  
  
• MYTH 3: Using a CRM Is Too Time-Consuming
  If your schedule is packed and you feel like you don't have time for even one more thing, that means it's the perfect opportunity to get started with a CRM. A CRM may look intimidating at first, but it will start saving you time every day within the first month. That really adds up, and it means you can focus more time and attention on the things that move your business forward in the long run.
  
  
• MYTH 4: Time Spent on CRM Is Better Spent Looking for Leads
  The first year of any real estate agent's career is spent learning the ropes and deciding what the ideal customer is like. After that, however, there needs to be a plan in place to go from "chasing down leads" to attracting them to your digital doorstep. Your CRM is the foundation of that effort, as it gives you the ability to deliver consistent, valuable marketing communication across all of your platforms.
  
  
• MYTH 5: A Real Estate CRM Is Too Expensive
  Agents who are currently using a half dozen different apps to manage their work often discover that a dedicated CRM is less expensive than licensing their other subscription products. The DeltaNET 6 CRM is designed to be affordable for real estate practices of all sizes, from large brokerages to solo operators. It scales with you as your needs grow and change, so you are always getting value from what you pay.
  
  
• MYTH 6: Only Big Businesses Use a Real Estate CRM
  Over the last few years, large brokerages from coast to coast have made the leap to CRM. That doesn't mean only the biggest companies can use them. Far from it! If you are in a market with a lot of large, entrenched competitors, that is an even bigger reason for you to adopt CRM as soon as possible. With world-class technology at a fraction of the price, you can stand head to head with your local rivals.

CRM Technology Isn't Just for Sales Teams Anymore — Now, Real Estate Pros Can Benefit

With DeltaNET 6, your very own real estate CRM, you get AI-driven visibility into your business from the first moment you log in. Not only that, but DeltaNET is packed with features to automate your digital marketing, making it simple to cultivate lasting relationships through email, social media, and more.

It's the key to doing less and achieving more.

Contact us today to find out more or get started with this all-in-one real estate center of excellence.

Virtual showings took the world by storm in the wake of the pandemic. Buyers and sellers alike needed to shift their perspective on virtual technology quickly to adapt to a new world. Agents and brokers had a challenge ahead of them: To learn and implement the new technology.

As the public health situation improves, virtual showings are still going strong.

However, more and more buyers want opportunities to return to the traditional way of seeing a home. In the past, open house events have stood out among the best ways for agents to meet new leads. It is sometimes possible to get an offer from a qualified buyer on a home in just minutes, too.

Although there will always be some people who are just curious, most people who go to a conventional home showing are interested in buying in the very near future. Although these events take planning and foresight, they help the agent connect with the local community in a powerful way.

Unfortunately, many agents had mixed results with their showings in the past. This might leave some under the impression that there's no space for open houses or showings in their marketing mix.

It's understandable showings seem like a tall order, especially at a time like this! But there is a solution: A property showing manager that lets you quickly and efficiently schedule, plan, and scale showings — whether you're doing one a month or several every week.

Enhance Your Showings with a Unique, Independent Local Showing Manager

On paper, the idea of a showing seems simple: Prepare the home, invite guests, and follow through. A quick tour, some questions and answers, and you may be well on your way to fielding qualified offers. In practice, though, there's always a little bit more to it than that!

You want to make the process quick and painless for yourself, your seller, and visitors to the property. At the same time, you also need to make sure the time you invest produces real business value — that means getting information for follow-up from every participant, including the "no shows."

For the first time, you can do it all with Local Showings — an independent solution designed just for you.

Local Showings is Delta Media Group's response to an overwhelming desire among agents and brokers to have a fully integrated solution that works with their technology rather than requiring them to start over with something new. It operates as a standalone product and within your DeltaNET®6 real estate all-in-one solution.

Here's what you can expect when you try it for yourself:

• Schedule a Showing for Any Listing in Your MLS
  It takes only minutes to schedule a showing from your phone, within your own website, or directly on your MLS. Local Showings is available in Web-based and mobile formats and also offers apps for Apple or Android. No matter what technology you use or where you work, it is ready for you.
  
  
• Generate White Label Reports for Your Sellers
  Sellers rely on the marketing you do for their properties, and they want to have confidence about your efforts. It's never been simpler to keep them in the loop with detailed reports from Local Showings. They can see the entire history of events, total attendees, and much more, all with your branding.
  
  
• Get Feedback from Attendees
  With full integration of event registration and post-event follow-up, you'll capture granular insight from your attendees with ease. And that's not the end of the story: In partnership with DeltaNET®6 or your existing solution, you can easily reconnect with no-shows and visitors who are still in the market.
  
  
• Communicate Quickly and Easily with Agents
  Communication is the key when you're working with multiple agents. Local Showings is equipped with a sophisticated communication overlay that allows you to plan and project manage your showings behind the scenes, ensuring a spectacular experience for both your sellers and their prospective buyers.
  
  
• Get Help and Support Whenever You Need It
  With years of experience in property technology, Delta Media Group knows how to deliver effective and meaningful support. No matter where you are or when you need us, our team is there: Our call center is ready to field your questions and troubleshoot your problems, so your showings stay on track.
  
  
• Showings Are Coming Back with a Bang – Get Ready with Local Showings Today
  Virtual tours are here to stay, but buyers have never been more enthusiastic about face-to-face property showings than they are right now. Showing management will save you time and help you achieve more for your customers.

Don't settle for partnering with the competition — use a modern solution from a leading property technology firm. Contact us to learn more or schedule a demo to see how Local Showings will work at your practice.

Email marketing continues to rank near the top of the charts for real estate agents who want to quickly, consistently and effectively reach a large pool of prospects with targeted, relevant content that converts. Whether you're new to email marketing or want to modernize your existing strategy, success starts with having a clear, detailed plan for reaching your goals. Here's how to unlock your email marketing potential, improve conversion rates and save tons of time in the process.

While there are many effective real estate marketing channels, few can boast the wide user base and nearly universal integration of email. No matter the demographic you wish to reach, chances are that they have an email account and check it every day. With the right tactics, you can turn email marketing into a consistent, reliable source of leads and a powerful tool to convert those leads into clients.

Start with a Consistent Schedule for Email Marketing

Email marketing works best when you choose a schedule and send emails regularly. When a new contact joins your email list, that schedule typically starts with a welcome sequence, during which you send a series of automated emails over the course of a few days to introduce yourself. These emails often have some of the highest open rates and are critical to establishing yourself with each contact.

Over time, the emails may become less frequent but should still adhere to a regular schedule. Basically, you don't want to overwhelm your audience, but you don't want them to forget about you, either. Most agents find that scheduling a few emails a week per contact is the best way to strike the right balance.

Segment Your Email List

Unlocking your email marketing potential requires sending the right messages, to the right people, at the right time. That's why it's so important to segment your email list based on the needs of your audience. This might mean segmenting based on whether a prospect is a buyer or seller, as well as whether this is their first time buying/selling a home. You can also segment based on the location where they're shopping, the type of real estate they're searching for, or any other key factor that helps you differentiate your target audience.

Be Informative and Personable

In order to keep your open rates high and have the best chance of converting, you need to provide email content that your audience wants to see. The good news is that if someone has opted into your email marketing, they're clearly seeking information on real estate. Your job is to make your email marketing as informative as possible, based on the needs of each segment of your audience.

Just as importantly, you want your email marketing to be personable and avoid the hard sale. While the ultimate goal of email marketing is to generate new business, your audience wants to be informed rather than pitched. Including a call-to-action at the end of your email is a good thing, but turning the whole email into a call-to-action is a mistake to avoid.

Leverage the Power and Time-Saving Benefits of Automation

We've stressed the importance of keeping a regular email marketing schedule and sending the right content at just the right time. Email drip campaigns make it easy to accomplish both goals while saving time with automation. Set up automated, informative campaigns that help nurture leads over time, tailored to buyers, sellers, first-time buyers, and prospects at every stage of their journey.

Integrate Social Proof

Integrating social proof into your email marketing is a great way to boost conversion rates and show prospects what your current clients have to say about your real estate services. For email, including testimonials is usually the best way to integrate social proof. Ideally, the testimonials that you include will be relevant to the segment of your audience that you're trying to reach.

Don't Forget About Your Clients

Speaking of those current clients, you don't want to forget about them when it comes to email marketing. Following up after a purchase or sale is simply good business and shows clients that you're still there for them after closing day. It's also a great way to generate referrals, as well as social proof that you can integrate into your real estate website, email marketing, and social media marketing.

Take Your Marketing to the Next Level with DeltaNET®6

The right real estate CRM makes it easy to boost your marketing, generate more leads, and save time by automating marketing tasks without sacrificing quality. DeltaNET®6 simplifies email marketing with email drip campaigns, AI-driven email newsletters, bulk email blasts, customizable eCards, and email templates that make it easy to send personalized messages for any occasion.

As a real estate agent, building long-term client relationships is essential to growth. There are two times when having a deep relationship is especially vital.

First comes the initial decision to choose a real estate agent. By sharing helpful, informative content on your real estate website, you can build credibility as a trusted expert. This is important because it might take weeks or even months before someone actually decides to dive into the market.

If you've built a foundation with a potential client, you are more likely to be chosen in the end.

The second time strong relationships come into play is after the initial transaction. No matter whether you work with buyers or sellers, you can expect that they will take 4-7 years on average before needing your services again. But, all the while, they can be providing you with referral business.

In the first year of any agent's career, it's normal to spend most time "chasing down leads." You need to learn the ropes, decide what works for you, and define your ideal customer. Beyond this point, however, it's crucial to start generating leads in a less effort-intensive way, and referral business is a big piece.

Some of the most successful real estate agents in the United States today get the majority of their work from qualified leads through their website, combined with referral business from satisfied customers.

That starts by focusing your attention on long-term customer relationships. And the process is much easier when you have the right technology in hand.

How Your CRM Can Boost Your Long-Term Client Relationships

To cultivate deep relationships, real estate agents need to make the best use of their time. That means cutting down on repetitive tasks and focusing on what moves you forward. Now, more than ever, that's achieved by implementing customer relationship management software for real estate.

Customer relationship management, or CRM, gives you complete visibility into all your relationships, so you never lose track of the people who matter to your business. You can easily see where your leads, prospects, current customers, and past customers stand in relation to their transactions.

An AI-driven CRM becomes a "center of excellence" that connects the dots between thousands of data points to keep you informed. It will clue you in on exactly when and how to follow up to maximize the positive impact you can make on those in your network.

Plus, it means spending less of your energy on time-intensive marketing tasks — those things you know you should do but that often slip down the priority list. Your CRM is a powerful machine learning multi-tool that helps you prioritize and execute in a fraction of the time.

Let's take a closer look at how technology can enhance your relationship-building efforts:

• Faster, More Targeted Email Marketing
  Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to spark a new relationship. Subscribers preview the value you have to offer, fostering rapport and trust. But writing weekly emails can add up to hundreds of hours of work. A CRM can help you deliver attractive template-based emails in just a few clicks.
  
  
• Social Media Without the Time Sink
  Real estate agents are the most successful of all professionals at turning their social media following into concrete business value. But even they run a risk of hours of scrolling their feed with nothing to show for it. Event-driven social media updates from a CRM save time and zero in on what matters to followers.
  
  
• Complete Integration with Listings
  Listings are the gateway to action for your buyers. But without data, you can't tell which listing features are driving interest. With your CRM, you can showcase your new listings directly on your website and capture detailed engagement information, helping you improve with every new listing you publish.
  
  
• The Power of Video Made Easy
  Video marketing is the next best thing to being there, but real estate agents have traditionally faced a steep learning curve. Properties in Motion is just one DeltaNET®6 feature that can help you use compelling visual content to captivate buyers and get them to linger over your listings.
  
  
• Digital Advertising Without the Mystery
  Online advertising is often worthwhile for real estate agents. It's the key to getting immediate attention on any new listing and racking up plenty of open house registrations. But ads can be complicated, and a simple oversight may make them unprofitable. Ad Wizard offers at-a-glance ad campaigns.
  
  
• The Right Technology Enhances the Human Touch
  Honesty, clear communication, and a genuine interest in your customers are indispensable to real estate success. Customer Relationship Management doesn't replace these elements: It helps showcase them in all you do while saving more time and energy along the way.

Contact us to find out more about digital marketing for real estate agents.

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a sci-fi fantasy, a dream of data scientists, or a catchy buzzword. The technology for AI has developed so much in recent years that it's quickly making an impact on — and potentially reshaping — nearly every major industry. Real estate is certainly no exception, with AI already making its presence felt in both subtle and obvious ways.

Does that mean that agents will soon be largely replaced by AI, with little work left for humans to do? Fortunately, you can take a deep breath, exhale, and know that your job is not in danger from AI. The truth is that AI in real estate can save you tremendous time on monotonous, repetitive tasks, allowing you to spend more of your working hours on the things that matter most.

Let's start with the basics. When we talk about AI in the present day, we're not talking about an all-seeing, all-knowing computer like you've seen in movies or read about in novels. Today's AI is designed to handle specific tasks in a fast, reliable, consistent way. Here are some of the ways that AI can lighten your workload on repetitive tasks and create more time for you to serve your clients:

• Keeping Clients Informed
  One of the ways that we're already using AI in DeltaNET®6 is to help you keep clients and prospects informed. With AI-driven email and print newsletters, you can easily keep your audience up to date on the topics that matter most to them. Create valuable, informative content and ensure that it always reaches the right person at the right time, without taking time out of your busy day.
  
  
• Quickly, Conveniently Find the Documents You Need
  What real estate agent enjoys digging through court records and spending hours searching for relevant documents? If you're the one agent out there who enjoys that process, we're sorry to break the bad news. AI can now help you search through millions of documents in a matter of moments, saving time for both you and your clients.
  
  
• Creating Better Virtual Open Houses, Showings, and Tours
  Digital tools like virtual open houses and showings, as well as virtual tours, have dramatically increased in popularity over the last few years. AI is partly to thank for this valuable real estate tech, which allows buyers to make informed decisions more quickly and creates new, powerful ways for sellers to market homes.
  
  
• Identifying Homes Ready to Sell and Pricing Them More Accurately
  Wouldn't it be nice to know with confidence which homes in your market are most likely to sell in the next year? AI can help you do just that, by analyzing market factors as well as factors unique to each specific home. In addition to helping you identify opportunities to win new listings, AI can also help you finish the job by pricing the home more accurately.
  
  
• Segmenting Leads and Reaching the Right Prospect at the Right Time
  AI excels at sorting through vast amounts of data quickly and reaching accurate, dependable conclusions much faster than we humans. Sounds like a useful skill for sorting through all of your leads, right? With the help of AI, you can more easily identify which leads are ready to pursue right now, which ones need nurturing, and which ones can be put on the back burner. Less time spent segmenting leads means more time to pursue the leads that are ready for action right now.

How Will You Invest the Time Saved by AI?

The examples above are just a few of the ways that AI can make life easier for real estate agents and dramatically speed up tasks that once took up far too much time. That means less work on the tasks that you probably didn't want to be doing anyway, but not less work overall.

Ultimately, the promise of AI in real estate is that you'll have more time to focus on the work that really matters. Think about every day that you've wished that there were just a few more hours to get done everything you needed to do. AI helps make that dream a reality without compromising on productivity or sacrificing your free time. All you have to decide is how to invest those hours that once went to tasks that can now be handled by AI.

The Future Is Bright for AI in Real Estate

One of the exciting things about AI is that despite the significant progress that's been made, we're still only scratching the surface of what the technology can do. The future is bright for AI integration in real estate, and we'll be sure to continue bringing you the best, most modern tech to help you thrive as a real estate agent.

Successful real estate agents build trust as experts in their local area. To attract the right customers to your practice, your marketing needs to make a human connection before you meet for the first time.

That may seem like a challenge — and it does take some getting used to — but it is the key to lasting real estate success. When you master it, you make the shift from "chasing down leads" to enjoying a steady flow of lead generation through your marketing.

Many real estate agents and brokers find marketing a challenge.

There are three big difficulties real estate pros can have with marketing:

• They find it hard to summon up the confidence to be the answer to their clients' problems.
• They are worried about appearing "pushy" or insincere in their networking and meetings.
• They don't quite know how their current skills translate to today's digital marketing realities.

These are understandable worries to have. Often, an agent or broker never says, "I don't want to do marketing and won't do it." Instead, they find other priorities to occupy their day. Weeks and even months go by without ever getting around to those marketing tasks they find intimidating.

Getting through this starts with busting a big myth about real estate marketing.

Your marketing CAN be approachable — and it can reflect your values and personality.

Step into the Age of Real Estate Digital Marketing

Real estate thrives on relationships. Throughout those relationships, there'll be plenty of times when you need to influence the other person to take the right step – whether that means signing up as a customer or doing what they need to do to move their transaction forward.

Nobody wants to be "that guy," the pushy salesman only out to make a sale.

Luckily, you don't have to be. There's been a big pivot in marketing — not only in real estate but in many other spheres — to make it more friendly and accommodating to the potential customer. It starts with sincere respect for the other person's time, attention, and intelligence.

It wasn't long ago when businesses of all kinds were making hundreds of calls a day to look for potential clients. Those days are over. Customers now have all the information they need at their fingertips, and they're less likely to take unsolicited calls.

As a result, real estate experts are shifting their focus to digital marketing.

The heart of good digital marketing is to solve problems and respond to questions your ideal customer already has. Marketing technology doesn't replace the human element but enhances it, ensuring you can consistently deliver valuable communications to clients and leads based on their own interests.

That fosters the all-important trust that enables leads to become customers. And only digital marketing ensures you're there every step of the way, even if takes weeks or months for the customer to dive in.

Let's look at some great ways to make your marketing more humane and approachable:

• Use Instant Messaging
  Seconds count when a prospect contacts you for the first time. Today's digital natives are increasingly comfortable with instant messaging, which sends a message directly from your website to your phone using an app like Facebook. Responsiveness can make the difference!
  
  
• Follow Up for Reviews
  "Following up" is the name of the game in real estate, but it doesn't stop when someone becomes a customer. You can already tell who's pleased with your services — translate that into something more tangible by directly asking for a review on Facebook, Yelp, or Google.
  
  
• Share Visual Content with Instagram
  Instagram is the most popular social media platform for real estate agents because it is built from the ground up for visual content. This is a terrific way to share breathtaking real estate photography. Many Instagram users look at it for inspiration for months before they finally decide to enter the market.
  
  
• Implement a Chatbot on Your Website
  You can't be at your desk 24 hours a day, and you probably don't have a big help desk staff to do it for you. An AI chatbot is the next best thing. It makes your website interactive by empowering visitors to ask questions in "natural language," which the bot then responds to with the appropriate content.
  
  
• Stay in Touch with Email Marketing
  Email marketing is more personal and intimate, giving all your communications a "one on one" flair no matter how many people you're talking to. This keeps you top of mind as buyers and sellers alike weigh their options. You can easily share new listings and content, too. DeltaNET®6 ties together your email, blog, and other marketing so that they can be managed in just a few clicks.

Contact us to learn more about digital marketing in real estate.

There are so many modern tools to make life easier as a real estate agent, but jumping from platform to platform in order to take advantage of your tech can chip away at your productivity gains while making it harder to find the data you need, when you need it. The solution? A reliable, all-in-one platform that combines all of the tech you need in one convenient hub. Here's how to make your technology work together, and give your productivity a boost in the process.

Making your technology work together starts with embracing an innovative, simple all-in-one solution like DeltaNET®6. With the right real estate CRM, all of your technology and key client data are in the same place, always ready when you need them.

Relationship Management

Building great relationships with clients is at the core of real estate success, and your technology should make it easier to manage relationships effectively. That starts with having the data you need when you need it. With a real estate CRM, you don't have to worry about tracking down client data from notes and disparate sources. You will always have the most up-to-date information on your clients, with the data you need to provide great, personalized service at your fingertips.

Lead Segmentation and Nurturing

Of course, real estate technology isn't just valuable for maintaining relationships with current clients. It's also the key to generating, segmenting, and nurturing leads to help you bring in new business. Automated lead segmentation makes it easy to sort through your leads, determine where each lead is in the purchasing/sales process, and ensure that you reach them with the right message at the right time. You should also have access to lead nurturing tools like email drip campaigns, AI-driven newsletters, eCards & flyers, and email templates.

Marketing Properties and Connecting Clients with Homes

Marketing properties is more complex than ever, with so many different tools available to help you promote your listings and connect buyers with the right home. Start with virtual open houses and showings, which allow buyers to tour a home virtually no matter where they're located. Or spread the word locally with printable listing flyers. You can also keep your clients up to date on the latest happenings in their market with auto-generated My HomeFinder, Market Watch, and Seller Reports. Keep clients informed with the information they need, make it easier for buyers to search for homes, and show sellers all of the modern ways that you promote their listings.

Automation of Key Tasks

Your real estate technology should save you time, not take away valuable time from your busy day. Automating repetitive marketing tasks is one of the best ways to guarantee that you'll save time while ensuring that clients and prospects always get the most timely, relevant content for their needs. We've already covered many of the automation tools that your tech should include, like email drip campaigns, AI-driven newsletters, and auto-generated reports on real estate markets. All of these tools make your life easier and help you maximize your marketing opportunities.

