First month as Marketing Director?

I started this Blog in hopes that people who are growing their Real Estate company can learn about some challenges that occur when Marketing. I hope that by posting a blog every few weeks that I can either get some help from the members here or that I can help them. In the end, I want to establish great relationships by helping one another to reach our Real Estate or Marketing goals.

So I have been working for a Elden Properties for about a month now and I must say, I love it! Since we are a small company I do have to wear a few hats. I am the Transactions Coordinator, IT, and Marketing "guy" at this company but I like having a few hats because we are small enough where I am not spread thin (yet) and it allows me to make decisions a little faster.

I have always been used to being in the corporate world and there are a lot of decision makers that need to know my idea before it can get approved. In this case if Marketing needed something that IT will have to develop all I have to do is talk to me about it. That makes me smile every time.

So the purpose of me being hired was to see how I can help change a Real Estate company by increasing leads. Originally, I thought I would just come in and start doing some Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad campaigns and see what happens. Although this was a great idea and I can still do this, the owner, who is very tech savvy himself, asked me to learn the new CRM tool he had. I then realized that although the company had 8 full time employees, there was no foundation in place. The Sales staff had no real way of capturing the leads they had. There was no system in place where if an Investor wanted photos of a property they were still emailing them to the investor. There is nothing wrong with that but with how much I loved technology I knew how more productive we could be if we moved to the cloud.

This is where my IT hat comes in. I'm sure as owners of a company you guys can relate to wearing many hats. So most medium to large companies I had worked for they had an Intranet (not to be confused with Internet). It's essentially the Internet but within a company where no one else outside the company can access. We didn't have one. I also like sharing folders in the cloud and we didn't have that either. With all of these tools we could share information quicker and even hold each other more accountable.

The solution was Google Apps for Business. I had been using Google for a long time. When Google Drive came out I had to be invited by Google to join. Just like gmail and Google Voice. In this case I remember using Google Drive for my collaboration projects in school. I remember using Google Hangout to chat with my classmates and work on a Google Doc or Spreadsheet together. It was remarkable because they were in other parts of the country.

So to make this story short(er), I presented the owner with how more productive we would be with using Google Apps for Business and by the end of this week we will have migrated all of our emails/domains over to Google. We currently share photos to Investors in an Investors Folder on Google Drive as well as have our Contractors load pictures from a Property onto it from their camera phones. If we want to see how a rehab is going they can just upload picture through a shared folder for our Contractors. It's really amazing when you think about it.

I would really like to know what you guys use. Let me know as I would really appreciate it.