Articles Tagged "DeltaNET 6"

Keeping in touch with clients and nurturing leads doesn't have to be a chore. Email marketing doesn't have to take too much time from your busy day. You really can increase the success rate of your marketing and save time without compromising on quality.

Email drip campaigns provide potent, reliable solutions to some of the most common marketing challenges faced by real estate agents, allowing you to stay in touch in a way that makes more sense for both you and your audience.

Here's why you should be using email drip campaigns, along with some proven tips to help you make the most of this powerful marketing tool.

What Are Email Drip Campaigns?

Email drip campaigns are built around automated email series which are sent to clients or leads over time, with little effort required on your end. Rather than sending out individualized email blasts or overwhelming your audience with content, drip campaigns provide timely, tailored content designed to appeal to different segments of your audience. The content in email drip campaigns is built to inform your audience, help them make decisions, and provide the information they want to see at just the right time.

The Advantages of Email Drip Campaigns

• Keep in Touch Without Overwhelming
  One of the challenges with email marketing is that we all get so much of it in our inboxes each day. It's easy to start tuning out that marketing when you see the same messages, from the same brands, with the same content, every time you open your inbox. In the case of email drip campaigns, less is more. Rather than overwhelming your audience with email, you send content that they want to see at just the right frequency to help cut through the noise of crowded inboxes and stay top of mind.
  
  
• The Right Content at the Right Time
  Perhaps the biggest reason that email drip campaigns are so effective is that they are designed to educate your audience with informative content that they actually want to see. Whether you're directing a campaign toward buyer leads, seller leads, or past clients who've already closed on a home, email drip campaigns can provide helpful hints at the right time to simplify the next steps of their real estate journey. When you send content that your audience wants to see, you'll leave them looking forward to the next message in your campaign.
  
  
• Save Time and Improve Marketing Results
  What agent wouldn't like to save time without compromising the quality or effectiveness of their email marketing? With email drip campaigns, little input is required on your end. The process is automated, so you don't have to worry about sending emails manually or picking the perfect time to reach out. All of that is handled for you, so you're free to spend more time focusing on providing great service to your clients.

Tips for Setting Up Effective Email Drip Campaigns

The first step for successful email drip campaigns is to segment your audience. Campaigns are designed to appeal to different segments of your audience, like buyer leads, seller leads, and past clients, so it's important for the right campaign to reach the right group. Planning ahead in this way will increase open rates and enhance the impact of your email marketing.

• Campaign Ideas for Buyer Leads
  Buyers crave information on markets and homes, so the best campaign ideas tend to focus on those topics. Whether you're sending the latest listings, updates on market trends, resources to help them make informed decisions, or community guides on the places where they're shopping for homes, knowledge is power for buyers.
  
  
• Campaign Ideas for Seller Leads
  Sellers want tips to help them sell their homes quickly and for a great price. This can include tips on preparing their home to list, home staging, open houses, market trends to help them price their home correctly, and educational resources to help guide them through the process.
  
  
• Campaign Ideas for Past Clients
  Email drip campaigns can also help you earn more referrals and future business from past clients. New homebuyers will appreciate tips on home maintenance, home improvement ideas, interior design, and the latest happenings in their neighborhood. You can also keep them up to date on any changes to your business, like new services or expansion into new markets.

Leverage Email Drip Campaigns and So Much More with the DeltaNET

Ready to enjoy the benefits of email drip campaigns and enjoy access to tons of other easy-to-use tools that can help you grow your real estate brand? The DeltaNET, our real estate all-in-one solution, integrates all of the tools you need to level up your marketing game. With the right real estate tech, you can maximize your marketing, provide better service to clients, and save tons of time in the process.

Whether you're an individual agent or you manage a whole team, success in real estate often starts with time management. It may feel like there are never enough hours in the day to tackle every important task... but what if you had a helping hand from reliable real estate tech to handle the tedious yet important tasks that can easily clog up your daily schedule? Just as importantly, how would you invest all of the extra time that automation can free up in your workday?

With a little help from technology, agents can spend less time on repetitive, time-consuming tasks, and more time on providing the best possible service to clients. Here's what automation really means, and how your real estate firm can benefit from it.

Here's What Automation Really Means

Nearly every industry has tasks that are better handled by machines than humans, and real estate is no exception. The difference is that instead of robotics and fancy factory equipment, real estate relies primarily on software to automate key tasks without sacrificing on quality. Automation can be an essential element of your lead generation, marketing, and so much more.

Getting Started with Real Estate Automation

When you're ready to start benefiting from automation, the first thing you'll need is a powerful all-in-one solution like the DeltaNET. This is where you'll find many of the dependable tools that help you automate the time-consuming daily tasks that are essential to real estate success in an easy-to-use package that's designed with agents in mind. The right real estate CRM integrates automation with many other handy tools that help you manage relationships, attract new clients, master your marketing, and save tons of time in the process.

How Automation Helps You Generate and Manage Leads

Lead generation and segmentation are two areas where automation really shines. The DeltaNET helps you generate more leads with tools like lead capture forms, tracked email marketing, and AI-driven email & print newsletters. Keep all of your leads in the know with auto-generated My HomeFinder, Market Watch, and Seller Reports. Then use convenient email templates or SMS text messaging to plan the perfect follow-up.

Lead segmentation is an essential task for saving time and increasing productivity, so automated lead segmentation will be a welcome addition to any agent's repertoire. With automated lead segmentation, agents can easily see where each lead stands, where to focus their energy, and what might be necessary to turn each lead into a client. That process is made even easier with interactive lead visibility, as well as robust tracking that makes it simple to anticipate their needs.

Attracting New Clients and Promoting Properties with Automation

Automation can also help you handle many key marketing tasks, both in terms of attracting new clients and marketing properties for existing clients. Email marketing is one of the biggest areas where automation can save you time, with tools like our smart drip email campaigns that make it easy to send the right email marketing to the right people at the right time. When your outreach calls for a more personal touch, customizable eCards and Flyers provide the perfect supplement to automation.

For marketing properties, our Properties in Motion platform automatically pulls information from MLS, and automatically feeds videos to your real estate website and Facebook page. You can also use the integrated texting platform to text new listings, price changes, and open houses to clients.

How Automation Helps You Handle Success

One reality of real estate is that success creates more work. More leads to manage, more clients to serve, more properties to market, and more administrative tasks to keep the whole machine running at peak efficiency. Expecting your existing team to simply handle all of that extra work is sure to lead to burnout, unhappy team members, and likely diminished production. Hiring more people is one way to handle that extra workload, but comes with its own risks, costs, and time commitments.

Automation is one of the tools that can help your team — or you as an individual agent — continue to thrive as your brand grows. It can cut down on the need for extra hires, make life easier for your team, and simplify the process of scaling your business over time.

Are You Ready to Experience the Benefits of Automation First-Hand?

In the fast-paced world of real estate, working smart is just as important as working hard — and automation can help you do both. In the end, the biggest benefit of automation is that it leaves you with more time to focus on the tasks that matter most and that you enjoy most. With software handling tedious, time-consuming tasks in the background, you can invest all of your time on the many parts of real estate that still require the human element.

Real estate is an industry that requires innovation, adaptability, and ingenuity in order to thrive. Just look at the last few years alone. Agents went from conducting business normally to handling everything virtually in the blink of an eye, and now we're transitioning to another new era that blends both worlds. Yet many agents have found ways to post some of the best numbers of their careers, even as the wider world has changed so rapidly.

