Many websites discuss the “best” real estate marketing courses without defining what “best” means.
And some don’t necessarily include actual courses but just links to blogs or opt-in email pages with free giveaways.
Other courses, even on platforms such as Udemy, are rather “shameless” plugs to their affiliate products and more of a sales page wrapped into separate course lessons.
At the same time, others are a bit too shallow, with insufficient “meat.”
That’s fine and a legit marketing strategy, but I wouldn’t classify them as courses. I wouldn’t even include them in my list for further analysis.
So, what’s the best marketing course applicable to a real estate out of the 13 that qualified for my analysis?
According to my analysis result in this article, it is “Google’s Digital Garage.” And the best one, more specific for and tailored to the real estate industry, the “Ressentials 102: Make 100K Annually in Real Estate Sales”.
Please read on to know how I came to these results.
3 Criteria to Find the Best Real Estate Marketing Course
So, I will do it differently in this article and first determine three criteria for “best.”
Based on them, I will analyze 13 different real estate marketing courses and/or marketing courses applicable to real estate, both free and paid.
For each criterion, I will allot points from 0 to 10.
I summarize them in a nice table and multiply them by a weight scale between 0 and 10 at the end of the article.
This will help you to be able to come to a conclusion about which real estate marketing course is likely to be the best.
So, what are the three criteria I will use?
1) Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
This is important because channels and methods can be outdated pretty fast today, especially regarding marketing tactics.
You don’t want to take a course that is already outdated about marketing channels or contains no longer effective methods.
This criterion will have a high weight in my decision grid matrix below because it dramatically impacts your chances of success.
2) Is the course offered at a low price or even free?
This one is a no-brainer, but not as important as you think.
Of course, you don’t want to spend all your money on a course with a high price tag, so courses with lower prices are preferred.
But in some cases, courses with higher prices may provide you with some great value, and that price would be justified.
Therefore, this criterion won’t have a high weight in my decision grid matrix below.
3) Does the real estate marketing course include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
This criterion is again a more important one.
You want to find a course that ensures that the strategies, methods, and tactics it teaches align with your real estate business goals and, therefore, also include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements.
So, it will be a plus if the course mentions and teaches about key performance indicators and measuring your campaigns.
It’s also a plus if it can break down some marketing numbers.
The latter include conversion rates and their meaning for the daily marketing tasks you must accomplish to reach your revenue goals.
For example, it won’t do much for a course that shows you how to do prospecting via cold calls but fails to show you the number of daily cold calls you would need to make to reach your monthly revenue goals and how to measure this overall.
So the course would need to teach you how to find out about the conversion rates of cold calling and how these conversion rates translate into the number of daily calls you need to make.
Therefore, this criterion will have a reasonably high weight in my decision grid matrix below.
Overview of 13 Real Estate Marketing Courses
1) PPC University
PPC University is a free course inside the marketing software of the agency called Wordstream.
Its focus is on pay-per-click advertising. It is not necessarily what you would expect from an online course, which usually has some videos and exercises.
It is a nicely structured page with an overview of educational content in article form.
I don’t say this as a minus, but it’s something you may want to know.
Some course pages are additional opt-in pages, so you get the course material after entering your credentials.
On the other hand, this course goes quite in-depth in areas such as:
- Beginner PPC in the category “PPC 101.”
- Intermediate PPC in the category “PPC 102.”
- Advanced PPC
- Social Ads 101
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
The course material is pretty up to date, and since Wordstream has such an active blog, there is a high chance that once the content is outdated, it gets updated quite soon.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
The course is entirely free. So, a plus here.
Does the course include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
Yes, the course includes several performance-oriented and data-driven elements, such as:
- Conversion rate optimization
- A/B testing
- Conversion tracking
- Adwords analysis and how you can benchmark and troubleshoot your PPC campaign.
- Call tracking
- Tips to 3x average click-through rates
- How to increase your conversion rates
You can find out more about this course here.
2) Google’s Digital Garage
Google’s Digital Garage is not only one course. It’s a digital university with different courses in the digital world.