Data and Analytics

In order for your tech to truly work together, you need access to data and analytics that help you make informed decisions. That includes keeping track of your own data on matters like email marketing, but also the data that your clients provide. With IDX search tracking as well as tracking for property searches, saved properties, and views, you can anticipate the needs of clients in order to provide them with the best possible service.

Real Estate Website

Just like you want your tech to work together in order to make your days more efficient, your clients and prospects want a real estate website that works together to provide everything that they need. That starts with IDX listing integration and MLS search to help them find the perfect home. You will also want real estate content, to provide advice, highlight your markets, and tell the story of your business. When your website has all of the features that your audience wants to see, it becomes a constant source of lead generation for your real estate brand.

Ready to Take Your Real Estate Tech to the Next Level?

If you're tired of being pulled in every direction by technology that doesn't work together, there's a better way. DeltaNET®6 makes it easier than ever to market your business, grow your brand, serve your clients, easily integrate with other popular tech platforms, and discover data-based insights that can help you thrive. You shouldn't have to choose between having great tech and having tech that works together. With the right real estate CRM, you get the best of both worlds.

Over the last few years, real estate agents have been looking for new and better ways to save time by incorporating technology. The pandemic accelerated key trends already taking place in real estate. The right technological tools are more important than ever for running your practice efficiently.

One of the most valuable parts of that process is Customer Relationship Management.

Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, was already in use in a wide range of industries before it ever reached real estate. Outside sales teams from coast to coast rely on it to monitor and manage the complex web of relationships that move their efforts forward.

But many real estate agents haven't made the leap yet, in part because a true CRM for real estate was hard to find. With better options than ever before now available, it's time to take a second look at the CRM trend and see exactly what it can do for you.

What Is Customer Relationship Management All About?

Customer Relationship Management is the modern answer to one of the biggest challenges that have always plagued real estate: Keeping track of people. It was not that long ago when the average agent would spend days each week just tracking down prospects, leads, and even their own customers.

The days of the overstuffed filing cabinets are over, however, and there's a better way to do things. A Customer Relationship Management app centralizes all the data on your prospects, leads, and current customers. It gives you complete visibility into relationships and the next steps for everyone you know.

This helps you monitor all your current transactions and determine if leads are standing still or stepping forward on their real estate plans. Using the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning can also make it easier than ever to follow up with each person and inspire action.

In effect, a real estate CRM is a "command center" that brings everything together into one place. This is essential for real estate agents who've found themselves struggling to get results from a hodgepodge of productivity and scheduling apps that don't necessarily work together effectively.

The right CRM has the potential to replace dozens of other applications, including those you may now be paying expensive licensing fees for. Because all of the features are designed to work together, you never need to be concerned some piece of the puzzle won't "integrate" or share data with all the rest.

How Does a Customer Relationship Management Suite Work?

Behind the scenes, there are two key elements to how CRM works. First, it connects to your website and social media, collecting and parsing the information that flows through those channels daily. This allows you to respond instantly when leads signal, through online behavior, that they are ready to act.

Since so much of real estate is done online, most of the data the CRM uses is collected automatically. The second element is data you input manually based on your personal networking and other face-to-face encounters. This puts your entire network "on your radar" as represented by your CRM.

At any time of your choosing, you can get an instant update on any prospect, lead, or customer. You can also look back through your entire history of interactions with someone. This means you will always be ready to provide value to them based on their unique interests.

All in all, it only takes a few minutes a day to get measurable value from your CRM. In the time you save, you have more opportunities to build your business in meaningful ways and boost your relationships. A CRM doesn't replace the human element — it makes that element more consistent and easier to deploy.

Why Is Machine Learning So Important in Customer Relationship Management?

Artificial intelligence and machine learning transform the best real estate CRMs into a reliable "center of excellence" for your whole practice. Since they learn as they go, they can make connections between thousands of data points that even the best human analyst would miss.

This equips a real estate CRM to easily and accurately score your leads based on the behaviors of past leads who became customers. Monitoring data 24 hours a day, your AI-driven CRM suite can signal you when it's the ideal time to follow up with someone, and even suggest how to do it.

Real estate CRMs can also automate social media, email marketing, and more.

These automated workflows may take an hour or so to set up at the very beginning. Like the rest of the CRM suite, though, they then work behind the scenes and report back to you. You can see exactly what results your campaigns are having at a glance.

Contact us to discover the power of DeltaNET®6 real estate CRM for yourself.

Credibility matters in real estate. As a real estate agent, you want to start building trust with your target audience as quickly and effectively as possible. Trust matters to clients who are considering referring you to people within their own network and to prospects who are sorting through their many options to find an agent they can trust with one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives. Fortunately, there are more tools for building trust with technology than ever before for real estate agents.

Building Trust with the Right Technology

While there are many good, old-fashioned trust-building tips that still apply now as much as ever, we're going to focus on some of the many modern tools that make it easier to build trust with a tech-savvy audience. Not only can the right technology help you build trust, it can also make your life much easier in the process.

Know Your Clients and Their Needs

Most of our tips will focus on building trust with prospects, but it's wise to remember that the process of building trust with existing clients never really ends. One of the best ways to build strong relationships with clients is to remember who they are, their real estate goals, and the details of any interactions that you've already had with them. The right real estate CRM makes it much easier to keep track of all that data and guarantees that you have it at your fingertips whenever you need it.

Build a Great Real Estate Website

A great real estate website might not be the first thing that springs to mind when you think of building trust, but it's a critical factor in a number of important ways. First, modern real estate prospects simply expect any agent they're considering to have an appealing, informative, modern website. Most people start their search for an agent online, so they're more likely to choose an agent with a robust, engaging online presence than an agent with a dated website or no website at all.

But it's not just about being seen. As you'll see in the next few tips, your website is also the most reliable place to integrate much of the other trust-building technology on our list. It's where people will consume your content, be persuaded by your social proof, and discover why your brand is the right choice for their real estate needs. So if you don't have a website or your current one is a bit outdated, a fresh investment in your online presence can be a key first step in building trust.

Share Advice and Expertise with Real Estate Content

One of the most straightforward, dependable techniques for building trust and credibility online is to prove to your audience that you know your stuff when it comes to real estate. Creating informative, timely real estate content, whether it's a written blog post, video content created with your phone, or a mix of both, is the perfect way to show your expertise.

Provide real estate advice, analyze market trends, create neighborhood guides, share seasonal home improvement tips — basically, anything that your audience might be interested in learning about regarding real estate. When done right, your content will continue to build trust long after it's first published on your website.

Integrate Reviews and Testimonials

Few things are more trustworthy than a referral, and social proof essentially serves as a referral from an online source. Social proof consists of things like online reviews and client testimonials, which can have a major impact on establishing your trust with an online audience. But even if they're very happy with your services, a client won't necessarily think to leave a review or testimonial unless you ask. Once you have some reviews and especially testimonials, make sure to showcase them prominently on your website.

Build a Strong Social Media Presence

You likely already use your social pages for social media marketing, and that's a great place to start. But are you taking advantage of the other ways that you can build trust through social? As you build your social presence, you will have more and more opportunities to engage with your audience. That engagement is crucial to building individual relationships that can lead to business, and also for proving your real estate expertise to a wider audience. 

Build Trust and Save Time by Investing in the Right Real Estate Tech

For building trust with a modern audience, it's only fitting to use the most modern, up-to-date tools. With DeltaNET®6, our digital marketing services, and an excellent, customized real estate website, you can start building trust as soon as a prospect discovers your brand online. Make your life easier and generate more leads by investing in the right real estate tech to build trust with your audience.

If you're in a large agency or brokerage, your branding naturally dovetails with that of the team. Still, no matter if you work independently or within an organization, you should keep an eye on how you present yourself to potential customers — especially online.

Branding may sound complicated, but it's simply the process of communicating in a thoughtful and consistent way to help people understand the three biggest things they need to know about you:

• What you do
• Who you do it for
• How you do it differently

No real estate agent is perfect for everyone, yet newcomers to the field often cast a wide net. They worry that if they get specific about what they do, they will alienate potential customers and get less business. The opposite is true: When your brand is specific, you attract more of your ideal clientele.

In the first year or so, any real estate agent will spend plenty of time learning the ropes. It's not out of the ordinary to be unsure what kind of customers you want to work with or what problems you enjoy solving. After some experience, it's essential to start tackling these big questions.

The sooner you do, the sooner you can go from chasing leads to attracting referrals.

Every interaction you have with the public or customers has the potential to influence their perception of your brand. Of course, we can't control everything and shouldn't try. But understanding your vision for your brand will help ensure you're upholding your values and aspirations.

Here are some ways to come to grips with real estate branding:

• Decide Which Clients Energize You
  It's okay to conclude that certain clients just aren't right for you — there are plenty of people out there and enough agents to help them all. Do you resonate with first-time buyers or luxury buyers? Boomers or Zoomers? Think about who you communicate best with and what interactions give you more energy.
  
  
• Zero In on Specific Problems to Solve
  For a brand to speak to someone, it needs to be crafted for their needs. For example, do you know first-time buying programs inside and out? If first-time buyers are your core customers, then your knowledge can become a cornerstone of your brand. The same applies to any type of problem or question.
  
  
• Have a Visually Consistent Style
  Your real estate website is where most of your future customers will first "meet" you. Be sure it has a consistent style, with the same colors and fonts used throughout. Then, reproduce those fundamentals on all other collateral, such as your business cards, email marketing, or direct mail fliers.
  
  
• Talk in Terms of Benefits, Not Features
  Benefits are what happens for the client. Features are just details of how they get there. Get to the nitty-gritty: Do you consistently get your sellers' homes to closing in 30 days or less? This concrete, numbers-focused figure will be much more enticing to them than a whole list of your credentials and education.
  
  
• Make Following Up Part of Your Routine
  No matter if you're working with a lead or a satisfied customer, following up is crucial. It shows them you care about their success and builds the relationship. You may need to follow up 7-10 times to get business from a lead — and some agents follow up every month with past clients to request referrals.
  
  
• Extend Your Brand to Digital Platforms
  Of all the different professionals who spend time on social media, real estate agents have the best opportunity to grow their business. Dig into social platforms to find out where your audience is active and what they're looking for — then provide helpful, informative content that leads back to your site.
  
  
• Network with Your Real Estate Peers
  A clear, well-defined brand makes you the "go-to" problem-solver in a specific arena. That means your peers, who also aren't trying to do everything for everyone, will be more likely to send business your way when they encounter someone who meets your criteria, but not their own.
  
  
• Have a Written Marketing Plan
  Your marketing can be thought of as your brand in action. Write down your key marketing goals and select a handful of ways, not more than three, to pursue them. Then, make sure all your communications consistently showcase what your brand is all about.

Leverage the Right Technology to Make Branding a Natural Part of Your Business Workflow

Branding for real estate is a big topic, but having the right technology on your side can help. When you use a real all-in-one solution like DeltaNET®6 to manage your relationships, you'll spend less time figuring out where people are and more time giving them the value they expect.

Contact us to learn more about how real estate marketing can enhance your brand.

Communication is one of the most important skills for any real estate agent to develop, and there are more ways to communicate digitally today than there have ever been. Effective communication can make all the difference in landing a new client, building trust, and helping your current clients achieve their real estate goals. With young, tech-savvy buyers and sellers making up an ever-growing slice of the real estate market, mastering digital communication is critical. Here's how to communicate with confidence and what tools you'll need for the job.

Before we get into digital communication tactics, it's worth remembering some of the tried and true communication tips that apply to any situation. No matter how you're communicating, it's crucial to put the focus on the person you're communicating with, listen carefully, ask questions, and be responsive to their needs. Always aim to be courteous, punctual, reliable, and considerate of the client's time.

While body language doesn't matter in most forms of digital communication, tone does — especially for text-based conversations. Before you send a message, make sure that you're saying exactly what you're trying to say, and that your tone is appropriate for the situation. By remembering the basics for good communication, you'll be better prepared to master the many channels available for communicating digitally.

Mastering the Many Digital Communication Tools in Your Toolkit

With the basics out of the way, let's dig into some of the key tools that you'll be using to communicate digitally. Remember that it's helpful to make communication as seamless as possible and be available through a variety of digital platforms to suit the varying needs of your clients.

• Your Real Estate CRM
  Remember all of that talk about listening, asking questions, and responding to the needs of your clients? Your real estate CRM is where you store all of the information that you learn during those communications so that you always have it available during future conversations. In addition to storing key information, the right CRM will provide an all-in-one suite of tools that make it easier to communicate with clients and prospects.
  
  
• Easy Email Communication
  Email is certainly one of the most popular ways to communicate with clients who are actively buying or selling a home. But it's also a great tool for nurturing leads and attracting new clients. Take advantage of automated smart drip email campaigns and AI-driven newsletters to turn more prospects into clients. Automation makes it easier to lighten your own load while still sending relevant, targeted email marketing to each segment of your audience.
  
  
• SMS Text Messaging
  Not every conversation requires a call. SMS text messaging is a convenient option for both you and your clients. When SMS text messaging is integrated into your real estate CRM, you can send texts from the desktop and mobile versions of your CRM. Just as important, you can keep an archive of all of your SMS text messages with each client so that you can easily keep track of text conversations.
  
  
• Social Media
  In addition to the many benefits offered by social media marketing, social platforms also rank among the most popular digital communication tools. Whether through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or a communication-centric platform like WhatsApp, make sure that you're available to communicate on the platforms preferred by your clients.
  
  
• Remembering Special Days
  Whether you're nurturing a lead or keeping in contact with a past client, remembering their special days is a great way to show them that you care. Take advantage of tools like custom eCards & flyers to reach out on the days that matter most. Start with an easy-to-use template, add branding, and customize it to suit any event that matters to your clients.
  
  
• Keeping Clients Informed
  Not every client will need constant back-and-forth communication about a pending purchase or sale. Some will be in "wait and see" mode while they plan their next move, which means that your primary role will be to keep them informed of the latest developments in their real estate markets. For those clients, auto-generated My HomeFinder, Market Watch, and Seller Reports can keep them up to date on the topics that matter most to achieving their long-term real estate goals while ensuring that lines of communication remain open.

Simplify Communication By Leveraging Real Estate Tech

With so many different ways to communicate digitally, it can be easy to fill a bit overwhelmed with the possibilities. That's why it's so important to have the right real estate tech on your side, to streamline communication and ensure that you have the tools you need to build great relationships with clients. DeltaNET®6 is a real estate all-in-one solution that puts all of the latest tools at your fingertips, making it easier than ever to master digital communication.

Marketing is often a challenge for real estate agents. It's notoriously difficult to be an impartial judge of your own marketing. That's true not only here in real estate but in virtually all industries. It's a problem faced by companies of all sizes, from solo entrepreneurs to Fortune 50 enterprises.

The crux of the matter is that marketing is subjective. You can develop a blog post, a video, or even ads that excite you, but have you stepped into the customer's shoes? Sometimes, even the best efforts can go awry. And that may lead to missing out on the value of a substantial part of your marketing budget.

Luckily, digital marketing can make the whole matter much easier to deal with.

There'll always be an element of "art" to marketing, but digital marketing is more scientific than ever. That's science in the literal sense: You make a prediction, test it, and gather data. There's more data available about the bottom-line impact of your marketing now than there has ever been before.

That has two powerful effects on marketing strategy:

• You no longer have to "guess" what works, as you'll receive data within just a few days
• You can continuously improve your marketing by focusing on what has proven results

Using Technology to Your Advantage in Real Estate Marketing

Real estate changed more than virtually any other industry at the outset of the pandemic. Professionals from all across the nation had to work together to develop new ways of thinking about and doing their work. It was crucial to protect both their customers and themselves.

At the same time, the way buyers and sellers approach transactions have also changed forever.

It was once unthinkable for someone to buy a home without setting foot in it. Now, these transactions take place routinely, especially when someone is planning a big move from out of state. A fast-growing population of younger buyers and sellers means more people are managing their home search online.

That has huge ramifications for your marketing.

Many of the trends unleashed by the pandemic will never be reversed. Instead, agents and brokers will be expected to adapt and incorporate new technologies in new ways. Technology is a key driver of your marketing success since you can see its results almost right away. By comparison, ad placements and conventional local media often provide no insight into whether or not you're getting ROI.

Let's look at some concrete ways you can boost your marketing results:

• Balance Open Houses with Virtual Tours
  In the "before times," open houses had the potential to surface several qualified buyers for each event. Open houses are returning as an important part of your marketing mix, but virtual tours are sought by nearly every buyer. Also known as "3D walkthroughs," these tours typically use a panorama of photos to create a robust digital experience. Buyers thousands of miles away can now see a home up close.
  
  
• Capture Data from Listings, CRM, and Website
  Each digital platform offers its own "analytics data" you can use to understand how people find you and what they do once they have. For example, the average amount of time people spend on a listing grants clues about which ones are most effective. By gathering and consulting your data regularly, you can be certain you're spending your marketing time and resources on the things that truly resonate.
  
  
• Automate Digital Marketing for Better Consistency
  To be successful, digital marketing needs to be consistent. Yet, manually setting up and managing an email marketing list, your social media feed, and more can take hours. Reliable, AI-driven solutions, including DeltaNET®6, can make the process easier. For instance, hands-free social media updates can be issued to your feed several times a day based on changes in listings.
  
  
• Keep Your Real Estate Website Up to Date
  Your real estate website is a powerful "digital-first impression" where most of your future customers meet you. Before they reach out, they're likely to check out everything on your site, so make it worthwhile. That means helpful, informative content that empowers them to solve problems and resolve questions. In today's smartphone-driven culture, it also means a responsive layout that's great for mobile users.
  
  
• Create a Seamless "First Contact" Experience
  Once you've signed an agreement with a customer, it's crucial to set the right boundaries. No answering calls at two in the morning! If a website visitor reaches out, however, seconds count. You have the best odds of getting a new customer if you respond within five minutes. Make sure it's easy to contact you, providing options for phone, email, social media, and even texting for real estate.

Contact us to find out more about digital marketing today. We look forward to helping you soon.

Are you covering all of your bases with real estate lead generation? With so many different ways to generate leads, it can be easy to overlook some of the valuable, reliable tools that can help keep your pipeline stocked to the brim. Diversifying your strategy can help you reach a wider pool of potential clients and give you the confidence that you're leaving no stone unturned when it comes to generating leads. That's why it's so important to understand where most leads come from and how you can ensure that you're maximizing your lead generation opportunities.

Start with Your Real Estate Website

Your real estate website should be one of your best sources for leads online, but simply setting up a website isn't enough to guarantee success. For your website to become a lead-generation machine, it needs to provide a seamless experience with the right features and design elements. This is important both for attracting prospects to visit your website in the first place and turning them into qualified leads once they arrive.

• IDX Listing Integration
  Many of the prospects who visit your website will be coming to look at listings first and foremost, so it's important to make that process as easy as possible for them. IDX listing integration makes it simple for prospects to search for homes in your markets, and those listings will be a key source of leads.
  
  
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  While SEO doesn't generate leads directly like some of the other items on our list, it's a critical factor in attracting traffic to your real estate website. Over time, SEO helps you achieve a higher search engine ranking, which leads directly to more traffic. And more traffic to your website ultimately means more leads.
  
  
• Real Estate Content
  The content on your real estate website helps you build trust, establish your real estate expertise, and show prospects how you can help them achieve their goals. Whether it's in the form of video content, blog posts, or both, your content helps convince prospects to take the next step.
  
  
• Social Proof
  Social proof in the form of reviews and testimonials is one of the key factors in the decision-making process of modern real estate prospects. Integrating social proof throughout key areas of your website is a must for maximizing your lead generation.
  
  
• Lead Capture Forms
  Once a prospect has spent some time on your website and seen what you have to offer, the goal is to have them fill out a lead capture form. This is where they'll provide contact information, outline their real estate needs, and take the first key step toward becoming a client.

Social Media Marketing and Relationship Building

The biggest social media platforms continue to rank among the best sources of leads online, so it likely comes as no surprise that social media marketing is so popular in real estate. Whether you're showcasing listings on Instagram, building relationships on Facebook, or sharing your best video content on TikTok, building your social presence is a must for generating leads in 2022.

Referrals and Your Personal/Professional Networks

The most highly qualified leads often come from referrals, and referrals are still one of the most dependable sources of leads for your real estate business. For individual agents, those referrals can often come from your personal and professional networks, in addition to your current clients. Building and maintaining great relationships still goes a long way toward generating leads, no matter who you're trying to reach.

Virtual Tours and Open Houses

More than ever, buyers are choosing to tour homes from the comfort of their current location with the help of virtual open houses and showings. Just like their in-person counterparts, these tools are key sources of leads — and not just for buyers! When sellers see that you're promoting listings with the best modern tech, they'll be more likely to choose you as well.

Social Media and Search Engine Advertising

Building your social media presence and boosting the SEO on your real estate website are both well worth the effort. However, it also takes time to see results. Paid advertising on social media and search engines provides more immediate results as a source of leads. Paid advertising is great for boosting visibility while building up your online presence and for supplementing your other lead-generation efforts.

