As a real estate agent, you need to have a marketing strategy and a sales process in place to be successful.
And if you’re the leader of a larger real estate team, you may also have different teams or team members responsible for marketing and sales.
Your marketing and sales teams are very connected and dependent on each other for success: your marketing team generates and qualifies leads, and your sales teams engages and closes the leads. Without a marketing strategy and team, you have no leads, and without a sales process and team, you have no deals.
So because they’re so connected and reliant on each other, it makes sense to have, and to understand, the crossover that these 2 teams have so that you can make them both more effective by having them work more closely together.
And that’s where the term “smarketing” comes in.
Smarketing is a combination of the words “sales” and “marketing”. It’s the alliance and crossover that you build between your marketing team and your sales team through creating measurable goals that bridge both.
★ Smarketing is directly related to inbound marketing. If you want to learn more about inbound marketing, have a look at these posts and resources:
- The Philosophy of Inbound Marketing, and Why it Works for Agents
- Planning a Real Estate Lead Flow Through Inbound Marketing
- Building an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Get Higher Quality Leads
- Download Our Inbound Marketing Guide for Real Estate Agents
Connected Through Software
Bridging your sales team and marketing team, through smarketing, starts by looking at the software you use for each of them. To be successful, your marketing software must be connected to your sales software (or vice-versa); or ideally, they’re using the same software.
This is key because the main way to start bridging the 2 is to make them transparent to each other. If you use 1 software for your sales process, and another (or maybe many) for your marketing strategy, neither will know what the other is doing because they won’t be able to communicate or see the same information.
For example, if they’re using the same software, you can see:
- How you first acquired a contact,
- What marketing that contact responded to,
- Where and when that contact reached out,
- How long it took that contact to move through he sales process,
- And when that contact eventually became a closed deal.
And this is important because this transparency helps each team understand where to make changes, based on what worked and what didn’t work, to make both team’s more effective and make it easier for them to meet both their shared and individual goals.
While it’s not impossible to do this through multiple applications that aren’t connected, it’s certainly a lot more difficult.
★ Depending on your needs, there are a lot of end-to-end software solutions out there that will help you bridge sales and marketing, like HubSpot and Active Campaign.
Connected Through Goal Setting
Your marketing team will have their own short/long term goals, while your sales team, will have different short/long term goals, but ultimately, because they’re so connected and reliant on each other, it makes a huge difference to have them set goals that they’re both responsible for.
While the entire team will have an overall revenue goal, breaking down the shared, smaller goals of sales and marketing helps you reach the main goal more effectively. For example, the shared goals, per month, could be:
- Number of new contacts generated.
- Number of conversions or new deals created.
- Number of meetings booked with the sales team.
- Number of closed deals,
- Number of closed deals first acquired via email marketing or social media.
- Number of closed deals that were acquired less than a month ago.
- And a lot more…
Really, those shared goals could be anything that helps the entire team reach their main goal of more revenue. And while some of those goals are specific per team, it helps if both teams understand what each are trying to do so they can reach the goals together.
★ Smarketing starts with lead generation. If you want to learn more about lead generation, have a look at these posts and resources:
- What To Do If You Have a Real Estate Lead Generation Problem
- Building a Lead Generation Strategy Through Education
- Download Our Lead Management Workbook
Connected Through Communication
Ultimately, both teams need to be communicative and transparent to be successful, and a lot of times, it makes sense to look at them as 1 singular team rather than individual teams.
The more these teams actively communicate, bridge transparency, and work towards the same goals, the better results you, your teams, and your revenue, will see from your overall sales and marketing efforts.
Want to drive traffic, build your brand, and engage your target audience? Download our eBook: ‘The Ultimate Guide to Real Estate Marketing’. It’s a collection of some of our best marketing articles, tips, and tricks that we’ve collected over the years.