Throughout the roller coaster of recent years, one of the few constants has been that technology is the key that allows agents to adapt and thrive. As an agent, technology can both help you adapt right now and provide the template for you to thrive in the years to come.

Meeting the Needs of Modern Real Estate Clients

Over the last few years, real estate clients have become more comfortable than ever with shopping for homes from a distance. Consider tech like Properties in Motion, as well as the virtual open houses and showings which have helped buyers find a new home from the comfort of their current one. Even as in-person showings and open houses return to prominence, these online tools provide a valuable supplement to seeing a home in person while allowing buyers to shop in markets located far away from their current location.

While the focus of many online shopping tools is on the buyer, they can help you attract sellers, as well. Showing a seller all of the ways that you can market their home, both online and through traditional channels, is essential to earning their business. If you want to provide the best possible service to all of your clients, tech is a dependable way to up your game.

The Present and Future of Artificial Intelligence

Once a dream in science fiction novels and movies, artificial intelligence (AI) now has a growing impact on many aspects of our day-to-day lives. We're just scratching the surface of what AI can do, and its present-day applications are already very exciting for the real estate industry. Take marketing, for example. Within the DeltaNET, you can already use AI-driven print and email newsletters to keep your clients informed on the topics that matter most to them. You can also keep clients up to date with auto-generated Market Watch, My HomeFinder, and Seller Reports.

In the future, AI will have even more applications, from marketing your brand to analyzing data and helping your clients find the perfect home. No matter what other new tech emerges in the future, there's a good chance that AI will be leading the way in helping agents adapt to the times.

Automation to Make Your Life Easier

Time is money, and the right real estate tech can save you both. Allowing you to save time on repetitive tasks and reduce your marketing workload are two more ways that tech can help you adapt. In addition to the AI-driven tools that we've already discussed, tech can also make your life easier through automation. Wouldn't it be nice to set up automated smart drip email campaigns to supplement your AI-driven newsletters? Couldn't you save a lot of time and effort with automated lead segmentation paired with interactive lead visibility? All of these things are possible with today's real estate tech, leaving you with more time to serve clients, close deals, and focus on the parts of the job that you enjoy most.

Gaining an Edge Over the Competition

One general point to remember about technology is that not everyone in the real estate industry adopts new tools at the same speed. This can be a disadvantage if you are slower to adapt to new changes, but it can also be a major advantage if you're willing to stay ahead of the technological curve. Agents and real estate firms who make the most of new technology are able to gain an edge over the competition.

Tech like automation and AI can save money, time, and energy, leaving more time to provide the best possible service to clients. The latest lead gen tools can give you a leg up on attracting new clients and create opportunities that your competition might miss. Behind the scenes, new ways to collect, search, and parse key data can reveal insights that impact every part of your business. All of these opportunities are only possible if you embrace real estate technology.

Integrating the Tools You Need in One Convenient, Easy-to-Use Package

Of course, tech is most valuable when it's easy to use and available when you need it. The DeltaNET combines the latest real estate technology in one convenient package, all designed to be easy to use for you and your team. Why wait for tomorrow when you can benefit from the best real estate tech today?

With so much to manage every day as a real estate agent, juggling everything you need to get done while managing client expectations can feel like a tall task. Time management is a valuable skill for any agent, and it's not something that you have to handle all on your own. There's so much technology available that can make your life easier, add value, allow you to meet client expectations, and save plenty of time in the process.

Educate Clients on the Topics That Matter Most to Them

Savvy, modern real estate clients crave data and strive to make informed decisions. While there aren't enough hours in the day for you to directly inform every client about every detail of every real estate market, technology can help you bridge the gap. Educating clients is easier when you're able to provide them with AI-generated newsletters targeted to their needs, along with key market data from tools like our automated My HomeFinder, Market Watch, and Seller Reports. These types of tools allow you to educate clients with dependable data and minimal effort on your end, which is key to managing time as an agent.

Build a Great Website That Serves Client Needs

Your real estate website is often your first point of contact with clients, but it can be so much more than that. When you integrate the right features, your website can be a resource that clients return to again and again throughout the process. It's a place where you can create content that informs, educates, and builds trust with your audience. It also provides an easy way for clients to browse listings, get to know neighborhoods, and discover all of the services that you offer. The best real estate websites have the dual benefits of educating clients and saving tons of time for agents.

Make Staying in Touch Easy and Convenient

Above all, clients want their real estate agent to be available. So much of their time is consumed by the process of buying or selling a home, so they want you to be available when they need you. But not every conversation requires a phone call or in-person meeting. Tools like SMS text messaging, bulk email blasts with templates, and instant messaging apps can help you provide the reliable access that your clients want while minimizing the time required for you to stay in touch.

Automate and Outsource Key Marketing Tasks to Leave More Time for Clients

Do you find yourself investing so much time in attracting new clients that there's not enough left over to serve your existing clients? Marketing is vital, but it can also feel like a chore when you have so much else on your plate. Leave more time for meeting expectations by automating some key marketing tasks and putting others in the capable hands of an experienced marketing team.

• Email Marketing
  Email marketing is one of the best ways to stay in touch, nurture leads, and keep your pipeline stocked well into the future. Of course, that doesn't mean you have to sit down and spend hours sending emails to potential clients. With smart email drip campaigns, you can automate your email marketing while still providing leads with valuable, informative content that speaks directly to their needs.
  
  
• Automated Lead Segmentation
  Automated lead segmentation may seem like a small thing in the grand scheme of meeting client expectations, but it can really save you time while also making your lead generation efforts more successful. Every bit of time saved adds up when it comes to providing the best possible service to your clients.
  
  
• Building Your Social Presence
  Social media is such a powerful tool for communicating with your clients and generating leads. But building a strong social presence requires a real investment of time. That's why social media marketing is a prime option to be handled by a marketing team that you trust. Rather than worrying about blocking out time for social each day, you can devote that time to your clients instead.

Listen, Learn, and Remember

Ultimately, meeting expectations comes down to understanding the needs of each client and helping them achieve their goals. Using an all-in-one real estate solution like DeltaNET®6 makes it easy to keep all of the client information that you need in one place and be ready to serve clients when they need you.

Choose the Right Tech to Make Life Easier for You and Your Clients

In the end, real estate technology is the key that unlocks more opportunities to meet and exceed client expectations. The right tech can make your life much easier, simplify time management, and help you provide the best possible service to clients. Why choose between meeting expectations and saving time, when you can have both?

Technology is becoming the key that separates the most successful real estate agencies and brokerages from all the rest. You do not need to be part of a huge team to take advantage of the latest artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning, however: It is within your reach right now.

Real estate agents have always faced this critical issue: When someone wants to buy, it isn't always easy for them to tell the difference between one agent and another. With the right technology, applied in the right ways, you can meet their needs proactively — that's the ultimate differentiator.

Making the Most of Today's Technologies Starts with Knowing Yourself

One of the most quoted aphorisms in history begins, "Know your enemy and know yourself."

It may seem counterintuitive that in a world overflowing with tools that aim to uncover more about your customers, you must focus on knowing yourself. But this is the step agents should take if they want to build a thriving practice that offers them the best work-life balance possible.

If you do not strive to know yourself, even the best real estate marketing software will not unlock your full potential. But when you begin by understanding exactly what kind of business you plan to build, technology becomes the facilitator you need.

That begins with two key questions:

• What kind of customer energizes you most?
• What key problems of theirs can you solve?