Covering Your Bases for Lead Generation in 2022

Whether you're interested in opening new avenues of lead generation or optimizing your existing strategy, achieving your goals is so much easier when you have the right tools for the job. With our DeltaNET®6 all-in-one real estate solution, all of the tools, tech, and resources you need to generate leads are always at your fingertips.

Every year, billions of dollars are invested around the world in developing new tech that improves the real estate experience for agents, clients, and real estate firms. Millennials are quickly growing into the largest real estate demographic, and catering to a young, tech-savvy clientele will only accelerate the desire for new technology. And it's not as if people under 40 are the only ones glued to their favorite devices.

When new technology emerges, everyone involved in the real estate industry can benefit. Here are some potential tech breakthroughs that could emerge in real estate in the coming years, along with a few recent breakthroughs that are likely to stand the test of time.

The Continued Development of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI has already helped the real estate industry accomplish some great things, whether you want to send timely, personalized reports to clients or develop a more accurate analysis of real estate market trends. But in many ways, we're only scratching the surface. The global investment in AI is immense, just like the future potential of the technology.

Consider the benefits of robust virtual assistants that can help guide clients through the process of buying or selling a home, taking some of the workload off of agents while providing a valuable service to clients. Already, some of the biggest real estate websites are also using AI to help match clients with the perfect loan, or the perfect home. Some of the biggest tech breakthroughs in the near future are very likely to involve AI and machine learning.

Streamlined Technology

With so much new tech emerging in recent years, one big breakthrough that we're already beginning to experience is the streamlining of real estate technology. With a real estate all-in-one solution like DeltaNET®6, you have the technology for managing leads, marketing properties, connecting with clients, and analyzing data in one convenient package. Expect the streamlining of real estate tech to continue as new tools are introduced, allowing agents to save time, increase productivity, and focus on what matters most.

Digital Documentation

Clients and agents alike dread the pile of paperwork that comes with closing on a home. Wouldn't it be nice if documents could be securely, reliably read and signed anywhere, from any device? The technology to do so is already emerging and should play a major role in real estate transactions in the coming years.

Taking Advantage of the Latest Tech

Focusing on the future is fun, but not at the expense of the present. Some of the tech that has risen in popularity during the pandemic is likely to remain important and be improved upon for years to come.

• Virtual Tours, Open Houses, and Showings
  Partly driven by the pandemic and partly driven by the young, tech-savvy generation of new homebuyers, touring homes from afar has become more popular than ever. With virtual open houses and showings, you can help connect clients with homes no matter where they're located.
  
  
• Marketing Automation
  Some of the latest advances in marketing automation make it easier to keep your pipeline stocked and save a ton of time in the process. From smart drip email campaigns to AI-driven, automatically generated newsletters, you have more tools than ever for automating key marketing tasks.
  
  
• New Forms of Real Estate Content
  Advances in technology outside the real estate industry can also have a major impact. With smartphones able to capture higher quality video than ever and tons of great apps available for editing your content, now is the perfect time to see if you can become the next real estate video star.
  
  
• Data Tracking and Analytics
  Whether you're tracking IDX search activity to learn more about the needs of your clients or tracking your marketing analytics to discover what works best for your brand, the easy availability of big data is key to thriving in the modern real estate industry. New technology can also make it easier to parse, analyze, and put that data to work.
  
  
• Integration and Streamlining of Tech
  The best real estate CRM platforms already include integrations that make it easier to use all of your favorite tech in one convenient package. With so much focus on streamlining tech, this is one area to expect continued growth.

Where Will Real Estate Tech Take Us Next?

Just 5 or 10 years ago, it would have been hard to predict all of the game-changing tech that has shaped the real estate industry today. And that's part of the fun! While we can make educated guesses about AI and other new tech, there's always the possibility of a breakthrough that almost nobody saw coming. With such a substantial investment of brainpower and funds in creating breakthroughs, it will be exciting to see where real estate tech takes us next.

We know that sometimes, technology can be a mixed bag.

Your computer's operating system is designed to get you to pay every month for programs that needed a one-time payment a few years ago. Your phone pushes ads anywhere and everywhere, even in severe weather alerts. It can feel like all these tools are constantly out to get you.

When it's time to invest in business solutions, however, you need a higher caliber of solution — designed from the ground up with your needs in mind. That's the kind of technology that works with you to reach your goals, not the goals of the software vendor or hardware maker.

The best technology is truly for you – and it works with you, not against you.

For real estate agents who want to perform at a higher level, that means CRM.

Customer Relationship Management for Real Estate Saves You Hours Every Week

A real estate CRM helps you do more in less time, no matter if you are an independent real estate agent or part of a large brokerage. A reliable, AI-driven all-in-one solution like DeltaNET 6 redefines your workflow by giving you complete visibility into all your prospects, leads, and clients.

With a CRM, you have the power to automate repetitive tasks while making informed decisions that move your strategy in the right direction. By doing more of the right things in less time, you'll avoid burnout, raise your productivity, and create opportunities for a healthy work-life balance.

Let's look at some of the ways a CRM serves you every day:

• No More Wondering When and How to Follow Up With Your Contacts
  Following up is a huge part of being a real estate agent. In fact, it can take anywhere from 8-15 follow-ups to produce results. Your CRM centralizes the data on your contacts, when you met then, and what interactions you've had. It even uses machine learning to cue you exactly when to make contact.
  
  
• Micro-Target Your Leads' Interests Down to Specific Listings
  Your CRM ties in with your website and other digital properties to help you gain knowledge of your customers and future customers. You'll see exactly which listings work best, so you do more of what moves you forward and laser target your email marketing to precise interests.
  
  
• Spend Less Time Scrolling and More Time Connecting on Social Media
  Social media has tremendous power for real estate agents, but it also brings with it the potential for a lot of wasted time. With your real estate CRM in tow, you can set up instant, event-driven social media updates that will bring interested leads back to your account without falling down the rabbit hole.
  
  
• Integrate All of the Latest Listing Features with a Single Click
  Not all real estate CRMs are created equal. DeltaNET®6 provides complete integration with the full suite of Delta Media Group products. Properties in Motion makes modern real estate marketing within reach along with virtual tours and remote showings through our concierge Local Showings service.
  
  
• Raise Your Website's Visibility with Better, More Focused Content
  Real estate agents should post helpful, informative content to their website's blog every month — it's called content marketing. DeltaNET 6 is your doorway into custom content marketing so you no longer need to do hours of in-house research or manage your own stable of writers.
  
  
• Accelerate the Process of Connecting Clients with Properties
  When leads reach out to become customers, they're betting you'll be able to help them find the right home far faster than they would be able to themselves. Manually, the process takes hours — but with Market Watch Reports, you have complete, accurate, white-labeled reports at your fingertips fast.
  
  
• Maintain the Confidence of Sellers with Full Visibility
  It's not always a seller's market – and sellers are often anxious to know exactly what you've been doing for them. Personalized Seller Reports take the mystery out, cataloging each and every activity as well as showing exactly how much interest your campaign has garnered over time.

Bring Your Real Estate Practice to Another Level Without Reinventing the Wheel

Technology is meant to simplify your life, not complicate it. Yet, the pandemic introduced innovation to real estate at a breakneck pace. Many agents and brokers wonder how to catch up as new technology-driven services, like virtual tours and showings, are becoming more crucial.

Instead of looking for a whole universe of different technology tools and trying to make them all work together, start with a CRM for real estate. When you select the right high-performance CRM, you can move with confidence knowing it's your "all-in-one" real estate center of excellence.

Contact us to learn more about capturing value from the latest real estate technology. We look forward to showing you all that it can do for you.

The National Association of REALTORS® reports that 75 percent of buyers say that they would recommend their agent to others. But even though they may have been very happy with the service you provided, their willingness to refer often fades as they move from buying a home into the next phase of their life. That's why it's so important to maintain that connection with past clients over time. Here are some tips to help you maintain relationships with past clients using real estate technology and generate reliable sources of new business in the process.

Staying Connected Starts with Your Real Estate CRM

The right real estate CRM isn't just a great option for generating and nurturing leads. It also provides valuable resources and tools for staying in touch with past clients. All of the information you gather over time can provide insights that make it easier to stay in touch with clients in a personalized way and give them reasons to refer you to others. Your CRM is also where you should find automated tools for staying connected and keeping past clients informed.

Keep Past Clients Informed with Email Newsletters and Content

Few tools are better than email for connecting with past clients. It's something that your clients check multiple times a day, it's unobtrusive, it can be automated, and it's an easy way for you to reach out at any time. There are so many different types of content that you can send via email, whether you're keeping past clients informed or simply finding excuses to say "hello."

For a client who has just purchased a home, you can send content that can help them transition to their new neighborhood and advice that helps them make the most of their new home. Home improvement tips and recommendations for local service providers can help them enjoy their new home. Neighborhood guides, advice on local attractions, schedules for local events, and information on the latest neighborhood happenings can all help them build deeper connections with their community.

By having a plan in advance for how you want to keep in touch with different types of clients, you can automate much of the email outreach process through your real estate CRM. On occasions where automation isn't the perfect fit, email templates make it simple to send personalized, meaningful messages.

Remember Their Special Days

Whether it's a client's birthday, kid's birthday, graduation, anniversary, or "house-aversary," remembering the special days of your clients goes a long way toward maintaining trust and showing them that you care. Your real estate CRM should provide tools for sending customized eCards and flyers, which you can use to celebrate any occasion. Of course, your CRM should also be where information on those special days is stored in the first place, so that you always have an easy way to remember the days that matter most to your clients.

Use Social Media to Build and Maintain Relationships

Social media isn't just for blasting out the latest info on all of your best new listings. It's also a great tool for staying connected with past clients and reminding them why you're the right choice when they're referring an agent to others. As you get to know a client, always look for common ground and keep a record of those commonalities in your CRM. Anything that can provide a starting point for conversation is valuable, whether it's a shared love of a local sports team, involvement in a community organization, or shared excitement about an annual local event. Investing some time each week in staying connected with past clients through social media goes a long way toward earning their referrals.

Remember That a Personal Touch Goes a Long Way

While technology is the main tool for staying in touch with past clients, sometimes a good, old-fashioned personal touch can make a big difference. A hand-written note certainly stands out in this digital age and shows that you have invested time in reaching out to a past client. A small, personalized gift can also be a great reminder for past clients, as long as it fits within ethical guidelines.

Connecting with Past Clients Is Easier with the Right Tools

Staying connected with past clients is important, but that doesn't mean that it has to take too much time from your busy day. The right real estate all-in-one solution, like DeltaNET®6, makes it easy to automate key marketing tasks, keep past clients informed, and remind them why you're the right choice for their (or their friends'!) real estate needs in the future. Mix in modern technology with old-fashioned touches like the occasional hand-written note, and you have a recipe for staying top-of-mind with all of your past clients.

When it comes to training options for real estate technology, there are a few different schools of thought on what works best. Some want videos, others swear by user guides. At Delta Media Group®, we're big on easy, on giving you — the one using all of that tech — the power to transform your training into exactly what you want and need it to be. 

That's why we're thrilled to announce the launch of DeltaNET® Academy, available directly within the DeltaNET CRM. With DeltaNET Academy, users have access to slideshow-based training courses that break down Delta Media Group's industry-leading, all-in-one CRM and wealth of features to their basics, making them simpler than ever to understand. Only a few clicks and admins can easily:

• Assign specific courses to specific sales associates
• Send courses to an entire office to help them master certain tools
• Use modules in multiple courses in order to spotlight tools more than once

Custom course creation also allows admins to set the metaphorical syllabus. Building your own courses is easy: Choose what you want to highlight and assign it to your team. Then, when a course is completed, associates can take a quiz to ensure they've got a handle on all the information. Plus, DeltaNET Academy tracks who's doing what within the system, so you'll know exactly where everyone stands. Consider it a progress report — we're sure everyone will be a pleasure to have in class.

Don't forget our promise of easy, either. DeltaNET Academy provides a user-friendly, intuitive platform that doesn't feel like a hassle or homework. We're still offering videos and guides, but we're also giving our clients more options with hands-on, engaging learning that gives the power of training back to brokerages. 

"When building DeltaNET Academy, we weren't looking for a tool that 'checks the boxes' when it comes to its capabilities," Director of Partner Success Harley Wolfarth says. "DeltaNET Academy gives our users control over course content, visibility, assignment, and even tests/quizzes while keeping those controls and settings in places where you expect to find them. We think we've made something that will make your life easier, not just because your agents and staff can be better trained by the courses you create, but because the process to create those courses is clear and easy as well."

Evolution is part of our Delta Media Group-DNA, so you can be sure we're already working on plans to expand the training offerings within DeltaNET Academy as well. And best of all? DeltaNET Academy comes without any extra cost. No hidden fees. No surprises. Just comprehensive training that gives you and your associates the knowledge to make real estate's most powerful CRM and tech tools work for you. 

No one wants to get schooled by their tech. So, jump to the head of the class with DeltaNET Academy and learn the ins and outs of Delta Media Group's game-changing features. 

"DeltaNET Academy is a platform to not only educate team members with pre-populated real estate CRM and marketing training, but it is also the platform to empower firms with the ability to create their own custom training programs for anything," Delta Media Group CEO/Owner Mike Minard says. "I'm excited to see how DeltaNET Academy transforms how real estate professionals leverage technology further as they are more empowered in their understanding of how much powerful technology is available to them today."

When it comes to success, momentum makes the difference.

Momentum is what turns a long, hard slog into a purpose-driven effort, even an adventure. No matter if you work alone or in a large brokerage, momentum is great for morale and protects against burnout. It provides a sense of direction and helps you deflect distractions.

Unfortunately, momentum can be difficult to build at first. Once you have it, though, it becomes much easier to sustain. In real estate, you have many opportunities to give yourself the tailwind that sets the stage for progress. At any size or scale, technology is the key.

Why Technology  Matters in Boosting Your Momentum

Momentum is forward motion. When you need to maintain forward motion over long distances, friction is your worst enemy. You can see examples of this in day-to-day life. For example, it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back on task after a distraction. Every distraction creates more friction.

As long as you're focused, it feels like you can go on forever. When the illusion is broken, not so much.

Luckily, today's best real estate technology is built around the idea of creating a seamless experience for everyone — buyers, sellers, and the professionals who serve them. Technology won't replace you (or the human touch). It simply sets you up to do more of what you do best, faster, and more effectively.

Let's look at some of the ways technology is smoothing the path to successful transactions.

Digital-First Approaches Are Here to Stay in Real Estate

Real estate was already making some promising forays into the digital realm in 2019. Then the pandemic hit. Of all the industries completely transformed by COVID-19, real estate moved the fastest. It had to — there was no other way to protect everyone involved in a transaction.

As it turns out, buyers and sellers alike love virtual tours and virtual open houses. Even as the public health situation changes, these are here to stay. Sellers no longer need to welcome crowds of strangers into a lived-in home. And buyers can expand their search radius without traveling any further.

What does it all mean for the real estate agent? Get comfortable in front of the camera and you can do a full tour more quickly and easily. Connect with the right title company and others and your customers can benefit from a complete digital closing experience. That's increasingly becoming a differentiator as Millennials step up their homebuying activity and Generation Z steps in.

All in all, that leads to seamlessly serving more people faster — and getting better results for everyone.

A Real Estate CRM Suite Gives You a Bird's Eye View of Your Customers and Contacts

Speaking of "seamless," there's nothing less worthy of the name than the old way of managing contacts. Only a few years ago, most real estate agents had filing cabinets stuffed with information on leads and prospects. It would take a day each week to figure out where everyone stood.

"Following up" usually meant calling on the phone, and that wasn't always welcome.

The right technology demystifies your network like never before. Customer Relationship Management for real estate is here. Not only can it centralize the details about everyone on your radar — it serves as an AI-driven center of excellence that scores your leads and cues you when and how to follow up.

The DeltaNET 6 CRM taps directly into your website to keep its finger on the pulse of your business 24 hours a day, whether you're awake or asleep. It can help you orchestrate outreach campaigns, including email marketing, social media, and much more — sending interest-based, event-driven updates to those on your list who want them most. That helps you cultivate your relationships seamlessly.

The Best Technology Is Indistinguishable from Magic – Today's Real Estate Technology Is Pretty Close

Today's buyers are ready to search for, evaluate, and close on a home completely on digital platforms. Sometimes, they do it from thousands of miles away. It's a brave new world out there — and with the right technology in your corner, you can do less and accomplish more.

How's that for momentum?

Today's real estate software has the potential to bridge distances in incredible ways and keep your key relationships humming even when you're otherwise occupied. It ensures you are always moving forward — and you end up with more hours in the day to do what matters most.

That may not be magic, but it's pretty close.

You can incorporate the next generation of real estate marketing automation into your business in as little as a few days and win back dozens of hours within just a few weeks. Contact us at Delta Media Group to find out more or get started.

Staying in touch with clients used to be a full-time job in itself. It meant knowing where current customers stood in their transaction and how leads' decision-making process was unfolding. It often took a day out of each week just to get updated on the latest.

Luckily, today's real estate agents have new opportunities.

The right real estate technology gives you the ability to deliver faster, more personalized experiences to every client. This is true before, during, and after transactions, ensuring a memorable and premium level of service. That can make all the difference in the trajectory of your practice.

It's well known that most people do not go back to their real estate agent three, four, or five years later — even if they were fully satisfied. The reason why is painfully simple: They forget your name. Even if you have delivered stellar customer care from end to end, you are still fighting this basic fact of nature.

The right technology helps you build relationships that are truly unforgettable.

Stay in Touch and Connect with the Best Real Estate Technology

For a modern agent or broker, the cornerstone of staying in touch is having a Customer Relationship Management app for real estate. A CRM helps you — and your customers — by keeping all the data you need centralized in one place. That makes it easy to identify opportunities and follow up effectively.

With your real estate CRM, you'll not only save time — you'll ensure higher quality and more relevant connections. Technology doesn't replace the human element but instead supports you in deepening key relationships in less time per day. That keeps you focused, doing more of what really matters most.

Let's consider some of the ways you can build client relationships with the right technology:

• Enjoy AI-Driven Lead Follow Up
  If you want the best real estate CRM out there, be sure to look for an AI-driven machine learning application. With AI, your CRM is constantly learning. It can connect the dots between millions of different data points and find patterns that are invisible to humans, cueing you to follow up at the perfect times.
  
  
• Better Understand Client Needs
  The better you understand your clients, the easier it is to position yourself as a trusted advisor who is there for the long haul. Your CRM can capture interactions with your website, email, and social media that help you know what information clients are looking for (before they even ask you for it!).
  
  
• Keep Clients Confident and in the Know
  Your CRM is your all-in-one "center of excellence" that ties together all of your other communications. In today's market, buyers and sellers alike want ongoing updates to be sure they're trending in the right direction. Your CRM helps you stay in touch across email, social media, text messages, and much more.
  
  
• Adapt Your Communication Strategy to Customer Preferences
  In the old days, picking up the phone was the default way to follow up. These days, you have options — and there's a clear generational divide. Millennials and Gen Z may prefer for you to text them, while some older clients prefer the phone. With a CRM, you will always be able to tailor your approach.
  
  
• See What's Working (and What's Not Working)
  Sound digital marketing is the key to lasting relationships, especially among clients you might not see again for 3-4 years. The bird's-eye view provided by your CRM allows you to understand what content resonates with clients, so you can do more of what they like – without crunching raw data yourself.
  
  
• Accelerate Common Digital Marketing Tasks
  Your CRM is the bridge between day-to-day customer interactions and digital lead generation. You will be talking to people online more often than in person, so it helps to be able to set up email campaigns, social media posts, and all the rest in just a few clicks.
  
  
• Keep Your Information Timely and Relevant
  If you're using an all-in-one real estate solution like DeltaNET®6, you'll have the opportunity to tap into a wide range of other tools. Market Watch Reports produce a branded, accurate overview of the local area in seconds. Seller Reports are great for keeping your sellers confident and engaged.
  
  
• Be Even More Responsive
  When you are fielding that all-important first inquiry from a prospective customer, minutes can make the difference in how you're perceived. Since your CRM can unify all of your digital properties, you can set alerts that will let you know as soon as someone new makes contact.

When it comes to full lifecycle support of your customers — the kind of care and attention that creates a life-long business relationship — the best digital technology is indispensable. Contact us to find out more or get started with marketing automation for real estate.

How often do you reach the end of the workday feeling like you accomplished everything that you set out to do when the day began? The life of a real estate agent is filled with surprises and unexpected demands on your time. It's so easy to end the day feeling like you missed opportunities to market properties, promote your business, generate new leads, and nurture existing leads.

But it doesn't have to be that way. With the right real estate technology, you have access to reliable, easy-to-use tools that allow you to automate key tasks, make your day more productive, and free up more time to focus on the things you love most about being a real estate agent.

Email Marketing and Lead Nurturing

Email marketing is one the most important places where automation can increase your productivity. Creating and sending email marketing manually takes so much time, and there are so many tools available to automate the process while still sending effective, appealing email marketing materials.

• AI-Driven Email Marketing
  More and more, automation in real estate marketing is being driven by artificial intelligence. Take advantage of artificial intelligence with AI-driven email newsletters that are packed with the information that your audience wants to see. In addition to keeping your clients engaged with the real estate market, AI-driven newsletters are great for nurturing your leads over time.
  