It offers several courses that can be relevant to your real estate business, such as:
- Fundamentals of digital marketing
- Get a business online
- Promote a business with online advertising
- Connect with customers over mobile
- Promote a business with content
- Google Search Ads
- Google Display Ads
- Google Ads measurement
- Google Ads video
- Create and manage Google Ads video campaigns
- Create and optimize Google Display Ads campaigns
- Make sure customers find you online
The most comprehensive course is “Fundamentals of Digital Marketing,” where you can earn a Google Certificate.
It already entails most of the other courses and takes 40 hours.
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
I couldn’t find out information about the publishing dates of the different courses.
However, you can be sure that the content is updated regularly since it comes from Google.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
All the courses are offered for free.
Does the course include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
Not all the courses include performance-oriented elements, but most include some, such as managing and measuring campaigns.
The extensive course “Fundamentals of Digital Marketing” also includes a module about Google Analytics and measuring search and display ad campaigns, content marketing, video ad performance, and much more.
You can find out more about the courses here.
3) HubSpot Academy
This one is similar to Google’s Digital Garage and is an academy with different marketing-related courses.
It offers digital marketing courses such as:
- Social media marketing
- Inbound marketing
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
There are more courses, but I selected only the ones that are rather independent of the software they sell through the other courses.
The latter includes teachings about their different software products.
Are the courses up to date and/or updated regularly?
I couldn’t find information about whether the courses are regularly updated during my research.
However, I assume this is the case since Hubspot is already quite an authoritative website.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
The different courses at the academy are offered completely free.
Do the courses include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
Yes, they do. Each course mentioned above includes at least one lesson about measuring your campaign.
You can find out more about the academy here.
4) Internet Marketing for Smart People Email Course
This free course comes from Copyblogger and is rather marketing-focused content.
The education materials come in 16 ebooks and 20 emails.
It’s a collection of all the content that has appeared on Copyblogger over the years. It is based on the four pillars of relationships, direct response copywriting, content marketing, and having something worth selling.
The relationship pillar emphasizes that creating solid relationships with your audience is better than advertising in the traditional sense.
But this is not to forget to still use some copywriting techniques, which is the second pillar.
Delivering great content strategically is the third pillar.
The last one is having something worth selling. So, it asks how you can create value with your service or product.
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
The course is likely not up to date. Why? The main page of the course seems to have been published in 2014.
Nevertheless, it includes many rather timeless concepts and strategies, compensating for the slightly outdated publishing date.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
The complete course is offered for free.
Does the course include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
The contents overview of the course doesn’t indicate having performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements.
You can find out more about the course here.
5) Quicksprout University
Like Copyblogger and Wordstream, Quicksprout University offers structured courses made up of past articles from their blog.
They are organized into different sections, such as:
- Digital Marketing 101
- Starting a Website
- Starting a Blog
- E-Commerce (not that relevant to real estate)
- Content Creation and Content Marketing
- Advanced Digital Marketing, including growth hacking, SEO, Social Media, Email Marketing, and Conversion Optimization
The digital marketing 101 section gets you the foundation.
It’s rather timeless core principles and strategies, such as thinking strategically, writing a value proposition, and a marketing framework guide, among others.
The starting a website section teaches you what the name is already saying – how to build a website.
Among others, it includes planning out your website, hosting companies, and website speed.
The next section is starting a blog with topics such as blogging platforms, blog design, experience reports, and more.
You might want to skip the e-commerce section since it’s irrelevant to real estate. It covers things like building a store and the checkout process design.
Content creation and content marketing cover everything to do with the content production part, such as creating infographics, writing five or more articles per week, how to create engaging content and more.
The last section is the advanced digital marketing one.
It covers growth hacking, such as growth hacking strategies, search engine optimization, social media strategies, email marketing covering services and how to increase your deliverability rate, and conversion optimization covering funnels and how to increase your conversion rates.
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
It is a mix of up-to-date materials and some articles already a few years old.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
All the “courses” in the academy are free of charge.
Do the courses include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
Yes, they do mainly in the advanced digital marketing section, where conversion optimization is covered.
The rest of the mentioned marketing courses in other sections don’t mention data-driven elements.
You can find out more about the university here.
6) Ressentials 102: Make 100K Annually in Real Estate Sales
This one is an Udemy course, a 10,000 feet view of real estate marketing.
It teaches you step-by-step what it takes to make $100k annually.
It breaks down the different tasks and shows you how many clients you need to work with, where to acquire them, and how many hours and expenses it will take to meet your goals.