In their first year, agents may spend all of their time chasing down leads in an effort to understand these two questions. They are learning the ropes, trying out various transactions and client types. Once you're ready to identify your core customers, then technology can equip you to exceed their expectations.

What Are the Most Important Technologies in Real Estate Today?

Thanks to the forward-looking innovation of top real estate thinkers from decades ago, our industry has access to vast quantities of data. Before anyone else realized just how important that was, the MLS was making virtually all U.S. properties and real estate transactions available at a glance.

Much can still be done to improve on and optimize listings — features like virtual tours, to give just one example. But improvements in individual listings are truly only the beginning. You must embrace a technology-driven shift in how you conceptualize your workflow and business.

Three emerging pieces of technology are transforming real estate as you read this:

• Artificial intelligence
• Machine learning
• Automation

Let's take a closer look at them and what they mean.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Artificial intelligence is the big basket into which "machine learning" and several other technologies fit. In essence, artificial intelligence is any effort to help a machine think like a human. In practical terms, it refers to efforts to give computers problem-solving capabilities beyond their original programming.
  
  
• Machine Learning
  Machine learning is one element of artificial intelligence. It focuses on the idea that computers can use the data they come in contact with to recognize patterns even the best human analyst would miss. As patterns become evident, the AI can then upgrade its problem-solving approaches and perform better.
  
  
• Automation
  Automation is the ability of an artificial intelligence computer system to undertake tasks using machine learning. With real estate marketing automation, for instance, AI learns behaviors that indicate interest in working with you, then notifies you so you can follow up with people who are ready to hear from you.

Adopting an All-in-One Real Estate Center of Excellence for Your Practice

Not that long ago, even basic artificial intelligence was the stuff of science fiction. It was worked on in the most exclusive universities and think tanks, and no products took full advantage of it. Today, your ability to use AI is limited only by your ability to envision a better future for your business.

At Delta Media Group, our all-in-one real estate solution puts the most powerful artificial intelligence available in the industry directly into your hands. Our customers are already using it to save time and money, zero in on opportunities with their leads, and help properties close faster and at better prices.

The centerpiece of our strategy is in real estate marketing automation.

Marketing is crucial to defining and growing your business, but it often falls down the priority list. Our seamless, AI-driven approach ensures machine learning integration in every aspect of digital marketing.

From email marketing to social media and everything in between, Delta Media Group customers can deliver highly valuable content targeted to the precise needs of their leads and customers. Once you're set up, you'll often spend only minutes a week ensuring helpful, informative contact that gives a "high touch" experience to your network — without the hours of effort on your part that high touch implies.

Contact us today to find out more or get started.

The real estate industry has evolved at an even faster pace than usual in recent years, with new technologies emerging that change the ways that both agents and clients conduct business. The online component of real estate transactions is more important than ever, and in some ways, we're already getting a taste of what the real estate industry of tomorrow will look like, from automated, AI-driven marketing to innovative new ways to experience properties online.

While surprises are inevitable in real estate, we already have some ideas about the ways that the real estate landscape of tomorrow will impact agents. Here are some of the tools in DeltaNET®6 that will help you navigate that landscape with confidence and plan for a successful future in real estate.

How Virtual Reality Will Help Buyers and Sellers

Over the last few years, we've already seen the rise in technology that helps buyers experience homes in great detail without ever visiting in person. Virtual Open Houses and Showings help buyers tour homes from afar, often with an experienced real estate agent as their guide. Tools like our Properties in Motion make it easier for buyers to fully experience properties online in ways that listing photos and descriptions can't match.

Given the popularity of these tools, you can expect the virtual aspect of touring homes to grow even more robust in the years to come. Buyers love it because they can tour homes no matter where they're located and get a meaningful impression of what the properties are like. Sellers love these tools because they increase the potential buyer pool, create more competition among buyers, and ultimately help them sell their homes for the best possible price.

AI-Driven Marketing Makes Life Easier for Agents

Technology isn't just making life better for clients. It's also making it easier for agents to market your services, build trust, and keep your audience informed on the topics that matter most to them. Already, we offer AI-driven email and print newsletters that make it easier to keep your audience up to date on the real estate data they crave. Our auto-generated My HomeFinder, Market Watch, and Seller Reports allow you to inform and engage every segment of your audience. With automated, AI-driven marketing, you'll be free to invest more of your own time in serving current clients, while still keeping your pipeline stocked full of leads.

Simplifying Lead Segmentation and Nurturing

Getting your foot in the door with a potential client is a great start, but generating leads is just one step in the process. Most leads will take some time to convert, which is why tools like smart drip email campaigns are so valuable for agents. These campaigns make it easier to nurture leads over time, with automated, targeted, timely content that appeals to their specific real estate needs. Automated lead segmentation, another tool that you'll find in DeltaNET 6, is also key to this process. Automatically segmenting leads makes it easier to know exactly where each leads stands, and which leads to prioritize. Interactive lead visibility adds another layer of real-time data that can help you convert leads into clients.

Integrated Technology Puts More Tools at Your Fingertips

New technology is constantly emerging in real estate, so being nimble is essential. It's much easier to keep up with the latest tools and put them to work when you can access everything in one place. DeltaNET®6 features integrations with dozens of partners that make it easy to do everything from market your real estate brand on YouTube to set up secure document signings for client who are ready to close on a home. 

Making the Most of Your Technology with Learning and Support

Even for tech-savvy agents, keeping up with all of the latest trends, tools, and technology can be a challenging task. Having access to the right training – whether for yourself or your team – is a critical step in adapting to the future real estate landscape. DeltaNET Academy allows you to plan courses, highlight specific tools, provide supplemental training to your team, and track results, all at no extra cost to you.

Be Prepared for Tomorrow with Technology That Adapts to the Times

Preparing for the future starts with choosing the right technology in the present, and with an all-in-one real estate solution like DeltaNET®6, you'll find the perfect platform to help you keep up with the times. So much of what we've mentioned in this article is already possible with the reliable tools in DeltaNET®6, and we're always adding new features to help you adapt to the changing real estate landscape. Why wait for tomorrow, when both you and your clients can benefit from the best real estate tech today?

As a real estate agent, one of the most important services you provide to any client is pricing the home to sell. A home is priced "to sell" when it meets both the seller's needs and those of the actual buyers who may put in a bid. Without that, a home could easily languish on the market.

You know that when a home lingers on the market, it's not a good sign. Traditionally, real estate agents have tried to close on a home within 30 days. With every passing day beyond that mark, more potential buyers are likely to wonder if something is wrong with the property.

Conventionally, a property that takes 90 days to sell ends up getting relisted.

Over the last two years, some homes have sold in as little as 24 hours. But the market is changing, and it is more crucial than ever to be attentive to the right price. The Comparative Market Analysis — or CMA — is the key to ensuring sellers don't accidentally price themselves out of the market.

With a CMA, you estimate a home's value based on recently sold similar homes in the area.

Some of the key dimensions of comparison include:

• Zipcode
• Square footage
• Bedrooms and bathrooms
• Amenities

No two homes are "identical," but the closer you can get, the better. With the right software tools, you can even cut down the time it takes to generate market-level insights in your area. That can be decisive when you need to act quickly to win a customer's confidence.

A traditional CMA is a hallmark of a well-informed real estate agent. The problem: It takes time and effort, and it could be out of date by the time the seller is ready to act. Plus, sellers may or may not understand all the information in the CMA. How can you make it really work for you?

Delta Media Group has the solution.