  
• Auto-Generated Reports for Buyers and Sellers
  For many clients, buying or selling a home is a process that involves finding and processing as much real estate information as possible. Make both your and their lives easier by automatically sending them reports with the information that they want to see. With My HomeFinder, Market Watch, and Seller Reports, you can easily send key information to every part of your audience.
  
  
• Smart Drip Email Campaigns
  Some leads are ready to convert right now, but others will take some time and engagement before being ready to commit. Smart email drip campaigns make it easy to automatically stay in touch with clients and prospects while ensuring that they receive the right information at the right time.
  
  
• Send Bulk Email Blasts with Easy to Use Templates
  Need to send an email that doesn't quite fit with the automated tools that we mentioned to a group of people? You can still save time by using pre-built templates and bulk email blasting to reach them quickly.

Lead Segmentation and Tracking

Pursuing dead-end leads is a serious drain on any real estate agent's time, but segmenting leads takes time as well — at least, segmenting leads takes time when you do it yourself. Your real estate CRM should provide automated tools for segmenting leads, so that you know which leads are hot, which ones are cold, and where your leads are in the purchasing/sales process.

In addition to lead segmentation, you should be able to rely on your CRM for tracking lead activity with IDX search tracking, as well as tracking saved properties, property searches, and views. All of this information can save you time and allow you to focus on leads that are ready to convert.

Content Creation for Your Blog and Marketing Materials

At the end of a long day of serving your clients and pursuing new leads, how often do you feel like sitting down to write a blog post for your real estate website? Save time by integrating custom content creation for your real estate blog by professional content creators and taking advantage of automated tools for creating marketing materials. Keep your website stocked with content, your clients/prospects informed, and free up more time for productivity.

Quickly and Easily Promote New Listings

When you have a hot new listing, speed matters. You want to get the word out quickly on multiple channels, reach a wide audience, and start generating interest in the property. Take advantage of automation by automatically creating flyers for your new listings, and automatically promoting new listings to your social media pages. Once the word is out, you can easily let clients tour homes from anywhere with tools like virtual open houses and showings.

Are You Using Real Estate Technology to Become More Productive and Make Life Easier?

If you want to make your life easier and enhance productivity, then you need access to a seamless, high-performance real estate technology platform. In addition to tools for automating tasks, your real estate CRM should also include an extensive suite of tools for making so many other tasks easier to accomplish. Does your real estate CRM provide everything you need to thrive? DeltaNET®6 includes all of the automation features mentioned in this article and so many more tools that can boost your productivity as a real estate agent.

What makes a good lead? Understanding the what, why, and how of lead qualification can save so much time for real estate sales associates, allowing you to focus your energy on leads that are more likely to convert while setting aside dead-end leads. In order to effectively qualify leads, you need to have a reliable process in place to identify promising leads with speed and efficiency.

In short, a good lead is someone who is ready to buy or sell a home. They've likely already put significant thought into the process, have an idea of what they want to accomplish, and are looking for a real estate agent they can trust to get the job done. These are the leads that you want to prioritize over other, less qualified leads who are further from taking real action.

How to Qualify a Lead

In order to identify which leads are good ones and which can be put on the back burner or discarded, you need to ask the right questions. Ideally, you want this to happen as soon as possible when a lead enters your pipeline. That's why it's so important to have a system in place for qualifying leads and to use it consistently.

• Is the Lead Buying or Selling a Home in Your Markets?
  Start simple, and make sure that the lead is interested in buying or selling a home in one of the markets where you do business. Naturally, a lead shopping for a home in a city or neighborhood that doesn't fall under your umbrella can usually be easily disqualified.
  
  
• What Is Their Motivation for Buying or Selling a Home?
  Figuring out the motivations of the buyer or seller is one of the most important steps that you can take when qualifying a lead. What is their motivation, and just how motivated are they to take the next steps? A buyer or seller who's moving for work, financial reasons, family reasons, or another strong motivating factor is more likely to take action than a lead that lacks a strong motivation to move forward quickly.
  
  
• Have They Been Pre-Approved for a Mortgage?
  One way to gauge the motivation and engagement of a lead is to find out whether they've already been pre-approved for a mortgage. A buyer who has already made an effort to get pre-approved is more likely to be ready to take the next steps. Lacking pre-approval isn't necessarily a factor that disqualifies a lead outright, but it's certainly a positive when a buyer has been pre-approved.
  
  
• What Type of Budget Are They Shopping With?
  Is the buyer searching for a home that fits the price range of the homes that you have to offer, and the listings in your cities/neighborhoods? If it's a seller, are they interested in listing a home in a price range that fits your market, and your target demographic of buyers? Answering these questions can help you determine whether the lead is a good fit for your real estate services.
  
  
• Are They Looking for a Specific Type of Home?
  For buyers, are they looking for specific features from a home? Not only will the answer to this question help you determine how far along the buyer is in the process, it can also tell you whether you might already have listings that match their preferences.
  
  
• How Long Have They Been Searching?
  Has the lead been working on buying or selling a home for a long time? Have they already worked with a different agent in the past? These questions help determine motivation, and knowing if they've already worked with an agent can help you plan how to move forward.
  
  
• How Soon Are They Hoping to Close the Deal?
  A highly motivated buyer or seller is also more likely to be a highly qualified lead. If they're interested in closing the deal quickly, that's a good sign.
  
  
• Are They Ready to Set an Appointment?
  Is the lead ready to take concrete action and plan next steps? If they're willing to set an appointment, then one of the most critical questions is already answered.

Use the Right Tools to Turn Qualified Leads into Satisfied Clients

Of course, qualifying leads is just the first, important step in the process, and the right real estate tech can make the next steps in that process so much more efficient. The right real estate all-in-one solution, like DeltaNET®6, offers so many valuable tools for converting leads. Whether you're sending AI-driven newsletters, reaching out with convenient SMS text messaging, helping people tour homes from afar with virtual open houses & showings, taking advantage of integrations with all of the top real estate platforms, or using one of many other tools, DeltaNET®6 provides everything you need to get the job done in one convenient package.

How do you measure success? Every successful real estate firm prioritizes slightly different metrics, which means that there's no one right answer to that question. But with the ability to track so many metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), it's easy to feel a little overwhelmed by all of the data at your fingertips. The important thing to remember is that metrics are more than just numbers. Tracking results, from lead generation to closings, is one of the most reliable ways to help your team grow and unlock higher levels of performance from your sales associates.

Prospecting and Lead Generation Metrics

Analyzing results and projecting future performance starts with understanding what your sales associates are doing to generate leads. Statistically, luck tends to even out over time, which is one reason why volume is a key factor in many prospecting and lead generation metrics.

• Leads Generated
  We'll get into some of the more granular details shortly, but if you want a quick, overall look at what your sales associates are doing to generate new business, then leads generated is the perfect place to start. The simple fact is that sales associates who generate more leads also tend to close more deals. Volume is important, and leads generated is a catch-all metric to track the work your team is doing to bring in new clients.
  
  
• Calls/Contacts Made
  How efficiently and effectively is your team working to generate leads? The number of contacts made online and good, old-fashioned phone calls that a sales associate makes naturally play a big role in the number of leads that they generate. While raw outreach numbers don't tell the whole story, they provide a solid picture of the effort being made.
  
  
• Database Size
  Ideally, the number of leads, clients, and contacts in a sales associate's database should show stable growth over time. A bigger database means more opportunities, and creating more opportunities leads to more closed deals. If a sales associate is making a large number of calls/contacts but the number of clients in their database isn't growing accordingly, they may need to adjust their tactics for converting leads.
  
  
• Appointments Generated
  Generating appointments is a critical step in turning leads into clients, and sales associates who post a high number of appointments generated are giving themselves more chances at success. Like database size, the appointments generated metric provides a window into how well a sales associate is managing leads.
  
  
• Appointments to Listings/Appointments to Buyer Representation Agreements
  We group these two metrics together because they're two sides of the same coin. Appointments to listings is a KPI for sales associates who cater to sellers, while appointments to buyer representation agreements tell the same story for sales associates who work primarily with buyers. These metrics tell you how well your team is doing at turning leads into clients.

Measuring Results and Client Satisfaction

Of course, results matter too! Keeping track of how many leads are converted, how many deals are closed, and how happy clients are with the service they receive can provide important insights into the performance of your team.

• Average Sales Price
  How does the average sales price of homes listed by your sales associates compare with the overall average sales price in your markets? If the average sales price for your sales associates consistently beats market averages, then your team is likely doing a good job of marketing, promoting, and showing homes.
  
  
• Showings Per Sale
  Are your sales associates using showings as a key tool for finding buyers? While marketing and pricing also play a role in showings per sale, a sales associate who posts weak showings per sale numbers may benefit from some extra training to help with performance during showings.
  
  
• Listings Closed
  How many listings are your sales associates closing? While this is a fairly basic metric, it's also one of the important numbers for measuring the success of your team and individual sales associates.
  
  
• Client Feedback Score
  Are your clients satisfied with the service they received? A high client feedback score often means more referrals, which can be a goldmine for sales associates. Of course, the client feedback score is also an important reflection of how clients view and trust your real estate brand.

Improve Tracking and Success with the Right Real Estate Tech

Is your real estate CRM providing you with all of the data that you need to help your team thrive? With DeltaNET®6 you get more than just a comprehensive suite of tools for lead generation, marketing, and relationship management. You also get more ways to track performance, discover which tactics work best for your team, and analyze results. If you want your team to learn, grow their confidence, and thrive, then it's critical to provide them with the right tools for the job.

I think I am like most entrepreneurs. I'm constantly looking for opportunities to do something new or to improve what is already being done. You are probably a business owner yourself, or you work for someone that is constantly pushing for improvements in technology and marketing to grow the business you are involved in, so you understand.

It was only a few decades ago when many experts believed that, due to the rapidly accelerating pace of productivity, technology would render the five-day workweek obsolete in a few generations. There were several visions of how it might happen, including a three-hour, four-day week.

Amazingly, while productivity has continued to rise, most people are working even longer hours. What's more, wages have stagnated in relation to productivity, meaning that earners in many industries are going home with less. Luckily, real estate pros are positioned to reverse both these trends.

Unlike so many others, the nature of your business means you really can have it all:

• Vastly accelerated daily productivity by using technology the right way
• Business results that mean your income actually track with productivity

Where workers once relied on muscle, your stock in trade is concentration — and even that can be stretched to the limit. Good technology investment is something that allows you to do more in less time while focusing more of your attention on things that matter to you.

All machines have one major purpose: To save labor. That hasn't changed at all even though we're now using artificial intelligence and machine learning instead of windmills that grind flour. And by unlocking the labor-saving power of modern technology, you can achieve more in a day than some do in a week.

Let's look at some of the best technologies for a smooth, seamless increase in productivity:

• Customer Relationship Management for Real Estate
  Most real estate agents spend the majority of their time building or evaluating their relationships. It can be both difficult and time-consuming to know where all your prospects, leads, and customers stand in their individual journeys. A real estate CRM like DeltaNET®6 gives you complete visibility into all of your contacts. It also uses artificial intelligence to cue you on the best times and ways to follow up.
  
  
• Centralized Online Showing Management
  While many buyers and sellers are enthusiastic about virtual tours, face-to-face showings are still called for in many markets. A property showing management platform can make all the difference in convenience, flexibility, and accuracy. Combining end-to-end visibility with a self-service element that gives buyers a measure of control means you can leave much of the logistical work to them.
  
  
• Social Media Automation
  Some people seem to be born with the "social media gene," while others — even some of the most outgoing and gregarious real estate experts — don't seem to get it. Wherever you fall on the scale, social media automation can help you capture more business value while spending less time scrolling your feed. Event-driven updates on your listings can be sent to your followers instantly.
  
  
• Simplified Virtual Tour Setup for All Your Listings
  Virtual tours are beloved by just about everyone. Sellers no longer need to invite huge crowds into their homes, and buyers can extend their search radius while minimizing their travel hours. Tours can increase the time buyers spend on listings by 20% or more. However, it can be tough to set up a polished, professional virtual tour. Properties in Motion makes it easy to maximize the impact of every listing.
  
  
• Email Marketing to Build Your Business
  Your email subscriber list is one of the most powerful assets your business has. It gives you the ability to highlight and publicize your most valuable listings to your most enthusiastic audience. But, to get there, you need to be building that list. Automated email marketing is the key to ensuring that every message you send is packed with relevant, valuable content that deepens the relationship.
  
  
• Manage and Optimize Paid Advertising in Minutes
  Whether you're looking at pay-per-click advertising on Google or paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram, it's essential to be conscientious. Carefully maintained ads can accelerate your transactions, but all the pieces must be in place. Delta Media Group tools such as Ad Wizard make it easy to monitor your ads, ensure results, and fine-tune any that underperform.

The secrets of productivity are no mystery. Contact us at Delta Media Group to get inside information on how our suite of reliable, AI-driven tools can help you achieve more in less time in the coming year.

At Delta Media Group, our mission statement is literally: "Automate to Elevate Life," so it should come as no surprise that 2021 was a year of constant innovation for our team. Of course, this challenges us to constantly look for ways to automate processes within our business, and more importantly, automate processes for the agents and brokerages that utilize our all-in-one CRM & website platform, the DeltaNET®. With this in mind, I wanted to look at some of the biggest technology updates we saw in the real estate industry and what to expect in 2022:

I can't speak for everyone, but I can tell you that, at Delta Media Group®, we learned a lot this year. We learned that deer will go out of their way to climb onto an expressway and jump in front of your car even in broad daylight (maybe only I learned that). We learned that working remotely really does work, but it's not for everyone. We learned that when big hedge funds are involved, the stock market looks a lot like a casino. Lastly, and most importantly, as far as this article is concerned, we learned that simplicity is one of the most important elements when it comes to making something that people want to use.

Meet Abbey Parsons.

Brokerages currently face a real estate paradox: 90% of sellers and buyers say they would use their agent again, yet only about one in five home buyers and one in three sellers actually used the same agent a second time.

Many times, new business owners start with a clear idea of what they want to offer the world — and it's something that excites and uplifts them. As they think about the details, however, doubt creeps in — and it shows itself the same way across all industries.

"I can't turn away business," they start to think. "I have to appeal to everybody!"

No matter how many books you read or business coaches you hear from, it can feel counterintuitive to be told to "niche down." Deciding on a small segment of the total customer base to focus on may seem like a scary commitment, one in which you're not sure the other side will "love you back."

Yet, focusing your strategy allows you to do the same with your marketing, advertising, and other types of communication. And it's precisely that laser-focus that appeals to people. Because you get specific, they recognize you understand their problems. That draws them to you!

This is especially crucial in real estate.

In your first year as a real estate professional, you might feel like you're doing a little bit of everything. After all, there's so much to learn! Soon, you start to develop a better sense of which customers fit you best. Ideal customers should be easy and fun to work with so you can add value to their lives!

On the other end of the scale, some customers will drain your energy and may leave you miserable.

It's crucial to get those encounters out of the way in the first year — because your business is not "for everyone." It's for the right people with the right budget at the right time. Those are qualified leads, the ones more likely than anyone else to become customers, and they grow your business.

Sad, but true: Unqualified leads don't add to your bottom line, no matter how many you get!

How to Qualify Your Leads the Easy Way

Ideally, you would be able to qualify your leads by collecting just a little bit more information each time you encounter them. You might get some details when they sign up for your email list, a few more when they register for an open house, and a little bit more when they schedule a call.

By spacing out your "asks" naturally in encounters like these, you can learn a lot!

And an all-in-one real estate solution like DeltaNET®6 makes it much easier. That's because your CRM can capture and analyze details any human would easily overlook. Making connections between all the thousands or even millions of data points available, an AI-driven app helps you turn "information" into "insight."

Still, it's a wise idea to have a qualification framework in mind.

A qualification framework is a system of expected data points you collect about each prospective customer. Prospects that give answers within a desirable range are well-qualified leads. Those whose answers are outside the norm may be poorly qualified or not qualified at all.

In real estate, people are often trained to maintain every relationship they can — "you never know who'll become a customer!" With a qualification framework, you might still get caught by surprise now and again, but you will be able to develop informed expectations about every prospect in your funnel.

When you know, you can focus your attention on leads most likely to be your future customers.

Plus, you can do something that might otherwise feel unthinkable: Let go of unqualified leads! Referring them to someone who can meet their needs better does a service to them, you, and a colleague of your choice – and with a steady stream of truly qualified opportunities, it'll always feel good.

A Simple Real Estate Lead Qualification Framework

The BANT framework originates in business-to-business sales and adapts very well to real estate.

For each prospect, ask these questions:

Budget

Does the prospect have a budget that matches the type of properties in the local area you typically deal with? If not, can you help by providing facts about mortgage qualification or new homebuyer programs?

Authority

Is the prospect "in charge" of the buying decision? If working with a couple, both should be consulted on everything. If a large family is moving, everyone's preferences and needs should be taken into account.

Necessity

Does the prospect "need" to move now? If not, what would increase the sense of urgency? If so, what roadblocks are standing in the way — succinctly, why hasn't the person taken action? How can you help?

Timing

Is the prospect planning to move now, next week, next month, next year? Get a sense of projected timing and any contingencies. Entice long-term "waiters" who are well-qualified onto your email list.

Contact us to discover how digital marketing automation can help you qualify leads faster and better.

Real estate technology is constantly evolving, with valuable new tools that can help agents better serve clients and run your business more efficiently behind the scenes. The most successful modern agents take advantage of the latest tools to make their lives easier, boost their business, and provide the best possible service for clients. So if you want modern agents, you need to have modern tools. Here are some key tools that you can use to help your agents modernize their habits and reach their full potential.

What Does It Mean to Be a Modern Agent?

If we have learned anything from the last couple of years, it's that being a modern agent means being prepared to adapt. Adapting to changes in technology, changes in how real estate business is transacted, changes in client habits, and changes in the wider world that impact the real estate industry. Embracing technology is the best way to adapt to all of those changes with confidence and stay up to date in the ever-evolving nature of the industry.

Changes in demographics, like the current trend of tech-savvy Millenials and Gen Z clients entering the real estate market for the first time, further stress the need to take advantage of the latest real estate technology. Modern agents are ready to serve clients in the ways that best fit their needs, and that means using real estate technology to make life easier for everyone involved.

Start with the Right Real Estate CRM

If you want to provide your agents with the best tools for the job, the right real estate CRM is the perfect place to start. Modern agents need access to reliable, accurate client data, marketing tools to generate new leads, and virtual tools that make it easier to conduct business in our modern world. DeltaNET®6 provides all of the tools that your agents need to serve their clients in one convenient package.

With DeltaNET®6, agents can easily manage relationships and generate new business. Take advantage of integrated email marketing, AI-driven newsletters, automated lead segmentation, and smart drip email campaigns to cultivate leads. Use SMS text messaging to stay in touch while making the most of virtual open houses and showings to accommodate modern clients. Track IDX search activity, integrate IDX listings, and track property searches to see what leads are searching for online.

And those are just some of the features that your agents will love when they dig into all that DeltaNET®6 has to offer.

Tap Into Your Artistic Side with Creative Studio

Modern agents wear many hats, which often means tapping into their creative side with things like listing brochures, flyers, email templates, and social media posts. Creative Studio makes it easy for agents to get creative, with accessible, easy-to-use graphic design tools that can give all of your marketing materials a professional shine. Easily design your own layouts, or use pre-designed templates to speed up the process while still getting great results.

Creative Studio also works well with DeltaNET®6, allowing you to quickly upload photos and listings directly from your CRM for a seamless design process. You can even store online versions of the materials that you create, have them sent to a print shop, and have the results delivered directly to your door.

Quickly Provide Accurate Valuations with Our AVM Report Platform

Business is booming in the real estate world, which is good news for real estate professionals but also presents some unique challenges. One of the biggest challenges that comes from a highly active real estate market is that there are major inventory shortages in many markets. Providing accurate valuations is always important, but especially so when inventory is so low compared to demand.

Our AVM Report Platform makes it quick and easy for agents to find the accurate valuation information they need, when they need it. They can easily catch up on the latest market conditions, quickly find the data that they need within the platform, and provide accurate estimates for clients from up to five independent sources. The reports that clients receive include multiple calls-to-action to generate conversions while providing them with the accurate, market-specific data that they value. It's all driven by AI, which helps the process automatically improve over time as it receives more data.

Help Your Agents Modernize Their Practices by Providing the Best Real Estate Technology

The bottom line: If your agents don't have the best tools for the job, now is the time to upgrade your real estate technology. The investment that you make in technology more than pays off with more efficient, modern agents and satisfied clients. From online marketing to relationship management and AVM, our team can provide your team with the tools that they need to thrive in the modern real estate industry. Contact us today to get started.

For years, Zillow has seemed like the big bad wolf of the real estate industry. Since the company's 2004 founding, Zillow has steadily expanded its reach into territories where only an experienced real estate agent could help you buy or sell a home. Now, the company garners millions of web visits a month and threatens the success of local real estate experts. And despite the news that Zillow is shutting down its homebuying business, that doesn't mean the company will go away — nor does it mean other competitors won't try to achieve the same goals as Zillow but with better efficiency.

