From SEO to PPC to regular old email marketing, modern lead generation is made up of so many moving parts, that it is super easy to mess up your real estate marketing strategy.  Even the most experienced real estate agents, lose business every single day because they aren’t factoring the most mundane, albeit important, marketing practices into their workflow. In this guide, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 most common real estate marketing mistakes that we see a lot of agents making and how you can avoid them👇

1. Not paying enough attention to your web design

A lot of real estate agents make the mistake of thinking that web design is the sort of skill they can learn overnight. The end result is that they end up building horrendously unengaging websites and landing pages.

This is an unacceptable situation to be in. 

Your webpages are the face of your company, and in a lot of cases, the way they look and feel will decide whether all of those potential homebuyers that click on your listings are going to convert or not.

If they are unengaging, more of your site visitors will drop, fewer people will convert and you will close fewer deals.

Invest the time, effort and money it takes to build a good website. This could look like doing research into all of the available website/landing page building tools available to real estate agents to identify the best ones (I highly recommend Squarespace, Wix or Placester); Or if you have a little more time (and the inclination to do so) you could enroll in an online web dev course so that you have a better sense of what exactly you can achieve with your website. Better yet hire a reliable web designer who’s entire life is dedicated to making websites like yours engage visitors!

2. Not Utilizing The Power of Video

Take a second to think about how many videos you watched on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube in the past week?

If you’re anything like the average person then your answer is probably pretty high.

A staggering 85% of American internet users watch videos on their phones every single day, and guess what! Most real estate agents aren’t taking advantage of this.

Homebuyers do a lot of research while looking for properties, and since most real estate agents aren’t using video in their marketing campaigns, you could make your listings stand out from the crowd with high-quality video content that gives them the information they need to complete the buying process.

Beverly Hills broker Peter Lorimer realized this early, and he’s been so successful at leveraging video that he even landed his own TV show!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej9qnDW3kE4

If you aren’t already doing so, start making videos today, all you need is your phone, a webcam, a laptop and if you’re into screencasting, a software like BombBomb or Soapbox to record your screen!

3. Not Using Retargeting Tools

A lot of real estate agents think that once a prospect drops from their LP or website, they are gone forever.

This is untrue.

Using retargeting, you can re-engage dropped visitors with banner and social media ads so that they don’t forget that your company exists and potentially convert when they’re eventually ready to close the deal.

This is especially important in real estate because finding a home is a long process and you can’t expect prospects to convert on their first visit.

All of the big ad platforms (Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Taboola, Outbrain, etc.) have retargeting code snippets that you can start with today.

4. Not Using Social Media Right/ Being Too Invasive

Over the last decade, social media has marketing has become a real estate marketing staple, and with good reason!

Pretty much everyone uses social media so if used correctly platforms like Facebook and Instagram can help you gain a positively insane amount of visibility.

Unfortunately, many real estate agents misuse social media to the detriment of their own businesses and the industry as a whole.

If you want to get the most out of social media for your real estate marketing campaigns, don’t be one of those agents who spam unrelated comment sections and post dozens of overly sales-y posts every single day. This is only going to annoy the people who 

Instead focus on posting content that is helpful, relevant, and most importantly, authentic, and you’ll surely reap the benefits of greater visibility.

5. Not Giving SEO the Required Attention

Regardless of what industry you work in SEO is the key to getting consistent organic traffic to your listings.

No matter how good your site looks if you haven’t optimized it for Google’s algorithms you are not going to hit your marketing goals.

A lot of real estate agents (possibly you) have not realized this yet, and that is an opportunity for you!

If you invest a consistent amount of time and effort into beefing up your organic search performance six months down the line, you will reap the benefits in the form of growing traffic on your listings and of course more conversions.

A good starting point is this Ultimate Real Estate SEO Guide from the folks over at Placester

6. Disorganized Data Management

Real estate agents are often so focused on nailing the pitch that they neglect all of the boring tasks that unfortunately need to get done behind the scenes for an optimized marketing campaign.

Perhaps the most important of these tasks is basic data management.

You need to be using a CRM to manage your leads.

A CRM (short for Customer Relationship Management) is a piece of software that neatly organizes all of the leads you capture.

This might seem like an innocuous function but the CRM is the backbone of any Real Estate marketing campaign.