Delta Pitch Brings the Comparative Market Analysis to the Next Level

Through our experience working with thousands of users of the DeltaNET®6 all-in-one real estate solution, we've learned about the drawbacks of the CMA — and developed ways for you and your customers to get even more value from it at the click of a button. The results are here in Delta Pitch.

Delta Pitch integrates completely within our AI-driven real estate CRM, creating a center of excellence you can use to generate precise, accurate, beautifully designed CMAs for any property in the United States. Delta Pitch means real business impact from every CMA you create.

With Delta Pitch, you can:

• Finish Your CMA in Just Seconds (When It Really Counts)
  When a seller is ready to price a home, they don't have time to wait. Even a few days of delay may shake their confidence. Even more significantly, it could leave you with inaccurate data. With Delta Pitch, you have results within seconds. There's no complicated setup, research, or math involved.
  
  
• Design Your Branded, High-Impact CMA with Easy Templates
  Since Delta Pitch is so fast, so you can focus your attention on getting more value from each CMA. Want a beautiful, data-rich CMA customers and leads will remember? It's easy. You can customize the colors, structure, and how the information is presented, then save your favorites as templates.
  
  
• Make a Lasting Impression with Interactive FlipBooks
  An annotated FlipBook is more than just a report — it's a rich multimedia experience. Your contacts are more likely to review it in full, remember what it says, and actually act on it. And you don't need any expensive software or multimedia design training to make the most of it.
  
  
• Share With Your Clients and Contacts in a Single Tap
  Even people who are only "thinking" about selling are fascinated by accurate, actionable data about their neighborhood. Now, you can whet their appetite with a single tap. There's no limit to how many CMAs you can develop, how you can tweak each report, or how often you can share them.
  
  
• Launch Video Calls Directly from Delta Pitch
  Video is the next best thing to being there. Now, you can launch video calls from Zoom or your favorite alternative directly from Delta Pitch. That makes it a snap to go over information you just sent to your contact in a Comparative Market Analysis or interactive FlipBook.

Delta Pitch isn't just a tool for making the best CMAs in the industry — it's a complete proposal generator that strengthens your brand's reputation for excellence. And just like the rest of our growing technology suite for real estate agents, it only takes a few minutes to learn to use it. In a single year, you could save hundreds of hours on CMA research.

Contact us at Delta Media Group to learn more about real estate marketing automation.

As a real estate agent, one of the most important assets you provide is your expertise in pricing. A home must be "priced to sell" to meet the needs of both your client and the market. Left to their own devices, many people will overestimate the value of their own home and hinder their sales efforts.

Because of the emotional attachment that develops between a homeowner and property, it's crucial to demonstrate your advice is built on a sound foundation. Otherwise, you might encounter resistance and have difficulty coming to terms on pricing. That can cause trouble for you and your customer.

Until recently, most real estate agents and brokers handled this issue manually.

When a property goes up for sale, they would diligently do the necessary research. Gathering "comps" from the local area, they would look at location, size, and amenities to triangulate a solid price. In any discussion about price strategy, they could show the calculations that went into their work.

As valuable as that is, it takes precious time — time that's at a premium in fast-moving markets.

More and more agents in today's most desirable metro markets have run into the problem that by the time they complete their analysis, conditions have already changed. And explaining their rationale to a customer can still be counter-intuitive, creating the potential for confusion and lost confidence.

For these reasons and more, you should be using AVM.

AVM Takes the Guesswork Out of Pricing to Sell

An AVM — short for automated valuation model — does the hard work for you. You'll get accurate results fast, equipping your customers to take action. But how does it work, and how can you start leveraging it for your real estate practice?

AVM takes advantage of the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning combined with a key fact about real estate: Every transaction is public record. By analyzing recent local sales using a sophisticated mathematical model, it can generate an asking price aligned to market behavior.

A good AVM increases confidence while cutting manual work out of the equation:

• You no longer need to wait for a traditional appraiser to arrive to estimate a home's value
• You can give your customers helpful, actionable intelligence in a fraction of the usual time

Property transaction records are the "training data" for most AVMs. Some integrate data directly from the MLS system. Others synthesize estimates from a variety of trusted third-party data sources. In any case, the proof of an AVM's value is in how consistently it delivers estimates close to a final sales price.

Your Customers Already Trust AVM Without Knowing It

Homeowners love to scope things out and get a sense of what their home might sell for. No longer do they have to trawl through local open houses to get insight on what neighbors are buying and selling — instead, they go online and look for an automatically generated estimate.

While there are many popular websites using an AVM, all but the largest brokers have traditionally been cut out of the game. This deprives many independent brands of the opportunity to leverage AVM as the practical tool and rapport-building mechanism it already naturally is.

When you offer AVM, you have the opportunity to seamlessly follow your leads and customers from interest to action. And you no longer need to pay hefty licensing fees to do it. If you are a DeltaNET®6 customer, AVM is already a part of the trusted center of excellence that is your all-in-one real estate solution.

Accurate AVM Estimates Now Available in One Click

Imagine having an accurate, branded AVM report in just seconds — one that provides amazing context such as the average price of sold listings, average size of sold listings, and total number of sold listings a given zip code had over a period of twelve quarters or more.

Delta Media Group's previous AVM has been deployed on thousands of customer websites. Now, it evolves even further to provide even more accurate and granular information. This self-learning valuation tool will only get better and better as it crunches more data.

Some of the top highlights include:

• A clean, clear, and curated AVM report that empowers you to scan through data at a glance
• "Market Conditions" tab gives you a capsule overview of all market health signals in an area
• Valuation data from up to five trusted, objective sources, including Delta's AI-driven estimate
• Deeply integrated AVM experience to help you weather the effects of record low inventories
• "Door Knock" opportunities — you get leads even when the prospect provides no information
• "Current Demand Report" infuses a sense of urgency as visitors explore the AVM interface

It's time to take your business to the next level with AI.

Contact us to learn more or get started with DeltaNET AVM.

Time and again, email marketing is shown to be one of the most powerful marketing tactics for real estate agents and brokers. Although email marketing is used in a wide variety of industries — in fact, adoption is nearly universal for online enterprises — it is uniquely suited for real estate.

This fact is based on two important reasons:

• Done right, email marketing costs only a few cents and takes minutes to oversee each month
• It is the most personal and personable way to maintain relationships with your current leads

Let's take a closer look at how email marketing shapes the competitive landscape in real estate.

Email Marketing Is a Superior Financial Investment

All in all, email marketing is the most cost-effective approach to marketing, online and off. Once it's set up, it costs less than $10 a month. Just as importantly, expert analysis shows that it yields over $30 ROI on average for every dollar spent. There is simply nothing else that even comes close.

That figure has every potential to be even higher for real estate agents. Under ideal conditions, a single transaction can lead to tens of thousands of dollars in commission. By comparison, the money spent on email marketing is nearly nil. With the right software, the time investment can also be near zero.

Email Marketing Fixes Agents' "Invisible Problem"

Real estate agents have a unique strategic problem: Most of the people who can move their business forward are invisible. That is, the vast majority of people you meet won't be ready to jump into a new transaction with you right away, while those who are "nearly" ready have no reason to speak up.

Traditionally, agents have tried to overcome this problem by networking relentlessly. If they meet a hundred people a day, the law of averages dictates that they will find ready business. But with email marketing, you can build a relationship by keeping subscribers on your list until they are ready.

Not Everyone Gets Results from Email Marketing – Here's Why

As valuable as email marketing is, not everyone is succeeding with it.