The good news is that tactics like Zillow's haven't been tested by time the same way those of the traditional agent have been. In fact, you have an advantage over Zillow and all the other online real estate companies that want to be on top: you're a real-life expert that buyers and sellers can trust. With that in mind, Zillow-proofing your business is not only possible, it may even come easy! Here are 5 steps for taking on Zillow.

1. Be Powerful
   Your brand is far more meaningful in your community than those of the online companies. In fact, you may be more of a household name than you realize. You can increase your brand recognition with clean and effective website design. Effective SEO will also keep you on top of your market digitally, even to the point where you can compete and surpass Zillow for top spots in search results.
   
   
2. Be Efficient
   Efficiency in the digital age means spending less time on routine tasks and spending more time utilizing your unique skills. With an all-in-one real estate solution like DeltaNET®6, you can automate away pesky and time-consuming tasks while generating more and better-qualified leads.
   
   
3. Be Creative
   Taking advantage of cutting-edge software and services doesn't mean letting go of the wheel completely. With a powerful online creative studio, you can fine-tune promotional flyers and brochures to your liking. That way, you can ensure your personality and messaging shine through without needing to be a graphic design wiz.
   
   
4. Be Reliable
   Everyone is skeptical of faceless companies, but when a client can put a name and personality to their real estate venture, they'll be far more trustful knowing a real person cares about their experience. Automated text messages may seem impersonal to someone who's never used them, but their power comes from being able to stay in contact with clients and allowing clients an easy way to get in touch with you when they need a more in-depth consultation.
   
   
5. Be Different
   It's always good to make yourself stand out, but it's also important for your clients to know exactly what makes you different. With the right tools, you can focus your energy on providing clients with the expertise you've earned through years of connecting families with homes.

For more tips on how you can Zillow-proof your business, contact us today.

Real estate has come a long way in a very short time.

Looking back on the history of our industry, it's easy to get distracted by the profound changes of the last few years. With the start of the pandemic, agents and brokers at all levels needed to completely rethink their business to keep themselves and their clients safe.

Even though the public health situation is beginning to change, real estate thought leaders still focus lots of attention on the new best practices revealed by this situation. While that is important, it's crucial not to miss the forest for the trees. In truth, real estate has been in a period of flux for over a decade.

Even though those changes have unfolded gradually, they are all driven by the same thing:

Changing customer preferences.

Zoom out from the pandemic and take a look at the longer trends, many of which were accelerated in 2020. Gone are the days when new buyers would look for real estate agents in the phone book or drive around the neighborhood to spot any "For Sale" signs in front yards.

In-person outreach is still effective and it isn't going away, but the great majority of future customers will find you online. Most new home searches start online. The younger a customer is, the more likely they are to have a "digital-first" mindset — but elders are getting involved in growing numbers.

This gives agencies and brokerages unprecedented power to attract the right leads to their door.

Today's Real Estate Experts Need to Look Toward Data-Driven "Scientific Marketing"

Scientific marketing describes an approach to marketing in which data is used to create hypotheses, test assumptions, and make continuous improvements so you can allocate your budget toward the initiatives that make the greatest impact on your bottom line.

All businesses that operate online face some of the same challenges. Data provides the answer to both today's issues and tomorrow's. For example, there's no point in posting on Twitter if all of your leads come from LinkedIn. By comparing ROI across channels, you can optimize your investments.

But where, precisely, does the data come from? And what's the ultimate goal?

In real estate, most of the data you collect and apply to your business helps you with lead generation. Your digital assets have the power to attract the right leads to you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Your website is at the center of that effort. Every visitor to your site offers you a trove of data.

Your analytics suite is the software that helps you transform that data into actionable insights.

What Is Analytics Software and How Does It Work?

In modern real estate, analytics takes place on two levels:

• An analytics suite runs on your website, so you understand how people are using it
• Your CRM uses AI-driven analytics to help you qualify and follow up with your leads

These two systems often work together. For example, the analytics suite on your website can keep track of the exact blog articles someone has read. Your CRM then compares these activities to the behavior of leads who converted into customers in the past.

When a strong match is found, an AI-driven CRM can let you know — helping you follow up at the right time and in the right ways. With a clear understanding of a lead's individual interests, you have the opportunity to craft truly personalized correspondence and start a meaningful conversation.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence empower today's analytics software to make connections that would be invisible to even the best-trained human analyst. A centralized, "all in one" CRM may have the capability to evaluate not just thousands, but millions of data points in search of a pattern.

The practical benefits are twofold:

• You are more likely to connect with people who are ready to convert and close an agreement
• You can save hours every week you would otherwise spend keeping track of leads and clients

Step Into the CRM Age: Better Performance with Less Manual Labor

Another critical benefit to artificial intelligence is the sharp reduction in manual data entry.

Not only does this mean less time spent typing in names, dates, and figures, but it will also narrow the scope of human error. That's vital when you're working with email marketing, online advertising, or any other scalable system where you might be in contact with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people.

There's no need to take an artisanal approach to everything you do: Data makes life easier and doesn't call on you to sacrifice quality. DeltaNET®6 is today's state-of-the-art solution that not only collects data but highlights the lessons buried within, so your business can act right away.

Contact us to learn more.

Marketing is one of the most important parts of real estate, and it can also be challenging for agents to come to grips with. Once you've learned the knowledge and skills you need to serve clients, marketing should be your next priority.

Having a marketing plan is essential to your overall success!

Marketing is indispensable because the majority of your future clients will find you online. These days, most home searches begin there. As more Millennials turn to the market and the eldest of Gen Z find their way into it for the first time, this trend will continue.

A marketing plan helps you identify where your audience is, how to connect, and the best ways to do so over the time it takes them to launch their home search. From the high-level plan you develop, you can work backward to understand what you need to do every quarter, month, and week.

The concept may seem intimidating at first, but it is worthwhile.

Marketing is the central piece in pivoting from finding new business through in-person methods versus drawing qualified leads directly to your website with minimal effort. This transition has the potential to save you thousands of hours a year, but it relies on having the right marketing assets in place.

What Does a Real Estate Marketing Plan Include?

A real estate marketing plan is a top-level strategic roadmap you develop once and review quarterly based on your evolving goals and the success of your marketing initiatives. It is built around Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as leads generated and transactions completed.

How Do You Write a Real Estate Marketing Plan?

There are seven components to a marketing plan for real estate.

While some may prove challenging, each element builds on the ones before. If you do not have the time or resources to conduct a deep market analysis, you can leverage the wisdom of your colleagues and mentors to start with some basic assumptions that you then verify with experience.

The elements of a real estate marketing plan include:

• Target Market
  Who are your ideal customers? What are their biggest concerns as they enter the market? What venues do they use for their research — who do they trust, and how can you use those patterns of behavior to get in touch with them? Write out everything you know about the clients you want.
  
  
• Market Research
  With your target market identified, you can go broad. What volume of buying or selling in your area can be attributed to customers like these? For buyers, what is their typical budget? For sellers, what is their typical sales price? What is their next move once they've finished their transaction?
  
  
• Positioning
  Positioning refers to your overall brand and how you use it. If you've been around for a while, then it will start with how customers see you, both positive and negative. If you are new, then you should answer how you will frame your brand so it is the natural source of expert advice for your target customers.
  
  
• Competitive Analysis
  How many competitors are in your market? This is especially significant in real estate because you can use what your competitors do right as a jumping-off point to develop your own tactics. You may not want to go head-to-head with a large agency, but you can choose to be where they aren't.
  
  
• Market Strategy
  The question here is: "How will I find and attract my ideal customers?" DeltaNET 6® is the real estate all-in-one solution that enables you to automate your social media, promote listings, post blogs, and manage your email marketing, among many more, from a centralized, "all in one" marketing command center.
  
  
• Budget
  Your budget is a month-by-month breakdown of what you intend to spend on marketing. For most digital marketing, your major KPI will be website visitors generated, so keeping an eye on this will tell you if your investments have been cost-effective — use data analytics tools to monitor each channel.
  
  
• Metrics
  It is up to your website to do the "heavy lifting" of converting visitors to customers by offering them resources and answering their questions. In addition to visitors generated from your marketing, closely monitor conversions — both to customers and to email subscribers who may later become customers.

Turning Your Marketing Plan into Reality

To achieve your goals, you may find you need more tools or training. Upfront investments are common in the first few years of the real estate journey. Be sure you understand how much you're spending, why, and a timeline for a) first value and b) return on investment, including recouping the initial spend. From there, review your analytics data monthly to track trends and prepare for a quarterly plan update.

Contact us to find out more about digital marketing for real estate.

Real estate has long been considered one of the best investments of all.

The sterling reputation of owning a home as a way of building wealth took a beating among Millennials after successive waves of downturns and crises. Now, it's on its way back. Up-and-coming Generation Z made a strong showing in homebuying during the pandemic.

Only a fraction of that generation is old enough to enter the market now. But general trends indicate they look at buying a home as an important life milestone — and a goal to be pursued at earlier ages than ever before. This is sure to shape the real estate landscape for years to come.

In short, they have a different view of their return on investment.

ROI is the ultimate goal of any investment. It stands at the heart of the concept of "putting your money to work for you." If your return on investment is flat, it's evidence that you could have gotten greater value from that money elsewhere. If it's negative, then you've identified a bad investment.

To succeed, real estate agents should put this concept at the forefront of their minds.

Real Estate Technology May Be the Best Investment an Agent Can Make

Every time you choose one solution over another for your business, you are making an investment. The goal is to make money or save money. However, it's not always easy to trace the path from the tools you use to your bottom line. To make the connection, go back to the simple maxim everyone knows:

"Time is money."

If you can save time, you can make more money. Even if you don't "reinvest" that saved time directly into work hours, it still makes a difference. After all, having more time for rest will enable you to do your best work longer and more consistently. This is always more productive than just getting by.

On its own, real estate technology can't promise you'll close more deals or get more leads. But it can serve as a platform to accelerate and simplify your use of the skills that yield those results. It multiplies what you are capable of. Imagine doubling or even tripling your productivity without making a hire!

Now is the time to seek out and implement the modern tools that make it possible.

Real Estate Technology Is on the Grow After Pandemic-Induced Slowdowns

The pandemic drove tremendous evolution in the real estate market in a matter of weeks. A rapid pace of change was imperative to keep transactions moving while maintaining safety for everyone.

With pandemic restrictions beginning to fade, it's clear that real estate won't be returning to "business as usual." Many pandemic-driven changes are here to stay, and technology facilitates it all.

All in all, real estate technology has two big effects:

• Customers have more data at their fingertips to make informed buying and selling choices
• Real estate experts have faster and more effective ways to help them reach their goals

There's no greater example of this than the virtual home tour. Virtual tours were gaining momentum before the pandemic, along with other types of interactive and video content. To expand buyers' search radius and protect sellers from dealing with crowds, they mushroomed practically overnight.

As a result, real estate technology solutions have evolved to make them easier, even for agents who have never been comfortable in front of the camera before. The tempo of technological innovation is sure to remain upbeat as work gradually returns to normal and teams can collaborate more easily.

Artificial Intelligence and Automation Combine to Make Real Estate Technology Work Better

Two core capabilities define the real estate technology of tomorrow:

• Automation: The ability to accelerate or fully delegate routine tasks to technology systems
• Artificial Intelligence: Machine learning that spots trends so you can take action on them early

For example, real estate agents from coast to coast use social media. It is the #1 source of high-quality leads for many agents and firms. But on its own, social media can be a time sink. Automation speeds up the process of using it, while artificial intelligence verifies the business value that it can offer.

DeltaNET™ 6 is the all-in-one real estate solution that unifies these two capabilities in a way designed from end to end with your unique needs in mind. It gives you complete visibility into all of your contacts, customers, and brand advocates, where they stand, and how best to connect with them.

Delta Media Group is constantly expanding and improving its product line. In 2021 alone, we've added dozens of additional free features to DeltaNET™ 6. By adding more value, we aim to become your best investment in the growing world of real estate technology.

Contact us to find out more or get started.

If you have seen any of the sales or training presentations I've delivered to REALTORS® in the last 12 months, then you'll know I've been beating the drum that the industry needs to "BE DIFFERENT." That's because there's growing disruption within real estate that's not going away anytime soon. In particular, we have continued to see massive movement from industry juggernaut Zillow over the last 12 months.

Artificial intelligence is poised to become the next big thing in real estate.

Lots of ink has been spilled about the potential of AI to replace jobs. But as the pandemic has shown, that future remains a long way off. Instead of displacing professional expertise, AI has the potential to serve as a highly versatile and adaptive "multi-tool" that can help real estate agents and their clients.

In fact, it is already affecting every stage of today's real estate transactions. To understand what makes artificial intelligence so exciting, it's best to begin with the basics.

What is Artificial Intelligence, Really?

Artificial intelligence enables a piece of software to make inferences and draw conclusions based on a set of data. Some AI, called Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, have the ability to interpret and answer a question posed in the "natural language" that ordinary people use every day.

AI has been around since the 1950s. However, the processing power and bandwidth available today has driven it to new heights. Everyday people can now interface with AI-based systems using the supercomputer they keep in their pocket. This is accelerating AI development on a grand scale.

Automatic processing and data collection are where today's artificial intelligence tools shine. They aren't always great at solving complex problems alone, especially when that means applying creativity. But they help agents, buyers, and sellers "connect the dots" and gain deeper insight for more informed decisions.

Let's dive in and see what artificial intelligence is doing to improve today's real estate world.

Lead Generation

AI is especially crucial for real estate agents in their never-ending quest for lead generation.

These days, the vast majority of lead generation is bound to happen online. Agents' real estate websites and their social media are the two biggest planks in the strategy. Both can be enhanced by using AI to generate branded customer care experiences in a seamless and delightful way.

Machine learning is on display in a modern real estate all-in-one solution like DeltaNET™ 6. By continuously learning about buyer and seller behaviors based on past transactions, it finds patterns within millions of data points — patterns invisible to even the keenest human analyst.

This saves time by automatically scoring leads and facilitating effective follow-up.

Home Search

Home listings are already searchable in massive quantities in any market you care to name. But buyers in particular depend upon real estate agents to sort through the oceans of listings and find those that meet their criteria. Agents, in turn, can look to artificial intelligence to accelerate the process.

Yes, the process typically begins with the AI system pulling in data entered by the real estate agent or directly by the buyer. By monitoring details like how long was spent on each listing and which photos were looked at, however, it highlights factors that allow it to surface additional listings faster.

This equips agents to send a curated round-up of listings to their buyers so they can act faster.

Transactions

Real estate transactions aren't as confusing or complex as they might look from the outside. Still, there can be many twists and turns – and there's a lot both buyers and sellers don't know. The right AI can streamline transactions, making data searchable and easy to reference when you need it.

One of the biggest advantages to artificial intelligence is how it can cut down on human error. While it's always a wise idea to double-check every document, you no longer need to worry about tedious data entry that can introduce problems. Instead, software auto-populates forms contextually.

Property Valuation

We all know of an AI-driven valuation tool that's notoriously off the mark in many of the estimates it gives. Despite that, AI-driven property valuation is growing better by the day. One key to making it work effectively is to cross-reference data from multiple vetted data storehouses.

By doing this behind the scenes, a machine learning tool can determine how much weight to assign to different sources. Ultimately, estimates continue to improve. Instead of spending hours developing a list of comparable sales, you can quickly generate a report and double-check the figures.

Lending

The lending landscape will always affect real estate agents and their clients, so it's crucial to know what changes are around the corner. Mortgage lenders have jumped into AI with both feet, using it to tame the ferocious process of underwriting — which can involve hundreds of documents.

Artificial intelligence can highlight key points within an entire corpus of documents, allowing lenders to make an initial determination in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks. As the process continues to get faster and more accurate, lenders stand to double or even triple their productivity.

Contact us today to learn how you can capture AI's power with confidence using DeltaNET™ 6.

You're working too hard. But then, I don't have to tell you that, do I? What you might appreciate me telling you is that you don't have to.

Data is a big topic — not only in real estate but in every industry where digital technology offers insights.

Data can seem esoteric and opaque to gregarious, relationship-focused real estate professionals. But you don't have to be a data scientist to make sense of it all. Instead, you need the right tools to connect those figures with your business outcomes.

Data is crucial in real estate because, as in other selling professions, it provides an objective source of truth to fact-check expectations against results. When challenges arise, it's no longer necessary to fill in the blanks with "hunches" or "gut feelings."

Instead, you can know precisely where your limited time, energy, and budget are best spent.

That means you can continuously, consistently improve.

No single piece of data is a North Star. You'll need data from a variety of sources. Synthesizing them, you can create a total picture of your business. That leaves you with less ambiguity to navigate and a much shorter path to actionable plans.

Let's see how it all comes together.

The Biggest Types of Data You'll Use in Real Estate

It wasn't long ago when real estate agents had access to very little data. They would meet people, follow up, and track the outcomes of their conversations. Between encounters, however, the lead's mind was unknowable. Even if it seemed like leads were moving forward, it wasn't necessarily the case.

Then, as today, it could take weeks or months for a lead to dive into the market. There were few high-touch, low-effort ways of staying connected until that happened. Phone calls and in-person meetings were the norms. By comparison, today's leads provide an enormous amount of data.

That's just one area where data has clarified the picture. Let's zoom in on the crucial types of data that shape the real estate world:

• Lead & Customer Data
  Every time a lead visits your website, reads an email, or looks at your listings, you learn more. You often get this information directly from a Customer Relationship Management suite which, in concert with your website or other digital properties, helps you track some key questions: How leads find you, what they do on your site or social media, and when and how you should follow up to build the relationship.
  
  
• Property & Listing Data
  Modern MLS interfaces are tuned into data as well, giving you a deeper and more granular view of what appeals to buyers. Individual websites use this data to communicate with visitors about which listings are popular and highlight the ones that offer video, virtual walk-throughs, and other features. At the same time, they provide you a tantalizing glimpse into the thought processes behind buyer decisions.
  
  
• Analytics Data
  No matter what software collects your data, there is a second level to be aware of: Analytics. Analytics is a broad term for a platform that converts raw data into insights. For example, to get the most data from your website, you need an analytics solution running in the background. This helps you recognize which venues are sending the most traffic to your website and what content most appeals to your audience.

Three Steps to Leverage Your Data for Greater Success

Ask data scientists and they'll tell you data is always increasing in two ways:

• Velocity: Data is being generated and communicated faster
• Volume: More data is being generated from more sources

As time goes on, these effects increase and compound one another. Luckily, you don't have to worry about vast oceans of data. With sound processes, you'll stay laser-focused on finding and using the data most relevant to your prospects, leads, and customers. That, in turn, propels your business forward.

• Understand Where You Need Data From
  Start by identifying your sources of data. Every time you post a listing, you want to be sure you know what data is collected, which metrics matter, and how to access that information. Make the connection in your mind between the different data sources at your disposal and the lead or customer's journey.
  
  
• Pull It All Together into a Singular View
  DeltaNET 6 is the all-in-one real estate solution designed to pull disparate data together into a centralized view. With its built-in lead tracking and marketing functionality, it helps you see how each contact responds to your online marketing initiatives. With precision data, a timely and personalized follow-up becomes easy.
  
  
• Take Time to Implement Lessons Learned
  With data, you'll know more about your contacts than ever. Some data has obvious uses: Understanding exactly what someone's looking for in a home, for example. Other examples take creativity but are just as valuable in brand-building: Knowing what blog topics hit the spot with readers and publishing more.

Delta Media Group helps you achieve repeatable, reliable marketing and growth through data. Contact us to find out more today.

Video is quickly taking over the internet, and the same can be said about real estate marketing!

Well over half of all internet traffic is now made up of video content. As more people gain access to unlimited smartphone data plans, that number continues to increase. The adoption of 5G internet will accelerate the trend even further as it becomes possible to stream video fast from almost anywhere.

Real estate pros would do well to get comfortable with the power of video — both in front of and behind the camera. Video is much more likely to be viewed, remembered, and shared than plain text content. And video has the unique power to build rapport and foster trust like nothing else out there.

Video for Listings Is King – But it's Only the Beginning

Nothing will ever replace real estate photography, but video is the next best thing to being there.

When video is used to enhance listings, it allows interested buyers to go from merely browsing to imagining everything a space has to offer their lifestyle. With context provided by your narration, they can engage all of their senses and envision their future in the home.

That said, real estate listings are just one of many places video can make a winning difference. When used as a central part of your overall marketing strategy, it helps you deliver high-quality, branded communications that leads and customers will really look forward to.

Let's consider some other great ways to use video in your real estate marketing:

• Video for Real Estate Testimonials
  Social proof is the key to helping your future customers see that others just like them had an excellent experience working with you. Real estate testimonials are powerful because your satisfied customers can express themselves in their own words. This kind of uncoached reaction is very compelling. Plus, they are more likely to feel invested in your brand and offer you referral business in the future.
  
  
• Video for Neighborhood Introductions
  Buyers often find themselves with a general idea of where they want to be, but they need to compare many different neighborhoods ¯ especially in large cities. They might not have time to explore every alternative in person, but video can take them there. You can show off the top landmarks, restaurants, shopping, and other amenities. All this helps to position you as a trusted local expert.
  
