5 Mistakes Real Estate Agents Make When Marketing

Marketing your real estate business is hard, especially for those of us without formal marketing training. Here are the critical errors that most real estate professionals make when marketing their business, and how you can avoid making these mistakes.

Mistake #1: Inconsistency

Successful real estate marketing is a game of consistent delivery. No matter what you're doing; social media, email, direct mail, open houses and events, it all requires consistency in order to be successful.

If you're a hit-and-miss marketer, you'll never pick up the momentum necessary to be successful. Additionally, Realtors who aren't consistent with their marketing miss a chance to learn from the performance of their past efforts, thus making their path to improvement much longer.

How to Avoid this Mistake

Start by making a marketing calendar. Sit down at the start of the month and plan out exactly what marketing you'll be delivering on which days, and stick to the plan. You're going to have to block time out in your day to make sure you're making good on your promises to yourself, but the more you do it, the easier it will get.

Mistake #2: Expecting Immediate Results

The real estate marketing cycle is long. Prospects don't turn into leads and leads into clients overnight; this is a process that takes months (in some cases, years). Realtors who don't take this into consideration get frustrated with their short-term results and change tactics before their efforts have a chance to be effective.

How to Avoid this Mistake

When it comes to real estate marketing, measure your short-term success by the amount of work you do, not by the number of deals you close. Once you've been consistently marketing for six months, start to track your closed transactions back to when your relationship with those clients started; with your marketing.

By measuring your success based on the work you're doing, you'll keep motivated to continue in the short-run. And, by connecting the transactional results to your long-run work, you'll build the motivation and strategy to keep going.

Mistake #3: Being a "Secret Agent"

Real estate is a funny business in the sense that our colleagues are also our competitors. As a result of this dynamic, some real estate professionals are content with their marketing not reaching an entire market in fear that other agents will see it and copy their tactics. This is a mistake.

Limiting the reach of your marketing will reduce your effectiveness, make each lead you turn to a client more expensive, and slow your growth path dramatically.

How to Avoid this Mistake

To avoid this mistake, you need simply to realize a basic truth; if you're doing something great, 90% of agents won't have the skills or motivation to replicate it, 9% will try but won't have the ability to think long-term about their results, and the remaining 1% might have what they need to do the same thing.

The threat to your business is very low, and if you are doing something worthy of imitation, you are in the top 1%. Embrace it!

Mistake #4: Relying on Social Media for Sales

Social media is a great place to sell items that cost less than $100, but a terrible place to sell a house. If you are using social media as a vehicle solely to market listings and generate sales, you're doing it wrong.

How to Avoid this Mistake

You can avoid this mistake by remembering that social media is not about selling, it is about verification. Social media is a place for your potential clients to connect with you to see that you are who you say you are, and do what you say you can do. Structure your social strategy around providing people a window into your world, not a direct path to a contract.

Mistake #5: Not Effectively Tracking Marketing Results

If you aren't closely measuring the amount of time and money it takes to generate marketing and pairing that information with the amount of return you're getting from that effort, you're missing opportunities. Understanding your ROI is critical when it comes time to reevaluate and scale your marketing in order to grow your business.

How to Avoid this Mistake

Start with a very simply tracking sheet. Record the basics; what you spent, how much time it took, and what business you can track back to that effort. From there, you'll understand the return on your dollars and time.

Bringing it All Together

Real estate marketing can be challenging, especially if you're trying to do it all yourself. Fortunately, Elm Street Technology is here to help. We offer a ton of great marketing solutions, from social media, to websites, to direct mail, and more. If you need help bringing your marketing strategy to life, Elm Street Technology is here for you.