The job of a real estate agent is to help their client buy, rent, or sell properties. Most of their responsibilities revolve around researching market conditions, creating listings, conducting walkthroughs, and guiding clients through the process of home buying, selling, or renting. Marketing is often a big part of the job, and yet, not all real estate agents are good at it.
Successful real estate agents know how important marketing is when it comes to selling or renting out properties. Unfortunately, the process of becoming a real estate agent does not involve a lot of training in marketing. More often than not, real estate agents have to teach themselves how to market effectively or otherwise hire someone else to do it.
That said, here are some examples of bad marketing that some real estate agents do—as well as how to avoid them:
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Not marketing to the right audience
One of the most common causes why real estate agents fail is because they’re trying to reach the wrong audience. For example, if you want to sell a house, you want to target people who are actively looking for a mortgage broker. Marketing to people who are unlikely to have any interest in buying or renting a house is simply a waste of time, not to mention an easy way to flush money down the drain.
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Investing in the wrong marketing strategies
Every industry has a unique set of marketing strategies that prove to be most effective. The real estate industry is no different.
While cold prospecting may be effective in a different industry, it is not the most lucrative marketing option in real estate. Consumers are more likely to hire a real estate agent based on a referral than someone they have never heard of before. The reason for this is quite simple: the job of a real estate agent is based on service, and consumers want proof of the quality of that service before they hire someone to handle a significant deal. Hence, they are less likely to hire someone based on a newsletter that they receive or an ad they see online.
Here are a few examples of marketing strategies that are not very effective for the real estate industry:
- Email blasts. While email marketing can still be an effective marketing strategy in real estate, email “blasts” are very different. Email blasts essentially send non-valuable content to all the people on the email list in hopes of generating a lead. However, more is not always better in this scenario, and email blasting can actually lead to people marking the emails as spam.
- Direct mail. Direct mail is slowly becoming an obsolete form of marketing, and it is no different in the real estate industry. According to a National Association of Realtors (NAR) survey, direct mail is considered a high-cost, low-yield form of marketing.
- Websites for organic leads. In the same survey, only 4% of sellers said they found their agent on a website. Although real estate agents need websites so that prospective customers can look them up, websites should not be the primary source of leads.
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Not focusing on word-of-mouth marketing
The majority of sellers, buyers, and renters find their real estate agents through a friend, a relative, or a neighbor. Moreover, a quarter of consumers say that they hire the agent that had previously helped them list or buy a home.
With these factors in mind, word-of-mouth marketing is the best type of marketing to invest in. Consumers are more likely to trust someone referred to them by someone they trust, and the fact that nearly 71% of closed seller transactions came from trusted sources or in-person contact demonstrates this.
That said, focusing on word-of-mouth marketing is a must for real estate agents to increase conversions and repeat business with existing clients.
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Spreading resources too thinly
Marketing takes time, energy, and money. On top of other responsibilities, real estate agents are often working with limited resources. Having said that, marketing efforts must focus on a few of the most efficient methods as opposed to multiple methods with substandard yields. Otherwise, agents may end up spreading themselves too thinly and not receiving a substantial number of leads from it.
These are just some of the many bad examples of marketing that are, unfortunately, common in the real estate industry. By avoiding these mistakes, however, one can improve their business and open up more opportunities for effective and efficient marketing.