  
• Video for Live Open Houses and Tours
  Virtual open houses and virtual tours have become extremely popular over the last year. Originally a way of maintaining safety for buyers and sellers alike, they have proven popular with everyone. Sellers no longer need to plan ahead for big crowds and buyers can extend their search radius with a minimum of travel. You can make these even more enjoyable with your own commentary.
  
  
• Video for Blogging and Content Marketing
  All in all, online videos are more likely to be shared than almost any other kind of content. Just about anything you publish on your website can be enhanced with video. Video makes a website seem more polished and professional even when an individual visitor doesn't actually choose to view it. Even a video of just one minute can spruce up a post, "about us" page, or contact page.
  
  
• Video for Social Media Updates
  Video has a tremendous impact on social media. Even though each social network has its own rhythm, people tend to scroll quickly. Visual content is more likely to stop them in their tracks, and videos are all but irresistible. Sprinkling videos in among the real estate photography you already share on your feed will get more people to engage with what you have to say. That can ultimately net you more leads.
  
  
• Video for Custom Email Messages
  To nurture relationships over weeks and months, you're probably already using email drip campaigns. This is the best way to keep your message in mind with leads who are on the fence or waiting for the market to pan out a certain way. When it's time to add an extra jolt of motivation, a custom video can kindle a more personal connection. Just use what you know about a lead to start a conversation!

You Don't Need to Reinvent the Wheel to Come to Grips with Video for Real Estate

Video can seem like an intimidating prospect, but it's fun and exciting when you get comfortable making them.

To seamlessly tap into the power of video, you need a nimble, high-performance center of excellence you can trust to remain stable and dependable. DeltaNET 6 is that solution for thousands of real estate professionals across the United States. It gets you rolling with video in minutes, not days or weeks.

Contact us to find out more or get started with the top all-in-one solution for real estate.

Lead management is crucial to moving your real estate business forward.

Every lead has their own story. Some are motivated to jump in and get involved with the market right away. Some want to "wait and see." But the vast majority are somewhere in between. It may take weeks or months for them to get started. Proper lead management ensures two things:

• You get to keep track of them no matter how their thinking evolves or how long it takes
• You can play an active role in helping to educate and motivate them so they take action

With a modern lead management strategy, no time is lost and continuing communication is seamless.

Customer Relationship Management for Real Estate Is Crucial to Staying Ahead of Your Leads

Customer Relationship Management refers to a software suite designed to provide complete visibility into leads and their activities. While CRM is common across many industries, especially in sales, only one CRM suite was built from the ground up with input from real estate pros across the United States: DeltaNET 6.

Following up is the name of the game in real estate. It wasn't that long ago when you had to plan out all of your outreach manually and hope your timing was right — not too much and not too little. These days, your CRM can keep track of lead behaviors and connect the dots so you know precisely when to follow up.

As a DeltaNET 6 user, you'll enjoy a number of other great features:

• Email Marketing Drip Campaigns for Real Estate
  Email marketing is a critical element of lead nurturing. It allows you to make sure you are in contact over the long journey from lead to client. With "My Customer for Life" email newsletters, you can build deeper lead relationships with helpful, informative content. Using detailed "open" and "read" data for each subscriber, you can quickly hone in on precisely the kind of information that resonates with each lead.
  
  
• Hands-Free, Event-Driven Social Media Marketing
  Social media is a potent lead engine in its own right, but it can also be used to cultivate relationships long-term. It's common for would-be buyers who are on the fence to follow local real estate agents for some time before they act. Facebook Connector and LinkedIn Connector can give you the power to keep your social media feed flowing with instant, event-driven updates. That keeps eyes on your listings and your brand.
  
  
• Text Messaging for Agents and Brokerages
  Many people see text messaging as more convenient and more intimate than email. That's especially true of Millennials and Gen Z, who will often avoid a drawn-out phone call in favor of a quick message. With our real estate text messaging platform, you can harness this popular technology for your lead development. You can boost your email drip campaigns with text or even schedule text blasts for groups of subscribers.

How to Organize Your Lead Management More Effectively

Lead generation and lead management go hand in hand. Providing excellent experiences that introduce leads to your brand will put them on a trajectory to work with you. This means publishing the right digital resources and making sure your offline efforts, such as in-person networking, benefit appropriately from them.

Here are some ways to do it:

• Know Which Channels Are Sending You Leads
  Your listings are a major source of leads, but only one of many. Your website, social media, and events such as open houses also contribute to the mix. Keep an eye on your data so you understand which channels are doing the most. That will help you focus your efforts where they have the greatest impact.
  
  
• Make Sure You Have Clean, High-Quality Data
  As leads trickle into your system, take some time every week to take a look at them. Sometimes, people will sign up with fake emails, phone numbers, and more so they can get access to information. You can remove these contacts and update those whose details have changed over time.
  
  
• Use Lead Activity to Guide Your Content Marketing
  Content marketing enables you to strengthen your lead relationships by providing helpful, informative blogging, videos, and more. The better aligned your content is with your leads' interests, the more effective it will be. By checking your analytics data, you'll see which website pages and social updates got the most attention.
  
  
• Segment Your Leads to Enhance Your Results
  Almost all of your leads will end up on your email list at one point — that's one of the big conversion actions that defines a lead. To ensure everyone gets relevant, useful content, divvy them into highly targeted segments: That includes warm leads, cold leads, and past customers at the very least.

Contact us to find out more about real estate lead management.

Is marketing your top priority?

For most real estate pros, the answer is "no" — and with good reason!

Marketing is an essential part of building your business. In the long run, few other activities contribute quite as much to the trajectory of your unique brand. If you want a lucrative practice that nonetheless offers the right mix of work-life balance, marketing needs to land on your radar consistently.

On a day-to-day basis, though, it's no surprise you have other things to think about.

Buyers and sellers alike are growing savvier and getting more demanding in the level of customer care they expect. The youngest movers in the market — whose lifetime value is highest – are also the most likely to say they will lose interest if they do not hear back from a real estate agent immediately.

You are your biggest business asset. To work on deals and build relationships, you must be present.

So marketing slips down the priority list. Or does it? No marketing resource can replace you, nor should it try. You need assets that extend your reach. The solution is digital marketing automation for real estate agents.

Spend Less Time Marketing and More Time Engaging Your Customers — Without Sacrificing Either

By automating away routine tasks, you free up time and reduce human error. But there's more to it.

With end-to-end digital marketing automation, you create something just as valuable: Consistency. Your email, social media, and more can deliver personalized communication in your own warm and relatable voice. No matter if you are talking to ten, one hundred, or one thousand leads, it can always sound like you!

This is crucial because trust is the foundation that real estate success is built on.

Fostering that trust begins long before you ever meet with a potential client. They are already out there on the internet, comparing their different options for a real estate agent. It may take weeks or even months for them to jump in. Your marketing messages between now and then can make the winning difference.

With the digital marketing center of excellence offered by DeltaNET 6, you can present your expertise with full confidence. Our all-in-one AI-driven platform empowers you with seamless integration and dependable high performance on all the core marketing tasks that drive your business forward.

That includes:

• Social Media Automation with Facebook and LinkedIn
  Many real estate agents get a huge proportion of their online leads from Facebook. On the flip side, LinkedIn is the place to find luxury real estate clients. Facebook Connector and LinkedIn Connector enable you to fill your social feed with helpful, informative, event-driven posts that keep your followers up to date with minimal effort.
  
  
• Online Advertising Automation Using Our Ad Wizard
  Ad Wizard means Facebook ads are like magic! Targeted Facebook and Instagram ads have never been easier than with Ad Wizard. You can configure, launch, and monitor your campaigns in seconds. Proven templates and included creative collateral give you a full library of effective options to get eyes on your new listings fast!
  
  
• "My Customer for Life" Email Marketing Newsletter
  Open the door to a life-long partnership with your favorite customers! "My Customer for Life" strengthens your relationships at every stage with valuable email content that builds your brand. Personalized, beautiful emails with a handcrafted look and ultra-targeted relevance are always just a few clicks away.
  
  
• Virtual Tours with Properties in Motion
  Virtual tours are convenient for buyers and sellers alike. Sellers love the idea of not having to schedule around a crowd of strangers in the house. Buyers can extend their search radius without more commuting. Properties in Motion is your key to sophisticated virtual tours without having to spend weeks learning new software.
  
  
• Virtual Open Houses with Open House Connector
  Open House Connector makes open houses more convenient for you and your guests. They can register online and sign in from their mobile device, letting you track interest and attendance. Follow-up is a snap, as you can keep both "no shows" and attendees in the pipeline to further publicize future opportunities.
  
  
• Technology Independence from Start to Finish with Local Showings
  Local Showings is our new property showing management platform. An independent, full-featured property showing software and service, it allows you to schedule showings of any property in your MLS, offer a calendar view of available times, generate reports for your sellers, highlight essential feedback, and more.

No matter what the future brings, digital marketing is an essential part of the equation for real estate experts at all levels. DeltaNET 6 keeps you on the cutting edge by giving you real estate marketing automation capabilities that can save you thousands of hours every year, all without sacrificing the human touch.

Contact us today to learn more or get started.

In this week's Tech Tuesday, Harley Wolfarth demonstrate how you can add panoramic photos to your listings through the DeltaNET.

Video Transcription

Harley:

Hello, and welcome to Tech Tuesday presented by Delta Media Group, where there's no time for clever jokes or movie references today. So, pitter patter let's get at her. So, today we're going to take a look at some new functionality we have added for listing photos, specifically, you can now add panoramic photos to your listings. And they're pretty neat. You can actually go into these photos in such a way that if you even had Google Cardboard, if you've ever heard of that or a VR headset, you could actually view this panoramic photo in VR. So, it's kind of neat and kind of an easy thing you could actually do with your phone at a listing.

Harley:

So, in order to add a panoramic photo to the DeltaNet, you must first create the panoramic photo using a regular camera that supports a panoramic photo mode; or most phones out today, or most smartphones do have the ability to take panoramic pictures. But how you do that depends on your device. Now, once you've taken your picture and you have downloaded it onto your computer, or you could actually do this with your mobile device though the interface will look a little bit different, you can go in and add it to your listing.

Harley:

So, to do that, we're here in the DeltaNet. We're going to go down to listings and then down to manage my listings. And now from here, we're going to go into the listing profile page for the listing that we would like to add our panoramic photo to. So, in this case, we'll just go ahead and choose this first one. So, I'm going to click on the MLS ID in order to get to that page. Now, the MLS ID looks a little funny because this is a test listing. But you'll just click on your MLS ID to get into this page.

Harley:

Now, from here, you'll see that we have a new tab up at the top called panoramic photos. I'm going to click on that, and now this is where we can upload our photo. Now, you can see here that for best results it's looking for an image aspect ratio of two to one. So, the idea is that, and it says here, the width must be exactly twice the height. So, the closer you can get to that, the better the image is going to look in the viewer.

Harley:

So, now we're just going to click on add file, and I happen to have a panoramic photo prepared here. I'm just going to click on that. So, there we go. And now once you've added it here, you click on start upload to actually add it to the system. There we go. You can see the page refreshes. So, if I go back over here and click on panoramic photos, you can see there's my picture, my very pretty scenic vista here. And now if we go to the listing detail page for this property, I can just click here as a shortcut to get there.

Harley:

You can see that opens up in a new tab. And now in my listing photo section, you can see there is an additional button for panorama. If I click on that, it'll actually show me all of the panoramic photos I have uploaded to this listing. In this case, I have just the one; but if I had more than one, it would actually show a box for each one here. And then if I click on the photo here, it will open it up in the panoramic viewer.

Harley:

And you can see how cool this is. So, it opens it up. You can navigate it. I say navigate, but you can move around within the image using your mouse here. Or if you were using a mobile device and you were viewing this, as you moved your device around, you could actually see this move with your phone as if your phone, you're looking through a window into this image. So, that's kind of neat.

Harley:

And the other thing you can do is down here, there's some additional settings. So, I could click this to full screen it, which would make it fill up my screen depending on what size your monitor is. And then you can view a larger version of this image. Or I can click on this gear down here, and I have some additional options. So, right now it's on mouse control, which makes sense for what I'm using. But if I were using a mobile device, I might want this to be on sensor control, in which case it's using the gyroscope in the device so when I move my device around, it's moving me around within the image.

Harley:

And the next thing we have here is under mode. I'm on normal mode, so it's just basically displaying a box that has my panoramic image in it. But I could change this to Cardboard view. So if I was using a Google Cardboard or a VR headset, you can see that it will line up with the eye sockets, the eye holes on that device. So, it'll be like virtual reality. It'll act as if I'm there.

Harley:

And then lastly, we've got a stereoscopic mode. So, you can see it is two separate, slightly different images. You can see how they're a slightly different part of the image because it's designed, you're right eye would be seeing one. Your left eye would be seeing the other. This would be used for more dedicated VR headsets as opposed to the Google Cardboard view specifically which is designed to line up with the lens sizes in a Google Cardboard if you set one of those up, if you know what that is.

Harley:

But there you go. So, that is how you can add a panoramic image to any of your listings and then how your customers can get in and see those images online. And as I said, you can add more than one. So, you could have a whole series of panoramic images for different parts of the yard or different rooms within the property.

Harley:

So, there you go. Thank you very much, kind of a short one today. I'm keeping it easy on you. So, as always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, feel free to send an email into support@deltagroup.com, or give us a call and we can walk you through whatever functionality you'd like. And thank you very much. I will see you again next week.

Deal flow is the rate at which business proposals and pitches are received.

Investors, including investors in commercial real estate, use this as a general barometer of whether business is good or bad. The same term is also used, alongside lead generation, among real estate professionals focused on residential property. More referrals lead to better deal flow overall.

Leveraging marketing automation technology is a key step in accelerating real estate deal flow. Although there are many tools that can help, the cornerstone of any strategy is CRM. CRM, short for Customer Relationship Management, enhances visibility across your customer ecosystem.

A powerful all-in-one solution like DeltaNET™ 6 is no longer "nice to have"; it is an absolute must-have.

A CRM serves your needs in three powerful ways:

• It provides complete visibility into where your leads and current customers stand in their transactions
• It enables you to nurture your leads consistently using personalized email marketing and other tools
• It strengthens your ability to follow up with leads and past customers to get more deals and referrals

Not long ago, only a fraction of real estate agents used CRM. Now, the tottering old "technology stacks" of yore, built of a dozen apps that don't work together, are giving way to centralized solutions. By using CRM effectively, you benefit yourself and your clients.

When it comes to deal flow acceleration, a single technique can bring your business to the next level.

CRM-Based Audience Segmentation Improves Deal Flow Through Targeted, Personalized Messaging

Your email marketing list is one of your most valuable business assets.

That's because your list is packed with people who have a definite, pre-existing relationship with you and are amenable to hearing what you have to say. You have the power to significantly influence subscribers, making customer conversions more likely at times when they benefit you most.

You can also use the same resources to stay connected with past customers and acquire referrals.

But what's the best way to differentiate your messages so they remain relevant and welcome?

Audience segmentation means refining your email list by placing subscribers into sub-lists, called segments, that match up with your relationship and their interests. Using segmentation, you can make sure subscribers get only the most targeted and relevant information. That makes it more likely they'll take action.

5 Ways to Boost Your Monthly Deal Flow Using Audience Segmentation

There are many situations where segmentation creates better experiences for your contacts. Your CRM can turn your single list into a seamless collection of highly focused sub-lists in a matter of just minutes. That means you will get better ROI from your email drip campaigns and can expect a fuller schedule overall.

Let's look at some audience segments that can bolster your business:

• Past Customers
  Audience segmentation is particularly important when current customers close their deals and become past customers. They will no longer need content on negotiating a buy or finding financing, for example. You can keep the conversation flowing with these subscribers by sending them information on homeownership, DIY repair, decorating, and more. The more you know about their interests, the better.
  
  
• Cold Leads
  When leads have gone cold, it is a wise idea to activate a special sub-list for them. Use email in conjunction with text message marketing to re-ignite the conversation. If you can verify that someone is still looking for a home, then they return to your current leads list. Your cold leads list can leverage urgency and limited-time offers to spur action. If a lead remains cold for months, however, it is polite to pause messages and circle back later.
  
  
• "Love List"
  Your "Love List" consists of your customers who have demonstrated they were not just satisfied with your work, but thrilled. For example, they might have given you 5-star reviews on multiple platforms without you even raising the subject. They deserve a special list category because you will want to pepper your messaging with personalized check-ins. It is okay to ask your Love List for referrals several times a year!
  
  
• Open House Attendees
  Open house registrants who actually show up are clearly on their way to a purchase — the question is when they'll find the right home for them. Follow up with attendees you don't hear from right away, using a text, call, email, or even a social media message to see what they thought of the property.
  
  
• Open House No-Shows
  Open house no-shows can stay on a list segment, ensuring they get future invitations to local events. But you should also touch base to see if you can find out what happened. Did other commitments come up, or was the house a dud? If you've done a virtual tour, be sure to send the link.

Contact us at Delta Media Group to unlock the power of marketing automation.

Stubborn listings are no fun for sellers — or for their real estate agents!

It's well-known that as a listing sits on the market, it becomes less likely to capture an attractive offer. The ideal is to move a listing within 30 days. The longer it waits, the more likely buyers will assume something is wrong with it. At the dreaded 90 days, relisting is nearly inevitable.

There are two situations where agents need to be especially wary about idle listings:

• Markets that strongly favor buyers, especially when there's plenty of housing stock
• Overheated markets where voracious sellers price themselves into the stratosphere

Before a listing even goes on the market, pricing it to sell is one of the most valuable services an agent can offer. Sellers can easily overestimate the value of a home for sentimental reasons or just because the market seems to offer them a big payday. Agents need to step in, look at recent sales, and make the facts clear.

But sometimes, even when price is aligned with market conditions, a home simply won't sell.

This is highly frustrating for sellers, and it's also one of the situations most likely to lead to a bad review – never a fun prospect. Sometimes, there may be many factors outside your control making the road ahead difficult for your listing. The key is to seize on what's in your area of influence and course correct as soon as you can.

Let's look at some of the most effective ways to do it:

• Update the Staging
  Staged homes generally sell for more money and do so within a shorter amount of time. A staged home is more enticing than a vacant one because it lets buyers exercise their imagination about how they will use the space. Take care to optimize every room, highlighting the features you want buyers to focus their attention on.
  
  
• Improve the Curb Appeal
  In this era of Google Maps, you can bet would-be buyers will be checking up and down the street before they even register for an open house. Curb appeal always counts, whether that means doing some extra lawn work, landscaping, or revitalizing the exterior with a fresh coat of paint. The ROI can be exceptionally high!
  
  
• Make Sure Your Photos Are Quality
  A listing is judged by its photos, and the surging quality of photography in most listings means you need to keep up. Many real estate agents are partnering with professional photographers. Get crisp, clear shots of each room and every angle of the exterior, ideally featuring the same locales at several different times of the day.
  
  
• Fix Specific Issues with the Home
  Some sellers are perplexed to learn that they can't simply list a home "as-is" and hope for the best. Buyers not only regard such properties with suspicion but many are bound to get a home inspection anyway — lenders require it. Carefully raise the subject of repairs, especially if the roof, sewer system, or wiring is involved.
  
  
• Leverage Social Media and Social Ads
  Social media can give a listing a fresh burst of attention even when it's outside that ideal 30-day window. If you have exhausted your options on Facebook (or LinkedIn, if it's a luxury property), consider busting out a secret weapon: Facebook advertising can help you tap into a wider local audience for your listing.
  
  
• Excite Buyers with Live Video
  Live video is another great way to unlock the power of social media. You can stream a complete virtual tour of the property through Facebook or Instagram. To pep up your listing for visitors who miss your stream, consider using a tool like Properties in Motion for branded, shareable video with built-in tracking.
  
  
• Host More Open Houses
  To create more value for today's sellers, agents need to be prepared for open houses in all their forms. Know when to pivot from traditional face-to-face events to virtual open houses and when to combine the two. Open houses can revive a flagging listing, as the right buyer has the opportunity to make an offer on the spot!
  
  
• Use Seller Reports
  If your seller's morale collapses, then the listing is as good as doomed. It's understandable for sellers to worry, so head them off at the pass with resources that will show them the progress they've made. Customized seller reports consolidate everything you've done for a listing into a single view.
  
  
• Restart Your Marketing Cycle
  Once you've consulted with your seller and committed to making some of the changes above, kickstart your marketing cycle again with an updated listing — with or without actually re-listing. Revise your collateral and get a fresh perspective on the property by emphasizing its new advantages. And, of course, don't give up!

Contact us to learn more about digital real estate marketing.

For years, CloudDelta™ has been a great resource for easily sharing secure files quickly with your team. It helps your company save time, money, and valuable resources when all the documents you need are accessible in DeltaNET 6™, the all-in-one solution for your real estate businesses.

Delta Media Group's secure cloud-based management tool ensures you don't need to email large documents to your agents, and you don't need to worry about yet another third-party system you have to support — with one login, you have all the tools you need for digital success.

