Ready to take your business to the next level? When it comes to real estate marketing, you need to be at the top of your game. Don’t let these four common mistakes hold you back:
- Not knowing your niche
If you’re just getting started building your real estate business, this is an understandable – and entirely forgivable – mistake to make. For most people, every client is a good client when you don’t have an established base (and may not even have a sense of who your ideal client is yet).
But once you’ve been working for a while, you need to start refining your ideal client profile from “anybody and everybody” to a more specific niche. Do you prefer working with buyers or with sellers? Are there neighborhoods you know especially well, or where you would like to do more business? Do you have an especially good rapport with first-time home buyers or military relocaters? Answering these questions will help you refine your messaging and let you target your EDDM or real estate postcard campaigns much more effectively.
- Not differentiating your strategy
Once you’ve narrowed down your niche, you need to determine what kind of messaging works best for those prospects. You may find that when you’re targeting young, first-time home buyers, social media and email marketing get you the best response, whereas older prospects looking to downsize prefer the more personal connection of a real estate door hanger campaign. Or you may find that the reverse is true, or that another method altogether works best.
What really matters is that you don’t choose your strategy haphazardly; you focus on the real estate marketing approach that has proven to be most effective for the prospects you want to reach.
- Neglecting your past clients
Aside from your targeted messaging to your ideal prospects, the most effective real estate marketing you can do is to your past clients. These are the people who know your work, and who have already trusted you with one of the largest financial transactions of their life. You absolutely must ensure that you’re the first person your past clients think of when it comes to real estate, both today and ten years from now.
Referrals and word of mouth business aren’t the only benefits of marketing to past clients, either. If a buyer you worked with three years ago finds themselves needing to move for a new job, or unexpectedly pregnant with twins and in need of more space, you don’t want them scratching their heads trying to remember your name.
Maintain a relationship through regular contact, whether that comes in the form of an email newsletter, a referral postcard, or the occasional holiday greeting card (or ideally, all three!). That will ensure that your name is easy to remember, whenever it comes up.
- Not marketing during your busy season
This is the easiest mistake to make for real estate agents at any level. In fact, most of us will make this mistake a couple of times during our careers (which is why we like to remind people of it every so often). When you’re in crunch mode, it’s easy to push everything non-essential to the side – and totally let your marketing slide. But there’s only one way to ensure that your business sees consistent returns all year long: marketing efforts that don’t wax and wane with the seasons.
You can still make it easy on yourself, though. Look for marketing methods that are passive (like a real estate car magnet or a good yard sign) or are easy to set up ahead of time (like an EDDM campaign).