Learning how to grow your real estate business is a daunting, if rewarding, pursuit. There are numerous tasks that require your attention, and there’s a never-ending set of tips to grow your real estate business, which can have your head swimming with information and to-do list items.
Worse yet, whether you’re starting a real estate team or growing your real estate portfolio, there’s a seeming barrage of must-have tools and services required for any modern business — which can eat up profits in no time.
Luckily, one of the most powerful tools for learning how to grow a real estate business, fast, is also one of the cheapest…in the form of the suite of services offered by multi-billion-dollar company, Google.
Here are five strategies you can use to grow your real estate business powerfully — and on any budget — harnessing the power of good, ole’ Google.
How Google Can Help You Grow Your Real Estate Business
1. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is far more than a simple web-monitoring service. With its ability to send filtered digest notifications to your inbox on a variety of subjects, it’s the ultimate way to keep tabs on trends & strategies that directly affect your business (not to mention give you insight into exactly the type of people you should target to add to your real estate network.)
There are numerous ways to use Google Alerts, but here are a couple of guidelines when adding this powerful service to your real estate investing toolbox:
- Industry news: Crete an alert around particular keywords related to your industry — such as “housing market” or “Denver real estate” — and let Google find the most relevant, timely information you need to know about.
- Market shifts: Want to keep abreast of major housing developments or other civic developments that affect your market and will help you learn how to grow your real estate portfolio? Create alerts that let you know about large companies setting up shop in your area or new building projects that could affect business in your market.
- Build your network: Want to find out who the movers-and-shakers are — from a real estate perspective — in your market? Set up alerts to find out any news regarding contractors, attorneys, real estate agents, or private money lenders in your locale. (Bonus points: Be the first to congratulate them on any new career milestone.)
- Monitor your company: Create alerts based around the name of your company to ensure there isn’t any less-than-stellar chatter about your business.
More Info: Google Alerts
2. Google Analytics
If you don’t have a fancy analytics tool already — and chances are, you don’t — then Google Analytics might be the next best thing. With Google Analytics you can:
- Track campaign performance: Not sure which social media marketing campaign you ran works best? Create some tracking links and let Google do the work for you.
- Calculate average lead value: Google Analytics makes it easy to calculate how much each lead is actually worth to your bottom line. (Which makes those head-scratching real estate marketing decisions much easier.)
- Customer demographics: Not sure what your ideal client/lead looks like? Use Google Analytics data to cultivate a demographic makeup of who you need to reach — gender, age, zip code, occupation — which can make platforms like Google Adwords and Facebook advertising much more effective.
- Most popular pages: Not sure which pages of your website are performing best? Google Analytics does. By studying your Google Analytics reports you’ll know which content is grabbing visitors…and which isn’t quite pulling its weight.
More Info: Google Analytics
3. Gmail
With nearly one billion monthly users, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with Gmail. But what you may not know is some of the powerful email marketing features available to you:
- Outsource email: By setting up the “email alias” feature you can have an assistant, or other member of your team, send email on your behalf. (Without the other party realizing it.)
- Sync up your accounts: Prefer to send email from your real estate website email account, as opposed to that Gmail account you set up 10 years ago? With “send email as” you can easily link your domain email with your Gmail account. One dashboard for numerous accounts.
- Schedule emails (far in advance): There are quite a few third-party tools, such as Gmelius, which allow you — right from your Gmail dashboard — to schedule email and set up recurring emails. Great for reaching out to your real estate network at regular intervals, without having to put it on your calendar.
More Info: Gmail
More Info: Gmelius
4. Google PageSpeed
As the name suggests, PageSpeed is about giving you insights into how your website is performing. The reason this is important is because the load time of your real estate website directly affects its placement in the Google search engine rankings.
With PageSpeed, you’ll get valuable intel such as:
- How your website performs on mobile and desktop
- How your website compares to the competition
- Tips for what you can do to improve the speed of your site
Best of all, with its server integration feature, you can optimize your site straight from Google, without fussing over confusing code on your website.
More Info: PageSpeed
Google Isn’t Just a Verb
As anyone who has successfully learned the art of growing a successful real estate business will tell you, many of the largest gains come not when you work harder, but instead when you work smarter.
And there may be no better, smarter way, when cultivating the ability to grow your real estate business, than utilizing the numerous, mostly free — and quite powerful — tools available from Google.