Once your leads are stored in a single location, you can categorize them by a whole bunch of factors (lead quality, house type, etc) and then use those categorizations to target leads with personalized, relevant, informative outreach most CRMs have some form of outreach functionality) that will move them along the funnel to closing.

If you’re looking for a CRM, check out our real estate CRM guide for more info.

7. Splurging on Marketing Tools

The real estate martech space is crowded. Every single marketing task that you need to get done will likely have at least a dozen software tools (all claiming that they are the best) for you to choose from.

The unfortunate byproduct of this situation is that many agents end up spending money on tools that might not fit their needs or are just straight-up unnecessary.

To avoid this mistake in your marketing operations, sit down on the weekend (you’ll really just need one weekend for this) and do a complete audit of the tools that you are paying for

Ask yourself how often you use each tool? How useful the tool is in your life? And ruthlessly cut off the tools that aren’t giving you value.

8. Not Responding Quickly Enough

We work with clients in a whole bunch of different industries (legal, insurance, healthcare, finance, etc), so trust me when I say this: real estate agents deal with the pickiest, most spoiled customers in the world of digital marketing.

Don’t get me wrong, homebuyers are great (I’ve been a homebuyer in the recent past), but the expectations they have for the agents that serve them are positively insane.

By far the most insane one is the expectation of an instant response.

Homebuyers visit a bunch of listings, fill out a bunch of inquiry forms, and then play a sick and twisted game where the first agent/marketer that responds gets their money.

This sucks if you’re an agent because after a point your ability to respond first, is based on dumb luck.

Step out of the office for some fresh air when a lead comes in?

Too bad, your competitor got the customer!😕

Set aside some time to watch the (underwhelming) GoT finale?

You lost some leads!😩

Go out with your friends for a wild night of mini-golf?

You’re practically just throwing your money out of the window!💸

Most real estate agents think about this situation as the cost of doing business in the industry, but we looked into it and guess what! It doesn’t have to be this way.

By investing in conversational tech (chatbots, live chat), you can flip the script on homebuyers and give them the instant response communication that they desire.

In fact, if you want to get started today, check out our kickass guide on why chatbots are the future of real estate marketing👇

9. Not Figuring Out Your Niche Online

We tell this to our mortgage clients as well, but the beauty of working in the real estate-mortgage space is that your target market is pretty much every single adult in your area. Literally everyone wants to buy a house.

The downside of having such a big market though is that it is easy to get distracted.

You probably already know this, but real estate buyers can be categorized across a whole bunch of different categories (budget, property type, etc), and each of these categories has a completely different set of needs and preferences.

Unfortunately, your agency has only so much manpower so you literally don’t have the time to build landing pages and websites that cater to every single one of these niches.

A lot of real estate agents try doing this and it epically fails because they end up creating webpages that underwhelm homebuyers in pretty much all niches, and drive away business.

Too often, we come across real estate marketing campaigns that try to please everyone and end up

Instead, we recommend that you pick a niche (or a handful of niches) and double down on it like your business depends on it.

By branding your real estate agency as a specialist in a niche, you can position yourself as the go-to local expert in the space and drive more closings.

10. Not Showing How Much You Care

I know what you guys are thinking… I already care about my customers! I’m not making this mistake, so I can skip this part of the guide and guess what, you’re kinda right!

If you weren’t caring about your customers, you probably wouldn’t still be in business, BUT you could be doing more.

A lot of real estate agents think that the hustle ends after closing, and that could not be further from the truth.

Going the extra mile and giving your customers a touch of customer service even after they’ve closed can go a long way in consolidating your word of mouth referral networks because your existing customers will be that much more pleased with you.

In practice, this “extra caring” just means that you pay attention to the small, seemingly innocuous details of the customer experience.

Send homebuyers a “Thank You” card or a small “Closing Gift”. I wish them on their birthday after they’ve closed. These might seem like small gestures, but they go a long way in creating the sorts of relationships that you need for a robust referral network.

Time to Learn From the Mistakes and Get into Action

Well, that’s pretty much it from us.

If you avoid the mistakes that we detailed above, we’re pretty sure that you will get more out of your marketing campaigns, without investing too much more time or effort into them and that will help you drive more sales.

Also, please by no means view this as the ultimate list of marketing mistakes that you need to look out for. With technology developing as fast as it currently is, real estate marketing is an ever-changing landscape and you need to always be on the lookout for the trends, tools, and people you should be investing in, and perhaps more importantly, the ones you shouldn’t be investing in.