From the outside, email marketing can look like a lot of work. And social media, which also provides plenty of business to many real estate brands, is more flashy and attractive. But if you only use one digital marketing method — or only have time for one right now – you should start with email.

Done right, email augments your real estate website to turn it into an asset that's always working for you. No matter if you're awake or asleep, 24 hours a day, your email marketing can ensure subscribers receive value and learn precisely what you can do for them, positioning you as a trusted advisor.

The biggest reasons email marketing flounders are simple:

• Not knowing who your ideal customer is
• Not dividing your email list into segments
• Not following up with individual subscribers

Master these, and your email will transform visitors into leads and leads into customers.

How to Revitalize Your Email Marketing

• Use Single-Purpose Landing Pages to Capture Data
  When you show a listing through your own website, you gain the capacity to collect a user's email so they can register their interest in a property. Expand this idea as much as possible. Create purpose-built pages for events like open houses, webinars, and more. Offer compelling bonuses, like a local market report, to give people an incentive to join your list. In effect, grow your list as much as you can.
  
  
• Target Your Emails to Your Audience
  You can't make the shift from "chasing down leads" to having business come to you unless you have a rock-solid idea about exactly who you serve and how. Clarify who your ideal customer is — that is, the kind of customer who energizes you and moves your business forward. Using your insight into their unique problems, needs, questions, and background, create messaging that nobody else could.
  
  
• Segment Your Emails by Customer Stage
  Everyone who becomes a customer goes through a buyer journey. They start with a problem or question and the need to resolve it; that's often the motivation to visit your website and sign up for your list. Then they become a lead, a customer, and hopefully, a brand supporter. What's relevant to a current lead is irrelevant to a past customer, so make sure you have "mini-lists" (segments) for each profile.
  
  
• Automate Your Email Marketing Efforts
  Last, but certainly not least, automation is the key to making email seamless. Instead of constantly writing and refining content, you can set things up once with confidence. From there, automated systems like those in your DeltaNET®6 all-in-one real estate solution will help you collect emails, dispatch messages, and follow up.

Contact us to discover more about making email marketing easy.

Do you find yourself spending too much time and effort on lead generation? Do the results of your lead generation justify the investment of time and resources? The biggest secret of lead generation is that it doesn't have to be a challenge, but you need reliable tools for the job, starting with your real estate CRM. Investing in the right real estate tech can both boost the results of your lead generation and unlock more time in your busy day to serve the clients that your enhanced lead generation attracts.

Easily Capture Leads and Store Key Data

The first step to generating and converting leads is simply getting your foot in the door. Your real estate CRM should make it easy to acquire key data on leads through online lead capture forms and other sources, then store that data so that it's always available when you need it. As you learn more about leads over time, you can build a robust profile of what each lead wants, how you can earn their business, and how you can help them accomplish their real estate goals.

Improve Results with Automated Lead Generation and Nurturing Tools

One of the biggest time-saving benefits of your real estate CRM comes in the form of automation, which allows you to nurture leads with content that appeals to their needs and helps turn them into clients. All of the tedious work is handled by dependable technology, leaving you with more time to capitalize on the opportunities that automation creates.

• AI-Driven Email and Print Newsletters
  Your leads all have specific real estate needs that brought them to your door, whether they're buying, selling, or trying to juggle both tasks at the same time. With a little help from AI, you can keep them up to date on the topics that matter most to them through convenient email and print newsletters.

• Auto-Generated Market Reports
  Data isn't just useful for real estate agents. It's also something that your leads are actively seeking, especially regarding the markets where they're buying or selling a home. With auto-generated My HomeFinder, Market Watch, and Seller Reports, you have automated tools for keeping every type of lead informed.

• Smart Drip Email Campaigns
  Not every lead will be ready to convert right away. Some are still feeling out the market, making plans, and preparing for real estate needs in the near future. Smart drip email campaigns make it easy to stay in touch, nurture leads over time, and earn their business when it's time to convert.

Always Be on Time with Automated Lead Segmentation

Knowing what leads want and when to reach out are critical elements to lead generation success. Too early, and they won't be ready. Too late, and they will have already found someone else to help with their real estate needs. Automated lead segmentation makes it easier to focus on the leads that are closer to converting and reach out with the right message at the right time.

Email Templates and SMS Text Messaging

Lead generation is easier when you can communicate in the ways that are most convenient to your target audience. Use email templates to easily customize just the right message or SMS text messaging to reach out with quick, convenient communications.

Your CRM Can Help with Traditional Marketing Materials, Too

Some leads are more comfortable with technology than others, so it's still important to have traditional marketing materials available when you need them. In addition to the AI-driven print newsletters we mentioned above, your CRM can help you create customizable flyers while taking advantage of lead segmentation to create digital and print materials targeted to specific groups.

Integrated Training to Make the Most of Your CRM

The features that we've touched on are just the tip of the iceberg of how your CRM can help with lead generation, marketing, and so much more. Learning how to use all of those tools may feel like an intimidating task, but it's much easier with access to features like DeltaNET Academy. Easily tailor training courses for associates, and learn everything you need to know about how to unlock the full potential of your CRM.

Let Us Help You Simplify Lead Generation

More leads, less work — who could say no to that? All of the tools and tactics we mentioned above can be found within DeltaNET®6, our all-in-one real estate solution which makes it easier than ever to grow your business with the latest in real estate tech. Automate important processes including lead nurturing, generate more leads with proven, easy-to-use tools, keep all of the key lead data you need in one secure place, and free more time to focus on closing deals for your clients.

Is your marketing puzzle missing that one small yet important piece that can help take your business to the next level? Paid social advertising is one marketing tool that real estate brands of any size can integrate to generate leads, grow your brand, and expand your social media presence. Here's why paid social advertising may be the missing piece to your marketing puzzle, along with some tips to help you get started.

How Paid Social Advertising Works

One of the perks of paid social advertising is that you don't need a ton to get started. A great real estate website is a must, of course, because you'll want a place to send the people who see your ads, and you'll need to set up a business page on any social platform where you plan to advertise. As you plan a campaign, you'll decide on the campaign's objective and determine the target audience, budget, and length of time that your ad will run. Then you'll set up the details of the ad, including the headline, copy, and images. You can easily monitor the results of your campaign over time with data-based insights that allow you to customize your advertising with confidence.

Enjoy the Benefits of Highly Targeted Advertising

One key benefit of paid social advertising is how it allows you to target specific demographics and reach the prospects who will be most interested in what your real estate brand has to offer. You can build profiles to target specific demographics, promote listings to people who have already searched for similar listings, or target prospects who have already indicated some interest in your services online. These are just a few of the many ways that you can customize paid social advertising campaigns to suit your needs.

New to Real Estate Marketing? Paid Social Ads Can Expand Your Reach

When you're a new agent or real estate brand, you don't want to wait for results with your marketing. Growing your online brand organically with tools like SEO and content marketing takes time. Paid social advertising has no such limitation, making it a perfect complement to your organic marketing tactics. Paid advertising allows you to reach your target audience immediately, get your brand in front of the right eyes, and start generating leads from the time that you launch your first campaign.

A Dependable, Versatile Tool for Growing Your Brand on the Biggest Social Platforms

For paid social advertising in real estate, two platforms stand out above the rest. Both Facebook and Instagram are excellent places to promote your brand with paid advertising campaigns. The versatility of paid social advertising on those platforms allows you to reach diverse audiences, whether you're promoting listings, targeting local customers in specific markets, or simply establishing relationships with potential clients that you can nurture over time.