So, it is a goal-oriented course focusing less on specific marketing methods.
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
The course was last updated in 2018.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
The usual course price is $49.99 and is currently offered at a discount of $11.99.
Do the courses include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
The main focus of the course measures how you can reach the goal of $100,000 annually.
So yes, it includes performance-oriented elements.
You can find out more about the course here.
7) Build a Lead-Generating Real Estate Website
As the title already reveals, this course focuses on building a website that can generate real estate leads.
It goes through the pros and cons of a real estate website, what to include, the goals, how to use funnels, the tech, and tools, and finally, how to build it with WordPress.
The title might be a bit misleading because the course will mainly teach you the foundation of a website that will be able to generate leads.
However, I doubt you will generate leads the first moment you finish the course.
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
The course was most recently updated in 2018.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
The standard price of this course is $129.99, and it is offered right now with a discount of $11.99.
Do the courses include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
It provides the fundamentals of building a website that can potentially generate leads.
You can find out more about the course here.
8) Real Estate Marketing – Facebook Marketing for Realtors
This one is quite a complete course about Facebook Marketing for realtors.
It covers different ways, especially for realtors, to use different types of Facebook Ad campaigns to generate buyer and seller or listing leads and leads for open houses.
Other topics that the course covers are:
- Local Facebook Ads & Targeting
- Booking appointments from the generated leads
- Follow Up Automation with Email, SMS & Facebook Messenger
- Bot Marketing
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
The course was most recently updated in 2019 and’s reasonably current.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
It is offered at a discounted price of $11.99, and the usual price is $129.99.
Do the courses include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
The course somewhat has a performance-oriented element, which covers eliminating bogus leads. I couldn’t find any other data-driven features in the course.
You can find out more about the course here.
9) SEO 2020: Complete SEO Training + SEO for WordPress Websites
This course is quite thorough and will teach you about the following SEO topics focused on WordPress based Websites:
- 50+ SEO factors to rank number one on Google
- How do these factors affect your website ranking on Google
- The Dos and Don’ts
- 8 Technical SEO factors
- How to improve your page speed so it loads in less than 0.5 seconds
- How to optimize your website for Google, Bing & Yandex
- How to improve the user experience as one of the future SEO factors
- Getting indexed faster
- How to decrease the bounce rate of your website
- Best free SEO tools across the web
- How to take advantage of long-tail keywords to drive targeted traffic
- Link-building myths and which backlinks you should avoid
- 25 White Hat Backlink generation sources
- SEO techniques that can hurt your website
- How to defend your website against negative SEO attacks and find bad backlinks
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
Yes, the latest update was in 2020.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
It is offered at a discounted price of $12.99, and the usual price is $139.99.
Do the courses include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
Yes, the keyword research and page speed optimization techniques mentioned in the course can count as data-driven elements.
You can find out more about this course here.
10) Awesome Open Houses
As my article mentioned, open houses can work if done correctly.
This is also the opinion of the teacher of this course.
She argues that they can be a great lead-generation source.
The course teaches you about four different types of open houses and the marketing methods you can use to increase your success rate with them.
So the content of the course covers the following:
- Benefits of holding open houses
- Types of open houses
- Setting up an open house
- Marketing open houses
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
The course is slightly outdated and was published in 2017.
But many elements of the course are close to evergreen. This includes the types of open houses and setting them up.
The only part where time has passed may play a role is the marketing part of open houses. Here the course teaches promoting them using social media advertising.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
It is offered at a discounted price of $11.99 and usually costs $19.99.
Do the courses include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
Unfortunately, they don’t at the time of this writing.
You can find out more about the course here.
11) Drip Campaign & CRM Follow-Up Mastery for Real Estate Agents
This course can get you up to speed regarding follow-ups, as mentioned already in this article.
It will teach you:
- CRM follow-up strategies combined with automation to achieve a higher engagement
- The creation of drip campaigns that you can include in any customer relationship management software
- The creation of a long-term automated follow-up plan
- How to choose the right CRM for your real estate business
- How you can close expensive and time-consuming leads more efficiently
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
The course is up to date and was published in 2020.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
The current discounted price is $11.99, and usually $79.99.
Do the courses include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
Yes, it includes data-driven elements, such as communication stats and tracking email open and click rates.
You can find out more about this course here.
