About the project
The real estate market is one of the most competitive sectors in the business world. That's why you need flexible and reliable marketing tools in order to stay in the lead. Our clients are specialists in digital marketing, content creation and lead generation, partnered with a team of real estate professionals. They have contacted us with the idea of building a specialised platform for real estate agents which provides them with tools for easily creating and managing marketing content for promoting their business and listings. We were excited to be a technical partner in a project with such potential.
Reach Advance is targeted at real estate agents and professionals, containing multiple services, such as generating marketing videos and e-flyers for property listings or general branded contents for a real estate agency, scheduling and managing social media posts, creating email and SMS campaigns, launching a microsite, CRM for managing the agency's leads list. Most of the customers are independent realtors who don't have marketing consultants or tech teams to help them with their online marketing, that's why it was important to make the platform intuitive and easy to use even by non-tech savvy users.
Each of these services is offered as a part of several subscription plans, so it's important for the Reach Advance team to have a well designed back-end with the flexibility to manage all subscriptions and monitor the customer's activity so the sales team can offer them the services they need. We are glad that we are not only a contractor in the project, but a true part of the client's team of marketing professionals. Because of this close connection, we are able to suggest and develop custom solutions for the sales team so they can reach new potential leads.
The Reach Advance platform in details
The project can be roughly separated in three main elements:
- Back-end, used by the Reach Advance sales team for managing customers, reviewing usage statistics and publishing editorial content;
- Main platform, used by the platform customers to manage their listings, generated marketing contents and social media activity;
- Public materials (microsites, social media posts, emails, videos, etc.), targeted at the potential leads of the platform's customers.
As we mentioned, the platform consists of multiple microservices, available at different tiers of subscription plans. Everything is designed in a way that any service can work in conjunction with each other, as well as not break the UX if it's not active in a given plan. Another important request of the client we kept in mind was the ability to add new services in the future, as well as making sure everything is scalable.
Let's take a look at the set of microservices we've developed for the launch of Reach Advance:
Real estate agent's profile
The customers of Reach Advance are real estate agents who want to promote their listings and agencies. The first step for them is to create their profile, upload their picture, contact details, introduction, agency logo, even set their brand colors to fully customize their marketing materials.
Listings management
The cornerstone of the platform are the listing records. Each agent can create a directory of their listings with full details, such as address, property characteristics, status (for sale, for rent, just listed, etc.) marketing text and an image gallery. Using this data they can generate customised marketing materials, videos, e-flyers, social media posts, etc. for each listing.
Generating videos and e-flyers
One of the key features of Reach Advance is the automated marketing materials generator. With a few simple steps each agent can easily create a promo video clip or an e-flayer for a selected property, using professionally designed templates. The set of marketing materials for each property is easily managed on the platform. Every item can be posted directly on the agent's Facebook page with a click of a button.
Custom website
Having a website is important for every agent, so they can easily showcase their portfolio of listings, as well as to promote their business both offline and online. For Reach Advance we've developed a website builder that's customizable and so easy to use that everyone can set up once and simply click “launch”. The microsite is then generated and hosted by Reach Advance. The agent can either use a reachadvance.com subdomain or redirect their own domain name. The website offers a modern responsive design, homepage with agent details, custom logo and brand colors, promo areas for featured listings, testimonials and FAQ sections, contact form, full listing directory with filtering options (price range, property characteristics) and a property details page with gallery.
Agent content
With this service you can generate a professionally designed custom Facebook cover video by uploading several images and pulling your agent profile details. There's also a section from where you can update your Facebook page's details directly, without leaving the Reach Advance platform.
CRM
The CRM features complete leads management functionality, import leads option, create and manage new leads, filter by source, interest type, custom tags, etc.
Email marketing
Once an agent has their list of leads in the platform, they can easily create and send-out a campaign for promoting a set of featured listings, single house spotlight, or an open house promo. All of which will be placed in a professionally designed and custom branded email template.
Autoposting
Another signature feature of the platform are the automated social media posts. Reach Advance's team of real estate professionals constantly develop a library of videos with tips, insights and useful information about the real estate sector, organized in categories in the RA's admin panel. This editorial content is available to the agents so they can schedule posts in selected weekly intervals to be automatically posted on their social media pages.
Posting calendar
This feature allows the agents to have a graphical view of all of their social media posts and keep track of all posts created by the Reach Advance platform, including manually published and automated contents.
Being a part of a team of professionals that trusts you completely with creating, launching and growing their idea is truly rewarding. We have worked together to build the Reach Advance platform step by step, each of the tools was carefully tested and added to the set of services so we were thrilled for the launch. Even though the official launch of the project coincided with the most difficult times of the global COVID-19 pandemic, we were happy to see positive results shortly after the launch. The customers responded very well to the platform and the numbers are still going up. Even after the launch we haven't stopped working with the Reach Advance team for a moment, we're constantly planning and developing new features and improvements to offer both the platform customers and the Reach Advance sales team.
