Real Estate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

The real estate industry is both highly competitive and reliant on self-marketing.  You studied for your real estate license, but to really succeed, you'll have to study up on marketing for real estate agents, too.

You've probably picked up on basics: you have your listings on Zillow, and you're established on social media. But it’s just as important to understand what not to do.

Let’s talk about the biggest real estate marketing mistakes that could be holding you back.

Why Does Real Estate Marketing Matter?

Even to the greenest agent, the need to spread the word about your listings is obvious – you can’t sell if you don’t advertise. These days, this aspect of real estate marketing is a no-brainer. Aggregate real estate sites make real estate shopping an all-you-can-eat buffet. Crafting an attractive real estate listing is an art, but the channels and strategies are established.

The trickier part of real estate marketing is, well, everything else.

Whether you’re starting out or trying to drive your business to new heights, one of your biggest concerns will always be, “How do I promote myself as a real estate agent?” After all, your success depends on people picking, staying loyal to, and recommending your services.

This is the area of marketing where a lot of real estate agents drop the ball.

Common Real Estate Marketing Mistakes

Below, we’ll point out five of the biggest real estate marketing mistakes that agents make and explain how to promote yourself and your services successfully.

Mistake #1: Stretching the truth on your listing descriptions

If you take nothing else away from this article, let this be the one mistake you avoid.

These days, home buyers practically require a detailed and accurate listing of amenities – they want to know the property’s features before they ever set foot in the door. They often rule out listings that don’t check all their boxes.

This can lead to the temptation to fudge the facts a bit to get people on the hook.

It's one thing to accentuate the positive, but misleading claims can get you into real legal trouble. Even if it never comes to that, you risk alienating people who might be interested in another of your properties.

Information, expertise, and earned trust are your biggest assets as a real estate agent. You can't afford to torpedo all three in the eyes of your clients just to dress up a listing.

Mistake #2: Relying too heavily on one channel

Maintain your own website, but also use Zillow.  Put money into digital, but don't forget print. Buy ads with Google and Facebook, but order door hangers, too. Encourage Yelp reviews and testimonials for your website. Have a system for soliciting referral business.

Invest in virtual open house tech.  Use email marketing to recapture leads that have gone stale. And video is one of the best marketing investments a real estate agent can make.

Yeah, I know. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.  You don't have to add everything to your repertoire at once. Test new channels, and don't give up too quickly. Any new real estate marketing campaign will require several months to succeed, and even the best campaign will fail if you pull the plug too early.

Mistake #3: Failing to drive your real estate marketing with data

With all the marketing options you have, it's tempting to throw stuff into the internet abyss and hope for the best. But don't. To really get the most out of your marketing dollars, you need to put on your mad scientist hat and measure your results. 

By looking at hard data, you can learn exactly where your best leads are coming from and which campaigns aren’t worth continuing. But first, you have to make new leads trackable to their source.

• Set up Google Analytics. It's well-established, it's free, and it can give you a lot of information.
• Set up a tracking link for any campaign that clicks through to your listings or your website. Basically, Google Analytics will spit out a string of unique code to put onto the end of a specific link. If you give each campaign or channel its own unique string, Google Analytics can tell you how many people you got from a specific source and what they did next. This lets you separate channels that only attract lookie-loos from channels that garner real prospects.
• For print advertising, use QR codes with tracking links to gather data and include these channels in your cost-benefit analyses.
• If you rely on inbound calls from advertising, it may be worthwhile to use a call-tracking service that gives you a similar level of information as tracking URLs. You establish campaign-specific phone numbers that all forward to your normal line, but you can now capture this data by using the tracking software to trace each call back to its source.

Mistake #4: Not behaving like an industry expert

Perhaps the best thing you can do with professional social media is to share your real estate expertise in a thoughtful way. We all get bombarded by advertising constantly, and no one wants to sign up for more. To keep people subscribed to your account, you need to offer them valuable advice and information. This also has the handy side-effect of establishing your authority and expertise.

In your social media efforts, focus on quality, not quantity. Say something valuable with every post. Share answers to common questions or how-to guides for first-timers.

Even your listings-related posts can be part of this strategy. Try pairing a featured property with some general real estate advice. Are you posting a house with a killer kitchen?  Speak to the value of kitchen renovations on property value. This will keep your followers hooked and avoid the impression that they've subscribed to a Craigslist feed.

Every agent has their own opinion about the amount of effort they’re willing to sink into social media, but showcasing your expertise can be handled in so many ways. You can do anything from sharing helpful third-party content as a quick social media solution to creating your own high-quality resources for clients and locking them behind a leads-gathering form. If you want to think about social media as little as possible, use a scheduling app to queue up a month’s posts at a time. This will keep your feed active without much effort on your part. If you want to be interactive, set aside scheduled times to answer questions live. This can help build excitement and connection with your base.

Mistake #5: Bringing too little or too much of yourself to social media

Real estate is a very personal service. Clients want to like the person they’ll be relying on to make such a big decision. You need to bring some personality to your professional social media, or you look just like everyone else. At the same time, you also don't want to alienate potential clients by sharing too much. 

Keep professional and personal accounts separate, and refrain from oversharing on your business account – avoid political views and health information, for example.

Instead, share tidbits that anyone can connect with, like hobbies, pets, family celebrations, and favorite places to visit in your area.  Keep these posts infrequent – no more than one personal post a week. Also, try to vary the subjects.  You don't want to accidentally become a labradoodle blog instead!

Bonus Mistake: Not continuing your real estate education

There's a saying in marketing: an advertisement is only as good as the product. In real estate, the product is you – sure, your clients are looking to buy a property, but what you’re selling is your services as an agent.

One of the biggest real estate marketing mistakes you can make is neglecting the quality of your “product.”  For any marketing to be successful, you have to stay on top of your game. Be knowledgeable, have a well-rounded perspective, and keep up-to-date. An important component of this is your continuing education (CE) in the ever-changing world of real estate.

As an online training provider with over 25 years of experience, we offer a full suite of pre-license and real estate CE courses that are location-specific and anchored in the latest strategies and regulations.  Our courses are affordable, self-paced, and mobile-friendly so you can fit your education around your life instead of your life around your education. Happy hunting!