Real estate agents need to market themselves constantly to keep their target audience engaged, whether they’re a buyer’s agent, seller’s agent, or both. How does an agent avoid real estate marketing mistakes with so many marketing strategies available across multiple social media platforms?
At Local Leader®, we realize that many real estate agents have limited marketing budgets but still must tailor their marketing strategies to reach their target audience effectively. While most real estate offices rely on social media for marketing, you need a deep understanding of how to market yourself for real estate to grow your business. Try to avoid the real estate marketing mistakes below.
1. Having a Bad Website
Your website design needs to be easy to navigate and mobile-friendly. It should direct visitors to your contact information, where it’s easy to send an email or call with a single click of a button. Your site should also be engaging and attractive, with featured listings and video tours on the front page.
Your website needs to feature multiple landing pages for traffic from specific ads. A landing page is a single-page site that doesn’t redirect to the rest of your site. Instead, a landing page should direct to a single call-to-action, such as “call now for a free home estimate” or “email for more information.” By funnelling traffic on a landing page to a CTA rather than your site, you remove choice paralysis.
2. Not Using Video Marketing
Let customers get to know your listings—and you—through video marketing. Short videos between one and two minutes long can be useful in showing off cool features in your home listings, demonstrating expertise in your local housing market, and educating sellers and buyers about essential steps in selling or buying a home.
Social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram can help you reach your target audience with tailored video content. Be sure to embed your profile picture and username into your videos to promote your brand if other accounts repost your videos.
3. DIY Marketing
Designing your website, rafting media posts, and creating your own videos might seem like a good way to reduce spending in your marketing budget, but lower returns on DIY marketing could cost you more in the long run. Trying to do it yourself is often one of the biggest real estate marketing mistakes.
Find a professional web designer or social media manager to design and monitor traffic on your website and social media platforms. The return for professional marketing services is often far beyond what you could generate yourself.
Experienced graphic designers and marketers possess the necessary skills to produce effective marketing tools and templates. They also stay on top of current trends and know how to identify a passing trend vs. branding with staying power. Trust your designs to a professional so you can focus on real estate and building customer relationships.
4. Failing to Use Social Media Marketing Effectively
Social media marketing strategies rely largely on timing to be most effective. You need to post regularly without bombarding followers with constant updates. The content should also be relevant to your target audience. If you largely work with retirees looking for a second home, you don’t want to feature local, family-friendly attractions. Focus on targeted content to reach the audience you want.
5. Not Using Direct Mail Postcard Marketing
Homeowners largely include Boomers and Gen Xers. Many aren’t using social media platforms to meet their local real estate agents. If you want to reach them where they live, do it directly. The USPS offers its Every Door Direct Mail service to target specific delivery routes. Let homeowners know that you sold their neighbor’s home at a great price and to call you to see what you can do to sell their home.
6. Inconsistent Personal Branding
Having different fonts or colors on your branded content is among common real estate marketing mistakes. Keep all your imagery, color schemes, and fonts uniform across your website, print ads, social media, and merchandise. Being inconsistent in your imaging can confuse your target audience, making it difficult to identify you out of a sea of real estate agents and offices in your area.
7. Not Understanding the Importance of SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the branch of marketing that targets Google’s keyword crawlers on your website content. A professional SEO content creator knows the latest metrics Google uses to rank search results, making them invaluable to your marketing. SEO developers manufacture new content to get your site closer to the top of Google’s organic search results.
8. Not Using CRM Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is essential for tracking and managing your leads. A CRM can connect with your digital VoIP phone system and discover useful information about a caller to create a new customer profile. You can then add notes about a caller, such as if they’re buying or selling, what they’re looking for, and what stage of the process they’re in.
9. Failing to Use Phone Tracking
Each ad campaign you run should direct users to call a different number to track leads from each source. You can set up different numbers through a VoIP phone system and use each number for a different marketing application. Use one number for direct postcard mail, another for Google Ads, and another for Facebook ads.
10. Only Showing Listings and Sales
If you solely advertise your transactional successes, that’s the only thing prospective customers would ever expect from you. Remember that working in real estate is about building long-term relationships with customers.
Sellers can recommend you to an old neighbor looking to sell their home years later. Buyers could become your new neighbors when they find their dream home in the town where you live and work. Show your personality in your content.
Improve Your Real Estate Marketing Strategies
Real estate marketing mistakes like these are just some of the challenges that real estate agents face. Learn more about effective real estate marketing when you subscribe to our newsletter at Local Leader®. We provide free digital resources for brokers, agents, and real estate professionals.