Real estate marketing: When to automate and when to customize

If you were filming a virtual property tour, there are two ways you could go about it. The first would be to conduct the tour for a specific buyer client. You’d get them on a ZOOM call, take them virtually through the home, and answer questions.

That would undoubtedly be effective. However, it would also be very time-consuming. Especially if you did that for every prospect!

Another way would be to record a property tour and add that video to a web page or MLS listing. That way, you could quickly send the link to interested prospects.

As an agent interested in boosting real estate lead generation, you often need to make these judgement calls when marketing your real estate agent services. You need to decide when to automate and when to customize.

How do you do that?

A helpful technique is to consider two factors: Time and impact.

TIME: How much time will it take to customize?

IMPACT: What impact will that customization have?

If customizing some aspect of your real estate marketing doesn’t take much time but has a big impact on real estate leads or real estate referrals, then it’s worth it. On the other hand, if customizing takes forever and doesn’t have much of an impact, then forget it and let automation do the work.

Let’s take a look at real estate newsletters and the common ways those can be customized.

You could write all the how-to-articles and market updates yourself. However, at a minimum of four hours per article or update — thinking, writing, editing, proofreading, setting it up in the newsletter design template — that’s a lot of work. And would prospects and clients notice and appreciate that you slaved away on an article all morning? It’s more likely what they would appreciate most is great content, whoever wrote it.

So, in this case your TIME involved is high but the additional IMPACT made by doing it yourself (customizing) is LOW.

Now, let’s consider the personal message of your newsletter. You could use a generic message as-is and the newsletter could still be great. However, if you spent a few minutes customizing that message or writing your own short greeting, that could increase the impact.

In this case, the time you spent is just minutes but the additional impact made may be worth it.

There are many other ways you may be able to customize your real estate newsletter so that it makes a bigger impact, and ultimately results in more real estate leads or referrals.

The lesson here is, you should customize your marketing when it makes sense from a time/impact perspective, and automate the rest. If you follow that simple guideline, you’ll get more oomph — as in, more leads and real estate referrals — from your marketing efforts.