Planning a Campaign? Start with a Goal and Target Audience in Mind

When starting a new campaign, you'll want to consider a few important factors. First, what is the goal of the campaign? Naturally, the content of your ad will be different depending on whether you're promoting a listing, open house, webinar, client testimonials, or services for sellers. If you want your target audience to take a specific action, then your advertising should be tailored to that goal.

Next, you'll want to consider who you aim to reach. This includes broad categories like active buyers or active sellers, along with more specific audiences based on demographic details. Think about who you want to reach, what they want, and how to appeal to their needs as you customize your campaign.

Why Your Website Is Essential to Paid Social Advertising

Since one of the main goals of paid social advertising is to attract traffic to your real estate website, you'll also want to make sure that your website appeals to the needs of your target audience. Integrating resources for buyers and sellers is a great place to start if you plan to market to both groups. You can also create localized content and neighborhood guides to help your audience make informed decisions on where to shop for homes.

Make Your Life Easier with Ad Wizard and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising Services

Searching for an easier way to master paid social advertising? Our Ad Wizard tool makes it easy to create, customize, and launch campaigns with as little as a few clicks in DeltaNET®6. With templates, customizable ad layouts, stock art, and a wide variety of ad types, you can launch your next campaign with ease. Or you can rely on our team of PPC advertising pros to help you develop campaigns that maximize ROI. Either way, you don't have to worry about handling all of the details of paid social advertising on your own.

SMS texting has skyrocketed to become one of the most important tools for real estate agents. It can be used to stay in touch with clients at any stage of a transaction, including building a relationship with all-important leads before they commit to making their move.

Since 2017, NAR research has shown that about 90% of realtors prefer to use text messaging — that's just behind emails and phone calls. While all of these options have enormous potential, texting now stands out as a modern and convenient approach that respects everyone's time.

Why SMS Text Can Be Even More Powerful than Email and Phone Calls for Staying in Touch

Emails tend to be on the longer side. They take time to read and digest. If you don't have a strong relationship with the recipient, your emails could be overlooked. On the other hand, texts usually consist of just one sentence and take only seconds to absorb.

The average American checks the phone approximately 96 times a day, or every ten minutes. Texts are integrated directly into most phone systems, requiring just one click to check and showing up right on a lock screen's notifications. By contrast, checking email often takes several taps and swipes.

And in many situations, texting also beats phone calls hands down.

The Millennial generation is now the biggest in the housing market, and Generation Z is surprisingly close behind them. If there's one marketing fact that real estate agents and brokers need to know about them, it's this: They hate voice calls. About 75% of Millennials say they're too time-consuming.

If you are trying to get hold of a Millennial or Generation Z client on the phone, then your interaction has already started with a groan, even if you succeed. On the other hand, you can be certain that your new text messages will be reviewed during the day — sometimes within just a few minutes.

How to Make SMS Text Messaging Part of Your Real Estate Marketing Strategy

As a core part of the smartphone experience, text messaging is here to stay. The majority of smartphone users can send thousands of texts a month, or have fully unlimited texting. Texting isn't just convenient for them; it can also be a huge time-saver for you.

Here's how to make the most of it:

• Keep the Conversation Going with Direct Texts
  Prospective buyers might need to scan through dozens or even hundreds of listings before they find a property that speaks to them. Once you know their priorities well, you can follow up your listings with a text. Unlike email, text solicits a response right away and enables feedback. Asking a question is a great way to energize your texts, as many recipients will not want to rudely ignore it.
  
  
• Send Mass SMS Texts to Interest Groups
  Done right, mass texts can help you cultivate interest and ensure leads and customers take action. For example, you might send a "text blast" to all the registered participants for an open house. This helps them remember what they already planned to do, which can only be helpful. Likewise, a quick text is valuable when opening up a conversation with a "no-show" attendee.
  
  
• Awaken Your Cold Leads in a Warm Way
  Leads can go cold for any number of reasons. After all, they have plenty of other priorities in mind. If a lead seems to vanish, it rarely means they've given up on their aspirations. Nor should you assume they have chosen another real estate agent. Instead, following up after a week of no contact with "Hi [name], are you still interested in a home in [area]?" can give you all the information you need to proceed.
  
  
• Use Real Estate Text Message Automation
  Just like email marketing, text messaging empowers you by giving you the ability to set up your whole campaign well in advance. Carefully crafted SMS texts equip you to talk to dozens or even hundreds of people as if you were having a one-on-one conversation with each. Real estate text messaging from the experts at Delta Media Group makes it easy, even if you've never texted before.
  
  
• Integrate Texting and Email Marketing
  Email and text share many of the same strengths, and they can go together like peanut butter and jelly. Using the same systems you access through your DeltaNET®6 all-in-one real estate solution, you can link them together so you'll always be in touch. For example, you can automatically send an email about a particular listing followed by a text to get your lead's opinion on what they saw.

The Future Is Now with Text Message Marketing

Text messaging is a powerful, efficient, cost-effective tool for real estate marketing. Contact us to find out more or get started with text message marketing in your practice.

Quick — what's the most powerful form of marketing for real estate agents?

These days, the first thing that comes to mind might be something like social media. And it's true that of all the professionals active on Instagram, Facebook, and the rest, real estate pros have the best shot at transforming all that time spent scrolling their feed into real business value.

Next, you might think of email marketing. And it is the best in at least one way: Experts estimate it has the highest ROI of any digital marketing technique. After all, it only costs a few cents to send emails all month long. And each one could help you close a transaction valued at $50,000 or more.

But neither of these is the best option.

In fact, there isn't one.

Over the last few years, digital marketing has made a big impact on the world of real estate. Millennials are stepping up as the biggest group of homebuyers, and Generation Z is just one step behind them. In both cases, these younger buyers look to the internet when it's time to launch a home search.

It's crucial to be where they are since they might be deep into that search before they reach out to local real estate agents. But, despite all of the techniques that can reach your audience, there isn't a surefire approach that definitely will. It's crucial to have a variety of methods at your disposal.

"Doing It All" Versus Doing a Few Things Well

Whether online or off, effective real estate marketing helps you do two things:

• Build and deepen relationships with prospective customers before they contact you directly
• Turn those prospects into leads who are engaged with your brand and prepared to call you

Both these functions are crucial to growing your real estate practice. Buyers of any age or background can take weeks or even months before they decide to enter the market – with marketing, you can be sure they're on your radar. As you communicate with them, they're more likely to choose you.

Likewise, you can motivate and inspire prospects to become leads who are ready to take action. Yes, you can't get someone to buy a house when they aren't ready, but you don't have to. Education is the key — as a real estate expert, you can highlight when it might be the right time for them to make their move.

The question then becomes, "How do you do it?"

There are dozens of different marketing tactics that can help your business grow. The challenge is to apply a variety of skills but practice them consistently. Inconsistent marketing usually fails to make a difference. At the same time, it leads to frustration and disappointment.

Getting reliable ROI from marketing also has a few easily identified planks:

• Choosing an approach you can make part of your routine, hone, refine, and improve over time
• Using digital marketing automation technology to save time and accelerate the value you'll get
• Once automation is working, moving on to and setting up another digital marketing technique

An AI-driven center of excellence for marketing is the secret behind some of today's fastest-growing real estate agencies and brokerages. Using an all-in-one real estate solution like DeltaNET®6, you can ensure that you are in constant contact with leads through a full range of digital channels — while spending minutes a week.

