The benefits of hiring virtual real estate assistants include offloading sales and marketing and various admin-related tasks. In short, a virtual real estate assistant can free up your real estate agency’s estate agent or manager and be a cost-effective addition to your team.
There are various lead-generation tasks that a virtual real estate assistant can perform that can be particularly beneficial to your business.
Real estate leads provide potentially more revenue and constant business. A virtual assistant can help your team by giving them ongoing work to complete as they find clients. All such transactions can be achieved online.
It is known that 44% of buyers do their home shopping online. To reiterate, here are the key lead-generation tasks your virtual assistant can complete for you.
Email Marketing
Email marketing can be extremely productive, providing high-value leads. However, the assistant must ‘warm up’ the email address before an email marketing campaign can be completed.
Using a different domain can also help to buffer and protect your original domain name from being labeled spam. These additional steps are needed to ensure that your email address and domain are not ranked as a spam site.
After that, the assistant can create personalized emails to the different markets, including sellers, buyers, or even quality renters.
Website optimization
A website is a passive form of marketing. But it should not be dead – you need to optimize your site continuously to ensure you gain the best leads possible.
This means more than just having a home page and a ‘contact us’ form − you need to use tools to generate leads. These can be lead magnets such as exclusive content, the addition of fun and interesting quizzes, and optimizing the SEO of your landing pages.
This latter task will involve conducting proper keyword research. Such related tasks can be very grueling, making them the perfect choice to be outsourced − all this while your agents focus on their core work: selling and finding renters for their clients.
Generate, upload, and promote marketing videos.
Video marketing is becoming very popular as bandwidth and internet speed improve. More so, clients enjoy being in the space they are visiting virtually − this gives a better sensation than photos can deliver.
Additionally, video content leads to higher conversion rates. A virtual assistant can edit all your videos. These videos can be used as virtual tours of a property.
More so, they can be used to promote the lifestyle the agent is trying to convey to the client. Such can include highlighting the neighborhood −from the neighbors to coffee shops to schools in the area.
However, videos can also be used as training material and more effectively convey the message than a textbook. Moreover, testimonials and marketing videos can be created to promote an agent or agency.
These videos can be posted on various social media channels and also on YouTube to build rapport with potential buyers.
Produce unique and high-value content.
A task a virtual assistant can do is to keep your social media followers and other online audience engaged with excellent, quality content. The assistant can use words that match to attract the right client for the right property bracket.
Moreover, the assistant can personalize the content when directing it to a niche audience. This type of content can be used on your website, social media pages, property listings, and as guest posts on other business sites.
Boost your social media.
Social media has become an integral part of most people’s lives. Social media is thus a great tool for real estate agents to reach their niche market and attract their attention.
However, content must be high quality and consistent. Posting the odd post once a month is simply not the correct approach. Additionally, creating and then posting such content on various social media channels can be time-consuming.
It is, therefore, a task worth outsourcing. Such outsourcing can cost you less than doing it yourself. But correctly done on social media can result in you finding many different leads.
Get online reviews
Your reputation is everything. A bad review can damage your brand, and it can take many years to overcome this type of damage. However, reviews can also be a great source of leads for your sales team to explore.
Your virtual assistant can attract more people to post great reviews. This can lead to a better reputation, one which will drive more people your way.
One technique is to email clients who have had a good experience and ask for a testimonial. These reviews can then be added to your website and posted on social media channels.
Always ensure you gain the customer’s consent, and inform them where these reviews will be used.
Use lead-generation tools and sites.
There are many lead-generation websites and tools available. After extracting data, however, do make sure that when the time comes, you use the data correctly and you have your systems ready before you start with this.
You will also need some skills to deal with the various lead-generation tools. This is also a very detailed process that can present a long and laborious task.
Assist with sales tasks.
A virtual or remote assistant can also help your sales team. The tasks they can do which will help with lead generation are to keep your CRM system updated. They can follow up with new leads and reconnect with older leads.
A virtual assistant can set appointments and revert to sellers on the progress of selling their properties. This latter will be good − you want to build on your customer service and have your clients talk positively about you and your agency.
Begin and maintain your real estate blog.
Blogging is a useful SEO tool to drive traffic to your website. You can also use other tools like forms to capture the client’s details.
More so, a blog can help to build trust amongst your client base. In fact, you can attract up to 67% more leads by adding and maintaining a blog.
The content writing can be outsourced to a virtual assistant who can do the posting for you.
Provide free real estate advice.
With high-quality content comes sound advice. This means informing a buy-to-rent client what to expect and how to minimize their taxes.
The client is likely to have a problem; therefore, offering them valuable info can help to solve this. For instance, the information would be on a Facebook group focusing on property.
This is also an excellent space to generate leads. It can be hard work and will take up much of your time; therefore, outsourcing is the most sensible solution. Also, a remote assistant can work on questions and answers, which can be posted on your website, in a blog, or on one of your social media channels.
The remote assistant may offer advice to a journalist who will acknowledge your site. This response will help provide backlinks to your website. You can then increase traffic to your site − more people mean more leads.
Conduct research
Understanding the market trends, what your competition is doing, and which developers are planning new development projects can mean more business for you.
In other words, the assistant can conduct proper research on the real estate market. This research can indicate areas on which agents should focus or which strategic path you should consider.
Additionally, having a good understanding of your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses can help you stay ahead. Therefore a remote assistant can locate your competitors, find out what they are doing, where they are winning and losing, the traffic their site is generating, and more.
Networking
Networking is essential for business. It helps to build leads and trust and to gain information. Here the virtual assistant can create Facebook and LinkedIn groups.
The assistant can create webinars and boot camps, respond to various real estate forums, connect with home stagers and other service providers, and set up networking meetings for your team to attend.
The bottom line
If you do not have a virtual assistant for your real estate business yet, then you should consider using this valuable asset. A professional virtual assistant can help you immensely to generate leads, which can be used by your sales team to convert.
They can find many different places to connect with multiple potential leads. It is important to note that most of these tasks are not instantly accomplished − they must be given the requisite time.