Here are some of the features CloudDelta™ users already know:

• Only pay for the storage your business needs.
• Administrators control which files your team has access to. Have peace of mind knowing users can only access and see files they should.
• Reports showing all files in the system, when files were last updated, and how many times they've been downloaded.
• Create your own YouTube video library. Share all of your training videos in one location.
• Easily find files via any web browser. The built-in file quick search makes it simple to find files and folders by name or keyword.
• Bookmark and share useful websites with your company. Keep a list of helpful, industry-important sites for your entire company all in one location and always up-to-date.

At Delta Media Group, we strive to bring our clients the best products, which is why we're constantly listening to feedback and thinking of ways to make improvements. Even when we think we have something great, we acknowledge our products will evolve over time, as everything does. With CloudDelta™, we've targeted some areas where we could improve form and function, and we're happy to announce this tool is getting a big update!

Here are upgrades coming to CloudDelta™ you can get excited about!

• Updated, modern interface.
• Larger thumbnails and "back create" thumbnails for all files.
• List view and gallery view options.
• Tree view support.
• File path view for files as they are being viewed.
• Faster searching.
• Favorite files and have a favorites section.
• The ability to view files (Presenter Mode) more easily.

We look forward to the feedback from these upgrades. If you have questions about getting the most out of your real estate technology, contact us today.

Most homeowners would be glad to work with their real estate agent again — but they never do.

It's true. The average homeowner will own three or four properties in a lifetime, with most purchases spaced out between three and seven years. But even when they are thrilled with the service their real estate agent offered, they often end up using a different one for every transaction.

How can this be?

Some of the reasons are purely logistical. If someone is moving across the country, odds are they connect with a real estate agent in their desired area as one of their first steps. But there is a bigger reason: traditional real estate marketing is focused on customer acquisition, not retention.

Customer acquisition can be an all-consuming part of any real estate agent's first year on the job.

After that, it's important to start building referral business. This means you can spend less time going after that next client and more time building the long-term assets you need for the kind of firm you really want. In the long run, retention is easier than acquisition, which can cost 25x more.

Long-term engagement is the key. And it can start with the clients you have right now.

Long-Term Engagement Turns Customers into Allies for the Life of Your Business

According to research from 2018, real estate agents are among the least trusted professions in America.

In fact, only 11% of respondents consider real estate agents trustworthy, placing them above only politicians and car salespeople. Responses varied by region, with those out west feeling most suspicion of the profession.

That's bad news, of course. But it means that when someone finds a real estate agent they trust, they don't really want to start over again from scratch. By recognizing and working with that reality, you can create lasting loyalty. That, in turn, has the potential to multiply the value of every customer relationship you hold.

Getting more transactions from a single customer is an obvious example. You could double or triple lifetime value from your customers if they keep coming back to you every time they're ready to buy a new property. But that's not all: you can also get dozens of referrals from each customer over the lifetime of your practice. From that perspective, having even a handful of strong relationships could drive your revenue goals for years.

After all, long before you have the opportunity to meet a client-in-waiting, that same person is expressing their desire to buy a home. . . to their family, their friends, and to just about everyone they know other than you.

Referral business is a hot ticket, letting you be the very first real estate agent to talk to any buyer or seller. That positions you to build trust and continue the cycle, helping more people while growing your business.

Set the Stage for Long-Term Engagement with Digital Marketing and Smart Follow-Up

Real estate digital marketing becomes easier than ever when you adopt the right technology. Good technology doesn't get in the way of relationships; it makes them easier — allowing you to check in with people in helpful, meaningful ways without wasting lots of time on data entry.

Here's how you can strengthen client relationships into real bonds of trust:

• Have a Consistent Plan for Following Up
  Everyone has their own schedule when it comes to following up with happy clients. It's not unusual to follow up with clients four times in the 12 months after their transaction, including on their closing day anniversary and New Year's. Some agents aim to follow up once a month. Whatever suits you best, have a plan and stick to it.
  
  
• Share Content Related to Home Ownership
  A blog is one of the most crucial features of your real estate website. To give you topics to talk about with your clients after move-in, consider creating content around homeownership topics. Maintenance, DIY, decorating, and more are all on the table and mean you can send useful content to the right clients.
  
  
• Use a CRM to Make Things Easier on You
  The DeltaNET™ 6 all-in-one solution for real estate centralizes everything you know about your clients. It gives you access to your whole history at a glance, no matter if someone is a new lead, in progress toward closing, or a satisfied customer. This saves time and keeps your contacts relevant.
  
  
• Treat Customers to Pleasant Surprises
  Relationships between people are built on sharing pleasant experiences and learning more about each other over time. You can put a little brightness into a customer's day with a handwritten note, a small gift, a coupon, or many other surprises. If they've opted in, real estate text messaging can be effective, too.

Contact us to learn more about how digital marketing fuels better relationships.

Millennials are still the largest, most active generation of homebuyers, but they are no longer the youngest. That distinction goes to Gen Z buyers, who are entering the real estate market for the first time and will represent a rapidly growing generation of buyers in the coming years. They count on real estate agents to help guide them through their first home purchase, which is why it's so important to learn what makes these young buyers tick.

The Newest Generation of Homebuyers

According to the latest data from the National Association of REALTORS®, Gen Z makes up about two percent of homebuyers in 2021 — but don't let that small number fool you. A few years ago, millennials were a small fraction of the market, and now they're the largest group of buyers. While they're adept at conducting general real estate research online, more than 90 percent of young buyers and sellers rely on their agent to guide them through the complicated process of purchasing their first home.

Gen Z homebuyers are very comfortable using tools like virtual tours and virtual open houses to research homes. Many of them have entered the market for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic, so they've had no choice but to rely even more than usual on virtual tools. This generation of homebuyers is typically very active on social media and uses a wide variety of technological tools to stay in touch. They value home locations that provide a short commute to work, neighborhoods with plenty to do, and homes that they can grow into long-term.

From their agent, they want consistent communication, integrity, expert guidance, honesty, and attentive help with all of the details of closing the deal. With inventory low in many markets, they also count on their agent for help identifying homes that match their needs in their target neighborhoods. They value the experience that agents can provide during negotiations, especially in markets where most homes for sale generate multiple offers. So they're looking for many of the same things as buyers from other generations, but with the added needs that come with being a first-time homebuyer in an unprecedented time for real estate.

How DeltaNET™6 Can Help You Connect with Young Homebuyers

As the number of Gen Z homebuyers continues to rise, it's crucial to have the expertise to guide them through the process of purchasing their first home, along with the right tools to both earn their business and provide them with the best service possible. That's where DeltaNET™6 shines as a real estate all-in-one solution that helps you provide young homebuyers with everything they need to succeed.

• Easily Keep Track of Client Needs and Data
  As first-time homebuyers, your Gen Z clients will have different needs than those of more experienced buyers. At its core, your real estate CRM should be the perfect place to keep track of client needs, store key data, and have everything that you need available when you need it.
  
  
• Simplify the Home Search with Virtual Open Houses and Showings
  Gen Z buyers have become accustomed to using virtual tours, open houses, and showings to learn more about homes during the last year-plus. Even if they eventually visit their top-choice homes in person, virtual tools make it easier to narrow their list of options. So it's important to have a CRM that makes it easy to integrate high-quality open houses and showings.
  
  
• Custom Content and Market Watch Reports Keep Buyers Informed
  Position yourself as the local real estate expert with custom content that showcases your markets, keeps Gen Z homebuyers up to date on the latest trends, and helps them stay informed. Quality content builds trust, is great for SEO, and helps you connect with the many buyers who rely upon online research to learn about real estate.
  
  
• Build an Online Presence That Attracts Gen Z Homebuyers
  A reliable website that offers a seamless experience on all devices is crucial to connecting with all buyers and sellers, including Gen Z. Choose from dozens of mobile responsive themes and completely customizable website designs that showcase the best of your business. Integrate the features that buyers want most, connect your website with your social media presence, and make it easy for homebuyers to search through all of your listings with custom filters.

While Gen Z homebuyers have their own unique preferences and processes, they are ultimately looking for many of the same things from a home — and a real estate agent — as the generations of young buyers that came before them. With the right tools, the right approach, and a deep understanding of the latest trends in the communities where you do business, you can become a go-to resource for Gen Z homebuyers in your market.

Social media is one of the best tools for real estate agents to build a stand-out digital brand. Research shows real estate professionals are some of the most active voices on social media. Some acquire 30% of their online leads or even more from social channels.

Of course, some haven't seen the results they want just yet.

When you're new to social media, it can be tough to see the connection between a tweet or hashtag and a client meeting on your calendar. But that doesn't mean the potential isn't there, hidden just under the surface.

With the right methods, you can make social media work for you.

Social Media Automation Makes it Easier to Achieve Real Business Value

There's a simple formula for deciding what should be automated.

If something is important, but low-yield . . . automate it!

The more you can automate basic processes that underlie your business, the easier it will be to scale and grow in the future. Real estate marketing is the most natural place to enjoy all the benefits of automation — and because social media can consume so much time, it just may be the prime candidate.

It's easy to get off on the wrong foot with social media when you feel you need to watch it like a hawk.

Social media platforms encourage this level of reactivity. After all, for every minute you spend scrolling your social media feed, advertisers on the platform have the opportunity to sell something to you. Social media automation helps uncouple the bottom-line benefits from the "Fear of Missing Out."

Here are some ways to manage your social media more effectively:

• Pick the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Business Goals
  It seems like a new social media platform bursts onto the scene every month or so. Even if you focus on only the biggest and best, however, not all of them fit into the real estate world. Facebook is the leading all-purpose option, while LinkedIn is great for connecting with luxury buyers. Instagram is the home of the top real estate photography. You can use Facebook Connector and LinkedIn Connector for automated, event-driven posts.
  
  
• Time Your Social Media Posts to Capture Audience Attention
  Every social media network moves at its own pace. For something like Facebook, it may be okay to post a few times a week and still get the results you want. For Twitter, the situation is reversed: The feed scrolls by so fast that posting multiple times a day is a must. Whatever platform you use, be sure to schedule and time your posts for maximum audience activity in your area — the prime hours are lunchtime, after work, and weekends.
  
  
• Share on Social Media Consistently to Get Seen More Often
  Consistency is king on social media. Since you can never be 100% sure that any one specific follower will see a given post, you need to create multiple opportunities to catch their attention. Come up with a figure for daily and weekly posts and stick with it. Get used to sharing older posts more than once — many followers won't have seen them the first time, and you might put the right content in front of someone at the perfect moment.
  
  
• Use Relevant Hashtags for Your Specialty, Area, and Brand
  Hashtags are specialized topic markers that render posts easier to find on a social platform's search function. Not surprisingly, the most common hashtag in the industry is #RealEstate. Tagging your posts makes it more likely that buyers and sellers in your local area will see you even if they're not looking for you. As your brand becomes well-known, you can start to pepper in branded hashtags for customers to use.
  
  
• Monitor and Respond to Comments on Your Social Posts
  Social media is so enticing in part because it's responsive. You should take the chance to answer any questions or comments people send you, whether directly on your posts or within their own feed. Yes, this rule goes for negative comments, too: Your professionalism leaves a lasting impression on anyone who might read them in the future. Once a good conversation is rolling along, you can switch to direct messages to talk business.
  
  
• Use the Rest of Your Digital Marketing to Your Advantage
  You can use social media to create a virtuous cycle that improves the rest of your digital marketing. If you are using email marketing drip campaigns, you're empowered to promote your social media on your emails and share your best email content on your social feed. The same is true for the terrific content you've been writing for your blog or anything else helpful and informative on your real estate website.

Contact us to learn more about using social media automation to help your business thrive.

We talk about CRM's every single day in our business. The importance of using one, how to clean up contacts, the benefit of email marketing strategies. Having automations empowering your business with tools like our Social Media Connector for automated posts running to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter can make your entire business life easier. What I wanted to share today is how to actually utilize that type of software in ways that will deliver even more tangible results.

Digital marketing might sound complicated, but it doesn't have to be.

Today's digital marketing is inbound, meaning it attracts leads the moment they are most in need of your services. With that in mind, every piece of online marketing you do should help your target buyers or sellers reach their goals. Understand this and you're halfway to success.

What can give digital marketing a feeling of complexity is the wide variety of techniques involved. However, it's not necessary to be everything to everyone. You can focus in on a smaller selection of marketing methods you perform consistently. Plus, real estate marketing automation lets you do more faster. When you dig a little deeper, you discover digital marketing can be easy.

Digital marketing approaches usually fall into one of two categories:

• You can do them in a few minutes to make a little bit of progress every day; OR
• They take a little bit longer, but offer long-term returns through higher visibility

Knowing that, marketing's dual nature becomes obvious: marketing itself is a marathon, but it can be broken down into a series of sprints. Those sprints, in turn, are easier to stick with and produce real results. As you gain more momentum, marketing develops into a series of habits.

Let's cut through the clutter and look at some effective digital marketing methods:

• Accurate, Detailed Customer Profiles
  Every piece of marketing is "for" someone. Before you can even start working on a marketing campaign, you should zoom in on precisely who your ideal customer is. What are their pain points? What level have they reached in their career, education, and family goals? As you meet more clients, add more details to your customer profile. Soon, you will have a character who effectively represents most of your target audience.
  
  
• A Modern Real Estate Website
  A website is imperative in any business these days, but it's especially important in real estate. The majority of your future customers will find you online, and the number of buyers who start their search that way is only growing. A real estate website needs to be visually compelling, simple to use, and designed for smartphone compatibility. From there, the sky's the limit on expressing your brand creatively through the digital medium.
  
  
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  Your website is your foundation. Once you have it, you need to build! The way is Search Engine Optimization. SEO consists of a number of valuable best practices in website design, but the one real estate agents should know best is keyword research. Keywords reflect the actual search queries your future customers use. Knowing and using these phrases throughout your website and content elevates your search engine visibility.
  
  
• Email Marketing Drip Campaigns
  Email marketing has the potential to deliver the highest ROI of any individual marketing tactic. To set up a drip campaign, you first entice visitors to join your email list – by offering them a local market report in exchange for their email, for example – then send helpful, informative email messages every week. This cultivates a long-term relationship and positions you as a trusted adviser. You can set it up in minutes through DeltaNet 6.
  
  
• Blogging and Content Marketing
  Blogging every week may be the most powerful way to raise your online visibility and get noticed when people search for topics related to your expertise. Yes, every blog you write should be imbued with the right keywords, reflecting relevant, high-traffic search topics. Just as crucial is your ability to communicate actionable advice about navigating the real estate market tailor-made for the concerns in your customer profile.
• Text Message Marketing
  Text message marketing for real estate has signs of being the next big thing. The average person reads more than 90% of all texts directed to them and is much more likely to respond to a text than an email. Since texting is a more personal form of communication, it lets you get into a real conversation with your leads. It's especially notable for its ability to warm up cold and lapsed leads, motivating them to move forward sooner.
  
  
• Consistent, Relevant Social Media
  Social media stands apart from the rest. Many people imagine that to master it, they need to be everywhere at once. Not so with the right digital marketing automation tools. Facebook Connector and LinkedIn Connector allow you to update your social media instantly when newsworthy events happen: new listings, updates, open houses, and much more. You can get all the benefits of social media without scrolling your feed all day long!

Marketing has many moving parts — but with the right technology, most of them can "move" themselves.

Delta Media Group makes the best in marketing automation accessible to everyone, from solo entrepreneurs to nationwide brokerages. To learn more, contact us.

According to the National Association of REALTORS®, 93 percent of real estate clients from all generations rely on real estate websites as a primary source of information when buying or selling a home. How does your real estate website stack up to the competition? In order to capitalize on the immense online interest in all things real estate, there are some essential features that every real estate website should have. With the right mix of features, content, and smart design, you can turn your website into a constant, reliable source of leads for your real estate business.

• Responsive Mobile Design
  One more interesting statistic from the NAR: 76 percent of all buyers found their next home using a mobile device. And that number is even higher for Millenial and Gen X home buyers. So if you want to maximize the potential of your real estate website, it needs to look and function as great on mobile devices as it does on bigger screens. Responsive mobile design allows your website to scale to any screen size and makes it easy for website visitors to access key features on any device.

• IDX Listing Integration and Convenient Search Filters
  While many website features pique visitors' interest, the number one reason most people visit real estate websites is to search for listings that match their needs. So IDX listing integration is absolutely essential for any real estate website. It's also important to make sure that people can filter their search based on the features they want in a home to easily fall in love with homes that match their needs.

• Informative Real Estate Content
  Informative, educational real estate content is key to informing website visitors, demonstrating your expertise, and showing them why you're the right choice for their real estate needs. Whether you maintain a real estate blog, post video content on a reliable schedule, put together information-rich infographics, or ideally all of the above, your content provides a window into what potential clients can expect from your real estate business. Clients especially appreciate content that answers real estate questions, helps them overcome challenges, and dives deep into what buyers can expect when purchasing homes in the markets where you do business.

• Social Proof and Social Media Integration
  Social proof is one of the best ways to turn website visitors into clients by showing them exactly why your current clients love your real estate business. Featuring testimonials from current clients is a great way to showcase what you have to offer and show prospects the quality of service they can expect when choosing you for their real estate needs. It's also important to make it easy to find all of your social media feeds so people can seamlessly connect and engage with your business on their favorite social media platforms.

• Neighborhood Guides for Home Shoppers
  While making it easy to search for homes is a great start, it's also crucial to help buyers learn more about the neighborhoods where those homes are located. Neighborhood guides are a great way to help buyers get acquainted with your neighborhoods while finding locations with the attractions, services, amenities, and characteristics that match their needs. Your blog posts and video content are also great places to go deeper into what local neighborhoods have to offer by highlighting local attractions, dining destinations, traditions, events, and anything else interesting about those neighborhoods.

• Lead Capture, Calls to Action, and Subscription Forms
  With great content, IDX integration, responsive design, and social proof, you already have many of the ingredients that will help turn curious website visitors into strong leads for your business. Now it's time to capitalize on all of those important features by capturing leads and encouraging website visitors to take the next step. It's important to include calls to action throughout your website that encourage people to take that next step, add forms that make it easy for visitors to subscribe to your newsletters, and provide incentives for them to learn more about what you have to offer.

• Uncluttered Layout and Intuitive Navigation
  All of the great features on a website are only valuable if visitors can easily find them. Making it easy to find everything will also encourage them to stick around on your website for longer periods of time. Avoid cluttering any one page with too much information, and make sure that visitors can easily, intuitively navigate all of the features that your website offers.

While there are essential features that every real estate website should have, there are also many different ways to customize your website within that framework. With the right mix of features and design, your website can be a major asset for your brand. Contact us today to learn how to make the most of your website.

The central challenge of real estate marketing is serving more people without losing the human touch.

Many real estate agents are solo performers. As their business scales up, increasing headcount isn't an option. Instead, they need to find ways to utilize their resources more efficiently. The most cost-effective approach in modern real estate is automation, especially digital marketing automation.

And automation isn't only for one-agent shows.

Teams of any size can achieve more by taking a hands-off approach to repetitious but necessary tasks. That's indispensable to having more time and energy for what really matters. By accelerating what you can achieve in one day, you are prevented from falling into the trap of working ever-increasing hours as business grows.

In other words, real estate marketing automation is the key to work-life balance. It's also one of the most versatile assets you can have at your disposal.

Real Estate Marketing Automation Helps Your Business Scale Effortlessly

If more real estate marketing meant you had to "turn the crank" more every day, the result would be a disaster:

• Some real estate agents would end up working themselves to exhaustion doing more over time
• Others would make marketing a secondary priority that would almost never get into a schedule

But marketing is a crucial part of growing your presence in the community. Without it, you can easily end up chasing referrals for years to come. The alternative is building a steady stream of leads that will find their way to your website at the precise moment they're most interested in what you have to offer.

In effect, automated real estate marketing plants seeds that come to fruition over time to enhance your results.

Let's look at some of the most significant ways it can change your work life for the better:

• Social Media Automation
  Across all industries, real estate professionals are some of the most active contributors to social media. Posting every day is essential to raising your visibility, but it can also cost you hours of your day. Trigger-based social media automation allows you to instantly update your accounts when you have a new listing, listing change, a showing, or other event. Facebook Connector and LinkedIn Connector make it easy.
  
  
• Automated Email Drip Campaigns
  As the housing market ebbs and flows, it can close the taps on leads who might have been inches from reaching out to you. How can you stay in touch in the weeks and months it might take them to make a decision — and make sure you're the agent they finally choose? Helpful, informative content released in an automated "drip" email campaign positions you as a trusted advisor. DeltaNET 6 is your center of excellence for automated email.
  
  
• Text Message Marketing
  Text messaging has the potential to be more responsive and more personal than virtually any other option. It lets you get into fast-moving conversations where you can build genuine insight into your leads and customers. Open rates for text message marketing are through the roof, and it might take only a few minutes to spark a genuine rapport with someone who has just expressed interest in what you can do for them.
  
  
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  Do you know where each of your leads stands in the buyer journey? Do you know exactly what's next for every single one of your customers? Keeping track can task your memory to the breaking point, but exceptional customer care depends on it. Delta Media Group's all-in-one real estate solution takes the heavy lifting off your shoulders. It ties in with all your other tools, so you always have the most accurate information available. Orchestrating follow-up is a snap!
  