What should your marketing toolbox look like?

These are some of the most potent marketing moves around:

• Social Media
  Facebook and Instagram are second to none when it comes to getting the word out about your listings. Many people surf "aspirational" properties on Instagram because its visual nature is ideal for real estate photos. LinkedIn can be an effective way to connect with motivated luxury buyers.
  
  
• Email Marketing
  Email marketing helps you share your expertise and position yourself as a trusted expert who'll be there when your subscribers need you. Beyond listings, agents should also publish articles that answer burning questions and help solve problems your ideal customers are having on their real estate journey.
  
  
• Open Houses
  Face-to-face open houses are becoming popular again. At the same time, digital tours aren't going away — used correctly, they can attract would-be buyers from a much larger radius. Brush up on your staging skills and make sure both forms of open house are in your marketing quiver.
  
  
• Real Estate Website
  Your real estate website is where it all begins, tying your digital brand together. A good website is fast, easy to navigate, and provides visitors with useful information. The more blogs, videos, and other content you share on your site, the more likely you are to appear in relevant online searches.

Contact us to learn more about marketing automation for real estate professionals and teams.

Zillow has endured some notable failures recently, including shutting down its Zillow Offers iBuying program after consistently taking losses when flipping the homes that it purchased. But does that mean that the threat of Zillow is over for real estate agents? Not quite. While Zillow is no longer in the business of purchasing homes, it's still a popular, well-known platform that many people turn to for real estate information.

The good news is that, while Zillow is still a threat, there's plenty that you can do to stay out in front and provide a level of service that big platforms can't match. Zillow's clout comes from its name recognition and size, but agents and smaller real estate firms have the advantage of being nimble. With the right tools to boost your marketing and provide personalized service, you can stay ahead of big-name brands like Zillow.

Your real estate CRM, like DeltaNET®6, is one of your most powerful, reliable tools for overcoming the threat posed by companies like Zillow. Here are some of the many ways that your CRM can help you stand out from the crowd.

Provide Personalized Service by Knowing Your Leads and Clients

Whether you're gathering data on new leads or keeping track of the needs of your clients, your CRM allows you to keep all of the information that you need to provide great service in one place. With all of your key data in one place, you're always ready to provide personalized service and connect with clients in meaningful ways. It's not just about remembering names and contact information. The data that you compile lets you know what your clients want, where they stand, and how you can help them move forward with their real estate goals.

Take Advantage of AI and Automation to Boost Your Marketing

As an individual agent or small real estate firm, simply finding the time to stay ahead of brands like Zillow can feel like a tall task. DeltaNET 6 offers many time-saving benefits to help you stay ahead, from auto-generated, AI-driven newsletters to smart drip email campaigns that can help you reach out to large segments of your audience with content that converts. All of this can be done with little effort on your end, leaving more time for you to provide the level of service that keeps clients coming back again and again.

Segment Leads to Send the Right Message at the Right Time

Automated lead segmentation is another tool that both saves time and leads to better results with your marketing. One of the biggest challenges with marketing is making sure that the right message reaches the right person at the right time. Every lead is at their own place in their real estate journey, and knowing where they stand can help you reach them with the content that they want to see. Segmenting leads also makes it easier to know which leads to prioritize so that you can invest your effort where it will make the biggest difference.

Track Data to Improve Results

We've already touched on how being nimble is an advantage compared to big companies like Zillow, and part of being nimble is a willingness to find out what's working, as well as what could be improved. With analytics and tracked email marketing, your CRM can provide you with the data that you need to make informed decisions about your business. You don't have to guess what's working and what's not. You can easily learn more about your strengths and discover insights that help improve upon your weaknesses.

Integrations Put Countless Tools at Your Fingertips

The tools within DeltaNET®6 extend far beyond the basics, including integrations with dozens of popular platforms that can help you market your business, promote your listings, build deeper connections with your clients, and make your life easier in the process. Why scour the internet to find every tool that you need when you can have it all available in one place? Just one more way that your CRM can help you stay ahead of Zillow.

Zillow May Be a Threat, but You Have the Tools to Overcome It

Even with some very public failures, the threat of big-name online real estate platforms like Zillow is unlikely to disappear completely anytime soon. That's why it's so important to take advantage of the tools that you have available, like DeltaNET®6, to attract new leads and provide the best possible level of service to your clients. There's no one magic fix to overcome big brands like Zillow. Instead, it's the sum of all of the small things that your real estate tech provides, along with the ability to innovate and adapt at a much faster pace than the big, corporate brands.

Most people know more than one real estate agent. Likewise, even if they know you well, the majority of people you connect with aren't ready to jump into the market: If you're lucky, they'll be thinking about it. A final decision could be weeks or months away.

What should a real estate agent do in the meantime?

The traditional answer is "follow up." And while following up is important, it's a little too vague on its own to be useful. What's the best, most effective way to maximize the power of your follow-up while saving precious hours of the day? The answer is email marketing.

By turning first-time website visitors into email marketing subscribers, you ensure that you can connect with them on a regular basis. Providing helpful, informative content through email helps you reach your goals while enabling your leads to do the same. That positions you as a trusted adviser.

Alternatives like phone calls and in-person visitors are interruptive and demanding of both your time and the lead's. On the other hand, an email can be dispatched in seconds. Using the power of email marketing automation, you can speak to a thousand people as easily as just one.

The Biggest Mistake Real Estate Agents Make with Email Marketing

Email marketing is believed by many experts to be the digital marketing technique with the highest ROI. It only takes pennies a month to maintain your email campaign, but you can inspire action that results in thousands of dollars in commissions or referral business.

That said, your emails must be precise to be powerful. If you are sending out email without a clear plan in mind, your results are likely to be disappointing. Those early disappointments can lead you to think a robust approach to email isn't worth the necessary effort.

Get through the initial setup phase, however, and your real estate marketing CRM can shoulder much of the work for you afterwards. The most important thing is to avoid the most common mistake in email marketing. If this mistake is baked into your assumptions, it can hold back your entire campaign.

The mistake is this: Believing your email marketing is only about your listings.

Yes, your listings can and should be a part of your email marketing. Especially if you know enough about a lead to understand their priorities and expectations for their next home, a targeted list of properties is a value-add. But it shouldn't be the only thing in your email marketing strategy.

To distinguish yourself from all the others out there, you need to go above and beyond.

That means sharing helpful, informative content laser targeted to each lead.

How to Bring Your Real Estate Email Marketing Strategy to the Next Level

No matter if you're just getting started with email or you've had it going for a while without seeing the results you want, it's not too late to make it work for you. Email has the potential to influence readers and inspire them to reach out to you, helping fill your schedule with less work on your part.

Here's how to strengthen your email results:

• Develop a Compelling Lead Magnet
  A lead magnet is a sophisticated piece of content that helps the reader to solve a problem or answer a question. People agree to join your email list in exchange for access. One useful lead magnet is a market analysis of the local area. A neighborhood comparison is another. As a DeltaNET customer, you'll be able to create a white-labeled Market Watch Report any time and receive it in a matter of minutes.
  
  
• Segment Your List by Buyer Persona
  Who is your ideal customer? Even if you have only one very specific customer persona — say, first-time homebuyers — you will still need three segments: One for leads, one for current customers, and one for those whose transaction is complete. Segmenting your list helps ensure the information each subscriber receives is relevant to their needs. It also makes your list part of your customer retention.
  
