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Birdeye is an experience marketing solution for real estate agents
Platforms: Browser, iOS app, mobile-responsive
Ideal for: All brokerages and teams, independent or franchise that want to increase ROI on SEO, reviews and online profiles.
Top selling points:
- Totally new to leverage, measure online presence
- Highly strategic
- Automatically creates referral leads from completed transactions
- Easily gauge, measure customer feedback
- One location for lead intake and assignment
Top concern:
More passive and strategic, Birdeye’s appeal may not land with brokerages and teams not ready to face their inconsistent or dis-intermediated online presence.
What you should know
I’ve ranted more than once about the collective, ever-fractured web presence of so many industry brands. Primarily a characteristic of large franchises, far too many offices exist under multiple, SEO-unfriendly domain names, outdated front-ends and clumsy subdomain agent pages and inconsistent bios and office profiles.
The industry has to do better. And Birdeye can help you get there.
Overall, “experience marketing” is hard to define, but think of it as capitalizing on the positive (and negative) interactions your company has with customers.
The relatively new concept uses testimonials, reviews and all the online profiles of your company as an evergreen form of brand awareness and lead capture. Your Yelp! page, Google My Business profile, Facebook pages and generally, any form of business search result or listing aggregator.
The aptly named Birdeye’s Listings interface offers users an overhead look at how each of your online listings is performing — more than 150 of them. Is your address on Bing? Should you update a phone number somewhere? What’s not been accessed in months?
Each one is rated based on its level of completion, and offers direct links to log on and fix anything.
The Reviews feature populates your dashboard with each one, regardless of source, and empowers to take action, whether that’s sharing directly to social media or sending it as an email. This screen is also where you’ll find a tool for inviting people to submit a review, and you can choose a single template that will ask for reviews on multiple sites.
If desired, review requests can be sent automatically as part of a scheduled workflow. Referrals work the same way, empowering the agent to request them, with all included text and information, in a couple of clicks.
Birdeye’s Unified Inbox is a multifunction catch-all for consumer interactions. All system communications, such as texts, new review alerts, voicemails or survey responses (from Birdeye’s Survey creator), get aggregated here for the agent to react to. Any new contacts are labeled as Leads, and they can be assigned as appropriate or quickly sent a templated response. Expect to spend a great deal of your time in this feature, as it’s a comprehensive business pulse reader.
Speaking of taking a pulse, Birdeye’s Surveys are designed to be deployed quickly and encourage responses at each step of the relationship so everyone knows how it’s all going, which is a good way to let your clients know that you care. It also lets brokers and team leads feel good about the chances of a deal getting done.
And in case one of those surveys comes back less than favorable, the Ticketing feature applies a customer support model to address it. The agent or other party can ticket the response for a resolution. Ticketing can also be used for bad reviews or negative online profiles, thus providing the brokerage with a clear way to listen to the consumer.
Birdeye comes with a Contacts feature and extensive reporting through its Insights module.
What’s noteworthy is Birdeye’s overall user experience. It’s a standout design that truly reflects its intrinsic devotion to the software’s intent. Developers clearly recognized that the last thing they could risk was not delivering for their own customers.
This is a great looking product, through and through, and ends up for me in a category with some of the industry’s other unique takes on critical, but often undervalued, business functions, such as PrecloseGO, TopHap, WyzeGyde, Sisu and DashCMA, among others.
If you’re a growing brokerage or an independent brokerage dedicated to keeping pace with the well-funded national tech-forward brokerages, this is your kind of product.
Give it time, let it work for you, and you’ll rise in search rankings, earn more reviews and become more accountable to your clients — and there’s nothing more important than that when it comes to winning your market.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
