6 Mistakes Agents Make When Marketing Online

Marketing is the hardest part of real estate. There’s no question about it.

Getting clients to work with you seems like such an easy process; shake hands, sign the contract, find a buyer, get paid.

We all know it’s harder than that, especially on this new foreign platform of social media and the internet.

Without further delay, here are 6 Mistakes Agents Make When Marketing Online and how to correct them.

Focus On The Agent

I would say that 90% of all failing real estate ads fall are failing because they’re trying to sell the wrong thing: the agent.

The reality is that the vast majority of our clients, past, present, and future, don’t care enough about us to follow our real estate careers on social media.

Nobody really wants an agent, that’s just a means to buying or selling their home.

And if there was a cheaper, more effective way than hiring an agent, you can be sure they would choose that over whatever gardening tips or recipes the previous generation of agents used to stay top of mind.

Your job is to understand your client base, identify their pain points, and create content and dialogue specifically tailored to providing a solution to their problem.

Run Ads From Business Page

Along the same lines of focusing on the agent more than the solution are running ads from an agent’s business page.

Facebook Business Pages for real estate agents have been exponentially increasing every year, to the point where most agents create one just because they heard everyone is doing it.

The problem is most agents try to run ads from a business page, thinking that there’s something appealing or unique about 200 pages called John Smith, Realtor posting the same “how much is your home worth” ad.

People don’t like to be sold to, and a page essentially dedicated to the business of a real estate sales person is the last thing anybody wants to click on, even if they are your perfect customer.

The Solution: Run ads from a Community Page instead. These rank higher and have a much softer approach to generating leads.

Forget to Build a Landing Page

Landing pages are a crucial component to generate leads online, as they allow the lead to “opt-in” to your email list and authorize you to contact them.

However, 9 times out of 10, agents will just put their phone number or a link to their company website, hoping people will take the multiple steps to reach out for an awkward phone call or somehow find your email.

The Solution: If you’re in the Awesome Club, you get unlimited free landing pages custom built to work, so you have no excuse not to use them! For everyone else, I put together an Agent Toolkit of services that I recommend/endorse, so check out Landing Pages in there.

Target Other Agents

This one is always really funny for me. The point of these ads are usually to generate leads.

I’m like, the worst audience for a real estate agent to be running ads to.

I’m a real estate broker who is publicly known for teaching real estate agents how to generate leads. I basically have “real estate” written all over me. If I’m seeing your ad, then chances are you didn’t spend enough time on your targeting to exclude me.

I exclude other agents for a variety of reasons. They’ll never hire me to list their home, for starters.

They’re also the most likely group to report me for being more creative than they are or try to copy my funnel. Which I prefer, because there’s enough business to go around for everyone.

The Solution: When creating your audience, always remember to exclude as many real estate related Job Titles and Employers you can, while leaving the Interests and Behaviors in place. This will exclude other agents, but include people who have a recent interest in real estate, like buyers and sellers.

Bait And Switch

For any campaign to work, everything has to run in perfect alignment like a machine.

That means your offer, ad copy, landing page, and email sequences all have to be highly targeted and mapped out intentionaly.

If your offer isn’t clear, or you offer something in the ad but don’t deliver on the landing page, you won’t see any conversions and you might even get reported.

The Solution: Instead of that headache, make sure that everything you write lines up with everything else that’s been written. Reusing headlines is a great way to keep consistent. If your ad offers a Free List Of San Francisco Homes, then your landing page headline should be Free List Of San Francisco Homes.

Sell To Yourself Instead Of Your Crowd

At the end of the day, what works on you won’t work on your target audience, and what works on them will never work on you.

As a broker, I’d never click on an ad for a list of the nicest homes in the area, but that’s one of my most successful ads.

Similarly, I would personally click on a home valuation ad just to get another take of where my investment stands, but these ads tend to perform the worst.

The Solution: Add all your past clients as Facebook friends and pay close attention to their interests and behaviors. See if you can find any trends, for example if everyone is into the same activities. This will help you get way more accurate in your campaigns.