  
• Content Marketing
  Content marketing helps you capture preferential positions in online searches related to your business. Whether you work predominantly with buyers or sellers, Millennials or Empty Nesters, content marketing reduces friction by answering leads' burning questions. My Customer for Life newsletters combine the best of blogging and email marketing, ensuring leads will actually look forward to reading your emails.
  
  
• Market Reports
  It can take days or even weeks to manually compile an overview of your local real estate market, and in that time, so much can change! Market Watch Reports are branded reports that make it easier for your clients to make informed decisions. They can be generated in minutes and are always up to date. Sellers are especially eager to see the impact of their campaign, so Seller Reports are the answer built right into DeltaNET 6.

Real Estate Marketing Automation Is a True Game-Changer

If you're not using real estate marketing automation, you could end up working morning through night and still falling behind. Luckily, the best automation technology — especially for real estate — is within your reach. Contact us to learn more and get started today.

The valuation of a home is essential to buyers and sellers alike. A property's valuation determines its taxes, influences insurance rates, and plays the biggest role in capping how much even the best-qualified buyers may borrow. For smooth financing, the valuation of a home must be established well in advance — and above all, it must be accurate.

In the past, it wasn't unusual for a professional appraiser to spend dozens of hours working on a single report. Sophisticated valuation processes apply to residential and commercial properties and must consider dozens of factors describing the market and neighborhood.

Sound valuation isn't just about today; it's also an informed projection of a property's future state. This is why, for example, home inspections that turn up problems with plumbing or wiring can have a devastating impact on the appraised value of the home and its financing until the problem is resolved.

Real estate agents are most familiar with the sales comparison method of property valuation. Here, the value of a property is determined with reference to similar local properties that sold recently. Depending on a home's amenities, it may be priced higher or slightly lower than the average.

In 2020, Delta Media Group made it easier than ever for brokerages to provide accurate and informative market intelligence to their clients. Our Recently Sold map enables would-be sellers to get an instant sense of relevant activity in their local market, helping them make informed decisions.

This map tool is part of our AVM (Automated Valuation Model) toolkit, a crucial feature in DeltaNET 6. AVM allows you to quickly and accurately determine property values — all while appealing to the natural curiosity sellers feel as they start to examine the market.

With new AI-driven features, this all-in-one valuation center of excellence is getting better and better.

Delta's AVM Platform Empowers You to Connect and Inform

Word-of-mouth and Fear of Missing Out are often major factors when sellers first start to explore the market. But anecdotes from friends and neighbors can lead them in the wrong direction. They need a clear picture of what's truly happening in their area — and a real estate expert like you to provide it.

Not that long ago, a relatively simple sales comparison in one neighborhood would take days: finding "comps," getting recent sales information, eliminating outliers, and more. With AVM, you can go beyond, harnessing the power of a machine learning engine that seamlessly examines thousands of data points.

Yes, thousands!

Delta Media Group's AVM Platform strives to be the most powerful in the real estate industry, putting you on an even footing with your large, established competitors. Our AVM Platform redefines the game with information your current and future customers can trust, direct from you as their local real estate expert.

In response to the pandemic, we've added features and expanded the most popular ones:

• More User-Friendly Interface
  The easier a piece of technology is to use, the more benefit you'll get from it. Using feedback from professionals like you, we refined the AVM report for superior scannability and data curation. You'll easily see residential market trends at a glance, including average property asking price.
  
  
• Hyper-Specific Market Data
  Your local insight is what differentiates you as a real estate expert. Our AVM Market Conditions section gives you all the deep details that once took days to uncover: active listings, average days on the market, closed sales, and months of supply. You'll never miss a beat in your neighborhood.
  
  
• Constantly Evolving AVM Response
  Ours is the only AVM artificial intelligence tool on the market that's always growing and improving. Every time there's a sale, purchase, or listing update of any kind, it learns more and more. This groundbreaking AI is truly self-learning, so you can pass on the most useful advice to your clients.
  
  
• Complete Workflow Integration
  We've re-engineered how the AVM process works behind the scenes to ensure a fully integrated experience for the most common real estate workflows. In particular, we have upgraded our AVM to deliver unbeatable results when used in conjunction with DeltaNET 6's robust comparative market analysis capabilities.
  
  
• Excellence at Lower Costs
  If your goal is to reduce redundancies and save money on third-party providers, the DeltaNET 6 AVM is the right move for you. Our tools are aligned with your business requirements, allowing individuals and teams to do more than ever before without adding overhead.

The real estate market moves fast, and a comparative analysis process that takes days could give sellers the wrong impression. With the DeltaNET 6 AVM, you and your clients will always have the best, most accurate, and most comprehensive real estate data for all your pricing needs.

Contact us today to find out more or get started.

Old leads can be a valuable source of new business, but reconnecting does require a mix of touch, tact, and timing. Reconnecting with those old leads is an especially good idea right now, with so many buyers and sellers who put their real estate plans on hold in the last year now looking to get those plans back on track with the help of the right real estate agent. With a good action plan in place, you can heat up those old leads and show them why you're the best choice for their real estate needs.

Take Steps to Ensure That You're Always Ready to Reconnect

Every lead has potential, even if they're not ready to buy or sell right this second. That's why it's so important to learn about your leads and make sure that you have key information ready for when the time is right. When you engage with a lead, note their preferences in your real estate CRM even if they're not ready to take the next step right now. Learn about what types of homes they're interested in if they're a buyer, what their timeline is for buying or selling, and what's motivating them to explore their real estate options.

How Email Marketing Can Help You Reconnect with Old Leads

Email marketing is a great way to keep leads engaged, and the AI-driven campaigns in DeltaNET 6 can help you make sure that your leads are getting the right content at the right time. When you identify an older lead that may now be ready to take the next steps, a personalized email can help you reestablish lines of communication:

• For buyers, check in to see whether they're still searching for a home, and remind them of the value you can offer in helping them find the right match. If they indicate interest, then find out what type of home they're looking for, where they're shopping, and whether they have a real estate agent helping them with the process. If they still need an agent, the next step is setting up a virtual or in-person meeting to provide advice and earn their business.
  
  
• For sellers, the same steps apply when you first reconnect. If they're currently interested in selling and don't have an agent, then an up-to-date market analysis for their home can be a great way to show them you're the agent they can trust to help them achieve their goals. Give them some time to review the CMA, then follow up to answer questions and help them plan what to do next.

Get Social to Learn about Leads and Reconnect

When it comes to both lead generation and re-engagement, social media has tremendous value. If you've connected with an old lead via a social in the past, their social activity can provide valuable insight into when the time is right to reconnect. And even if you don't scout social to find out what leads are up to, social platforms are still an easy way to open lines of communication.

• In addition to helping you learn about leads, social media is a great tool for allowing leads to learn more about what you have to offer. Use the social media tools in DeltaNET 6 to maintain an active presence on the biggest social platforms and seamlessly integrate your social feeds into your real estate website, so you'll always be ready to show your value when you reconnect with a lead.
  
  
• When you initially connect with a lead, note their social media preferences. A Twitter DM or Facebook message could be the perfect way to connect with one lead but may never be seen by another lead who isn't active on a particular platform.

Offer Something in Return and Always Follow Up

Reconnecting with a lead is a great first step, but they may still need a little nurturing before they're ready to make a decision. Offering targeted, valuable real estate content that speaks to their needs is a powerful way to show your value and incentivize them to continue the conversation. No matter how you reconnect with an old lead, always remember to follow up. Your first contact can help create interest, but it may take more outreach before they're truly ready to buy or sell a home.

Do You Have the Right Real Estate CRM to Maximize Your Leads?

The right real estate tool is a huge component in both generating new leads and reconnecting with old ones. Do you have all of the tools you need to generate new business? Contact us to learn more about how DeltaNET 6 can help you take your business to the next level.

Social proof is one of the most important elements of your real estate marketing mix because testimonials and reviews play a key role in helping potential clients decide which real estate company to choose. When a prospect can easily find out what satisfied clients have to say about your business, they will have more confidence that they can trust your agents to help them achieve their own real estate goals. If you've been wondering how to make the most of the testimonials that your business earns, you've come to the right place. Let's take a closer look at maximizing your testimonials and using social proof to earn new business.

How to Maximize Your Testimonials

• What Testimonials Are and Why They Matter
  Maximizing the value of testimonials requires an understanding of why they are so important for potential clients who are researching real estate businesses. When someone is shopping for or planning to sell a house, there's a natural level of anxiety that comes with such a major decision. While other elements of your marketing are sure to pique their interest, there's nothing like the real words of a satisfied client to help soothe that anxiety. They're the modern version of word of mouth, providing a natural way to build trust and eradicate doubts for prospects.
  
  
• The Best Testimonials Include Specifics
  Getting the most from your testimonials starts with knowing what to ask for, and details are key. A very general testimonial that simply says your business is great to work with doesn't have the same value as a more specific testimonial that details exactly why and how you helped that client achieve their goals.
  
  So when you ask for testimonials, don't be shy about requesting details. Ask specific questions about why they chose your business, how you helped them overcome challenges, what surprised them about the process, and what their favorite part was about working with your team. The client giving the testimonial likely had their own concerns about the real estate process initially, so showing how you helped them overcome their concerns and challenges is a compelling form of marketing for prospects who may share the same concerns.
  
  
• Showcase Your Testimonials Front and Center
  To earn a glowing testimonial from a client, your agents had to do a great job of helping that client with their real estate needs. That's certainly something worth celebrating! When you get a great testimonial, make sure that it's showcased prominently — ideally on the home page of your real estate website. You can also create a landing page dedicated entirely to testimonials to display all the best ones in a convenient location. Integration of testimonials is a dependable way to add value to your website and increase conversions.
  
  
• Authenticity Matters
  Social proof works best when it's authentic, and that's certainly true for testimonials. Prospects will encounter many heavily edited or even fabricated testimonials during their research and will tune out those that don't feel authentic. A testimonial that includes specific details and examples will feel much more authentic than a more general, impersonal example.
  
  
• Add a Name and Face to Testimonials
  If you want an easy way to increase authenticity, try adding a photo of the client to the testimonial (with the client's permission, of course). Being able to pair a face with the name at the end of the testimonial helps build trust. You can even take your social proof to the next level by requesting video testimonials. While recording testimonials does add some extra work, it's worth the effort. A video testimonial is an incredibly powerful form of social proof, and it's tough to top the authenticity of a client talking directly to the camera about your business.
  
  
• Integrate Testimonials Throughout Your Real Estate Marketing
  In order to maximize the value of your testimonials, you need to maximize the chances for prospects to see them. So while displaying them on your website is a great start, you will also want to sprinkle them in with the rest of your real estate marketing. Start by sharing them to your social feeds and encouraging other clients to engage in the comments with their own experiences. You can add testimonials to your profile on many of the most popular national real estate websites and integrate them with your email marketing. Don't be afraid to innovate and find new places to display your best testimonials.

Maximizing your testimonials is so much easier with the right real estate marketing team on your side, and we'd love to help you make the most of all your marketing tools. Contact us to learn more about DeltaNET 6 and how we can help you grow your business and take your real estate marketing to the next level.

Real estate has changed quickly over the last year. There are new technologies and new marketing techniques. Some of them leverage trends that were already percolating in the background, accelerated by the pandemic. Others are all-new, the byproduct of the collective ingenuity and creativity of a highly adaptive industry.

Whatever the case, real estate's evolution won't end with COVID-19. On the contrary, agents and brokers should prepare for a fresh era of change — one in which they'll need to draw on recent lessons while connecting with how they can best communicate their unique value to clients.

That's because the time is now to start Zillowproofing your business.

Big or Small, 2021 Is Pivotal to Zillowproofing Your Real Estate Future

Zillow is no longer "just" a place for listings — it's a real competitor.

But don't panic! Zillow has a big budget and even bigger aspirations, but you have competitive advantages that it can never take away. More than that, it can't even come close to replicating them.

Only local real estate pros can:

• Develop deep and personal relationships with their leads and clients and maintain them for years
• Deliver the highest quality of responsive, professional service to help clients navigate transactions
• Recognize and respond to changes, both individually and within your community, and react fast
• Craft a brand narrative that attracts your own ideal customers, not just "anyone and everyone."

In sectors of the economy from accountancy to roofing and everywhere in between, motivated professionals and small or mid-sized brands have always found ways to compete successfully with "the big guy." Zillow's brand recognition is a double-edged sword: millions of would-be clients will soon be turning up their noses at the name everyone knows and looking for a local real estate expert who truly cares about their needs.

Meet (and Beat) Zillow on Your Terms: 7 Ways to Get Started Now

• Leverage Customer Relationship Management to Get More Done, Faster
  An all-in-one real estate solution like DeltaNET 6 gives you visibility into the activities of your contacts, leads, and clients. It keeps track of interactions with your listings and helps you know when and how to follow up. DeltaNET 6 will save you hundreds of hours of manual work so you can focus on building your business.
  
  
• Adapt to Real Estate Trends that Show Signs of Staying Power
  After 2020, the real estate industry has changed forever. Video is more important than ever for real estate marketing, and that includes virtual tours: they're convenient and effective, helping buyers broaden their search radius without long road trips. Properties in Motion and the Virtual Open House platform make it easy.
  
  
• Carve Out Spaces Where You Can Compete Effectively
  Zillow is big, but results still come down to one-on-one personal connections. In many cases, that means making life easier for your clients. Local Showings is Delta Media Group's solution. You can easily check availability and schedule a showing for any listing on the MLS — it's like Zillow, only better.
  
  
• Double Down on Your Branding, Niche, and Individual Appeal
  Your ideal client is eager to work with you, not anyone else. Be sure you're 100% clear on who that client is, what their pain points are, and why you can serve them better than the competition. Then, repeat that message loud and clear throughout your website, blogs, social media, and anywhere you meet people.
  
  
• Make a Personal Connection Before You Even Meet
  Video isn't just about making homes look good. It can also put you in the spotlight. People trust video — it's the next best thing to being there, and helps newcomers to your brand feel like they know you. Introduce yourself with a video on your website. Enhance your blog and social media posts with video whenever you can.
  
  
• Leverage Your Existing Network for More Referrals
  Referrals are the name of the game early in any real estate pro's career. If you keep relationships strong, that well never runs dry. Be disciplined in following up after closing day: one week, one month, six months, and a year to the day. Circle around to clients you haven't heard from recently and find out if there's more you can do.
  
  
• Make Your Website the Core of Your Lead Generation
  On the flip side, your website can develop into a lead generation engine that's always running. Zillow has been on the scene for years, but real estate agents still get excellent online visibility with SEO and content marketing. Follow best practices and publish helpful, informative content for your target audience.

What's the biggest takeaway? Don't get spooked! Stay calm, think things through, and make informed choices about your options to stay ahead of the curve. To learn more about real estate digital marketing, contact us today.

There are more tools available than ever before to market your real estate business, but finding the right marketing mix doesn't always feel easy. In order to generate the best ROI with your real estate marketing, it's important to understand both the tools available and how each tool fits with your audience. It also requires a willingness to set goals, and a commitment to tracking results. We'll cover it all, with a closer look at how to generate great ROI with your real estate marketing.

• Set and Track Your Marketing Goals
  Whether you track ROI down to the decimal or take a more general approach, there's no doubt that setting goals is crucial to both identifying what you want to improve and achieving what you set out to accomplish with your real estate marketing.
  
  While general goals like becoming the go-to source of real estate information are helpful, the most effective goals will be more specific to different types of marketing. Do you want to earn more website traffic, generate more social media engagement, or increase the success rate of your email campaigns? Set specific goals for those areas, and track your results over time to discover what works best for your business.
  
  
• Know Your Audience and How to Reach Them
  In order to achieve your marketing goals, you need to understand the target audience you're trying to reach. A small, boutique real estate firm that caters to luxury buyers seeking a second home will naturally have a different marketing approach than a brand that aims to pair first-time buyers with the ideal starter home. Of course, some real estate businesses cater to a wide range of clients, and that's okay too! With a powerful real estate all-in-one solution like DeltaNET 6, you can gain a better understanding of your existing clientele, segment your audience, and discover the data that you need to make informed decisions about your marketing.
  
  
• Create Content That Speaks to the Needs and Interests of Your Audience
  Generating engagement with your real estate blog and social media pages starts with understanding the needs of your audience. The best real estate content informs, educates, and inspires your audience, so ROI with content depends on a deep understanding of what your audience wants to see. With custom content creation from Delta Media Group and all of the data you accumulate, you can deliver content that positions your real estate team as local experts that your clients can trust.
  
  
• Tailor Your Email Marketing to Specific Segment of Your Audience
  One of the biggest challenges for generating ROI with your email marketing is simply getting people to open your emails, and tailoring your email content to specific segments of your audience is a reliable way to get them to click. A buyer, seller, or someone who's just looking will all be seeking different content to help them make important decisions. Our AI-driven email newsletters and targeted email marketing campaigns make it so much easier to reach each client with the most relevant information.
  
  
• Make SEO a Priority
  Most real estate prospects start their search for a real estate business online, and search engine optimization (SEO) is critical for making sure that they find your business first when they visit their favorite search engine with real estate questions. Local SEO integration is a dependable way to stand out within your markets, increase traffic to your website, and position your business as the go-to source for real estate needs in the places that matter most to your brand. Generating great ROI with SEO starts with having a plan. With custom website design, custom content, and a deep understanding of local SEO, Delta Media Group can help you achieve your SEO goals.
  
  
• Make the Most of Paid Online Advertising
  SEO and content creation can help you attract clients organically, but reaching some members of your target audience will require a more direct approach. Paid advertising is a great supplement to your other marketing tools, allowing you to reach more potential clients through ads targeted to specific demographics on search engines and social media. Setting goals and tracking results are especially important for improving paid advertising ROI, which is why DeltaNET 6 makes it easier when planning paid advertising campaigns.

Generating great ROI with your marketing is virtually seamless when you have the right team on your side, and we'd love to help you achieve your marketing goals. With all of the tools in DeltaNET 6 and the help of an experienced real estate marketing team, you can accomplish your goals while making the most of your marketing budget. Contact us today to learn more.

The trend of rising home prices from 2020 has continued with vigor in 2021, and it feels like every month we see a new record high in median home list prices. To say that we're living in a seller's market is a major understatement, as there are simply not enough homes available to meet demand in most markets. While high home values are good news for sellers, buyers feel frustrated with the lack of options available and the premium they must pay to land a home. Why are home prices rising, is there an end in sight, and how can real estate agents manage this unique market? We'll cover it all ahead.

How the Pandemic Has Impacted Home Prices

The COVID-19 pandemic is the elephant in the room when it comes to rising home prices, with both direct and indirect impacts on real estate markets around the world. High demand is a key ingredient nearly any time that home prices start rising, and being required to shelter in place in so many communities throughout 2020 has motivated many people who weren't previously in the market for a home to reconsider the benefits of owning over renting. For people who already owned a home before the pandemic, the challenges of 2020 made it less likely that they would be interested in selling.

While the real estate industry has continued to function throughout the pandemic, both buyers and sellers have had to navigate the necessary safety precautions in place. Virtual tools have helped connect buyers with homes, but both buyers and sellers have been wary of in-person visits to properties in many communities. Many potential sellers have chosen to wait until conditions improve to put their homes on the market, and buyers have been forced to choose from a limited inventory.

When Lack of Inventory Meets Low Interest Rates

The lack of inventory caused by the pandemic coincided with record-low mortgage rates that have put owning a home within reach for a wider pool of potential buyers. Of course, those interest rates dropped largely due to the economic impact of COVID-19, and they presently remain at record lows. When you mix together a paucity of inventory, the lowest interest rates of our lifetimes, and an especially motivated pool of buyers, you have all of the ingredients for the meteoric rise in home prices that we've seen over the last year-plus.

And it's not just the prices that have been so favorable to sellers. It's also the speed with which homes are selling and buyers' willingness to overlook issues with homes that may have made them look elsewhere in less of a seller's market. Buyers are more willing to waive contingencies and purchase homes as-is, while still often making offers above asking price in order to beat out the fierce competition. In the most competitive markets, homes barely have a chance to hit the market before the seller receives multiple high-quality offers.

A Look at the Near Future of Home Prices

Even as home prices continue to rise, there are signs that we will start to see a return to a more balanced real estate market in the relatively near future. COVID-19 vaccines are becoming more widely available, and more communities are beginning to open up as the number of vaccinated people rises. Many potential sellers who have been hesitant to put their homes on the market will feel more comfortable doing so as communities re-open, and an increase in inventory will be a huge factor in stabilizing home prices.

The low interest rates that have motivated many buyers to search for homes in such a competitive market are also likely to rise, as the overall economy begins to return to normalcy. With higher interest rates and more inventory available, we may see more balance between the number of buyers and the number of homes on the market. The when of all this happening is the tricky part during these uncertain times, and individual real estate markets are likely to evolve at their own pace.

How Real Estate Agents Can Navigate the Trends in Home Prices

Whether home prices are rising or falling, the best way to serve your clients is to have the right tools for the job. With DeltaNET 6, you will have all of the tools you need to unlock inventory, market homes, manage relationships, and keep your clients updated on the latest market trends. The right real estate tools help you make the most of the current seller's market, maintain the interest of buyers who are waiting out high home prices, and prepare your clients for what's to come as markets begin to normalize. Contact us today to learn more.