12) Mastering Live Videos for Real Estate Agents
This short course is about live videos tailored to real estate agents.
From reading my article about video marketing for real estate, you may know that video can be a great marketing method to generate real estate leads.
So, in this course, you will learn how to take advantage of live video and create compelling and engaging live videos of your properties.
Some of the course topics are:
- Handling fear and nerves
- The right equipment
- The right environment
- How to present yourself
- Getting to know your audience
- How to communicate while you are live
- Engagement
- How you can get helpful testimonials
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
Yes, it was just published in 2020.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
It is offered at a discounted price of $11.99 and typically costs $129.99.
Do the courses include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
Unfortunately, it doesn’t include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements at this time.
You can find out more about the course here.
13) Real Estate from the Online Marketing Institute
This one is a rather broad and thorough real estate marketing course. It aims to help realtors master digital marketing.
It is a 3 part series, and part one includes topics such as:
- Search engine optimization consumer insights
- SEO content
- Technical SEO
- How to own the search engine results page
- Local SEO
- Marketing Analytics
- Measuring Marketing Success
- Mobile marketing for real estate
Part two includes:
- Digital marketing basics
- An introduction to digital advertising
- Digital marketing automation & campaigns
- Content marketing strategies, brand building, and channels
Part three includes:
- Brand building with social media
- Creating an influential LinkedIn profile
- Facebook pages, posting, advertising, and insights
- Email marketing: copywriting, campaigns, permission, and legal compliance
Is the course up to date and/or updated regularly?
No information about the age of the course was available.
Is it offered at a low price, or is it even free?
It is offered at the normal price of $125. You can also buy the different parts separately at $49 each.
Do the courses include performance-oriented and/or data-driven elements?
Yes, it includes two lessons about marketing analytics and measuring marketing success.
You can learn more about the course here.
Analyzing the Real Estate Marketing Courses to Find the Best One
Now, let’s get to the final results. As you can see in the table below, I ordered the different courses already according to their total points.
Course | Up to Date or Updated Regularly | Weight | Low Price | Weight | Performance Oriented/Data-Driven Elements | Weight | Total |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Google’s Digitale Garage | 10 | 10 | 10 | 4 | 10 | 10 | 240 |
SEO 2020: Complete SEO Training + SEO for WordPress Websites | 10 | 10 | 9 | 4 | 10 | 10 | 236 |
Drip Campaign & CRM Follow-Up Mastery for Real Estate Agents | 10 | 10 | 9 | 4 | 10 | 10 | 236 |
PPC University | 9 | 10 | 10 | 4 | 10 | 10 | 230 |
Hubspot Academy | 9 | 10 | 10 | 4 | 10 | 10 | 230 |
Ressentials 102: Make 100K Annually in Real Estate Sales | 9 | 10 | 9 | 4 | 10 | 10 | 226 |
Quicksprout University | 8 | 10 | 10 | 4 | 10 | 10 | 220 |
Real Estate Marketing - Facebook Marketing For Realtors | 9 | 10 | 9 | 4 | 9 | 10 | 216 |
Online Marketing Institute - Real Estate | 6 | 10 | 7 | 4 | 10 | 10 | 188 |
Mastering Live Videos for Real Estate Agents | 10 | 10 | 9 | 4 | 0 | 10 | 136 |
Build a Lead Generating Real Estate Website | 8 | 10 | 9 | 4 | 0 | 10 | 116 |
Awesome Open Houses | 8 | 10 | 9 | 4 | 0 | 10 | 116 |
Internet Marketing for Smart People Email Course | 7 | 10 | 10 | 4 | 0 | 10 | 110 |
According to overall total points independent of category, the winner is “Google’s Digital Garage.”
An additional bonus when taking this course is also that you will get a certificate that might have some value on the free market or with your potential customers.
But this result doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look into the other categories closer to the real estate industry.
And suppose you need something more specific for real estate.
In that case, you might try “Ressentials 102: Make 100K Annually in Real Estate Sales”, which also got a nice number of points in my analysis.
Do you want to get more specialized with Facebook ads?
In that case, you may prefer the “Facebook Marketing for Realtors” course from Udemy or the course about follow-ups called “Drip Campaign & CRM Follow-Up Mastery for Real Estate Agents.”
Both also got a good number of points.
This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.
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