  
• Use Video to Tease Website Content
  Video is the most popular content online today. Most people greatly prefer it to text content, and they will even rank it over still photos and other visuals. By embedding a short video in your email, you can greatly raise the odds that readers will click through to view an article or a listing.
  
  
• Turn Subscribers into Contacts
  Although you can't control the timing of a buy or sale, you can nudge subscribers so they can get off the fence sooner. Be sure you are publicizing events like open houses, giving subscribers opportunities to take the next step. The more action they take, the more likely they are to become customers.

Contact us to discover how DeltaNET technology can help your email campaigns.

Many real estate agents spend the first year of their careers "chasing down leads."

The process starts by telling everyone you know that you're now a real estate agent. From there, hours of in-person networking are usually used to fill the funnel. But the truth is, most of these people aren't leads in the technical sense. They are prospects, people you only hope are interested.

Someone becomes a lead when they raise their hand in one way or another and signal that they really are interested in your services. They may not be prepared to buy or sell right now, but they do care to hear more. These relationships can be deepened until the lead becomes a customer.

This is a crucial distinction for real estate in particular.

You could focus all of your attention on networking and cold calling like the real estate agents of old, but inevitably, you'll end up investing more time on prospects who aren't interested than on leads who'll be ready to make a decision within the next quarter.

That can lead to stress and burnout, as it feels like your efforts are going nowhere.

Luckily, there's an alternative. By optimizing your real estate website, you can help leads self-educate and make it easier to engage with them at the right moment. Much of the process can be automated, ensuring you take powerful action at the right time rather than just "staying busy."

Meaningful Engagement Is Essential to Today's Real Estate Success

What makes a moment of engagement particularly meaningful?

Based on feedback from thousands of agents and brokers, "meaningful" engagement is:

• Timely
• Relevant
• Personalized

Any form of engagement with your leads can be meaningful when it delivers the right information at the right time based on what you know about that person's wants and needs. The format — call, text, email, and the rest — is usually less important, but some are easier to scale with your business than others.

Ideally, your website should be set up with a number of "conversion actions" so you are notified at the very moment a prospect becomes a lead. A lead may surface after having certain interactions with your listings, joining your email subscriber list, following you on social media, and so on.

A Customer Relationship Management suite like the DeltaNET®6 can give you the total visibility you need so you always know where, when, and how to engage. With data from your CRM, you can follow the best practices below to turn more of your leads into customers:

• Respond to Leads Right Away
  Research shows that responding to a lead within ten minutes makes the biggest impression on them, and you are most likely to have a full conversation with them if you respond within five minutes. This only becomes possible when your website notifies you instantly about new leads!
  
  
• Focus on the First Ten Days
  Once the lines of communication are open, use everything at your disposal to demonstrate your value in the first ten days. This time period is crucial to the decision-making process. It's a good idea to forward a lead with helpful online content and listings that match their priorities. Text to follow up if a lead "goes dark."
  
  
• Start Your Own Facebook Group
  Although Facebook isn't as wildly popular as it once was, millions of American adults still use it, and that includes most of your future customers. A Facebook Group lets you stay in touch and respond directly to questions and comments from leads, positioning you as a trusted advisor throughout their process.
  
  
• Create a Useful Lead Magnet
  A lead magnet is a sophisticated, high-quality piece of content you offer leads in exchange for joining your email marketing list. One of the most popular lead magnets is a report on the local real estate market. You can generate a white-labeled Market Watch Report from DeltaNET®6.
  
  
• Use Email Drip Campaigns
  Email marketing is the most cost-effective way to stay in touch with a lead for a long period of time, even if it takes months for them to enter the market. By emailing a lead once or twice weekly with helpful, informative content, you'll remain top of mind and more likely to close a deal.
  
  
• Share Your Social Proof
  Social proof is everything that shows a lead that others "just like them" have had success with you. A testimonial is the basic "unit" of social proof. You can spice it up by getting video testimonials, or build out a sort of miniature case study with details on the situation and home the customer bought or sold.

By automating first contact and initial follow-up with DeltaNET®6, you set the stage for a productive and mutually beneficial partnership. Contact us to discover more or get started.

Real estate technology is moving faster than ever, and some agents are beginning to wonder if they'll be left behind. Big industry players have made moves to automate real estate in disruptive ways — but, in the long run, they've only succeeded in "disrupting" their own business.

It is becoming more obvious that the average buyer or seller doesn't want a fully AI-driven process, nor do they want to do it all themselves, no matter how convenient the tools become. What they want is personalized advice from a local expert.

Rather than replacing agents, the best technology enhances what they can do.

More Accessible Technology Means Better Results for Organizations of All Sizes

It was not that long ago when the best technology was available only to the largest brokerages. With the introduction of Customer Relationship Management tools like the DeltaNET®6, that's no longer the case. From large enterprises to independent agents, everyone can benefit.

Likewise, CRM technology was once limited mainly to B2B sales teams. With a CRM solution built by and for real estate professionals, it becomes possible for any member of a team to be more productive than ever before — while doing less work and making fewer errors along the way.

Not even the most advanced technology available can do what real estate agents do: Guide customers to informed, confident decisions about buying and selling. But what technology can do is accelerate and automate rote tasks and routines, especially those related to marketing and advertising.

You know marketing consistently is an essential part of your business success. But how often have you set out to do it only to have other priorities take center stage? It's a common problem for people at all stages of their careers, and precisely the one technology is best suited to overcome.

Technology Supports Your Efforts to Deliver the Human Touch Every Time

To work with you, someone has to know you, like you, and trust you. One unique aspect of real estate is that you often must build that rapport before the person steps into your office for the first time. For that to work, technology needs to be there to fill in the gaps.

From your real estate website to social media and email marketing, an all-in-one technology center of excellence like DeltaNET®6 ensures that you are always communicating with your audience in a humane, consistent way — no matter if you're talking directly to one person, one hundred, or one thousand.

For email, it does this through a combination of templating and personalization. You set up campaigns once, for just a few minutes at a time, then the system fills in the blanks based on individual behavior. Every mailing list subscriber gets a tailored experience based on their interests.

For social media, an event-driven approach is best. For example, you can have automatic updates made whenever details on your active listings change. You can also instantly publicize new listings, focusing a fast-moving audience's attention on virtual tours and other features that matter to them.

Yes, you could do it all yourself, painstakingly writing social media updates and emails by hand. In the end, though, this wouldn't make the quality of your communication better. Instead, it would just mean spending more time on it, to the detriment of all the other things that move your business forward.

The Future Is Now for Real Estate — and Marketing Automation Is Ready to Help You

As real estate agents, we know technology isn't the answer to every problem. Despite rosy predictions about the future of machine learning, we are probably 200 years away from fully autonomous robots doing the work of today's agents.

In fact, an Oxford study ranks "real estate sales agents" near the middle of the pack for their long-term computerization risk — suggesting it will take a long time and a lot of technological development before agents and brokers need to be concerned.

In the meantime, technology is not an enemy, but an ally. You can use it to build the practice you want by giving yourself the leeway to spend your time and energy wisely. It's no longer a choice between so many long hours of marketing or nothing at all. In this sense, at least, you really can have it all.

That's an essential piece of the puzzle for agents and brokers who want to optimize their business for work-life balance. Within just a few weeks of implementing real estate CRM technology, you can save dozens of hours. Those can be used to push your business further or get the rest you need and deserve.

Delta Media Group is here to help you bring the promises of technology down to earth in your career. Contact us to learn more or begin.

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.